They’re busing in students from the very poor northern area of Memphis.” I said,
“What’s wrong with that?” Well, you know, integration by decree. I replied, “So
what?” So Paul went to this really good integrated school. He came home the first
day reading, because they were teaching the whole language approach – which is
the way really good schools teach. They sounded words out to them. I became a
room mom to the school and made all the field trips with them. It was so much
fun. I never regretted sending him to that school. He got a very good education,
which shows what a bunch of prejudiced professors knew about things. I didn’t
even like the applications they gave me to the all-white schools that their kids
attended. I wanted to write bad words all over them and send them back. I was
offended by some of the biased questions.
Although I had told everyone who would listen that I was never going to
get married again, almost immediately I met my future second husband, Julian
Hurt. He was a med student. My advisor said, “Myra, he’s a med student and
you’re teaching med students in the lab. Is dating a med student ethical?” I said,
“Am I giving him any grades?” He said no. I said, “Then how is it any of your
business?” It turned out that he was interested in me in an unprofessional manner.
Back in that ancient era, when men were interested in grad students in an
unprofessional way, women had no recourse. There was no one to report him to.
The only way to combat his interest was to ignore him and deny his power over
me. I had to put up with that for four years. It was either ignore him or quit my
program – which I was not going to do. Not after all that hard work, no, no, no.
While I was a graduate student I was on the board of the chairs of the medical
sciences. I represented all the graduate students, and that was really a great experience
because the chairs of the medical sciences – man, they didn’t really care
that we only made $6,000 a year. That was my food, clothing and gas money. I
wouldn’t have made it if my parents hadn’t helped me as much as they could by
coming in from Hot Springs to get Paul if he was sick and so forth. My parents
were not wealthy people, but they helped me to the extent they could – even
though they had no idea why I was in graduate school. They didn’t understand it
at all. But they wanted to support me.
So we had a very profitable time in Memphis, my son Paul and I. We loved
Memphis. I got my Ph.D., Julian got his M.D. and the three of us moved to
Houston. I moved to a really top-notch postdoctoral program – a National
Institutes of Health Genetics Training Program at Baylor – which prepared me
very well for the rest of my life. Paul moved on to a really nice middle school in
Houston, where he learned to play the cello and sports. And Julian moved to the
Baylor College of Medicine General and Vascular Surgery Residency Program,
the top heart surgery residency program in the United States, and also one of the
hardest and cruelest.
At the time, Houston was the murder capital of the country. So we went
from the frying pan into the fire, moving from Memphis to Houston. But for
a surgeon, the murder capital of the United States is a great training ground.
Breaking the Mold | 17