Dr. Bill James, Part 1, Transcript Section 3

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Dr. Bill James, Part 1
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KAREN: And now where did you say you grew up?

DR. JAMES: I grew up in Ohio.

KAREN: And what made you decide you wanted to go into medicine?

DR. JAMES: My dad was a veterinarian and I knew I didn't want to be a veterinarian. And I was just sort of always told I was going to be a doctor some day. You know, it was just a family expectation. And I enjoyed science and math and so forth in school.

KAREN: Do you have siblings?

DR. JAMES: Yeah, I have a brother and two sisters.

KAREN: Where do you fall in the age?

DR. JAMES: I was the oldest.

KAREN: The oldest. What kinds of things have they gone on to do?

DR. JAMES: Well, my two sisters, one was a social worker. Another one, the other one more just a housewife. And my brother's a judge back in Ohio.

KAREN: Varied. It's just sort of interesting how people end up doing what they are doing.

DR. JAMES: Uh-hum.

KAREN: And the family influences in childhood. So in Tanana, I've heard other people talk about radio call.

DR. JAMES: Uh-hum.

KAREN: And this they would talk to the villages on the radio.

DR. JAMES: We had a radio.

KAREN: There weren't health aides, though, so who were you talking to?

DR. JAMES: It would depend from village to village. There were sometimes a store keeper, sometimes a missionary. Seemed like there were several missionaries' wives were nurses.

The Episcopal Church had quite a few missionaries around. There was a -- one in Hughes, one in Allakaket, there was a missionary nurse in Venetie, there were priests in Nulato and Ruby, Kaltag. And sometimes a radio was in the -- in the store in town.

KAREN: Uh-hum.

DR. JAMES: And they would -- maybe a store owner or someone would answer the phone.

KAREN: And what were you doing in these radio calls? What kind of communication was going on?

DR. JAMES: Well, we were just talking to someone there about the general condition or any special patients they thought should come to Fairbanks -- come to Tanana for advice and so forth.

Public Health nurse, there was a Public Health nurse stationed in Tanana who covered the downriver villages, and very often she'd be out in the village and talk to us.

But it was hard to -- some days we wouldn't get through to anyone. Some days there was good communication.

KAREN: And how do you practice medicine via radio?

DR. JAMES: Well, not very well.

Later on, the second time -- I left the Public Health Service in 1962. I was in Tanana. And they were putting pressure on me to leave. And I was told that I had to move on to bigger and better things.

At the time they had what they called the medical officer in charge. So I was a medical officer in charge of Tanana. And they said that for career advancement and so on, you should go to a bigger place, more doctors, and so forth.

So most of the doctors stayed just two years, and I was in my third or fourth year then. And I thoroughly enjoyed being in Tanana. And they had a lot of doctors who would go in for two years because of the draft, and once they served their two years, they would get out.

So I was somewhat of a rarity in that I stayed longer than two years, and so I had more experience, and they thought I should go somewhere else.

And I was offered either Kotzebue or Bethel or Window Rock, Arizona, I think. And I decided that I really wanted to stay in Tanana.

And then they were putting pressure on me to leave, or where did I want to go next year, and the Yukon 700, which is now the Yukon 800 boat race.

KAREN: The boat race, yeah.

DR. JAMES: Used to go from Circle -- from Circle, go down to Tanana, and then come into town on the Tanana River. And they would refuel in Tanana.

And so we were -- we stayed up very late one night, it was 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, it was in June, the days were long, and I had just gone to bed, and I got a call from the nurse, Dr. James, there's been a -- very calm, she said, Dr. James, there's been a plane crash, would you mind coming over.

So some of the people from Fairbanks, quite a few people from Fairbanks, they were interested in the race and would come out to Tanana and watch them go by.

And it happened that one of the -- two of the people in the plane crash was Dr. Dunlap who practiced here in town, his wife and his nurse. So they flagged him down in Nenana. And his wife was fine, but his nurse had compression fracture of her spine. So Dr. Dunlap came down to Tanana.

And he and Dr. Lundquist had just started the Tanana Clinic.

KAREN: Here in Fairbanks?

DR. JAMES: Yeah. And they were interested in getting more doctors. He came down, got his wife, went home, and then came back down, stayed a day or two there with me. And talked to me about coming into Fairbanks to practice in the Tanana Clinic.

And finally about October, when they kept pressuring me to go somewhere else the next year, I resigned my commission and came in, I think I was the fourth doctor at the Tanana Clinic then.

KAREN: And that was in what year?

DR. JAMES: That was in '63. '62, I guess. '62. I practiced from '62 to '63, and decided that I felt incompetent in town for some reason, and thought I should take a residency.

And there was a real cold winter and we had two little kids, and we only had one car. My wife just loved Tanana, but didn't like Fairbanks, and I didn't like the private practice and everything involved, and so we decided to go Outside. We went to Idaho for a year. A little town in Idaho.

And we were there about six weeks and decided we wanted to come back to Fairbanks. I decided to take a residency, so I took my pediatric residency, so we were gone for three years, from '63 until '66.

KAREN: And that pediatric residency was in Idaho?

DR. JAMES: No, it was in Ohio. I went back to Ohio. Did my residency, then came back, was a pediatrician at the Tanana Clinic in July of '66. And then I was there from '66 until '73.

In the meantime, they opened up a Native clinic, the first Native clinic in Fairbanks, and it was over in the bowling alley building.

KAREN: I didn't know that.

DR. JAMES: And I started going over there as a pediatric consultant, a morning a week, then I was going two mornings a week. And I enjoyed that more than private practice, so in '73, I joined the Public Health Service again. At the Native clinic, by that time, it was in the hospital.

KAREN: And that's now Chief Andrew Isaac clinic?

DR. JAMES: Yeah.

KAREN: I think that's the same --

DR. JAMES: Yeah. It was just called -- it was still part of the Public Health Service. And then in the mid '80s, the Tanana Chiefs took over the clinic.