Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings April 2014, Volume 27, Number 2 | Page 76

Tributes to George J. Race, MD, PhD

W. L. JACK EDWARDS, MD
I first met George Race in 1945 at the Phi Chi medical
fraternity house, where he served as house manager in return
for reduced cost of room and board. He was a sophomore and
I was a freshman at the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern
Medical School. After graduation, George had an internship
in pathology at Duke under Dr. Forbus. Then he tried an
internship in surgery at Boston City Hospital. That year I had
an internship in pathology at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.
A college roommate of mine had found a small apartment
on Newbury Street for Patsy and me, but it was adjacent
to four railroad tracks. There was no air-conditioning so the
windows were open. When we heard a train coming, it was a
race to shut the windows before the smoke came billowing in.
Patsy contacted Anne Race to look for another place to live.
They found a two bedroom, one bath apartment facing the
Charles River, and we decided to share it to cut expenses. Our
first child, Tricia, came in January. George never complained
about a crying child. In general, he was very accepting and
not critical of people.
Then George went to the Air Force for training as a flight
surgeon, winding up at Nagoya, Japan. I had a year at Mass
Memorial in medicine and 4 months of a medical residency at
Parkland before being called to active duty in the Navy and was
assigned to the Army when the Korean War broke out. I wound
up as the pathologist and lab officer at the hepatitis center hospital at Kyoto, Japan. Courtesy of a kind commanding officer, I
was able to visit George in Nagoya, which was bombed heavily
in World War II since it was Japan’s major air center. We drove
around the city, seeing only block after block of vacant land
cleared of rubble 5 years after the war. Years later, George had
his own plane, and he flew into his early 80s.
After finishing his training at Duke and Peter Bent Brigham,
George got his first job as the pathologist for a hospital in
Tampa, Florida. That year I had a National Institutes of Health
traineeship in cardiology in Birmingham with Dr. Harrison. So
we packed up our three children and visited the Races. George
liked his job but wanted to return to Dallas. It was not long
before he became an assistant professor in pathology at UT
Southwestern. The medical school was nice, but low pay led to
his taking a job with Dr. Terrell, who did much of the pathology
and lab services for Fort Worth and West Texas.
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When Baylor University Medical Center (BUMC) was
looking for a new chief of pathology, Jesse Thompson and I,
among others, campaigned for George to take the job. He was
chosen and made a very good contract to provide pathology and
laboratory services for the hospital. George has trained many
pathology residents, and all of them have passed the pathology
boards. He found good people to run the Baylor labor atories.
He exhibited good organizational skills.
In 1955, Patsy, Anne, Alice McCarley, and Margaret Clayton decided to form a gourmet club, rotating in turn the chore
of fixing a multicourse fancy dinner monthly. It was a bonanza
for George, Ben McCarley, John Clayton, and me! The group
did meet monthly into the 1990s!
In 1960, I told George that I wanted to buy some land using a loan from the new Texas Veterans Land Board. This precipitated George’s first raw land purchase near Murphy, Texas,
and started his lifelong pursuit of real estate. Anne and George
have invited us to their ranch near Lampasas and to their South
Padre beach house. George preferred air-conditioning over salt
water, so he stayed in the house and watched three television
sets simultaneously.
I have been on three different deer leases with George. He
liked the camaraderie with the other hunters but not learning
the finer points of deer hunting. He frequently took a stack
of medical journals into a blind, flipped pages to advertise his
presence to deer, and then wondered why he saw no deer that
day. He would often arrive late at night after a day’s work at the
hospital wearing a suit, in which he hunted the next day. On
another occasion, he brought slides and movies from a recent
trip to Africa. That evening, he projected both slides and movies
simultaneously on the wall of the cabin. His only commentary
was a repeated “Africa is lousy with animals.”
George had the ability to concentrate and the drive to finish
a job promptly. When he began his tenure at Baylor, there were
about 100 unfinished autopsy reports. He worked night and
day for 2 months until all reports were current.
George believed in education. While a resident at Duke,
he obtained a master’s degree from a nearby college. While at
Baylor, he finished his PhD at Southern Methodist University
(SMU). He also took one course in contract law from the SMU
law school to help with his real estate investments. George was
instrumental in starting and editing the BUMC Proceedings, a
Proc (Bayl Univ Med Cent) 2014;27(2):150–152