On Call: A Neurosurgeon's Story of Serving God and Others

By James A Moody and Kathy Peel

The inspiring memoir of how a boy who grew up poor in East Texas overcame countless obstacles to become an award-winning neurosurgeon and play an instrumental role in transforming a rundown hospital into a regional trauma and transplant center-and is still "On Call" after a fierce battle with pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Jim Moody's

• Language: English
• Publisher: Foundations for Livng
• Release date: Jan 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987196014

James A Moody

JAMES A. MOODY, MD is a renown Board Certified Neurosurgery Specialist, now retired. He was instrumental in transforming Methodist Hospital from a small community hospital to a regional trauma center and helped establish North Texas's first air ambulance service. During his tenure at Methodist Dallas Medical Center he served as Chief of Surgery and President of the Medical Staff. He also served as President of the Texas Association of Neurological Surgeons, Delegate to the Council of State Neurosurgical Societies, and Board of Directors of the Dallas County Medical Society. He received the Servant Leadership Award in 2020.

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CHAPTER 1

Moody Family Values

Ispent my first twenty years in Mineola, Texas, a small town hemmed in by pines, midway between Dallas and Louisiana. Mineola was established in the 1870s when early railroad companies laid tracks across America. By the 1950s, the population hovered around 3,700—which meant no anonymity. Everyone knew everyone else’s business.

Mineola had a town square, two grocery stores, three stoplights, and a Dairy Queen. We locals spoke what I call East Texican, which makes two-syllable words out of one—such as, We went to the fay-er (fair), and I hope they find oi-yul (oil) on my lay-und (land).

Hunting in East Texas was a treasured pastime and an unspoken rite of passage I came to loathe. The winter after I turned ten, I sat dutifully in a duck blind before dawn, chilled to the bone, and made myself a promise: If I ever got old enough to make my own decisions, I would never again subject myself to such misery.

I have heard that big-city dwellers think the tall piney woods of East Texas obscured our view of the world. I believe there is some truth to that.

Lots of folks took a hand in my upbringing. When my parents married in 1937, Dad had a daughter and a son, ages fifteen and thirteen, and Mom had a ten-year-old son. The newlyweds had yours and mine but decided they wanted our kids too. My sister Beverly was born in 1944, and I came along the following year when Dad was forty-five and Mom was forty-two. The upside of their ages was that they had figured out what was most important in life. The downside was that some people thought they were our grandparents.

Growing up, I shared a room with Mom’s son, whom I called Junior. Though he was eighteen years older, Junior was extremely nice to me and a good role model. We slept in twin beds on opposite walls of a small room that the family had to walk through to get from one end of our 900-square-foot house to the other. Many nights I feared the attic fan over my bed would fall from the ceiling, and the blades would chop me up. I willed myself to stay awake until Junior came to bed and calmed me down.

Besides the sleeping hallway, our wood-frame house had two bedrooms—one for Mom and Dad, the other for Beverly—and one bathroom shared by all. Mom utilized every inch of the compact kitchen, equipped with a gas range and an icebox cooled by large blocks of ice delivered by the iceman or ass man, as a neighborhood friend taught me.

The front door opened into the living room with a sofa, two end tables, an upright piano, a rocking chair, and our Emerson TV. Dad was a chain-smoker, so when we watched Bonanza or The Ed Sullivan Show, cigarette smoke formed into wall clouds that I tried in vain to wave away. He added a room on the back of the house by turning a screened porch into a den— complete with a window unit air conditioner that afforded limited relief from Texas heat.

When I was fourteen, Junior married and moved out. Before he left, there’s no telling how many nights he yanked me out of bed when Dad yelled, Git to the shelter! Tornado’s coming! Dad had been obsessed with ominous weather ever since a tree fell through his house when he was young. If he spotted dark clouds moving in, his joints complained of rising barometric pressure, or the radio blared a weather warning, he scurried us to my uncle’s storm cellar a mile away. Lots of schooldays, Beverly and I arrived bleary-eyed after we had hunkered underground for hours during the night, waiting for harmless storms to pass. I feared spiders and snakes in the shelter more than tornadoes— until March 24, 1962.

Late that afternoon, I drove to Piggly Wiggly supermarket with Junior’s stepson Jerry in tow. As we walked toward the store, I spotted a tornado about three blocks away. I grabbed Jerry, ran into the store, and warned people that a tornado was close. Everyone ran to the back of the store and got down on the floor. I laid on top of Jerry and covered his head with my arms. A few seconds later, we heard the deafening roar of an F3 tornado ripping off the store’s metal roof like a can opener. No one in Mineola died that day, and Jerry and I left the store unharmed. However, I did gain a healthy fear of tornadoes.

* * *

My memory does not stretch back to a time when our family was not poor. Although the Moody family contributed to Mineola’s commerce and culture before World War II, big lumber companies moved into the area and put Dad’s sawmill out of business when I was young. After that, he took a job at a service station, and Mom went to work at the Buy Rite store on the square. They worked hard to eke out a living, but I never heard them complain, and we never missed a meal. Like every home, ours was far from perfect. Though we were financially strapped, I felt secure because I knew Mom and Dad loved me. That meant a lot.

My dad was a kind and loving man, but financial stress drove him to drink in secret. One day Beverly and I rummaged through a closet in our garage and discovered hidden bottles of bootleg whiskey. Wood County was dry, but according to rumor, a man could get more than a shave and a haircut at the barbershop. Beverly and I poured the whiskey onto the dirt floor of the garage and replaced the empty bottles.

We checked the garage closet when we noticed Dad cussing or slurring his words. Sure enough, we always found more whiskey and disposed of it each time. For years, Dad never said a word about this, even when Beverly wrote a lengthy letter to him and mailed it to the office at the service station where he worked. In her letter, she said, Dad, I’m writing to beg and plead with you to quit drinking. We all love you, but you have no idea how much sorrow you cause us. Writing this letter was a brave move for a fifteen-year-old girl, but it prompted Dad to stop drinking.

Anything Dad could catch or kill—catfish, crappie, quail, or squirrel—ended up fried and on our dinner plate along with cornbread, which Mom fixed daily. Now and then, she splurged and bought ground beef to stretch into multiple meals with vegetables from our sizable backyard garden. When I turned six, Mom taught me to tend the garden and harvest the peas, okra, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, snap green beans, and different kinds of peppers. She always kept a bowl of tomatoes, onions, hot peppers, and vinegar ready to set on our Formica-topped kitchen table before meals. Mom called her concoction Hades because it was hotter than hell. It was her specialty, along with butter-laden pound cakes she baked in a square pan. Family, friends, and neighbors loved both.

Dad had two rules that framed the strong work ethic of our family culture. First, If you have two feet planted on this earth, you must work to earn your keep. This rule meant we all pitched in to keep the Moody household afloat, and we got paying jobs as soon as we were able. Junior managed a Texaco station, Beverly was fourteen when she started working for Buy Right, and I was twelve when I hired on at the Texaco station that Junior managed.

On Saturday mornings, I opened up at 6:30, cleaned the restrooms, read and recorded pump meters, and put change in the register. Customers expected full service, so while I pumped gas, I checked tire pressure, popped the hood to read the dipstick, made sure the radiator had water, and cleaned the windshield ‘til it sparkled. I buckled my belt on the side of my pants to avoid scratching cars when I leaned against them—a tip Junior passed onto me. I was thankful for the job, though it was not a perfect fit for a preteen who could not abide dirty hands.

When I turned thirteen, I worked an additional job at Bowdoin’s watermelon farm during the June harvest season. Every year, area farmers filled about 1,400 boxcars with red- and yellow-meat watermelons headed across the country. The melons weighed from twenty- to twenty-five pounds each. Some days, my job was to pitch them one at a time from the ground up to the truck; other days, I stood in the truck bed and caught the melons. Every day was blazing hot, but it was the best-paying job in town. Plus, on breaks, Mr. Bowdoin let us crack open melons and enjoy the fruit of our labor.

After melon season came hay-baling season—and Mr. Bowdoin also grew hay. Instead of melons, I picked up forty-pound bales of hay and threw them up to a guy in a truck, or I stood in the truck and caught the bales.

Working various jobs allowed me to buy some things I liked, such as Levi’s. Mom was happy to buy Wrangler jeans with her discount at Buy Rite, but I wanted Levi’s, so I had to save money and buy them myself. I paid for a blonde baseball glove with leather lacing from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, but this purchase cost my parents a pretty penny. I used an ice pick to poke an extra hole in the