After Stethoscopes: An Autobiography with Thoughts About Leadership, Parkinson’S Disease and Life.

By Dan Stultz

This book is pretty much described by the title as it is an autobiography and my lifes journey thus far, with an emphasis on my career after the practice of medicine. My purpose is to present my autobiography and how my boyhood growing up in the fifties and sixties effected my adulthood and core. Additionally, the books purpose is to stimulate thought about leadership and what is and is not leadership. After Stethoscopes shares my thoughts on seemingly unrelated essay topics over the last five to six years and shares my experience with deep brain stimulation, an often-unused early weapon in the battle with Parkinsons. DBS has been a miracle gift for me. The book weaves together and my life story with Parkinsons and my experience with leadership and leadersat least my story thus far.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543477160

Dan Stultz

Dan Stultz, M.D., FACP, FACHE, is the former Pres. and Chief Executive Officer of the Texas Hospital Association where he served from 2007 to 2014. A member of the American College of Healthcare Executives, he earned designation as a fellow in 2006. He was the first physician CEO among the nations 51 hospital associations CEOs. Stultz was President and CEO of Shannon Health System, a three-hospital system associated with a multispecialty clinic, in San Angelo, from 1999 until November 2006. He was a member of the Texas Hospital Association Board of Trustees during that time and served as the THA chairman in 2004 to 2005. Dr. Stultz practice general internal medicine in San Angelo Texas for more than 25 years. He received his bachelors degree from Southwestern University in Georgetown Texas. He attended medical school at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, and did his internship and residency at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. While in San Angelo, Stultz was a member of the San Angelo Chamber of Commerce, serving as chairman in 2003. He has been honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. In May 2016, he was presented with an honorary life membership award by the American Hospital Association for outstanding service. Prior to retirement, Stultz was Associate Professor and Executive in Residence for Leadership at the Texas A&M School of Medicine in Round Rock, 2014-2015. He enjoys welding and metal projects and working in his shop. He and his wife Alice, have 3 grown children and 8 grandchildren. They reside in Georgetown, Texas.

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Copyright © 2018 by Dan Stultz.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018900459

ISBN:      Hardcover           978-1-5434-7714-6

                Softcover             978-1-5434-7715-3

                eBook                  978-1-5434-7716-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

From The Jerusalem Bible © 1966 by Darton Longman & Todd Ltd and Doubleday and Company Ltd.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/17/2018

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I could see his memories traveling back as he called them up one by one, willing to speak of them only after he was sure no errors would be made in the retelling.

Peter Geye

Wintering

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: Beginnings

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep:

Chapter 2: Hillcrest High School, 1965-1968

Graduation Headlights (Written The Morning After Graduation, And The Senior All Night Party At Six Flags, 1968.)

Lincoln, Influence, And Cocker Spaniels

Chapter 3: Southwestern University: A Pirate, 1968-1972

Dreams, Players, Healing.

Roads

Chapter 4: University Of Texas Medical School At Houston, 1972-1975

Chapter 5: Uk, Lexington Kentucky, Residency Training, 1975- 1978

Chapter 6: San Angelo, 1978- 2006

Chapter 7: Shannon Health System Ceo, 1999- 2006

Chapter 8: Leadership Thoughts

I Know It When I See It.

Leadership Essentials.

Leadership, Power, And Trust. How To Be Effective In Meetings With Other People.

Chapter 9: Texas Hospital Association, 2007-2014

Coaches And Practice.

The Admirals Club

Chapter 10: Speeches And My Favorite Quotes

Eklusis:

On My Watch

What’s In Your Wallet?

Favorite Quotations:

Chapter 11: Hobbies, Travel, And Parkinson’s Disease

Parkinson’s Disease

Crosses

Deep Brain Stimulation

New Dragons, Dbs 2, And What’s Coming

Memory, Mind Games, And Loss:

Christmas, New Year And Bilbo Baggins.

Nicaea And The Trinity.

Looking In From The Waterline: Thoughts On Omaha Beach

Chapter 12: Strands Of Thought And Finishing Touches

Bibliography

Curriculum Vitae

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

W E ARE DEFINED by the legacy we leave, the character and morality we exhibit, and the stories we share. This is an effort to tell my tale, my life and times with relatively random essays that involve leadership, Parkinson’s Disease, and life. This was collected in 2016-2017, after my stethoscope days of taking care of sick people and after my diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. The essays are from the last 5 years.

This effort is for Alexander, John Charles, Liam, Grace, Owen, Ana, Jack and Charles (and any subsequent grandchildren to be named later.) I love them very much and with time it may be increasingly difficult to demonstrate that love in ways they will understand. Usually perception is reality, but perception can misconstrue quietness and passivity as a lack of love and interest. I have enjoyed their exploits thus far and look forward to more to come.

Thanks to Linda Srubar who helped me immensely in getting this ready for press. I appreciate Norma and David Gaines willingness to spend their time reading this. They are very special to Southwestern University and to Annie and me.

I want to thank and dedicate this book to Annie (Alice Ann) who is known to those grandkids listed above as Ama. I have enjoyed love and life and will be forever grateful to the life and inspiration that she has given me. I have been truly blessed. I look back at the last 60 years and wonder how it passed so quickly? It seems like just a few years ago I was standing near the goalpost at a Garland High School football game with less than a minute to play, waiting for the referee to give the game ball to the winning coach, jog off the field, and take us home.

Dan Stultz

September 2017

INTRODUCTION

T HIS COLLECTION IS an autobiography intermittently laced with leadership notions, my essays and thoughts about Parkinson’s Disease. It is not an in-depth treatise of any subject, but a life story laced with my experience and observations about two topics that still slip from our grasp when we are asked to describe inspirational leadership and solutions to Parkinson’s Disease. One is a progressive disease and the other a life skill that shows up in people in different times and different ways. Both manifest at different times. Neither one has an early objective single test that defines it. When we try to predict one or the other we are frequently wrong. We aren’t sure what causes either leadership or Parkinson’s Disease, and there may not be an early test for them, but we know them when we see them. In medicine, we call the early diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease a clinical diagnosis as there is no early single test that is definitive. We know leadership when we see it, but a simple definition seems to lack adequacy in breath and scope.

I have tried to be copious in my reference citing about sources. I have included a generous bibliography about specific sources as well as books that I am bound to owe credit. I know I was impressed and influenced by these references and I chose to cite the entire reference, not specific pages. Dr. James Stoller’s work is such an example. We studied him while I was at the A&M Medical School and built our CME program partially from his work. I have included the references to his work for anyone interested in leadership and graduate medical education.

I have not spent any pages on evil leadership, people like Hitler and Jim Jones. It is interesting that followership, especially political followership, has been termed, Drinking the Kool-Aid after the tragedy in Jonestown in 1978, the ultimate example of evil leadership.

This collection is not an attempt to be a historian. I have tried to explain my view, my twist if you will, on several subjects and they all relate to the title. If you happen to believe that George Custer acted as an inspirational leader at the Little Big Horn, then I apologize. I am trying to present a modern-day view of leadership beyond that of pure bravery. And for anyone else I have unintentionally insulted, I offer the same apology, this is just my take on events. If you are offended about the events and results of the Council of Nicaea, then read about it again!

August 15, 2017

CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings

Our greatest responsibility is to be great ancestors.

Carrie Hess

M Y MOM WENT to Rivershon Park in Dallas on the evening of May 9, 1950 to watch the Crozier Tech Wolves play a high school baseball game and I was born uneventfully the next morning in Methodist Hospital. If you can call nine pounds seven ounces and 22 inches long uneventful! My Mom didn’t think it was uneventful, nor did my Dad and I felt like I was special from then on. Sara was born five years later, and she felt like she was special, as well. We were fortunate.

I grew up in north Dallas in the years after the Second World War. Although I didn’t feel it at the time, the world around me was very much a post war culture. My Dad, Rex Stultz, had only been home from Europe four years when I was born. The generation was just getting back on its feet, and the Greatest Generation had not yet achieved what they were to become. I was born at a time when young adults were glad to be at peace again, to have a different goal than the national war effort, and they wanted to put the war behind them. I never heard about World War II unless I asked. Even as a young boy of eight or ten, when I asked about it, there was a minimal answer. No details, no embellishing a story, no prolonged dialogue was provided. There was no war discussion at reunions, no family stories or next-door chatter about the war. Mother and Daddy never turned me down when I asked about it, they just answered quickly or left the room. For years it was that way, maybe 1980, before Dad would answer any detailed questions about his part in the war. Some questions, he never answered.

When he was very ill in 2012, perhaps the next to last time I saw him, I asked my Dad to tell me about those days from November of 1944 until New Year’s Day of 1945, his time during the Battle of Bulge. He had a battle star on his victory medal and I had known for years that he had been trapped in Belgium in the winter of 1944, along with other American forces. His eyes got misty, he looked aside out the window of his room, paused and said, You know I think the Red Sox are going to make a run for the pennant this year, they really have the pitching. That was it. I finally got it. The actual war part was not up for discussion, certainly not the cold winter of the Bulge.

Our house when I was born was small and I only remember a few things about it from my first five years there. I remember Daddy having coaches over on Sunday to watch game film in the living room scouting other teams. I remember I had a peddle wagon and I remember the dirt floor in the narrow part of the garage where Daddy’s workshop was. I remember the straw mats in the window as water dripped down from an evaporative cooler. The attic fan pulled the cool air through those mats in the summer. There was no true air conditioning, but lying in front of those window mats when the attic fan was on still evokes a cool calmness in me. I remember taking naps in the bedroom with the bed up against the wall and picking at the wet straw as air came through the window before I fell asleep.

My mother, Alice Mae (Al), is the daughter of a John Payne Fleming (Pop) of Sulphur Springs, Texas, and Lucille Rash (Mimmie) of Cumby, Texas. Born in 1922, Mother grew up in the small towns of east Texas, as Pop moved with the Methodist Church conference appointments almost every year. She graduated from Garland High School where she was a twirler majorette. She attended Gainesville Jr. College then transferred and graduated from SMU. Mom worked during the war and married my Dad when he returned from the war in 1946, her wedding dress made from parachute silk. She became a homemaker and taught at a pre-school once Sara and I were well along in school. Mom returned to school herself after we were grown, and got her master’s degree in remedial reading from East Texas State. She taught mostly fourth grade in the Richardson ISD for 20 years and retired as an honored teacher. Al is one of five children in her family and the sole remaining one still with us. She has been active in the Methodist Church since childhood, and led many church groups, including the Highland Park United Methodist Women. She moved into independent living housing at C.C. Young near White Rock Lake after my Dad died in 2012, and has been very active there. Sara keeps a close eye on her and Al enjoys Ranger baseball whenever they are on TV. She gets upset with them every year unless they get in the playoffs and wishes for better pitching, like all Ranger fans do.

In 1955, we moved out from the old Ashburn Elementary and Woodrow Wilson High district to the newer Dan D. Rogers and Hillcrest High district and into a new house at 6715 Trammel Drive. Northeast Dallas was booming in the mid-fifties and the neighborhood was about three miles from White Rock Lake. Later, I could ride my bike to Hillside Village Shopping Center, then take the city bus to the library into Lakewood. I could see movies at the Saturday morning kids show or even take the bus on into downtown to the public library. The Lakewood movie theatre frequently had Flash Gordon or some other serial plus a special movie. That’s where I first saw The Longest Day in 1960 about the D-Day invasion. It never occurred to me that I could not ride my bicycle anywhere in the area if I could get back by dark. My parents had a rule regarding my playing outside all day; when I saw the porch light come on, it was time to come inside for the night. It was not a good idea to have my Mom and Dad come look for me after dark. I don’t know that they worried a bunch, they usually knew where I was going, and northeast Dallas was a safe neighborhood to grow up, but it was a good rule. No one would allow that kind of childhood freedom now, but in the mid to late fifties it was common among my friends to roam widely. We thought nothing of riding our bikes up to the elementary school or 7-Eleven during the day, both of which were miles away. I was always close to home by dark and seeing the porch light was a good signal. Even my friends knew the signal, Hey Dan, your porch light is on. See you tomorrow.

During the summer when I was about nine or ten, my cousins Paul and Murray Fleming lived in Altus Oklahoma, north of Vernon. Uncle Doug was a minister and Paul and I were the same age. Our grandmother (Mimmie) wanted to visit the Altus Flemings and I went with Mimmie on the train to Vernon where we were picked up by Uncle Doug and Paul. We stayed a week in Altus then rode the train back to Dallas. The next summer Paul rode to Dallas on the train to visit me and Stephen, our Highland Park cousin. We went back and forth for several summers. The train ride was in the waning days of the train era and the trip must have taken about six hours once we got started. We had stops in Decatur, Henrietta and Wichita Falls. I remember the movable seats, the dining car, the lounge and the distinctive smell of the passenger cars. Mimmie was appalled at the prices on the menu, but we would have a dessert and watch the other passengers in the dining car. I could explore the train from one end to the other, each car with a different function or status. I remember going down the long stretches of concrete walkways, almost the length of the train in Dallas’ Union Station, to get on and off the train. The passenger train was a great way to travel for a nine-year-old. Annie and I recently took the kids and seven grandkids on a train ride to Burnet, Texas in a historic steam locomotive with a modified dining car, a lounge car, four passenger cars and a caboose. The smells and the allure of train travel all came back until I realized how much time we spent going and coming the 35 miles to Burnet. Train travel was part of my childhood that was going away in the 50’s.

Ridgewood Park (the Park) across the street had a park director during the summer, usually a teacher or coach and he provided activities, ran the swimming pool and held mini day camps for the neighborhood kids. We played scrub baseball for hours in the park. We went swimming at the appointed time in the park pool, we played paddle ball, croquet, pickup sticks and all types of board games there in the shadows of the large trees along the creek two hundred yards from my front door. In the evenings of the summer I would watch church league men and women’s fast pitch softball games. Mr. Grandstaff sold soft drinks out of the back of his pickup parked nearby during the games and we picked up empties hoping that for the right number of empties returned, we might get a free candy bar or Nehi soda. My buddies were Pat, Steve and Cathy, Little Mike, Bubba, and Randy across the alley. Summers were in the Park from daylight till dark. We could play scrub baseball from noon to three, swim in the park pool from 3-4 o’clock when the boys got the time in the pool and not have to take a bath at home at night.

Scrub baseball (also known as workup baseball) was a game we could play when we did not have enough players for two teams. In scrub, we picked two batters and everyone else played infield and outfield. Those two batted until one of them made an out. If the batter got a hit, the next batter had to get the runner in to home or he was out. When a kid got the batter out, he went in to bat and the batter returned to the field. For instance, if the batter was forced out at second, whoever was playing second went into bat. In this way, we could pitch and catch and hit with as few as six or seven people. It was better to have 10 or 11, but for scrub, you could play with less and still play baseball. We defined the game limit in time, not by innings. No team won, we all won, because we got to play baseball for hours. That’s the way I remember it. I played catcher one day when Randy was batting, and he slung the bat after he hit the pitch. The bat hit me across the nose and my eyes were swelled shut by that evening. I had a broken nose and I looked like a raccoon for the next several days with purplish greenish eyes. We didn’t have a catcher’s mask! It took three weeks for the swelling to go down. I didn’t volunteer to play catcher anymore with or without a mask, and I never slung a bat when batting.

We had two window air-conditioning units in the house during the day. In the evenings, we would turn off air conditioners, open the windows, and turn on the attic fan that pulled air in from the outside. I could go to bed in the front bedroom with my transistor or crystal radio listening to the Dallas Rangers play the Fort Worth Cats at Burnett Field in Oak Cliff. Transistor radios were about the size of a brick of cheese and the smaller crystal radio could be clamped on to anything metal to act as an antenna and still receive a faint signal through an earpiece. Both radios were portable, the transistor far superior in quality. During the summer evenings, we might play neighborhood games with the Coopers next door: Red light, Green light, Mother may I, Annie Over and others. Mike, Randy’s older brother, would later go to Vietnam as a Seabee. I remember Mike coming over and Dad talking to him many times after he came home from the Vietnam War. I never knew what they talked about, but Mike had