Alpert, Dr. Seymour: Oral History, May 17, 1978

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The following oral history of Dr. Seyour Alpert was done May 17, 1978 by Dr. Thomas Peery for The George Washington Oral History Program:

PEERY: This is Dr. Thomas M. Peery, recording for the Oral History Committee. Our interview today is with Dr. Seymour Alpert, at the request of the Oral History Committee. Dr. Alpert is currently vice-president for development of the university. He has been a member of the faculty at George Washington for, I believe, thirty-one years, and I don’t believe there is a member of the faculty who is as much loved and held in as high respect as Dr. Alpert. Without any further adieu, we’ll get started. Sy, do you have anything you want to say before we start?

ALPERT: Well, Tom, I can only say that I consider this an honor, a privilege, and I think this is particularly nice having it conducted by Thomas Peery. I think the years of your association with this school will be long remembered by everyone at George Washington and I can only say that seeing Tom Peery again makes this an extra plus.

PEERY: Well, you’re mighty nice. Sy, to start the record, would you tell us something about your background, your early life, your family, and perhaps put into it, if you feel like it, how you made a decision to become a physician.

ALPERT: Well, Tom, this is a very ordinary story. I was born on April 20, 1918 in New York City. At the age of three, my family moved to Lakewood, New Jersey. I spent my childhood in Lakewood through grade school and high school, and then went on to college, Columbia, in New York City. I must say that Lakewood was a small town. We only had about six or seven physicians at the time I was there. I knew them each personally and becoming a doctor was my ideal all my lifetime. I always knew I’d be a physician, and always looked forward to it. And I think coming from a town such as I did where I had the friendship and acquaintance of these people helped me along. My whole high school class, by the way, only had seventy-nine graduates in one year, so you can see it was a small school, and there were two teachers, particularly Ann Harris and Margaret Smith that I really give any credit for encouraging me to go onto a big city school rather than a small school in Jersey. It’s interesting, because there were three friends of mine who went to small colleges in New Jersey. Jersey, not having a medical school, it was very hard to get into medical school. But from Columbia, it was quite easy, and I think sometimes the push of a high school teacher to a student to go to a bigger college, a better school, and not a New Jersey school, was instrumental in my case.

PEERY: Sy, what was your father’s occupation?

ALPERT: My father was a builder of small homes, and lived in Lakewood until his death in 1945. My mother was a housewife, and I was an only child, let alone an only son. And they encouraged me in college studies, medical studies, and I have very fond memories of my childhood.

PEERY: That’s a wonderful background. Now, for the record, would you carry on, outlining your education? High school, you’ve already referred to, but something about your college and your medical school and your internship.

ALPERT: I spent four years at Columbia, in New York City. I received an A.B. degree in June of 1939, spent from 1935 to ’39. Columbia was a wonderful place. I was very active in the pre-med society, and if I could be permitted to brag about something I’m proud of, I hold four King’s Crowns awards from Columbia for Varsity Show, Columbian, that’s our year book, Jester, our monthly magazine, and Spectator, the daily paper. I sometimes think I should have gone into journalism because I enjoyed it so.

PEERY: I see now where you got your background for being Santa Claus at the hospital party.

[laughter]

ALPERT: That all came from the Varsity Show days. Right after college, in 1939, I went on to what was then called the Long Island College of Medicine in Brooklyn, which is now known as State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center. I was there from ’39 to ’43, and finished in March of ’43, and by the way, this was the first of the accelerated classes. We skipped summer vacation in our junior year, and went right on from the end of the junior year to the beginning of the senior year, and we were graduated in March of ’43, at which time I entered the Army and spent from January ’44 to July ’46 in the Army. I was a captain and my coming to Washington basically was because of Army service, and I was assigned at the Walter Reed General Hospital.

PEERY: Beside your assignment at Walter Reed, what did your Army year include?

ALPERT: I spend three months at, two months, rather, at Camp Bartley, Texas, in January and February of ’44, then went on to Woodrow Wilson General Hospital, and was there until September of ’44, at which time I was assigned to Walter Reed for the school in anesthesiology. I had no idea when I entered the Army that I would go into anesthesia. I’d always liked Ob Gyn, but was assigned to the school and really enjoyed the work, and I must say that since 1946, I did nothing else in medicine but anesthesiology.

PEERY: Do you mean you had no selection in it? You were just assigned?

ALPERT: In those days, when the Army was short, they’d assign people to various schools, and the one I was assigned to was anesthesia, and my chief at that time was Lloyd Mousel, who was chief of anesthesia at Walter Reed General Hospital, and when I got out of the service in ’46, Lloyd Mousel became chief of anesthesia at the George Washington Hospital, and you can see the tie, why I happened to come to George Washington University.

PEERY: Well, I’m glad to get that straight. I didn’t know that. Sy, you spoke about the accelerated program that you were in for the last year or so of your education. What was your reaction to that? Do you think you lost very much by being accelerated, or what’s your reaction?

ALPERT: In my case, I didn’t think we lost anything by it. We just skipped a vacation period, and I know my classmates and I felt that we got exactly the same education anyone else got. I do know the classes behind theirs a year or two later, some of them felt that there was a lack of direct teaching such as we had in ’39, 40, ’41, but it was war time, and I don’t think in the long run it made any difference at all.

PEERY: Sy, I’ve heard some people say that you don’t, maybe you don’t miss out on any formal classes. You get the same courses and so on, but that there isn’t the time to digest information. Did you feel that as a loss?

ALPERT: Tom, I guess we were so busy that we didn’t have time to realize that there was a loss, probably. I didn’t think so. I thought that if I had to say anything, I thought that the increased tempo was probably a good thing, and we all sort of concentrated a little more than people do now. I think, if I had to say it at all, I think it was probably better in the long run than just taking off the summer and lying around a beach somewhere. I might also add, the other man at Walter Reed when I was there was Brian Blades, and Brian Blades was our chief of surgery at Walter Reed, and Brian Blades also came over to G.W. as chief of surgery and it’s almost uncanny, in coincidence of dates, but this happens to be May 17, 1978, and this is the day of the first Memorial Brian Blades Lecture at the Medical School. Brian Blades died last year, and it’s being given by Donald Effler, and Donald Effler was one of Brian Blade’s boys at Walter Reed at the time, and came here right after the war. A very interesting coincidence.

PEERY: That is very interesting. It sounds to me like maybe Lloyd Mousel and Brian Blades lassoed a promising young man and brought him with them, against his will perhaps. Well now, Sy, if I remember correctly, you spent, after you got out of the Army, you continued your residency program in anesthesiology at the D.C. General Hospital. Will you say something about your experiences there, that is, the quality of the training program in anesthesiology and in other fields in those postwar years, the quality of the house staff, the quality of the teaching, and so on.

ALPERT: Tom, it was a very interesting period. D.C. General was then known as Gallinger Hospital, Gallinger Municipal Hospital, and I spent from July of ’46 until the fall of ’47 at Gallinger, or D.C. General. We had excellent training. The services were all under the supervision of George Washington. It was actually a George Washington service. Dr. Mousel came out a couple of days a week. Dr. Stubbes on the clinical faculty came out for the pain clinic. We had top notch people. Dr. Joseph Kreiselman, a man who’s world renowned in infant resuscitation was on the faculty. We had the finest surgeons in the world coming out to that hospital, and in training. We had a lot of postwar surgeons who were excellent people. When I was their chief of anesthesia at Walter Reed, Dr. Brian Effler was the chief of surgery. So you can see, we all came out of the Army together and we all worked there together. I’d say the quality was actually top notch. It was a wonderful teaching hospital.

PEERY: That’s been my reaction, that the man in that period, right after the war, coming out of military service, they had a maturity and a sense of direction and also a commitment. Many of them were married. They were really a superior group of people. And then there was the other thing, it seems to me. Because there were so many of them whose training had been interrupted and who were now seeking graduate training, the quality of them in a good program was always selected very highly. Do you want to say anything about that or have I already said it?

ALPERT: Well, I think you hit it exactly on the head. People who came in for training after being in the service a couple of years knew they were behind in time, and every month was valuable in every case. If anything, people wanted to fight to get in on cases, to scrub on cases, and to do cases. Of course this sounds like an older man, Tom, but the average man today tries to get out of scrubbing on a case, where there, they were vying for the opportunity go get in on a case. And for the residency appointments, it was actually a prize to get an appointment at D.C. General Hospital. It was really a wonderful spot.

PEERY: That reminds me. You remember here just a few years ago, or maybe now, ten years ago, G.W. more or less pulled out of D.C. General as a training institution. What was your reaction to that?

ALPERT: I had a feeling of nostalgia, and I must say that the old timers that were there still thought it was an excellent teaching place, but times change, and they really didn’t have the hospital that we had in the ‘30’s and the ‘40’s. I think in your excellence in this town, particularly, you remember D.C. General when it was a top teaching institution. They had difficulties in budget. They had difficulties getting proper personnel. And it really wasn’t the same place ten years, fifteen, twenty years after I left. And I think that the problems of transportation and getting people to go out there became so great that G.W. did the only thing it could do, and that was to get out. While it bothered some of us, I think it was the only feasible thing to do.

PEERY: Sy, as I remember it, when you finished at D.C. General, you joined the full time staff at the university hospital and spent a brief period of your experience at the old hospital on H Street, before moving into the new hospital on Washington Circle. Tell us something about the days in the old hospital, everything that you might wish to say about it.

ALPERT: Well, this in itself could go on for a long time. But the old hospital that we’re all talking about, 1339 H Street; the Medical School was 1335 H Street, a most unusual place. An old building that had less than one hundred beds, and by all of today’s standards, an outmoded, totally inadequate institution, was actually one of the nicest places you could ever imagine in which to work. The nurses were primarily G.W. graduates, and they were top quality. The nurses, in fact a few of them came over to the new hospital. It sounds funny calling a hospital that opened in 1948 the new hospital, but I still do that occasionally. But they took a real personal interest in the patient, and it was unusual. The people that operated in that hospital when I was there in ’47 and ’48, people like Charles Stanley White, Paul Putzki, Dan Borden, Alec Horowitz, were classic surgeons. They were just wonderful people. I thought of a lot of things about the old hospital. The old operating room with the amphitheatre type, somehow people came in in street clothes, sat there. We didn’t have any trouble with infections. Things got along fairly well. They watched surgery. Classic surgeons such as Charles Stanley White would explain, operate, talk, lecture. Everything seemed to get along very well. We had a ramp going from the third floor to the operating room, because it was built on an upper level, and I’ll never forget, in January of that year, an orderly was getting a flying start pushing a patient the ramp, and he toppled the stretcher and the patient, and the patient fell to the floor. We weren’t sure how many fractures the patient had sustained, but somehow that got along alright, and we never had any trouble.

But these are just a few of the things that you think of when you think of the old place. The old place was known as being supervised by the “three B’s.” You know, Bloedorn, Breen and Bowie. And I might say, it’s wonderful to know that Dean Bloedorn just recently celebrated his ninety-first birthday, and Katherine Breen is enjoying retirement, and Bowie is just retired about two years, and he’s taken a trip out west to see his family, and Bowie is getting along fine, too. So all is well.

PEERY: That’s a lot of nostalgia and memories there. One thing you didn’t mention about that operating room that I was always impressed with, was that mirror. Tell them something about that.

ALPERT: Well, the old mirror, or course, was of perfect use to those sitting in the amphitheatre for use. It sort of worries me a little bit to think it wasn’t cleaned too often, and the dust was settling all over it. But you know, our infection rate was probably less than we have today. Today, if we have a number of people watching a procedure, we use T.V. coverage, and we use direct line T.V. to our conference room. In those days, it was nothing to see fifty, seventy-five people in the amphitheatre, and the surgeon talk, watching the procedure in the mirror. But we had excellent result, and people learned a lot about surgery, and an awful lot of surgery was done in those G.W. operating rooms.

PEERY: I suppose that mirror didn’t make as much impression on you as it did on me, because you were always down on the operating room floor, instead of sitting in the gallery. Well from the old hospital to the new hospital, the switch was made in April of 1948, and I remember that you personally had a very very busy day on that date, the day of the transfer. Tell us something about that, Sy, for the record.

ALPERT: Well, that was going from an old place to what we thought was paradise. The G.W. Hospital on Washington Circle on Twenty-third Street was something where everything was new, and it was just, we just couldn’t believe what a beautiful place we were going into. We had moved over a lot of the equipment, but we still had to be ready to operate at the old place the evening before the move, and we had to be ready to operate at the new place the day before. You know an interesting thing; the first person operated on at the new hospital was Dean Bloedorn himself, who had an acute appendix. He was the first operative case in the new hospital, and the first clinical chart in the new hospital.

PEERY: You’d be interested to know that in the pathology laboratory of the new hospital, Dr. Bloedorn’s appendix was Specimen A-1.

ALPERT: I know [laughter]. He was the first case there, and we were very very proud of it. That was one of the first days that I’d ever seen T.V. coverage, and T.V. of course was fairly new thirty years ago, and people were watching it all over Washington. Our patients were loaded on ambulances and coming to the new hospital. Everything went along as smoothly as possible, and we entered this new place, which was one of the dreams of many many people.

An interesting sidelight, Tom, about the rates. The new hospital had a nine dollar rate for the four bed ward, eleven dollars for semi-private, and the private rooms were fourteen dollars, and the private rooms with bath, the corner rooms, the largest rooms, were seventeen dollars. And Dean Bloedorn worried that people would never pay a fourteen or seventeen dollar rate for room, because we had come from the old hospital where rates were approximately two or four dollars less per room. I think the ward bed was seven dollars in the old hospital. The scene changes in thirty years later, we can’t get enough private rooms for the demand, the rate is around two-hundred dollars a day. But in those days, fourteen and seventeen dollars a day was our only big worry. Who would ever pay the cost? You might be interested, too, that the first year budget was less than three million dollars for that hospital, and this year’s budget is in excess of sixty million dollars.

PEERY: Speaking of the prices of hospital beds in those days, do you remember, I don’t, whether Blue Shield and Blue Cross were operating in those days?

ALPERT: I don’t think it had started at the beginning. If I remember, it came in after we had been there a while. But people were paying private ways, and insurance coverage then was unusual. I think it came in a little later.

PEERY: That was my recollection. Now, you speak of the change in the facility. That undoubtedly had an impact on patient care, and the community’s reaction to the old hospital, sometimes unfavorable because of the condition of the building. What was the change in the community’s attitude towards the hospital, and perhaps any change in staff attitudes, and in the attitudes of interns and residents, and ancillary personnel? What can you say about that?

ALPERT: Tom, this has to be answered in a mixed way. I’m not hedging, but it has to be handled individually. We lost something of the closeness and friendliness in the old hospital. There wasn’t any question about, if you’re on at night and you went down to get a snack, there was one girl that fed you, and you know everyone personally in the hospital. You knew every nurse, every supervisor by first name, in the entire hospital. In the new hospital, of course, you had a much bigger staff, probably better coverage, but we did lose something of that personal approach. Community attitude of course was good as far as we had an emergency room. We offered a lot of services we didn’t have. But we had our problems with town and gown. Do you remember Blades came in as a full-time surgeon and Mousel was full-time anesthesia? We had a problem in our own specialty, in our own department, that we had a closed staff in the specialties, where we had, uh, you remember, you yourself being in pathology, and Charlie Wise(??) being in physical medicine, and Bill Stambrough in radiology, and Mousel, Charlie Coakley and myself being in anesthesia. So we had some plusses, some minuses. But the town and gown problem I don’t think will ever end. Somehow, I think in recent years, it’s quieted down.

The only regret I have is we have our own personal intra-hospital problems rather than we had previously the town-gown situation from outside. But basically, of course, we have to recognize, a new institution, a finer service, facilities of the type we have now, just are tremendous improvements. Our intern and resident staff, the old hospital, belonged more to a family. Here, they’re getting training, and it’s too big an institution. Our ancillary personnel are, again, fine people. They do their job. But there isn’t the feeling of belonging to the G.W.U. family, where everyone felt he had his own place.

PEERY: You were one of the early members of the full-time clinical faculty, and this was an enormous change after the war to have full-time people in the various fields, such as medicine and surgery, obstetrics and gynecology. Did you sense any reaction to that by the students? Was it good or bad in the long run to make that change?

ALPERT: I’m sure in the long run it was better. Students got more attention. After all, people in private practice would devote some spare time to teaching programs. Although in retrospect I have to say that how people could devote the amount of time they did when they carried on a full-time practice, to students and making rounds and teaching and working with them in operating rooms and clinics, you don’t see it today. But I think a full-time staff without question offers better programs, well-rounded teaching. It isn’t the haphazard covering of subjects depending on the patient on the floor at that time. And a full-time staff can see to it that every aspect of a specialty is covered. I think Dr. Parks, our good friend John Parks, who was then chief of ObGyn was one of the first in his field to become a full-time head of the staff in this hospital, in this city, too.

PEERY: I’m sure that’s true. Sy, you were much involved in those postwar years in G.W.’s program in post-graduate medical education. What was your reaction to that experience?

ALPERT: Tom, this is one instance where I can say that the one being interviewed should really be the interviewer, and should talk to you. For the historical record, Tom Peery himself was the director of these post-graduate medical education programs, and I’d like to give you my personal reaction to those. I came to Gallinger after the war in ’46 and ’47 and came to G.W. two afternoons a week to take the, I think it was a twelve semester-hour review basic science course. And for those who know people out of medical school for three years, being in the Army service, where you’re working day and night and coming back to prepare for American boards, I can only tell you that when I finished that year, that ’46. ’47 year and Charlie Coakley and I took the writtens of the American Board of Anesthesia the same time in ’47. We both passed with flying colors, and I’m just wondering how many of us would have passed the boards in our specialties if we hadn’t had this postgraduate course.

Now, then, to follow this, we had over the next number of years, a series of postgraduate courses in medicine and surgery and pathology and anesthesiology and all the specialties, and they were backed by the Kellogg Foundation, and most of them were one-week courses, and the response that we got from people all over the country was that the series of postgraduate courses at G.W. were the best they had ever attended. I know many people in anesthesiology wanted us to continue them even after we stopped them. They ran, how many years did they run, Tom?

PEERY: Ten years.

ALPERT: They ran ten years. And I know even then, after the ten year period, many people wanted it to continue. I think, and this is a special kudo to Tom Peery, I think this was a service we offered to not only war veterans, but those in practice who wanted to keep up and learn the latest developments in medicine, and I think this is one of the things that G.W. could be most proud of, in its ten years at the new hospital, at the new medical school, rather.

PEERY: I’m glad to hear you say that. I too think it was a very important thing for the medical school. One aspect of that basic science program that may have been overlooked by many people, in those postwar years, there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of qualified medical veterans seeking graduate training, and there were not enough approved residencies for them. By offering these programs in the basic sciences in the Washington area, it let the hospitals in the area that had not previously been approved for residency training get their approval, and so all of the hospitals that previously had not participated in graduate education had the opportunity with this program. Sy, tell us something about your relationship with Dr. Walter Bloedorn, the dean of the school of medicine when you joined the faculty and for a few years thereafter. He was much loved by everybody and highly respected by the students. What was your attitude as a staff member?

ALPERT: Well, this in itself could take a good hour. Dean Bloedorn was a giant in medicine in this city. I personally had the highest respect for him, not only as a person, but the man was dean of the medical school, he was professor of medicine, he was hospital medical director, in addition to which he carried on a very heavy private practice. A very interesting man. His word was law. It wasn’t by committees or decisions or bringing it up to senates and voting on it. When Dean Bloedorn said it, that was it, and it was carried by Catherine Breen, and that was the way it was. He was a very interesting fellow, and thinking about this, I couldn’t help but think of two instances. As you know, Tom, salaries were very low at that time, and I’ll never forget Bill Stambrough going into him one day and saying that he really couldn’t live on the amount of money he was making, and Dean Bloedorn talked to him for about fifteen minutes and told him that this retirement program which had just gone in, it must have been about 1950 or ’51, if I remember, if Stambrough would only contribute five-percent of his salary, he might get ten-percent back in retirement years. Here, Stambrough was going in to tell him that he couldn’t live on the money that he was making, and he walked out minus five-percent that he committed to the retirement program. [laughter]

I have a personal incident with Dean Bloedorn that I think is a funny type of thing. We had had residents from Massachusetts General coming in for Ob training at our hospital, Ob anesthesia, Drs. Todd and Bunker, and Dr. Henry Beecher came up every month or two to visit whenever he came to Washington. And Dr. Beecher and I became very friendly. In 1950, he, the year ’50, ’51 school year, he approached me with the idea of going to Massachusetts General and offered me fifteen-thousand a year. At that time, I was making twelve-thousand at G.W., and fifteen-thousand sounded like an awful lot of money. If anyone is listening to this in the 1970s and 1980s, it sounds very small, but in those days it was, a three-thousand increase was a lot of money. So, I went in to see Dr. Bloedorn, and he listened to the story, and I’ll tell you how he handled it. He said, “now, we won’t discuss this further.” He said “I’ll take care of your salary for next year, and we’re not going to discuss this again.” And I walked out thinking everything was fine, and I got the letter, and it was thirteen-thousand, five-hundred, but I didn’t discuss it with him again.

And that’s the way it ran. But, he was a greatly admired wonderful man, and in fact I had the pleasure of seeing Dean Bloedorn when he was a patient at G.W. Hospital just a few months ago. He’s doing well, and we’re just so glad to see that he’s with us and to enjoy seeing what happened with the hospital that he actually built. This hospital would never have been built if it hadn’t been for Dean Bloedorn. And some of our friends in Congress would . . . he was the guarding spirit behind our hospital.

PEERY: Sy, do you remember how many associate deans and assistant deans and so on there were at the time, and how many hospital administrators, and assistant administrators?

ALPERT: Well, we have to laugh at this, because Dean Bloedorn was not only dean, as I said, but medical director, and Leon, Mr. Smeltzer was the only hospital administrator. When he left the next year, Vic Ludwig(??) came in, and then Fred Menck (??) came. We only had one administrator, and then finally one assistant administrator. And at the medical school, I think the director of admissions wasn’t the dean then even, was he? No, there wasn’t any. And in fact we didn’t get the, Griffin, I think, was the first, Griffin was the first one that came in as dean, and that was after, that was years after. When Dean Bloedorn was here, he was Dean, he was Medical Director, and that was it. Today we have about ten on the administrative faculty of the medical school. We have about six or eight in the hospital administrative staff and this is actual fact. And our hospital hasn’t grown that much. It went from 425 beds to 550, and our medical school went from 400 to 600. So, well, I’m sure we’ve improved service, but we surely have gone ahead in numbers of people employed.

PEERY: Sy, you also served under Dr. John Parks, who was dean of the medical school, and later vice-president for medical affairs. I think he came on board with that title in 1957, and died then in the early ‘70s. What changes did you note in the medical school and hospital with this change in administration, from Dr. Bloedorn to Dr. Parks?

ALPERT: Well, Dr. Bloedorn, of course, was a private practitioner, and he tolerated the setup for where private practice as enjoyed by many members of the medical and surgical fields in our hospital. Dr. Parks had been brought up in the full-time staff tradition, since he had come from D.C. General and had come to George Washington in the old hospital and then moved over to the new hospital in ’48, and he tried and did change it to a really full-time setup. Under Dr. Bloedorn, the departments, Tom, as you know, of pathology, anesthesiology, physical medicine, radiology, were the only truly full-time staff. The others had private practice privileges, even though they were so-called full-time staff. Dr. Parks in time did integrate the staff to be a truly full-time staff, and of course, greatly enlarged the staff. Dr. Parks was, as many of us remember him, a former football star, a really sincerely dedicated teacher, fine physician, surgeon, man who headed many national societies, and was loved by his patients. He maintained a private, not a private practice but a practice in the university setup, where he saw patients and took care of them well. A most unusual man. It was under his administration that we built the Meyer Pavilion, the new wing, the east wing on the hospital, that as built in the mid 1960s. Dr Thomas Carroll was then university president, and Max Farrington was in the university development office. The building of that wing gave us a lot of private, semi-private rooms. We carried the air conditioning for the entire hospital. It was a tremendous advance, and I’m proud to say the gold-plated shovel that helped dig that building is one of my prized possessions, and I’m sure Dean Parks had one and Vic Ludwig had one. And it’s hanging in my office today. The Meyer Pavilion is really a showplace of an excellent hospital facility.

The tragedy of Dean Parks’s death in ’73; he died just before the new medical school opened. It’s almost like Moses just about to see the Promised Land and didn’t see it. He could see the building coming up. He literally devoted his life to this school, did a lot for it. In the period of ’69, ’70, when we were getting the funds for the school, and keeping together a close-knit faculty during very perilous times, we owe him a great debt of gratitude.

PEERY: It’s interesting too, Sy, that Dr. Bloedorn and Dr. Parks, while they did so much locally and for this medical school, they had time to have a very busy career at the national level, in the Association of American Medical Colleges and in the National Board of Medical Examiners. I doubt if there are many schools in this country who have had deans who served consecutively, two administrations, as they did, who were at one time or another president of the American Association of Medical Colleges and president of the National Board of Medical Examiners. Do you want to say something about that?

ALPERT: Yes. I think this is something of which we should be very very proud, this tradition of service that was started by Dean Bloedorn. We had had many fine professors and many fine deans at the school before, but they were local figures. And I think the tradition established by Dr. Bloedorn of going on to national leadership, and carried on so nicely by John Parks, I think was something that helped to give G.W. the name, the prestige that it has. It took a lot of time and effort to go to these meetings, to work on these committees, and we should be very proud that we had that caliber person on our staff.

PEERY: Sy, I know that you spent practically your whole professional life in Washington and at George Washington. What were some of the positive things that kept you here with us? I know that you had other opportunities.

ALPERT: It’s an interesting thing about Washington. I’ve often heard it said that people either love it or hate it. I must say that my wife, Cecile, and I loved Washington. We came through here on our honeymoon in 1941. I was married while in school, married September 7, 1941, and we spent the two weeks vacation in Washington, D.C. and in Virginia. At that time, we fell in love with the city. When I got out of the Army and needed one more year to fulfill my board requirement, we came here for the period at Gallinger Hospital, and then stayed on what was supposedly for one year at George Washington while the new hospital opened, and of course that one year lengthened out to, as it is now, thirty-one years.

Washington is unusual. It’s a tremendous city as far as medicine. You don’t see any of the, I don’t want to accuse any particular city, but you don’t see the poorer aspects of medicine that we don’t like to talk about, as practiced in some cities. You see an excellent caliber of medical practitioner here. Our medical schools have helped foster training programs in all, and I’ve just enjoyed every year that I spent in Washington, D.C. I think the full-time people that we had at G.W., the caliber of the volunteer faculty was excellent. Our social relationships were good, and surely now, with the Kennedy Center and all of the other things we have here, I think Washington is about the finest place in which to live and in which to practice.

PEERY: I couldn’t agree with you more, Sy. Now, when you went into anesthesiology, that specialty was quite new. Tell us something about anesthesiology as it was practiced in Washington at that time, and compare it maybe to that in the United States and elsewhere. What was the impact in your opinion of the war on the specialty of anesthesiology?

ALPERT: Well, I’m sixty years old today, and I entered, at this time, I should say, and I entered into the specialty in 1944. So, at the age of twenty-six, I entered into what was then a simply small group of people who specialized in anesthesiology. For example, there were only about 2,000, 2500 members of the American Society of Anesthesia in the country in 1946. Today, there are over fifteen thousand. When I received my Board certificate after the orals and the writtens and the whole thing in 1949, my number is 533. And now, about 7,000. So, it’s a specialty which was very young. Just to give you an example, I was trained in Ether anesthesia, Cicopropane, and Avertin, a rectal anesthesia. These three anesthetics, you don’t see today. We don’t use Ether at the university hospital, because of the explosive hazard. The same for Cicopropane, and Avertin, which is Tribromethanol and Ameline Hydrate, is practically unheard of by the residents today. The drugs such as muscle relaxants and Halothane were unheard of when I started in anesthesia. The field has changed absolutely entirely. We never thought of inter-cardia operation, and microsurgery of course wasn’t heard of, and just the entire field has changed and grown so, and I’m not saying this as an anesthesiologist, but I think all the surgical specialties can take pride in making possible the advances in surgery, in anesthesia.

I’ve got to tell you a little interesting background in Washington. Dr. Joseph Kreiselman (??) was a graduate of G.W. in 1919. He was the consultant to the Army in anesthesia, and Joe Kreiselman(??), a G.W. graduate, who was chief in anesthesia in Emergency Hospital, is the father of infant resuscitation in this country. So, we did have some anesthesia here in the 1930s. Men like Donald Stubbs and Wes Breuner(??) (sounds like Brewner) came in with Joe Kreiselman(??) at that time in Emergency Hospital. Dr. Chipman (??) was the chief anesthetist at G.W. Hospital. Dr. Bogan (??) was then in charge of Garfield. And I must tell you the story of Dr. Bogan’s. We were discussing in 1946, anesthesiology residency training programs. And Dr. Bogan said “let me tell you about my residency.” He said “I walked into the operating room one morning,” and he said “I was an intern, and the surgeon turned to me and he said “Bogan, we don’t have an anesthetist today. Would you take this can of ether and this ether mask and go into this room and give this patient an anesthetic?” Bogan said to the surgeon, “Sir, what do I do? I don’t know.” The surgeon said, “I’ll tell you what to do, Bogan. You put this mask on the patient’s face and you take this can and put a pin in the top, and just let the ether pour, and Bogan, go in there and pour it on.” And Bogan said, “that was the length and breadth of my residency training,” and he went on to become chief of anesthesia at Garfield Hospital.

The Department of Anesthesiology at G.W., as you know, in 1948 was Lloyd Mousel. Charlie Coakley and myself, with six residents, and we took care of a 425 bed hospital. Today, we have a 550 bed hospital and the staff is somewhere around sixteen full-time staff and twenty residents. Now, there are some who are at Children’s at times or at the Walter Reed and the outlying services, but we have something like five times, four or five times the staff we had, and they are getting, I’m sure, finer training all over, but we worked every other night, every other weekend, and we did render a wonderful service to patients, and we were proud of the fact that almost every one of our residents passed the Boards in the first time. I wonder how many hospitals and how many departments can say that today. But we crammed them, we worked with them, and it was a very wonderful feeling to be involved at G.W. By the way, I might mention, Dr. Mousel left the year after the hospital opened. He had a dispute with Administration on compensation, and it became a very difficult period, and he left in the fall of 1949, temporarily, to see what would happen.

Rumor had it around the hospital that we wouldn’t last a month or two in a big department such as that, but it’s amazing, that thirty years later, we can still talk abut the fact that the youngest two on the staff became the oldest two, and both of us now, Charlie is 64 and I’m 60, are still around to see the anesthesiology department in the George Washington University Hospital going along at a great pace.

PEERY: Sy, tell us something about your participation and involvement in the American Board of Pathology, um, America Board of Anesthesiology, would you, and the various national societies of your specialty, your part in them?

ALPERT: One of the pleasures of anesthesiology was the opportunity to participate with the American Board of Anesthesiology. From the period 1955 until 1969, I was an associate examiner for the American Board, and would spend one week each year giving the oral examinations to candidates from all over the country. This of course was an opportunity to meet all the leaders of anesthesiology, and as I stated before, it was a small specialty in the ‘50s, and beginning ‘60s, and these are memories that I hold with me, that I will hold with me for a long time. It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know these people and to be with them. I was also active in the American Society of Anesthesiology, having been president of the D.C. Maryland Society, and having been district director for Maryland, Virginia and D.C., and I was also on the board of governors of the Wood Library Museum of Anesthesiology, and started the Anesthesiology Bibliography about ten years ago. So, participation in medical societies and medical specialties were offered by G.W and many of us, as Tom, you yourself know in pathology, took part in these, and I wish the situation were reversed, because Tom’s involvement, again, was so much more than mine, and his contributions were so great that I’m almost ashamed to tell you about my part of it. What I did, I was really was very proud of it, and enjoyed it.

PEERY: Well, I’m sure your impact was more than mine. Sy, tell us something more about the American Board system. You can speak of it in relation to anesthesiology or in the broader aspect, either one. What do you think the impact has been on the practice of anesthesiology and on the other practice of other specialties in this country? ALPERT: I think the system is basically a good one. I think it picked up anesthesiology training programs to the level where they are today. You know, thirty years ago, a program could be approved almost at will by somebody applying for it, and now, with the rigid surveys, and with the prerequisites for certain numbers of hours of teaching and numbers of clinic staff available for operating room, and coverage of clinical problems, we’re testing people in inhalation therapy and emergency medicine and basic sciences, subjects that were neglected years ago. I think the rigid control of programs by the American Board has been an excellent one. I think the adding of the extra year that anesthesiology has recently done will even help further in this program. I think the specialties have done a lot to increase the caliber of medicine, to give us better background. The more well-rounded individual that has his boards, I think, gives better medical care to the patient populace.

PEERY: As you told us a moment ago, you have served on the American Board of Anesthesiology for, intermittently and consecutively, for a number of years. Do you, can you say anything about the quality of the candidates that you have examined? Has that changed appreciably over the years?

ALPERT: I really don’t think the caliber has changed. You know, in 1969, when I became a Vice-President for Development, I had to give up the exams, because I just didn’t have the time to do it. But I think that we examined on subjects in the late 1960s at a much deeper level than we did in the mid-fifties, the mid 1950s. Our questioning in the mid-fifties and up to 1960 or so, were mostly clinical problems. But the involvement more in basic sciences and fluid balance, pathology and other subjects as related to anesthesiology conditions, became much more in depth, and I think we had a better caliber person getting his Boards, than we had when I first started. Being an associate examiner there with men who were on the board such as Lundy, Beecher, people of the type that were the names in medicine, Adripts(??), Artusio. You know, it’s hard to believe. Adripts (??) is dead, Lundy is dead, a lot of these people. Adriani(??) is still alive. Adriani(??) is in Louisiana at Charity Hospital. He’s ageless, and his textbooks, by the way, were the backbone of our courses. But the specialty has advanced a lot, and we’re very proud of the success that it’s had in medicine.

PEERY: Sy, I know, that as you gained stature in your profession locally and nationally, you quickly became involved in some charitable enterprises in a very significant way. Tell us something about this, would you?

ALPERT: Tom, it was interesting that early on in Washington I did become involved with a lot of charitable organizations, but if I could, I’d like to include my work with the medical fraternity, Phi Delta Epsilon. Phi Delta Epsilon, as you all know, is a medical fraternity. I was a member in my medical school days, and when I came to Washington, a group of us became very active in a graduate club. I was president in 1950, and went on through the various offices, and became national president in 1961, and finally Chairman of the Board of Trustees. That’s the job the older man gets before he retires in 1973. But this has been a great feeling of satisfaction. I was at a medical school, and it was easy to attend undergraduate meetings at my school. I made a point to attend district and national meetings when they came out on weekends or when I could get away, and it really keeps you young, being involved in a medical fraternity.

My charities, of course, are a lot of them. I was very active in the, what started out as the Blue Feather Campaign. It became the United Givers Fund. And it’s a very interesting thing, that our own chairman of the Board of Trustees emeritus, E. K. Morris, was the chairman at the time of the United Givers Fund formation. He was the man who really made the United Givers Fund in Washington what it is today. My work with the American Friends of the Hebrew University started about twenty years ago. That’s a group of people who are helping the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and particularly the medical school. There is a great shortage of funds, and I’m national vice-president of that today, and chairman of the medical division. For the last twenty years, I’ve been very active with that group. You probably know about my work with the United Jewish Appeal, Tom, and I’ll just mention that in passing. I worked on many committees, and finally was general chairman of Greater Washington in 1963 and ’64, and was president of the United Jewish Appeal in 1965 and ’66. I was active in the, and am to this day, active in the State of Israel Bond Effort, and was general chairman in 1959 and 1960, and now a member of the board of governors, and also national chairman of the medical chairman. My wife says I don’t find time to go on vacations, but I do find time, Tom, to go to Israel every year in January for the Prime Minister’s mission for leaders in the United States. I’ve enjoyed the work. I must say that I think it’s very worthwhile, and I would only encourage people in the future years, whatever religion you’re interested in, whatever special thoughts you have about charities, get involved in a charity. It may be crippled children’s. It may be your church. It may be something to do with recreational work or sports. Whatever it is, I think some outside activities of this type, you owe it to your fellow man, you owe it to humanity, you owe it to your community.

I might say that I met some of the nicest people in the world in these charities. Nationally, the names wouldn’t mean anything to you, but, locally, people like Charles E. Smith, a trustee of this university, Mr. N. M. Cohen, the chairman of the board of Giant Food, Mr. Morris Cafritz, a well-renowned business leader, Paul Himmelfarb, who, by the way, was the donor of our [medical] library here, Jack Bender of Blake Construction Company. I could go on and on, and I would be less than honest if I didn’t add that it turns out that most of the, all of these people, happen to be major donors to G.W. University. Now, I don’t say this is quid pro quo exactly, but, people give to people, and if you work with them on charities, and they know of your interests, they owe you one, and they are willing to respond to requests from the university, where they might not be able, or might not have the inclination or desire to do so, without knowing the man who makes the request. As you know, I didn’t do this knowingly. I had no idea I’d ever get involved in the school in this effort, but my friendship with these people, and big donors to charitable organizations by and large are good people in general, and they will respond to every legitimate request, and I found it so, and must say that my best friends are the ones that I met in charities.

PEERY: That’s very interesting Sy. It certainly is a measure of your unselfishness, the amount of time and effort you’ve put into these operations. That leads up to the next subject I want you to say something about. How did you get involved with, in the fund-raising aspects of the medical school? I’m sure it must have been a spin-off from this involvement in the community. I’m sure John Parks found out about what you were able to do as a fund raiser for private charity, and knowing how much the medical school needed some money at this time, I’m sure this must have led to a great deal of arm twisting to get you involved at G.W. Tell us about it, would you. ALPERT: Well, Tom, this is a part of my life that you were very intimately associated with, because, when you were professor and chairman of pathology during the mid-sixties, you know we went out to raise the funds for the Meyer Pavilion. Dr. Parks had talked to Mrs. Meyer and the Meyer Foundation people, and they had made an initial gift, and we wanted to build this new wing on the hospital that would really complete the institution as far as air conditioning, new operating rooms, and really, vitally needed space. And I became chairman, voluntary chairman of the faculty committee, and I will say, Tom, that it was people like Thomas Peery and others who supported this effort and got this hospital off the ground. If it hadn’t been for our faculty support, and this faculty support came from people who were primarily not graduates of George Washington University, . . . . Now, our medical school, on the other hand, of course, that was later. That was primarily a faculty, that was primarily an alumni effort.

But our hospital wing was built primarily by the faculty at the hospital, and the full time faculty were included almost one hundred percent. And I mean, these weren’t casual gifts. These were gifts of the five and ten thousand dollar range, up to twenty-five thousand. Mind you, we’re talking abut 1963 and 1964, 1965 dollars. A five and ten thousand dollar gift in those days was a lot of money, and people sacrificed to help this hospital get its new wing and get off the ground. And Tom, I’d like to get on record of paying homage and appreciation to you, because you were one of the very first, and I’ll never forget it, who spontaneously offered, who didn’t have to be talked to and cajoled and induced to take part in this. Tom Peery is in my book just tops. Now, the building was finished in the mid-sixties, and the east wing of that hospital is still a perfect medical facility, and the new operating rooms there are still things that we can show off and point to with pride, as being excellent facilities. I might say, the pathology department profited, because when we gave up the operating rooms on the fourth floor of the old hospital, the pathology department moved in, and I think the pathology department came up alright. But my part in that was as the chairman of the faculty committee.

Now, in 1967 and 1968, the school had embarked on a program to build a new medical school and medical library. A high powered fund-raising firm was hired. A resident full-time man came here, and he spent about a year and a half to two years planning and printing very beautiful fancy booklets and setting up elaborate committees, and went after foundations and corporations. The only problem with this was that there was a deadline on our grant of June 30, 1969, and whereas this groundwork took place in 1967 and 1968, by April of 1969 there were no funds available to get the matching grant. And I had lunch with Dr. Parks one day, and as an aside, he said “would you consider taking a few months to help us with this medical school project?”

And Tom, that’s the, I don’t know if that’s the beginning of my downfall or whatever it was, but that few months in May and June of 1969 has lengthened out to nine years at G.W. University, in Development. But that’s a story in itself. I had, I would like to mention one thing, Tom, if I may. I had the experience in the mid 1960s of working on the medical library project with Merlin K. DuVal as part of the medical library committee for the Association of American Medical Colleges. We did this study in a period of a year, and published the guidelines for medical libraries, and, at that time, I might say, I was chairman of the library committee for the G.W. medical school. Well, I got actively involved in getting the grant for the medical library in G.W., because frankly I had the knowledge of the guidelines and knew exactly what they asked for. And I think that this initial grant that we got in 1967 of a million, two-hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars, which had to be matched three for one, was really the beginning of my getting actively involved in administration of fund-raising.

PEERY: Well, that’s very interesting. I’m glad to have the background on that. You spoke now, last, of the medical library and the fund-raising there. Tell us something about the special features of that library that you were able to get across. What would you say about that?

ALPERT: Tom, this is something I can talk about for a long time. I love medical libraries, having spent four years as chairman of the committee at our school, and also with DuVal on this national study. We came from an institution at 1339 H Street that had about five-thousand square feet of library space. We now have a medical library that has approximately forty-thousand square feet of space. And I’m proud to say that this library is really keyed to audiovisual. I think this is most apropos that Tom Peery should be the interviewer here, because he himself, as chairman of the curriculum committee, and as, in his many years of association at G.W., has always fostered audiovisual aids. And in pathology, as you know, audiovisual materials are used a lot. We have a good portion of the third floor of that library devoted to audiovisual. In fact, it became such a big amount of space, that when our grant was reviewed by the granting authorities at the National Library of Medicine, they questioned the allocation of such a large amount of physical space to audiovisual. They felt we should have more space allocated to books and periodicals, while those of us in medical education, particularly those of us who studied libraries know, that today, all their historical, not true historical, but all their material is kept on microfiche or on film or on tape, and you don’t need all the books and all the periodicals, so we can keep the file of all periodicals that are used once or twice a year on the microfiche and we can pull it at any time we want. And a small card cabinet can maintain an entire file that would normally take an entire floor in a library.

So they questioned this very carefully on the amount of space, and wanted to withdraw a portion of our grant. Our medical librarian at that time was Isabella Young, and we prepared a defense of this at the National Library of Medicine. This isn’t meant to be facetious. Well, it is funny in a way, and it isn’t meant to be crude. But when they gave us a hard time on the, really, putting that much space in audiovisual, it was a pleasure to be able to point to the guidelines and quote the page and the line, because DuVal and the committee members and I had written those guidelines, and we knew it chapter and verse. And that ended the discussion. We got the entire grant. And you know, Tom, as you well know, the total amount that that library, $1,295,000, became the cornerstone of our medical school, because we parleyed this into a part of the medical school project, simply by joining it with a corridor, and that’s how we came to build the library and the medical school at the same time. What you see now, between Twenty-third and Twenty-forth Street, between H and I, was started by the $1,295,000 grant, but we have a $26,000.000 enterprise there, that $26,000,000 physical structure in 1969 dollars. And that was then. That building today is worth somewhere between forty and fifty million dollars. But those are interesting sidelights.

But the, a personal aside about the man who made the initial gift, Mr. Paul Himmelfarb, was a man who lived in Washington all his life, and very, very active in communal affairs and charities. He hadn’t had any association with G.W., but he was told about this medical library bill that gave three dollars to one dollar matching funds, and it started as a joke, by telling him, “You know that, if you put up one dollar, it will amount to four dollars.” And that was the time that the proposed funding bill for medical libraries was being discussed. That was the mid 1960s. And he offhandedly said “Well, if the bill ever passes, come see me. It sounds like a good deal.” To make a long story short, that is the Paul Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library, and that matching funding was given by Paul Himmelfarb, and I’m proud to see his name on that building. A very wonderful man.

PEERY: How did you happen to make his acquaintance? Any family connection of some sort that was important there?

ALPERT: No, Tom. Paul Himmelfarb was the treasurer of the United Jewish Appeal. He was the perennial treasurer. He had been it for forty years, and he died in his late 80s, about ten years ago, and, very active in charities, very active in affairs in the city, and I met him through charitable work. We used to sit next to each other at the table a lot, and he would always kid me about the size of my gift. He’d say, “You know, your gift is bigger than mine, proportionately.” [laughs]. He would say “what I give proportionate to my wealth and what you give proportionate to your wealth,” he says, “you’re doing better than I do.” A very fine, wonderful man. He happened to be the father-in-law of Dr Alec Horowitz, one of our surgeons, and the mother of, uh, I’m sorry, the father of Mrs. Horowitz, of course, who is a graduate of our own law school, and herself a wonderful person.

PEERY: Tell us a little bit more about Mr. Himmelfarb. I have met him, but never did get to know him. How did he make his money?

ALPERT: Mr. Himmelfarb was a delightful man who, years ago, came to Washington from Baltimore and, gasoline for cars was just becoming popular. He came here in the First World War period, and he opened gas stations on various corners in Washington, and he sold what was known then as “Lightening Gas.” “Lightening Gas” was a non big-name company, and of course, Standard Oil and all the other companies came into town, and Amoco had never come to Washington, American Oil Company. Amoco was a Baltimore concern. And when they woke up to the fact that Washington was a big market, all the best corners, and all the best areas, were taken by all the name companies, and “Lightening,” owned by Himmelfarb. So, Paul Himmelfarb sold out to Amoco, so they could have his spaces, and where many of the Amoco stations are today, were Paul Himmelfarb’s original corners on the property. And of course, the man who bought the property for stations also then got involved in real estate, and he was a man of tremendous means who contributed vast sums of money to all sorts of charities. His name is revered and remembered by everyone in Washington.

PEERY: That’s very interesting about Mr. Himmelfarb. I’m certainly glad to get that on the record. Now, how did you draw up a plan, an organizational plan, for raising money for the medical center? If that’s not giving away any trade secrets, I’m sure we would all like to have it on the record.

ALPERT: Tom, there really aren’t any secrets. It was just a matter of a lot of direct talking to alumni. You know the plan laid out by the fund-raising firm was to go after foundations and corporations to get big moneys. And the plan is a good one. It’s a standard one, and is something that’s fine, except for the fact that foundations and corporations just weren’t about to give millions of dollars, apparently at that time, to the George Washington University Medical School. We were caught in April of 1969 with this deadline of two and a half months away, with very little funds. And we had a medical school plan that would be about twenty-five million dollars, with a federal grant of fourteen million, nine-hundred thousand, approximately, that we had to match, almost ten million dollars. And the deadline of June 30 required two-thirds of the necessary matching funds in hand before the grant would be finalized. So we had to come up with 6.7 million dollars by June 30.

Well, I can only tell you how it was done. It’s not the routine type of thing, but John Parks and I mapped out areas of the country, and literally, had a breakfast in one city, had a luncheon in another, and a dinner in a third. I remember my west coast trip, and I had two meals a day. You can see my size today. You can see that I eat very well. But went from San Diego to L.A. in one day, for lunch and a dinner, went the next day from San Francisco to Seattle, and I remember going from the west coast to Salt Lake City for a breakfast on a Sunday morning. I took a mid mid midnight flight to have a breakfast on Sunday morning in Salt Lake City at Howard McQuery’s(??) home. And Homer Ellsworth and all our friends from G.W. residency programs and graduates of the school were there. Homer took me to the airport for an eleven o’clock flight to Phoenix, where we had a luncheon, and then I got on a plane and went to Chicago for a dinner meeting. Now, this doesn’t sound like a standard operating procedure. In the case of G.W. alumni, they came through with the initial funds to get this school going. That initial trip, the month of May, that initial trip brought in over a million dollars, and that was in signed pledged cards, at which time, Charles Smith, a member of our Board of Trustees, said he would call a meeting of the Trustees since we had our million dollars in hand, and he wanted to see that we really meant it, that we really would do it, and he himself started out with a gift of $250,000. Katherine Graham and her mother and the foundation came in for $300,000. Charles Phillips and some of the foundation’s associates came in for $100,000. Well, from then on things began rolling. It just needed an impetus. It needed the trustee response. It needed alumni response. Then of course, people in town and others came in. We had the Ross gift that Dr. Parks and Dr. Bloedorn had obtained in a will at that time, of two million dollars.

And with that, we had the matching funds and in 1970, we got the balance of the ten million needed in pledges, and that medical school stands today without a mortgage. You know, with all our financial problems, Tom, that we have, with rising operating costs, we haven’t gone broke, simply for the reason that we didn’t have a mortgage on that building. You could picture going ahead with mortgages and paying interest rates that have in recent years gone to the ten percent plus or minus level. That would have just broken our back. So, we have a twenty-five, twenty-six million dollar facility, medical school, medical library, beautifully equipped, 1969 dollars, exactly, that is completely paid for. We owe no one on that, and that is keeping us alive today.

PEERY: That’s a great story, Sy, and I’m certainly glad to get it on the record, and we certainly owe you an enormous debt of gratitude for the effort you put into this, and for your success. Now, you told us about some of your achievements there. Do you want to tell us anything about some of the big fish that got away? I don’t mean to name names, but what was it for some people that turned off their reaction to G.W. and led them not to give?

ALPERT: Tom, we could spend the whole day going into the excuses people gave me why they shouldn’t give. Whether a child had ever been rejected for medical school admission in the 1940s, 1950s or 1960, or a patient had to wait in the admitting office before getting into the hospital, it’s amazing the number of excuses people can find not to give. I’d rather dwell on the fact that so many people gave, and the large sums that they did give, really without our really expecting them to. It was very heartwarming to see the response of people here. This man Jack Bender I mentioned before, a builder in town, who had no affiliation with G.W., on hearing the need for the school and the need for the hospital, he came here for the hospital originally, extension, gave $100,000 right off the bat, and then, before his death, pledged another $50,000, which was paid for by his son Morton. This is the type of response that we got from the city. We got it from a lot of individuals in the city who were just gracious donors. I might mention the widow of Charley Stanley White, established the pathology department with a $200,000 gift, and the picture of Charles Stanley White and Charles Stanley White, Jr., how hang in the pathology department of that first floor of the hospital. We had many examples like that. Patients of doctors in town. Dr. Bloedorn’s patients, Dr. Jack Clay’s patients. Mrs. Soper, the Soper lecture hall. These are things that we can just go on and on. Various departments were sponsored by gracious donors. I’d like to point to Louis Straws, the man who was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. A very gracious man, a $200,000 donor to the hospital.

Well, Tom, it doesn’t take too many two-hundred thousands to add up to big figures, but it’s interesting that the initial giving in this place, in this school, that gave the impetus to the Board of Trustees to come in, was from the alumni. Our hospital was from the medical faculty. Our impetus to giving came from the medical alumni, and it’s our total of about ten million dollars comes out divided about evenly between three million dollars plus alumni, three million dollars from trustees and people they represent, and our faculty and friends came in for another three and a half million dollars. So the giving to that project was not the usual type of fund-raising. You usually think of foundations and corporations as the biggest giving, but we had very little of it.

PEERY: I guess the outside donors saw the enthusiasm of the alumni for the project and the enthusiasm of the faculty. And this led the board of trustees to get involved, and then this led the community and others. It’s a remarkable story. Sy, what part did you play in bringing in the big federal grant that finally made the new building possible? I suppose you have already told us that.

ALPERT: Visits with alumni.

PEERY: Yes, that’s pretty much what you said a moment ago. Well, I certainly know you must feel an enormous personal pride in that achievement.

ALPERT: Tom, I think we should add something very carefully here. We’re emphasizing the fund-raising aspects, because, after all, that is my prime interest in your interviewing me. I don’t think it would be fair to talk about the medical school without mentioning John Parks and Angus Griffin for the work they did in planning the medical school. The hours and days and months and years of going over plans with the architects and the medical school planners, in which every chairman of the department participated and laid out his individual plans. I know you did it in the department of pathology, and I know that Angus Griffin must have spent two, three years on this project, and I know that John Parks, who at that time even had cardiac problems, pushed himself to the end to get this thing viable and to get this thing going. You know, getting grants and making applications and proving your position just doesn’t happen by sending an envelope in with a grant application. You appear at hearings. You prove your point. Your fight your way through. And these people really deserve the major credit for working up the plans, planning the school, and getting them actually down on paper. My part was financial fund raising. I would like to put my own credit in only as far as the planning of the library. That was done with a wonderful committee of Isabella Young, as medical librarian, Halla Brown, who unfortunately had been injured in this awful car accident, was a wonderful member, Frank Allen, Mary Lou Robbins, who herself is retiring this month, and the many other members, George Mahoney; these were the mainstays of our medical library committee, and these people devoted months and months of full afternoons, and I mean, we would start early afternoon and go on until late to get this library planned, and I think it’s a credit to all these people that the library is the wonderful library it is today.

PEERY: Sy, what stage in the drive for medical school funds were your talents as a fund-raiser recognized by the president of the university? I’m sure there must be some stories to tell there too.

ALPERT: Well, as you know, the grant was matched on June 30 of 1969, and a month later, I guess it was about the beginning of August, the end of July, the beginning of August, that President Elliott asked me for lunch one day at the Cosmos Club, and I thought this was a nice gesture on the part of the president. I thought he’d buy me a drink and get me a sandwich, and say “thanks very much,” and I’d go back to my department of anesthesiology where I had worked for Charlie Coakley for over twenty years, and I was looking forward to it. During the lunch, the president said, he says, “you know, everything’s worked out well at the med building fund.” He said “I’ll tell you what I’d like you to do. I’d like you consider coming over to the University with me for a year, and what we’ve done at the med school, we can try to do at the university. We can build this into a big school.” And he used the phrase which I tease him about quite a bit. He says “you know, at the med school, you’re tied down.” He said “you don’t have much time. You have certainly definite amounts of time, and if you go to the university, your time’s your own.” He says “you can come and go when you want, and that’s wonderful.” You know, I thought that sounded really good, because at the med school and hospital, you only had four weeks vacation a year, and I took off a week for the American boards, and I took a week off at the American Society or at other medical meetings. So, I was only away six weeks a year. Well, to make a long story short, I said, “yes,” I would take it for a year, and for the next nine years, I’ve averaged about two weeks a year off instead of my usual, [laughs], my usual six at the medical school.

PEERY: Is your day as long now as it used to be? I remember you used to be there at eight o’clock in the morning, and earlier, to get the operating room started.

ALPERT: Well, the office here starts at nine, but the office here doesn’t close like an operating room. Usually, we used to finish at four, four-thirty, five o’clock. My office stays open until we get through. And then, Tom, as you know, I still go to the Anesthesiology staff meetings. In fact, today, I was at the hospital at 7:15 for the Anesthesiology staff meeting, and I was there until 8:30. Well, I used to run those meetings, as you remember, and it’s almost, I get up on Wednesday morning and land up in the hospital. I just don’t know any other way to do it. So I still go to the staff meetings. Now, my day to day is supposedly a nine to five day, but it’s heavily interlaced with lunches and dinners, and my size, as you can see, bears [laughs] witness to the fact that I eat well at all these affairs.

Tom, I’d like to say one thing about working with Dr. Elliott at the school. We’ve emphasized the medical school, and that’s as it should be, because my background is professor of anesthesia, and I am an M.D., but I’ve been with Elliott at the university since 1969. I think it should be made a matter of record that a man of this type came into a school that has very little endowment. We had no history of fund-raising, really, and we had no luck in getting major buildings, and in the space of the fifteen years that he’s been here, well it’s less than that, it’s been about twelve, fourteen years, that’s he’s been here, we’ve put up 135 million dollars worth of buildings. And the great bulk of the buildings were built in the last ten years. He’s a man who strictly watches budget, and the reason why we don’t go in the hole is that we don’t spend money we don’t have. So I could bear witness to the fact that President Lloyd Elliott deserves a lot of credit for the way he’s run the school. So, my time being my own, particularly in development, hasn’t worked out the way I planned it. But I must admit, I like these things, and I think it’s been a tremendous experience. We built the Charles E. Smith Athletic Center, the sports center that you know is on Twenty-second Street between F and G Streets. It’s a marvelous facility. And by the way, many of our medical students use that swimming pool and the exercise tracks and it’s something that we as doctors should be particularly glad to see, a sound mind and a sound body. The new library, by the way, this is being recorded in the university library, was built in recent years. A new law library, the Marvin Center, where Tom Perry and I had lunch today, these are all buildings, the new, um, Rice Hall, the administrative buildings, the investment buildings, it’s been a tremendous experience, and we were looking out of the window of my office and pointing out where the new academic cluster is going to built, on Twenty-second Street and H, and the parking lot, which is now directly across from the university garage, and the university library. This will be a new art building, a new office building, a computer center, and it will be something of which everyone interested in G.W. will be proud.

PEERY: You alluded to the investment buildings. This was to me a totally new idea. I was used to universities having endowments. Instead, the investment building is emphasized here. Tell us something about that, would you please?

ALPERT: Tom, this is an interesting concept. This has been developed by Dr. Elliott and by the former vice-president, treasurer, Henry Herzog. You know, our area in Washington is limited from Nineteenth Street to Twenty-fourth Street, and from F Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. However, the land on Pennsylvania Avenue is commercial area, and is not particularly good for classrooms, and not particularly needed, because we have the space in the Nineteenth to Twenty-forth Street Area on G Street, H Street, and Eye Street. A consulting firm was brought in and they suggested that we do put up investment buildings, and it would, first of all, serve to block off the campus from the rest of the city a little bit, with some tall buildings, to make a nice approach, and give us necessary income.

Well, for example, the National Academy of Science building is on the corner of Twenty-first and Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s on a long term lease to the National Academy of Science. I forget the exact details, but I think it’s around twenty-five years. And the income from that building pays off the existing mortgage. And of course, we have to pay commercial taxes on this land, you know, because it’s non university use, and this, by the way, is not understood by some people. They think we are tax free. We pay taxes on anything the university doesn’t use for university purpose. At the end of twenty-five years, this building becomes free and clear, and the university then has an asset which will be in excess of twenty million dollars. That’s the same as adding twenty million dollars to an endowment fund. This one building has more than our endowment today. Our endowment is small, because as you all know, we’ve taken every available money we have when we buy land in the Nineteenth to Twenty-fourth Street area. The investment that we have in land and buildings is great. Our actual endowment is small. Now, the same goes for the Pepco Building, which was built on the area between Nineteenth and Twentieth Street on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Pepco building will also be paid off in a like period, and the building will then be free and clear and also these buildings have some cash throw off, that we use for operating expense. So we have the better of two worlds. We have an income from buildings that are built on land that we are not going to use, and university instructional buildings are necessary now, and we have an asset, that at the end of the lease, we will do one of two things. Either renegotiate the lease to the same renters, and have absolutely all the money coming in, because there won’t be any payoff on mortgage at that time. We’d just be paying taxes and operating expenses. By the way, the tenants pay. Or, it if the needs of the university changed, and if we require those buildings for spaces, we can then use . . . .

ALPERT: How much traveling do you do? How many speeches do you make? What do you have to do with alumni relations, all that sort of thing?

PEERY: Tom, this is an interesting position. It’s vice-president for development of the university, and as such, I’m responsible for the development office, which has an annual support program, deferred giving program, business and community support. Also, this office is responsible for alumni relations in the entire university, and public relations. It’s been very interesting, our dealing with the law school and other schools on the campus and to see each individual progress in its own way.

I’m probably the proudest of the accomplishments that we did in getting the Medical Dental Manpower Loan bill through Congress in the earliest ‘70s, and I’d like to pay particular tribute to Father Collins of Georgetown University. Father T. Byron Collins, a Jesuit priest, and I, with the help of our administrators and the faculty and students, went around to Congress and saw, well, as many congressmen and senators as we could on every one of the key committees, and we did get the Medical Dental Manpower bill passed, which kept us going until 1977. You know, in 1969 to ’72, we were given funds by the Disaster Act of HEW, under the disaster funds, and we got those for schools in serious financial distress. But we were taking the bulk of the funds in this amount, and the amount allocated by Congress, and we were told they couldn’t give us the amounts we needed, so we had to get this special bill passed. Father Collins is an amazing man, a man of tremendous education, who knows the ins and outs of Congress, and I would like to say that I’m a graduate of the Collins School of Congressional Liaison. He’s an interesting man. He’s six foot three, and weighs less than 160 pounds. And those of you who know me know that I’m six foot three, but I weigh about 230 pounds. So when we go to Congress together, they know that we’re both big, and one wears a collar and one doesn’t. They know one’s a father obviously and one’s a doctor, and in about one office out of ten that we walk in, the secretaries will say, “Well, hello Father Alpert, and hello Dr. Collins,” and this really is the funniest thing in the world. We are, at least we have entrée to the offices on the hill.

We got this bill through as a very unusual bill. It was authorized by the District Committee, which is a very unusual type of bill, and appropriated by HEW. To have a bill authorized by one committee and appropriated by another is in itself an unusual circumstance. But we were in an unusual situation, and we did have a lot of good help from friends in town and on the hill, and this was passed. Our last check for G.W. was three million and fifteen thousand dollars in June of ’77, and that took care of our operating deficit, of course, for that year. You all know the history of government direct grants since then. The government is not making any direct grants to medical schools in addition to the capitation which all schools get. So of course, our tuition has had to rise, has had to go up markedly. The entering tuition for this coming class is eleven thousand, eight hundred dollars. That’s a far cry from the tuition levels we had a few years ago. However, we were instrumental in getting passed the Health Manpower legislation that does provide a ten thousand dollar federally guaranteed loan to each medical student. This is limited to fifty percent of the class, but this will be adequate in our case, because roughly thirty percent of our students can pay their own way. Another thirty to thirty-five percent are on one form or another of federal scholarship, like Public Health Service, Army, Navy scholarships, leaving about thirty-five percent who will need loans. And these federally guaranteed loans are the only way doctors will be able to receive training, without putting families in very serious financial jeopardy.

PEERY: Sy, when a young man takes on one of these federal loans, does he make any commitment of time in the future to, as a part of paying off the loan?

ALPERT: Tom, this is a straight loan. This is on a commercial rate, and can be granted by financial institutions such as banks. In our case, the Washington banks have been burned so badly on student loans, they are shying away from this, so the school will act as an institutional lender, will lend the money itself, and then will sell this, they call it wholesaling the loans, to Sallie Mae, the student marketing association. They do not have to guarantee service, as opposed to the scholarship funds. When you take a Public Health Service scholarship or a Navy scholarship or Air Force, you obligate yourself for so many years service in accepting the tuition and the living expense money. Here, you’re obligating yourself to pay back the money, with interest. Now, there is a provision that if the borrower wishes, he can give service in an underprivileged, underserved area, at the request of the Secretary of HEW. If he does this, he gets the money that he makes, plus a ten thousand dollar credit against the loan. So this is a, per year service, he gets a ten thousand dollar credit against the loan. Now, this is a tremendous thing, because you can see the poorest boy going to school now, and if he wishes, he has fifteen years after school to pay it off. He has to pay interest as he goes along, but if he wants to give service, he can literally wipe out this, one, a year, ten thousand, two years, twenty thousand against the loan. This loan is so written that it’s eligible, ten thousand dollars a year, and also, the borrower can get ten thousand dollars during his training time, as an intern, to pay the interest on the other loan. Now, with salaries for interns or residents today being at the levels they are, Tom, I got fifteen dollars a month as an intern. I don’t know what you got, but . . . you got nothing, but I got a lot of money, I got fifteen. But today, our house officers get in the fifteen thousand dollar range a year, so they can take care of interest in many cases. But if they did have to borrow, they could do it on this loan.

So we think that the future of medical school tuitions is not bright. It will have to go high. A school like Georgetown is now twelve thousand, five, Hahnemann is now up to ten thousand, and I think that more and more states are finding it difficult to give moneys to schools. And I think you’ll find a lot of state support lessening in the years to come. You know, Washington D.C. schools are in a particularly serious situation, because we don’t have a state to go to, and the District of Columbia just does not have the funds to give us to run schools like this.

PEERY: Sy, has this increase in tuition at G.W. as compared to the Medical College of Virginia or to other state universities, had any serious impact upon our student application numbers and quality?

ALPERT: No, Tom, and this is the greatest surprise to us. We have about eight thousand applicants this year for 150 spaces. And I’m told that the caliber of applicant is among the highest we’ve ever had. Now, their grades are good. Their board scores are good. And G.W. is a school that they would like to attend. Of course, you know, there are somewhere around forty thousand applicants to medical school in the country, and only about fifteen thousand or eighteen thousand spaces. So, there is a shortage of spaces for the number of applicants, but we can honestly say, we’re getting a top caliber applicant at our school, and it hasn’t affected applications or caliber at all.

PEERY: I’m glad to hear that, because that would be a very important adverse effect if it did have that effect. I don’t believe you’ve quite answered a question I put to you a little bit ago, and that is, what does your work week as vice-president for development consist of?

ALPERT: Well, there’s no such thing as a usual week in this field. I can tell you that on the first week of May, the first of May I was in Tucson, Arizona, and by the way I had a chance to see my good friend Merlin K. DuVal, Monty DuVal, who was the chairman of the medical library committee. And there were a great number of phone calls made to all of the people in Arizona and Nevada for our annual support fund, medical as well as law and others. On Wednesday and Thursday of that week, I was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for the meeting of the Medical Development Officers Association, where we discussed the fund raising techniques used in medical schools throughout the United States. I left there Friday morning, and went to Salt Lake City. It’s interesting that this should come up now, because the man who sponsored our meeting in 1969, Howard McQuery(??) was there with Homer Ellsworth, and we talked about the fund raising, and we had a meeting of the Intermountain Medical Alumni, and it’s wonderful to see a group of people show up from Idaho, Montana and Utah to come into a meeting to hear what’s going on at G.W. I brought a lot of slides with me to show them the new building, show them what the labs look like, the outside, the hospital extension. It was very well received, and they really feel that they’re part of the G.W. family. In fact, a number of them are coming in at the end of this month for the medical alumni reunion. On Saturday, I was in New York for a medical meeting, and I came here Sunday, Tom, for the college and School of Government and Business graduation. So that is the typical first week in May.

Now, if you’re asking me what I’m doing this week, I can tell you that it varies from early morning until night. It’s luncheons and dinners almost every day, frankly with people who are interested in the university, and we look for help, we look for support from everyone that we can, we try to talk to alumni, we try to talk to leaders in the business community. After all, people with means do have a certain amount of money to give away, and I’d like to see them give some of it here. So, that’s my primary purpose.

PEERY: Sy, you’ve spoken a couple of times about the town-gown syndrome, meaning that there exists in some instances and in some years, a feeling against the medical school from physicians in practice. I have the feeling that that town-gown syndrome is inversely related to the distance the individual practice is away from the medical center. In other words, the physicians in Utah do not have the town-gown syndrome against G.W., like physicians in the District. Do you have something to say about that?

ALPERT: You hit it exactly Tom. I didn’t hear this once on the western trip. I didn’t hear it once in Arizona. I didn’t hear it once in Salt Lake City. And there were alumni of all ages there. You hear it here, because people are worried about hospital beds. The internist is worried about whether he’ll be able to get his patient in the hospital. And you know, G.W. has made it a point to keep the admissions to G.W. Hospital by the full-time faculty at less than fifty percent. I think the recent range runs anywhere from forty to forty-seven, forty-eight percent. And we mean to keep it at about half and half, or a little less than half, for the full-time, so we allow the voluntary faculty to come in. You know, after all, we still rely on voluntary faculty for a good portion of our teaching, and the ward rounds, and the work done by students in getting experience in offices and clinics. A lot of it is our volunteer faculty. And we do want this to be a community hospital. And I’m quite sure that the fifty-fifty division hasn’t been approached yet, and it’s running a little less than fifty, on the full-time faculty. And in fact, Tom, I think we overstress it sometime. I don’t think you hear too much of that now. It’s quieted down in recent years. I think part of our problem is the school, or our own internal family squabbles, rather than squabbles initiated from the outside. I think this situation has improved a lot.

PEERY: Incidentally, for those who think this might be a local phenomenon, one that’s strictly a G.W. problem, I attended, about ten years ago, a conference in Colorado Springs. That whole thing was devoted to the town-gown syndrome. So, it’s not a limited thing.

Sy, I know you’re still an anesthesiologist at heart. Have you ever had regrets about your change of direction from your purely medical career to that as a major fund raiser for the university?

ALPERT: Tom, I must tell you, it sounds crazy, but this has been like a second career, and it’s been a lot of fun to me. I never regretted the change. I still maintain my friends at the hospital, and we said before, I went to the anesthesiology conference today, in fact. I still read the same journals that I read before. I don’t read them as carefully, but I still look through them for the major interest I have in the field, and I, honestly, well it almost bothers me to admit, I haven’t missed medicine, because maybe I see the hospital every day, and I see friends of mine and patients in the hospital, but I’ve enjoyed seeing what we’ve done at G.W. to make this a major institution. So, all in all, my wife says I’m crazy, she says, but if you can do the things that I do every day and still enjoy them, but this has been a lot of fun. I’ve gotten a kick out of it.

PEERY: Sy, I have a few questions now for you having to do with your philosophy, as you reflect back over your career and your experiences. You must meet many students and many physicians from other medical schools. How do you think G.W. stacks up at the national level as compared to those other institutions? What do you see as our strengths and our weaknesses?

ALPERT: Our students really stack up with the best of them. We’ve long had a history of tremendous clinical orientation. Our students come out, they’re good doctors. And in recent years now, we’re going in more into the research field. We were not a research oriented institution as opposed to Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. We were a clinically oriented institution, but we still had many people in academic and research medicine. We’ve had deans of schools. We’ve had chairmen of departments, who’ve done beautifully. And I think that we don’t have to be ashamed of a G.W. graduate anywhere. And you can tell now from the house officer appointments that are obtained, G.W. people go to the best institutions in the whole United States.

PEERY: As you look back, Sy, over your experience of thirty years or more as a faculty member here at G.W., what do you perceive to be the major changes that have occurred in the school, both good and bad?

ALPERT: Well, the major changes that have occurred obviously have to be with the physical facilities. We came from an old medical school at 1335 H Street that was built in the early 1900s. It was woefully inadequate and, a hospital of eighty to a hundred . . . what was the exact number, eighty odd beds in that hospital? It was somewhere about a hundred, less than a hundred. Eighty to hundred beds. And from a hospital of that size to a hospital where we have today. Well, the physical plant of that hospital is totally inadequate, too, so we have hospital today with a Meyer Pavilion, with the Harry F. Duncan Pavilion, that houses radiology and a wonderful section of cardiac research.

By the way, I would like to add a personal note about Harry F. Duncan. This man is a chairman of the board of the Little Tavern shops, the hamburgers that many of us used to buy at five and ten cents apiece, and this man gave this university one million dollars for that Duncan Pavilion on the entrance to Twenty-third Street. A wonderful person and a great friend of the university. His wife Annalease(??) and he are really good G.W. family. So, we have a physical plant that is just superb. What we have lost, we have lost the personal feeling. We had the small staff where everyone knew one another, but I guess this is the price, Tom, we have to pay for getting big. I think it’s the same in any organization. It’s the same in any big family. You just can’t keep that close intimate contact we had. But, on the whole, I think the tremendous advance in physical plant has made it possible for us to get the pre-eminence we have.

PEERY: Sy, do you think that G.W. should pay more attention to its setting than it has? Should the programs offered by this medical school be different from those in different medical schools, others that are away from the center of the nation? Should we orient our instruction in any way toward federal service, towards international affairs, towards world medicine, etc.?

ALPERT: I think it gets to be a problem if we change our basic medical school curriculum and our basic intent. I would rather look on G.W. School of Medicine and Health Sciences as a national resource. I’d like to see people come here from all over the west the way they do from the south and the north. You know, we have over forty states represented in our student enrollment. If we become oriented towards federal service, we become almost a federal school, and we lose that general national resource aspect that we have. You know, the Navy is, the Armed Forces are building a medical school, and they are taking care of the armed forces part of it. I think that we haven’t got the finances, frankly, and we haven’t got the space to go into tying in medicine with international affairs, or tropical medicine, or aviation medicine. They require tremendous expansion, tremendous amounts of money, and in our limited space that we have, I don’t think we can do it, and I think these things will better be left to the federal government. No private school can carry the cost of initiating this type of effort.

PEERY: Sy, would you make any suggestions for changes in emphasis or priorities or perhaps in attitudes to improve G.W.’s programs and reputation?

ALPERT: Well, I think this evolves down to each individual department and each individual in that department. Tom, I’m sure in your time in Pathology, you yourself were looking forward to enhancing G.W. in every way possible. I’m sure there were some, one or two in your department, who didn’t have exactly the same feeling. I think that we all face that. I think that anyone who is in medicine today, and in full time university practice in the medical school, I think should be here primarily to teach medicine, to see that medicine gets, in the best possible way, to each student in that school, and I think the only way we’ll get this is by hiring the best people, and encouraging good researchers, good teachers to stay with us. I think that little by little, we’ll weed out those who are not interested, and those who are interested just in private practice are much better off in private practice. I think that that’s nothing wrong. There are some made to be teachers and researchers. There are some made to be private practitioners. And I think that we have to emphasize the prior group.

PEERY: Sy, you have had a better opportunity than anyone else to study the medical alumni of this university in relation to the university. What do you think is the proper role of the medical alumnus in relation to his parent university? And conversely, what is the proper role, if any, of the university medical school in the development of its graduates?

ALPERT: Tom, this is a big subject and I think that it’s alright for us to pontificate on what should be done. It’s a question of what can be done. I think a medical school can’t be everything to every graduate, to every student, to every faculty member, to every community person in the city, because we are circumscribed by physical boundaries and by financial needs. These things cost a lot of money, to go into big programs and to do good for everyone is not possible. I think we should concentrate on offering the best education we can for our students. We invite our students back. This medical alumni meeting coming up has an excellent program in itself. Now, what the alumni can do for the school, we utilize alumni in each city to do interviews for us. We have alumni who help place our students and our house officers in various hospitals in which they are affiliated. We look to alumni for support. Not only financial. We look for it in ways where G.W. can be a school that is a prime teaching institution. I think the aura of public relations from alumni in this city and the surrounding area that our good friends have conveyed for us have helped make G.W. the institution it is today.

PEERY: To move away now from G.W. and Washington for the moment, what do you see as the main strengths and weaknesses of the current American system of medical care? As compared perhaps to those of previous generations in this country, and as compared to those in other countries?

ALPERT: Tom, you and I aren’t going to decide these things, because medicine is at a crossroads. We’re accused by a president, of doctors not being fair with patients, and we’re accused of being the highest income earning class in the country. Medicine does not have the esteemed position that it does in the mind of some of our citizenry. I don’t know what we can do except act as decent citizens in the community. I hate to see when a doctor is involved in a fraud or Medicare or Medicaid difficulty. I would hope that our people are trained in proper ethics, and I should think that, it’s just like bringing up a child. I guess, Tom, you know better than I do. You never know what happens. But if you give them the best of the background, then you just try to inculcate in him the right thing. We think our doctors will do well. I don’t think we’ll ever have the type of socialized medicine that you see in Great Britain, but I do believe that people will demand catastrophic medical care in addition to Medicare and Medicaid, and I think, as such, G.W. is in a position to continue its service to the community.

PEERY: Sy, are you satisfied with the relationship of the federal and local government to the medical schools, or do you think that there is some other role that they should play? Are they playing too much, or should they take a greater part in it, both in medical care and in medical education?

ALPERT: Well, Tom, if you’re asking someone who is interested in getting funds for the medical schools to keep tuition costs down, I’d like to see the government do more in direct grants to medical schools. But, I can see the problem that senators and congressmen have when they go home to their constituency, and they are criticized because they voted large sums to medical schools. I think what the government has done now by making loan funds available ends that. They are borrowing money. They are paying interest. It’s made available to them. But the loans are paid back unless they give service. I think if we ask for too many handouts from the government, we’ll have government supervision, and the government will run our schools. I think what we have now is a, the best of the compromises that we could reach.

PEERY: Do you think the roles, the government’s role in relation to the support of scientific research at present is a proper one, an adequate one, or an inadequate one?

ALPERT: Of course, being in a university and a school, I’d like to see scientific research expanded, but I’m also a taxpayer. And I worry terribly when I see the tax rate going up each year, and I read about threatened tax strikes or taxpayers withholding taxes. I think we have about as good a deal as we can get. I’m sure every school in the country wants more money for support for research, but when I see the increasing funds every year, and I see what’s happening with social security taxes going up and federal and state taxes going up, I think we have a pretty fair share of what we should get.

PEERY: Sy, are you at all apprehensive about the medical practice of the future, that is about a career in medicine for the 1980s, the 1990s and so on?

ALPERT: Tom, I have a very optimistic view about the future. I think that we’ll never have the socialized practice of medicine. I think we’ll, as I’ve stated before, I believe, I think we will have more insurance coverage so we don’t have patients hit with catastrophes. I think the accident that happened to Halla Brown is the case in point I can think of. Here’s a woman practicing at the height of her career, and a husband who is a practicing physician, and to be hit with an illness, to be hit with an accident where you’re left paralyzed, and even the $250,000 major medical that the university carried is expended, is a catastrophe. That’s the kind of thing they have to protect against. But the general practice of medicine, I think will be an American system, a free enterprise system, with increased benefits, be it Medicare, Medicaid, or Catastrophic.

PEERY: Finally, do you think that physicians, by virtue of the nature of their education, should have any special community role other than that as providers of medical care?

ALPERT: Tom, I feel very strongly about this, and I’m glad that you’re the interviewer, because you surely know what I mean. I think as physicians, and as people who have had the benefit of an education that allows us to have a higher than average income, we owe something to the community. I think that, be it church work or be it working with underprivileged kids or be it working with a prison population or be it for oversees needs of needy people, I think there’s got to be a niche where doctors will take part and do what they can for their people in the local area, in their churches, their social organizations. And I think it behooves us, not only as physicians but as human beings, to take part in these efforts. I would strongly commend any man going into medicine to devote at least an evening or two to communal efforts, and I think the rewards will be so great in personal satisfaction that they’ll always remember these things as the highlights of their career, rather than just an adjunct.

I’d like to make one remark about the interviewer, and I want this as a purpose of record. Thomas Peery, as you know, was professor and chairman of pathology at G.W. for I guess about thirty years, wasn’t it Tom? Twenty years as chairman, but in the pathology department as thirty-six years. This man is one of the names that will be remembered at this university many many years after most of us are gone. And I’d like to pay tribute to Tom and his wife, Eleanor, and their girls as being one of the nicest families that’s ever been associated with the G.W. medical school, and I pride myself on the fact that I’m a friend of the Peerys and I’d like to thank Tom for taking the time and the effort to outline this, to prepare it, to guide me through this, and Tom, I must say, you’re one of the finest people I know.

PEERY: Sy, you’re just saying more things than I deserve. I do want to thank you for having provided this fine interview. I just hope that there will be somebody behind us in the years ahead who will take the trouble to listen to this tape, and I hope that it will become transcribed and be available as a permanent record. Thanks every so much, Sy.

(pause in tape)

PEERY: Well, Sy, here we are again. This is May the 24th. There are a few points that I wanted to go back over with you regarding the funding of the new medical school, and some other matters that I didn’t get into detail when I listened to it on the tapes. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just give you a few questions here now. Sy, were there two grant applications prepared for federal support for the medical school? That is, one for the medical school building itself and another for the medical library?

ALPERT: Yes, Tom, there were. The medical library application was prepared in 1965 and approval was given in 1966, and that was under the medical library, the national Library of Congress moneys that provided matching funds on a three to one basis. Three dollars of government money to be matched by one dollar of private money. As you know, our grant application was for a million, two hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars, and we were just all thrilled to know that the government gave us everything we asked for on that. Our application was in perfect form. The committee had worked very hard in preparing it, and our million, one-two-nine five of course, as you know, was matched by the giving of Paul Himmelfarb, and we’re all proud of the fact that the library today is known as the Paul Himmelfarb Library of the Medical School and Health Sciences. The application for the medical school was then prepared in 1966 and presented in and awarded in 1967. Both of these grants, by the way, had a two year time in which funds had to be matched, and if they weren’t matched by that time, the grants would lapse. While the library grant would have lapsed in 1968, but a one year extension was granted with the idea that the medical library would be part of the medical school. The medical school grant was just under fifteen million dollars. I can’t remember the exact figure, but it was somewhere between fourteen and a half and fifteen million dollars.

It’s interesting, Tom, that’s why we should record these things, because here it is 1978 and we’re finding it hard to remember exact figures and dates in the mid 1960s. And I guess people twenty or thirty years will find it even harder to remember. So it’s good for us to put this down. The grant for the medical school had to matched on a two to one basis, so this required, excuse me Tom, I’ve got that wrong, it had to be matched on, yes, excuse me, two to one, um, on a two to one basis, that’s right. The moneys to be raised by joining the medical school and the library came to just around ten million dollars. And, it’s interesting how figures skip your mind. The total sums to be raised that we established necessary, that was including the balance of the money on the increased cost of the library, that’s what it was. By the time we got around to building the library, the library costs had escalated, I remember now, escalated to over two million dollars. And we had extra costs for equipments and other things we hadn’t budgeted for. So, we established our private fund raising goal at just about ten million dollars. And to match this federal grant, we had to show that we had two-thirds of our necessary funds at hand. Now, to give you the exact figures and the exact time table, as you know, Henry W. Herzog was our vice-president, treasurer at that time, and I’m sure he has these exact figures at his hand. But we had to come in with six and half and seven million dollars in signed pledges and assets by the time this grant elapsed on June 30 of 1969.

PEERY: Sy, do you remember when approval was received from the federal government for these grant requests?

ALPERT: The approval on the medical library was in 1966, because it was a two year affair, and we had to get a year extension because of tying the library into the medical school. The medical library, the medical school grant, was granted in 1967, and that was a two year grant that had to be matched on or before June 30 of 1969. This was a firm deadline that we had to meet, and there weren’t any other funds in the offing. If we didn’t match these grants, there was a danger there wouldn’t be any further matching grants for medical schools.

PEERY: Well now, Sy, tell me again when it was that John Parks approached you to help in fund-raising.

ALPERT: Tom, I remember it was around the second week in April, and the grant deadline was approaching, and we had to come up with the six and a half to seven million dollars to get this grant, to get the federal funds granted, or we would lose it, and he asked me if I would take off a couple of months from anesthesiology and work with him and the others in trying to get these funds. Well, the emergency was there, and Charlie Coakley, who was our professor and chairman of anesthesiology, understood the situation very well, and there wasn’t too much any of us could do. We all had to chip in and just take part. So, from mid April until the end of June was the time that we devoted to this intensive cross-country fund raising effort.

PEERY: Well, as I understand it, Sy, the medical school grant came in ’67, and we had until June 30 of ’69 to raise matching funds. Now, what had happened in that effort of fund raising between ’67 and April of ’69 when John Parks spoke to you?

ALPERT: Tom, this was an effort that was devoted entirely to committee appointments, writing numerous proposals to foundations and corporations, and there was a fund raising outfit with counsel on the campus for about a year and a half. This is not meant in a derogatory sense in any way, because this is the usual fund raising technique, is to get fund raising counsel in to get a high powered executive of this type who would approach foundations with the idea of getting big money. The trouble with it was that the emphasis was all put on organization and booklet writing and writing proposals that didn’t materialize. We didn’t have a track record with foundations. Corporations didn’t know the school too well, and the massive gifts that were being depended on just didn’t come through. So we were left with a very sad situation three months before a grant deadline.

PEERY: Well, Sy, you certainly had your work cut out for you in April of ’65. You had a couple of months to raise six and a half million dollars. Is that right?

ALPERT: Well, we actually had the three month period and there were some small gifts in, but they weren’t massive gifts. There was the one big gift of two millions dollars that was a contingent gift of Walter G. Ross, which was a will, and that gift didn’t materialize until Walter G. Ross’s death in 1972, and his will was probated in 1973, I believe. And the funds came in the following year. What we did with this effort was to go the only route that we knew, and that was to solicit support from our medical alumni, from our trustees, and from our faculty. Tom, this is opposite from usual fund raising technique. You look for the major gifts of six figures, and then try to get the smaller gifts later. But what we did is set up alumni meetings in every area of the country and I have to thank Catherine Breen and her staff for doing the secretarial work to get out letters and post cards to all our alumni in each city. And these alumni meetings sponsored by various members of the alumni held in homes all over, and I think I mentioned this in our previous discussion, literally brought in a four week period over a million dollars. In fact at the meeting with the Board of Trustees at the end of May, we had a million and six thousand dollars, because I remember the figure was just over a million, of alumni giving.

Well, as I stated before to you, that meeting of the committee of the Board of Trustees brought forth the gift from Charles E. Smith for two hundred and fifty thousand, Mrs. Graham and the Meyer Foundation, and Mrs. Meyer herself, contributed three hundred thousand, Charles Phillips and some of the foundations that he’d been involved in, gave a hundred thousand, and the figure just mushroomed right down the line from then. Our trustees, our friends in Washington, members of our full time faculty, were most gracious, and the total was reached, and I think the total was just under seven million dollars on the date of June 30. It’s interesting the type of support that we had. The full-time faculty at the university hospital and medical school were instrumental in building the Meyer Pavilion. That was in the 1964, 1965 period. And this medical school effort was primarily sparked by the medical alumni, although we did many faculty, yourself included, and others in the hospital, who really helped us along.

PEERY: Sy, I know it’s impossible to remember all of the names of donors, even major donors, but I wish you would give as many of them as you can. You mentioned Mr. Smith and Mrs. Graham and the Meyer family and Mr. Phillips. Can you think of some others to add to that list?

ALPERT: Yes, Tom, there are many gracious donors of this medical school. Admiral Lewis Strauss gave two hundred thousand dollars. He was a trustee of the university and a very fine person. Mrs. Francis Freed, Her husband’s name was Allie, Mrs. Allie Freed, gave two hundred thousand for the lecture laboratory on the second floor. Mrs. Charles Stanley White gave the pathology department, in honor of her husband, then her son; you know, her husband was Charley Stanley White, Sr.

Mrs. Soper gave the lecture hall at the school for a hundred thousand dollars, and Mrs. Soper was a patient of Dr. Jack Clay. And Dr. Clay had been instrumental in seeing Mrs. Soper with our dean at that time, Dean John Parks, and Mrs. Soper gave a sum like that for the hospital extension, the Meyer Pavilion, in the mid sixties in addition to this money for the medical school. Families who had also given both to the hospital and the medical school were the Jack I. Bender family, who gave at that time, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the Meyer Pavilion, and his son Morton gave a laboratory at the medical school in honor of his father. There was the Oscar Goldstein gift off seventy-five thousand dollars for a laboratory at the medical school, and Tom, you know, the more we talk about it, you can go on and pick all the individual names out. Another trustee of the university was Watson W. Wise, of Texas, and Watson Wise gave a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. There were many many good friends among the trustees and alumni of this school who had made possible the building of that building.

You know, once the initial six point nine million was in Tom, we still had to raise about three million dollars to finish the building. And that we did from 1970 to 1973 to finish the building. And the total of between nine and a half and ten million dollars was raised. And when the building was finished in 1973, this is one of the few buildings that we’ve built that was literally built without a mortgage. This is no indebtedness on that medical school at this time.

PEERY: Sy, as I remember it, John Parks asked you to work on this for a couple of months. How long did that end up being?

ALPERT: Tom, this is a joke that we could talk about, because as I mentioned in our previous discussion, next week, what started out to be a two and a half month assignment, finished in July, and I went back to anesthesiology in July, and a few weeks after that, I had lunch with the president, and as I told you, and almost as a joke, he mentioned coming over to the university temporarily to try to get some expansion and some buildings going ahead and some of the projects that had been pending at the school moving, and I came over here in September for this temporary job, September 1 of 1969, and here it is in May of ’78. This September starts my tenth year in this temporary position.

PEERY: Tom, you know, it’s always difficult to give names and give dollar signs, but for historical purposes, I think it’s really necessary. I should mention that Dr. Sidney Levine was a graduate of the school in the class of 1941, and he was called by Dr. Morris Rosenberg, who along with many other classmates, made lots of calls in the dean’s office of the medical school. Sidney responded to the call for funds, and gave a hundred thousand dollars to the lounge on the second floor of the medical school.

You know, I could go on and give many other gifts that came in, but I hope you realize, we do leave out some names purely by inadvertency. You just can’t keep every name and figure in mind. And I also want to it stressed that these figures are given for historical purposes and all that. There’s no one, we’ve managed to keep these figure quiet. We don’t want to publicize them. But you should know the extent of the help. And I think historians in the future will see how a school like this can be built with the meager resources we had. But it was due to the tremendous support that we got from alumni, and as I say, trustees, and friends in this Washington community.

John Parks was a tower of strength to us. We had lots of luncheons in the Dean’s Office conference room on the top floor of 1331 H Street. They were simply tomato juice, sandwich, coffee luncheons. We explained the needs to groups of anywhere from ten to fifteen people, mostly alumni in the Washington area. And this was the smallest budget operation you ever saw for a major fund raising effort. But these luncheons paid off, and men were most cooperative.

There were many many people who made phone calls. I remember Charlie Thompson, particularly, Harvey Ammerman, a great number of alumni would sit in the office and call classmates all over the country and helped in getting this total in. You know, we had about two thousand donors from alumni lists out of a total of, oh, about that time, it must have been about thirty-two hundred alumni, living alumni, living alumni of the school, which made a tremendous percentage of contributions from our graduates.

PEERY: Sy, you mentioned 1331 H Street. You know, I’d almost forgotten about that. When was that in effect? I remember that was the old Times Herald building, and it was converted to a federal college on the lower floors, and somehow or another, the medical school got the upper floor. Do you remember anything further about that? It would be nice to get that on the record too.

ALPERT: If I had to guess, Tom, I’d say that was about 1964, ’65, because they were up in that area about four years, if I remember correctly, when we started this effort. But the Dean’s office was on the top floor of that building. The Admissions office was there, too. The entire secretarial staff. The medical school was just bursting at the seams in 1335 and just did not have enough physical space to house the people there. But an awful lot of work was accomplished, and I’ve got to mention again and again that without the help of Catherine Breen, who organized all our cards for us; you know, we didn’t have computers in those days to give us lists of alumni. They were all kept on 3 x 5 cards, and Catherine xeroxed these cards for us according to cities, put them in little packages according to states, wrote letters to each alumnus stating when Dr. Parks or I would come into a city to talk, and then we followed up on the xerox copies with those who couldn’t come to the meetings, and by phone. Most of the pledges were raised.

Another interesting thing about this. You know, in every fund raising effort, you have to allow a certain amount for what they call “breakage.” “Breakage” is someone dies, or becomes bankrupt or has a severe illness or financial reverses and goes bankrupt or something of that type that literally forces him to have difficulty in paying his obligation. The interesting thing about this fund raising effort is that only about three percent of all the funds pledged were not actually paid, and we’re still getting occasional checks of that three percent level that people for one reason or another couldn’t pay at the time. And a great amount of this pledging was done by phone, in cities and areas that we didn’t visit. You can only visit big cities. You can’t visit every little hamlet in the community, but we called people in surrounding areas. And the most amazing thing is that literally three quarters of our pledges were unsigned. The big ones were, by letter or confirmed. But a lot of the small pledges weren’t signed. It was too costly to try to visit and try to get them to sign and send a lot of correspondence. And these pledges invariably have been honored.

PEERY: Sy, you’ve had a lot to say about John Parks and his contribution to this role, to this job. I know he became sick along in this time, and had to pass much of the burden of task to you. Do you want to say something about that period of time?

ALPERT: Tom, I don’t think any of us really realized how sick John Parks was at that time. I do know he had an episode of [(sounds like rickla)??] fibrillation in that period, and he went into congestive failure in the spring of ’69. At that time, he had to restrict his activities and couldn’t travel much, although he did a lot of work in the area of Washington, New York and areas around this coast area, Atlantic coast area. He got progressively more ill, and wouldn’t admit it to himself, and kept carrying a full schedule of giving lectures and running the medical school, and he was very active, of course, in hospital operation and everything else, and this man literally killed himself in the job. He was too smart a physician to know, to not know how sick he was, but he wanted to die “with his boots on,” and he did. I’ve often felt that the load he carried, with all these activities and tremendous burdens on him, hastened this man’s death. I remember going once with him in a car, and I think I mentioned this to you last time, we were on our way to a meeting at the National Library once about special grants for libraries, and he was in congestive failure in the car, and we just turned the car around and admitted him to G.W. Hospital. This is, he was literally having trouble breathing, and it isn’t meant to be a melodramatic statement, but he literally killed himself with over-activity when he should have been leading a very sedentary life.

PEERY: This is the end of this tape.

(End of interview)

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Photographic Credit: n/a
Author or Source: MS0371/Oral History Collection
Document Location: University Archives
Date Added to Encyclopedia: April 3, 2007
Prepared by: Lyle Slovick, Assistant University Archivist

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