It was pleasant to make money while traveling. Site visits paid only a $100 per day stipend, but there was a reimbursement for travel costs, even if the federal government would not pay for first class air fare. Having been a former employee of the National Institutes of Health, I remained on their list of consultants available for visits to locations where biomedical institutions requested large amounts of funding for research projects. For a couple of days, I would be able to get away from Amherst and my routine interactions with faculty.
I could have made more visits; however, I limited myself to places that might prove interesting for side tours when I was not engaged in federal business. While other members of the team reviewed the scientific merit of the applications, my role was to evaluate its financial and administrative components. Over the years, I gained a solid reputation as a fiscal consultant for many of the Institutes of the NIH. I greatly enjoyed visiting San Francisco or San Diego during the winter. Chicago and New York were interesting cities for sightseeing when the committee was not actively reviewing a grant request. One site visit in 1976 changed my career and, no doubt, my entire life.
The visit was for a program sponsored by the National Heart Institute at the Rockefeller Medical School in New York City. The chairman for the visiting committee was Dr. Antonio Gotto from somewhere in Texas. The committee decided the project lacked sufficient merit and disapproved funding it. Six months later, the program’s principle investigator submitted a revised application, and another site visit was scheduled. Although all of the other visitors were newly selected, Dr. Gotto was again appointed to chair the group. He requested that I be the fiscal consultant for the revision. This time, our committee recommended approval, and I thought no more about the effort, which, after all, was routine.
It was during this second review of the Rockefeller project that Dr. Gotto inquired about my own future plans. Shortly after the visit, I had a telephone call from him inviting me to come to Houston for interviews with Baylor College of Medicine. I knew nothing about the medical school and even less about Houston. I did find it was located near the Gulf Coast and not in the vast interior of the state. I had nothing to lose by taking a look at a part of the country I had never before visited. Besides, for the previous months I had been perusing employment ads in the Chronicle of Higher Education and applying to large universities that had leadership appointments in their research offices. My battles with Warren Gulko had continued and it appeared that, with his inside track with Chancellor Bromery, I had minimally, if any, real future with UMA. It was still winter in Amherst and a few days of thawing out seemed ideal. I flew into Houston.
I was amazed at how flat it was. And how green! I had never seen the earth stretching out for miles with nothing but green woods and brown fields below me – and tall office buildings sprouting in the middle of this isolation. I thought this might be an interesting place to spend a few years in my career. The longest I had ever been in one location was our five years in Bethesda, and now seven in Amherst. Houston, Texas and life in a large city, even a “western” one might be enjoyable for a five to a seven-year interval before returning to a New England college town.
The faculty and administrators I met at Baylor Med were friendly; more so than those I had found up north, where the natives accepted newcomers only after long-term interactions had proven them to be worthy. On the other hand, southerners, I found, accepted newcomers immediately and then might reject them after they demonstrated they no longer merited any close attention.
At the conclusion of my interviews, I was offered three co-joined appointments: Administrator for the Department of Medicine under Tony Gotto; Director of Research Resources in the Office of the President, reporting to William T. Butler, M.D.; and Deputy Director for Administration of the National Heart and Blood Vessel Research and Demonstration Center under Michael E. DeBakey, M.D. The twenty-five percent increase in salary was also an important part of my consideration that this move might be worthwhile. Besides, on my way back from the Texas Medical Center to the Shamrock Hotel on Holcombe, I had the first and only proposition I ever had from a high-heeled lady sashaying down the street. Yes, life in Houston was bound to be different! And it has been, for more than forty years.