Discovery in the Morgue: How Curiosity and Risking One's Life Led to Discovering Life's Calling

By Philip Johnston

Social disruption was a harsh reality in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Every citizen in Memphis, Tennessee, felt the impact of the assassination of Martin Luther King, national political unrest, America's failure in the Vietnam War, civil disobedience, and the emerging horror of organized crime and the drug culture. Memphis's citizens largely believed segregation was a preferred social structure, with African Americans remaining subservient. In this blend of historical fiction, memoir, and social reflection, the author reveals the struggles of young Hank Henderson. Hank is a newly minted health professional who realizes the disparities created by racial segregation and long-term mistrust and oppression of African Americans. Hank's thoughts conflict, and he becomes progressively reckless. Hank's journey evolves with a background of personal and cultural experiences that are harsh teachings. Hank's reaction to social disparities is inflaming, showing how the healthcare industry functions as a dichotomy of service to Whites versus African Americans. Healthcare was not offered to African Americans as a right but as a privilege. Realizing how contrary this is to his upbringing, Hank risks his safety and professional career to make a difference. He joins forces with a friend to solve a mystery involving members of a drug ring. As they come closer to revealing the ring's actions, Hank's restlessness and curiosity get him over his head in trouble. He faces not only years in prison but is now a hunted man. His naïve decisions and what he now knows have resulted in a troublesome situation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350928587

Book preview

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. The novel’s story and characters are coincidental. Any semblance between the original characters in this book and natural persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Any public agencies, institutions, publications, or historical figures mentioned in the story serve as a backdrop to the fictional characters and their actions, which are wholly imagined. The author does not represent any company, corporation, or brand mentioned in this book—the author does not speak for or represent these persons. All opinions expressed in this book are those of the author. To protect the privacy of specific individuals, the names and any possible similarities or identifying details have been changed.

Dedication

The writing of this book would not have been possible without the support of my family and friends. I dedicate this book to them. A portion of the net proceeds of this book are donated to not-for-profit interests in Memphis, Tennessee, to support its citizens.

Author Bio

An accomplished scientific author, experienced university professor, and hospital pharmacist for over four decades, Phil Johnston provides real-life experience and imagination to engage the reader in a journey of self-discovery, social education, and mystery. In his career, he has been amid social change and healthcare innovation. His peers have recognized him for his leadership in the pharmacy profession, his scientific inquiry, and as an advocate for the underserved and marginalized. Phil is retired and lives in Tennessee with his wife and extended family.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

—Mahatma Gandhi¹

Chapter One

Wherever you turn, you can find someone who needs you. Even if it is a little thing, do something for which there is no pay but the privilege of doing it. Remember, you don’t live in a world all of your own.

—Albert Schweitzer ⁹

On Monday, July 2, 1973, I entered the University Human Resources office to begin my first professional job as a newly minted clinical pharmacist. My name is Hank Henderson. The office was in the administration building on Dunlap Street, adjacent to the School of Pharmacy building, next door to the research building, and across Madison Avenue from John Gaston Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. July 2 was the first day for all new faculty and staff hired in the new budget year, so the office was abuzz. Several new employees were beginning that day, but none were likely as naïve as me. Classmates told me that members of the pharmacy faculty had said that the school was bringing in pharmacists who were not prepared to be faculty due to our young age and lack of experience in teaching, but also our lack of training and experience in research—the holy grail of academia.

That wasn’t so much on my mind at the time. My mind was directed toward getting started with a full day and meeting the folks I would work with. I was proud to be selected and recruited for a faculty position and was committed to making a positive difference—restless to improve the world. On Tuesday morning, I started in the outpatient pharmacy of Gailor Clinic, adjacent to John Gaston Hospital. That was my faculty location, and I was stationed there to teach student pharmacists.

The John Gaston Hospital was named after a restauranteur who migrated to the city and became a philanthropist after becoming wealthy. He left enough money in his will to be used to build a hospital for people in poverty. Since 1936, John Gaston had been the poor people’s hospital and the African American people’s hospital. Since the 1968 garbage strikes and the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, the hospital had been a focus of attention among the public and in the City Council.

Phyllis, another pharmacist working in the clinic, came to work concerned about her experience the night before. She had worked the late shift and, as usual, was cautious when she left the building and walked across to the parking lot.

She asked, Has anybody but me noticed the number of ambulances and hearses coming and going from the morgue? Last night, five vehicles lined up in the alley outside the morgue door. What was strange to me is that they all had different license plates. Aren’t most of our bodies in our morgue from around here?

We found this humorous. Smiles were shared all around.

One student in the pharmacy commented on the hearses they had seen coming and going and said, It gives me the creeps seeing them come and go. It makes me wonder what’s going on there.

Having worked in the same pharmacy as a student, I had noticed the activity near the entrance to the morgue in the past but hadn’t recently thought about it. It was hard to ignore because as you exited the clinic, you stepped into the morgue’s driveway to get to the parking lot. One of the students asked if we could go into the morgue on a field trip and laughed. Another proudly said they had walked near there out of curiosity and had seen several well-dressed men, apparently from funeral homes. Others, they said, looked like bouncers. I remembered that during my rotation in the pharmacy a couple of years prior, the morgue was a mysterious place. The entrance was often occupied by police cars and out-of-town hearses and ambulances. I had my rotation in the pharmacy in January, and when work was done, it was dark outside. Walking from the building to our cars was a little eerie, I would admit.

Phyllis resisted working the evening shift alone, which was justified. While in the pharmacy, she was brazened, but when she had to leave at the end of the 3:00 to 11:00 p.m. shift, she was petrified to walk to her car, fearful of being mugged by one of the homeless people often passing by. She was always anxious at the end of a shift, imagining an unpleasant encounter with anybody on the street. Security was rarely available for an escort, but an officer would sometimes help watch as she went to her car. The pharmacy was on a busy street, and foot traffic was still present at night. The area of town was known for its high rate of crime. This was the setting I was placed in, which was quite different from the environment and culture I grew up in.

From birth until high school, my world was a White culture. The small town I grew up in was predominately White; the folks I went to school with were primarily White, and the folks that were my parents’ friends were all White. The folks we did business with were White, as were our doctor, dentist, attorney, jeweler, barber, and banker. African Americans lived in a small area of town together. African Americans were typically service people, maids, laborers, and maintenance workers. Their children did poorly in school. I knew no African American children who were student organization leaders or excelled in class. Our high school band had one African American student in it.

I was taught to be tolerant and respectful of African American people, although not everybody I knew was taught the same values. Jokes and comments were derogatory toward our town’s African Americans, the poor, and the ignorant. Some people in our city didn’t have a job, enough food for their families, or a permanent place to live. We didn’t associate with them except when we donated food and toys at Christmas. My life was protected from their social situations.

During high school, I worked in a community drug store, where I encountered many of the health issues the African American folks experienced. The pharmacist I worked for would care for them with kindness and patience. He taught me what they commonly used as remedies for various health issues. Their concerns ranged from cuts and scrapes that needed bandaging and treatment to maladies that prompted him to help them obtain care from a doctor or dentist. I didn’t know until later that most of these folks had no insurance and little money. They suffered from various problems that required care they often would not receive.

In my high school junior year, 1967, my father was transferred from a small Tennessee town to Memphis, Tennessee. In Memphis, I attended a predominately White high school in a lovely city area. There were African Americans in the school who came into the Memphis drug store I worked in. There, I met African American men and women who were professionals, active citizens, and church leaders. It was different.

At the time, Memphis was still recovering, along with the nation, from ugly situations and events that occurred in 1968. It was a disruptive year in America and Memphis. Political struggles existed between political parties and among legislators regarding the integration of schools and public services (libraries, hospitals, theaters, etc.). Memphians were staunchly opposed to integrating schools, stating that integration would harm the quality of public schools and that African Americans lacked the mental capacity to succeed in public schools. Memphis city sanitation workers were unsettled.² African American sanitation workers were given different working conditions than Whites. The equipment used by sanitation workers needed to be updated and in better condition. The pay was meager (sixty-five cents an hour), and health benefits and retirement options did not exist. Most sanitation workers had to take on additional work to support their families. African American garbage workers had to continue collections in inclement weather, whereas White workers could go home for the day with pay. If African American workers went home, they were not paid for the day.

Amid the turmoil, two African American sanitation workers were killed³ by a faulty sanitation truck, which sparked strong reactions from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). On one fateful day, two African American workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, stepped into the back of a garbage truck to escape the pouring rain. The truck short-circuited, and the back door crushed the two men to death. That provoked action from the NAACP and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). As tension mounted, union officials recruited garbage workers and hospital employees, encouraging them to strike.⁴

The NAACP representatives kept the situation in Memphis newspaper headlines. Meetings between NAACP and city leaders brought forth the needs and wants of these workers, but these meetings resulted in little progress.

Martin Luther King was invited to come to Memphis, and he came, hoping to support the African American sanitation workers and to do it peacefully. His staff reached out to ministers in Memphis, asking them to join in a march on Beale Street to protest the current conditions of sanitation workers. My father was a minister and wanted to march. An argument between him and my mother will always stay in my memory. He had been convinced that he should support this effort to help his fellow man and all the people of Memphis. His reasoning included the immediate need to help people experiencing poverty and help our culture heal. My mother was adamant, saying it wasn’t our battle to fight and that she feared for his safety.

We are all children of God, he said. We have to join together to show support for each other. Our city leaders must change their beliefs and stop beating down the African American people.

My father didn’t march, but the Memphis Ministers’ Association joined in the march on March 28, 1968.

I hadn’t seen this side of my father before and had never heard him verbalize his thoughts as he had in his argument with my mother. His statements made a real impression on me. I wanted to support him but couldn’t find the words. From that day on, I longed to make a positive difference for these people.

The march began in peace but ended in violence. Some young marchers began breaking storefront windows of White-owned businesses and looting stores along the march. The Memphis police responded to the looting viciously. Stores were burned out, and a city quarantine was declared. Martin Luther King was assassinated within a week, which changed everything in Memphis.

Memphis was under a citywide curfew after the assassination. After attending church the following Sunday, Tennessee National Guardsmen stationed in the church parking lot asked us to leave promptly. The looting, burning, and riotous outbreaks continued down the street. There was fear, uncertainty, tension, and hate. Newspapers and television news stories focused on reports of street violence nationwide. The African American culture was stunned that their leader had been killed.

Between 1968 and 1973, there were many conversations and political struggles over health services being a right or a privilege.⁵, ⁶, ⁷ Healthcare was considered a right for most Whites but not for African Americans. Whites denied African Americans the same rights to healthcare all over America. The healthcare facilities migrated to the suburbs and areas of the city that were predominately White. African Americans struggled to have the financial means, public transportation, job benefits, peer healthcare providers, and the same access to healthcare as Whites. This was no more evident than in this period of conflict in America. It was a wrong that needed to be righted!

In addition to the cultural tensions, the Vietnam War was hot and heavy. Dropping out of high school or college was almost an automatic call up to the military unless you were physically or mentally disabled. That wasn’t for me. I wanted no part of the survival lifestyle and life-threatening action depicted on television and felt I could support my country in other ways. Before accepting the draft, I would join the Air Force. But first, I had to attempt a successful entry to pharmacy school with a deferral and a chance to enter the military as a commissioned officer.

Fortunately, the war cooled between 1968 and 1973. President Nixon proclaimed an end to the conflict and began ordering the military back home to the United States.⁸ Immediately, politicians and pundits considered this a grave mistake: not winning the war and not stalling communism in that part of the world. Without war worries, beginning my career was again exciting.

Something about that chapter in Memphis history caused me to feel more committed to helping the underserved when selecting a direction for my career. I knew then that I had to make a difference. Until now, I didn’t know the strife, cruelty, and harshness instilled in the African American population. As an adult, it hit me with a significant impact.

I had a lot to think about. 

Chapter Two

Human rights are not a privilege granted by the few; they are a liberty entitled to all, and human rights, by definition, include the rights of all humans, those in the dawn of life, the dusk of life, or the shadows of life.

—Kay Granger¹⁸

The following day, I ran into Greg Sullivan, one of six persons who was approached and hired from our class. Greg was well-connected and must have had an inside informant. Greg knew all the school scuttlebutt. As he approached me, he asked if I had heard what the other class members got as salaries compared to ours. I didn’t expect him to know the faculty hiring scuttlebutt so quickly—we had been employed maybe twenty-four hours!

Greg was from West Texas and carried himself with a constant smile and swagger. He always had a look on his face that told you he had some juicy news and couldn’t wait to tell you. He claimed to be somewhat of a woman’s man, but we rarely had evidence of that. Greg sported long sideburns and a magnificent mustache. Burt Reynolds would have been jealous. If he didn’t have a white clinic jacket, dress shirt, and tie on, you would expect him to have on overalls and a flannel plaid shirt. His speech and manner didn’t quite go over with his dress. Nevertheless, he was intelligent and engaging and, as of today, was beginning a specialty in psychiatry at the Veterans Hospital on Jefferson Street. I was looking forward to getting to know Greg better and thought our working as faculty in the same department would enable that.

Greg quietly said, Adam is getting over $18K, Tom over $15K, and I’ve just signed for $13K to avoid spreading the word too widely. What did you negotiate?

I didn’t expect such a direct attack, even from a friend. As a student, we continually compared what we were getting per hour, but now that we were earning an actual professional salary, I intended to keep my information to myself. The truth was that the average salary for a pharmacist in Memphis was about $12,500 annually. Retail pharmacies paid a bit higher; hospital practice was lower. There were typically no sign-on bonuses or annual bonuses. Some private chains would pay pharmacists a Christmas bonus; I had yet to hear what amounted to any retirement programs. And, for goodness’ sake, retirement was in another realm at this point—who cared?

Yeah, I think I got screwed, he said. It makes me feel that the faculty had all this worked out before they came to us, and it makes me mad to know that other guys in the same class working in the same department are getting different salaries. Don’t you think so? And so, what did you get?

I stammered and said, I think you and I are in the middle range of the numbers you heard. What did Arnie and Ben get? They are going to be at the VA too, you know. Amazingly, these conversations were secretly going on simultaneously across campus, and it was an explosion of news!

Adam, who was getting $18,000, was the brightest guy in the class and had worked at Memphis Cancer Institute all during school. He might be worth that, and maybe not. It seemed at times that he was on the coattail of some of the medical and PhD staff there and was considered such an innovative guy. Should he be rewarded so highly right out of school? It fried me to know there was such a difference in the salaries, too. Even if Greg wasn’t right or may have pulled some numbers out of the air, his reputation of knowing the dirt was respected. This would have to be taken up with him later.

There were pressures outside my immediate world that were changing our nation for the good and the bad. Arab countries had raised the price of oil, causing gasoline prices to double. Roe versus Wade made abortion an American constitutional right. Japanese automobile manufacturers impacted the American market by manufacturing smaller vehicles with smaller engines, just in time to respond to the rising gasoline prices. Elvis Presley performed in Hawaii in the first worldwide telecast by an entertainer and was watched by more people than the Apollo Moon Landing. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System construction was approved to pipe oil from Alaska to the American mainland. The Sears Tower was completed in Chicago, making it the tallest building in the world. Secretariat won the triple crown in horse racing. The first hand-held cell telephone call was made.

On a lighter note, popular films included Live and Let Die, Jesus Christ Superstar, American Graffiti, and The Sting. Famous musicians included Stevie Wonder, The Eagles, John Lennon, Elton John, and Diana Ross. In politics, Spiro Agnew resigned from the Vice Presidency, guilty of income tax evasion. President Nixon announced that a peace accord had been reached in Vietnam¹⁰ which was good news, but Nixon was also involved in the Watergate scandal. The average cost of a new house was $32,500, the average income was $12,500, and the price of gasoline was sixty cents a gallon.

The conversation with Greg caused me to think back to this past year of school and a discussion I had had with Oscar Brimley a few weeks before.

It was the last year of pharmacy school for our class. After two years of undergraduate chemistry, math, biology, and the humanities, and three years of pharmacy school, we were all so entirely drained of our enthusiasm for classrooms and labs; actually, we were exhausted by the whole educational process.