Montana girl does good, real good !

Montana is flyover country. Nobody smart lives there. We all know that.

But when I got there in 1972 an issue of Science contained an article by State Legislator about a modification of general relativity — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Nordtvedt.  MIT grad, Harvard Junior Fellow etc. etc. 

Then there was the son of a doc I practiced with in Billings.   Honors physics at Billings Senior high school placed him in 2nd year physics at Harvard, from which he graduated in 4 years obtaining a masters in physics as well. 

Then there was a local boy, the Thiokol engineer who predicted the Challenger disaster and was over-ruled. 

The great thing about Montana was that no one ever bragged about this sort of thing.  There were so few people, that no one felt compelled to tell you about themselves, you’d find out about them soon enough.  The classic example was an excellent surgeon and friend I practiced with for 15 years.  Only on reading his obituary last year did I find out that he had a Fulbright after college.

Which brings me to Lindsay, a girl I first met when she was a high school student.  The family were ranchers with a beautiful spread on the east face of the Crazy mountains north of Big Timber.  I’m not sure how we first met — I don’t think I saw any of them as a patient.  But we all became friends and the galactic premiere of a cello sonata I wrote with a 19 year old secretary in a lumberyard was in their living room. 

The two least important things about Lindsay are that she was a centerfold and an olympic silver medalist in woman’s two person crew.  Don’t get excited about the centerfold bit, she was fully clothed, but for some reason the Harvard Alumni magazine had a 2 page picture on a field of daisys of her back in the 80’s when she was there. 

Lindsay went on to get a PhD from Cambridge and her work and that of her husband may have come up with something useful for Alzheimer’s disease.  I’ll talk about the science behind it in a future post.  But when the news broke today, the stock of her company hit 70  (it was around 7 at the beginning of the year).  For details please see — https://finance.yahoo.com/m/49fa6153-4235-3866-bff2-5a35470e54da/why-cassava-sciences-stock.html.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer girl.  Of course it didn’t just happen.  Decades of hard work went into it.  So as you fly across the country, look down.  Some people down there might be even smarter than you are. 

Now is the Winter of our Discontent – II

One of the problems with being over 80 is that you watch your friends get sick.  In the past month, one classmate developed ALS and another has cardiac amyloidosis complete with implantable defibrillator.  The 40 year old daughter of a friend who we watched since infancy has serious breast cancer and is undergoing surgery radiation and chemo.  While I don’t have survivor’s guilt (yet), it isn’t fun.

Add to that the recent loss of an excellent surgeon I practiced medicine with in Montana for 15 years.  Reading his obit was how I found out that he was a Fulbright scholar.  This is so typical of Montana and how great it was.  Don’t ever brag.  Show us how you are and what you can do, but never tell us.  There are so few people out there that you’ll bump up against each other again and again. They’ll figure out who you are without you telling them.  When I’d go back East, I noticed that city people (who a friend in Montana called decorated ants) would tell you what they were really like.  They had to as they’d likely never get another shot at you.

Which brings me to another greatness of Montana back in the 70s.  Back East your education pretty much pigeonholed you.  Right or wrong, you assumed intelligence correlated with the amount of education.  Not so in Montana. In the early 70s there were plenty of bright people who couldn’t go on to college growing up during the depression.  So you quickly learned to treat everyone the same.

Princeton?  Where is it?  Is is an Ag school?  You were free to create your own identity without being pigeonholed.   It was a fabulous feeling.

There were Ivy leaguers around (all Ivy Fullback, Brown, Dartmouth, Yale etc. etc.)  but we all kept it fairly low key.  One rancher acquaintance had gone through Harvard in 3 years.  His daughter went there as well, and was actually the centerfold of the Harvard alumni magazine, and this before she won a silver in the olympics.   The son of another rancher went to Harvard and was told that his father was a cow farmer.  When he did well academically, he was told that he was there to lower the curve.

The children of my friends continued the great Montana tradition of exporting its  brightest youth, going to Cornell, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Harvard (and doing quite well there) but never coming back.

The one group of people that I didn’t (initially) treat ‘the same’ were the Indians, united only by their different appearance from what I was used to (maybe I met one in the years of college, grad school, med school, internship, residence and even the Air Force).   Calling them native americans back then would have gotten you some strange looks.  I worked with some excellent Indian nurses in the local hospitals, and did some consulting for the Indian Health Service, getting to know the culture much better.  My kids went to school with some.

If you wanted to invent an institution to produce social pathologies (alcoholism, child abuse in particular) you couldn’t do better than putting people on a reservation, giving them enough money to get by and giving them nothing to do.

My father and his brother had  the classic liberal conservative debate (before I knew what they were).  Uncle Irv would always say — it’s the system doing (whatever behavior that he didn’t like) — you must change the system.  My father would  counter saying that people would corrupt any system.

I basically bought my father’s position (being reinforced by living for the past 16 years in Massachusetts).

Now I’m not so sure. After one son moved to Hong Kong, I realized that uncle Irv had a point.  Hong Kong is dynamic, vibrant and clean (at least it was 2 years ago the last time I was there) with hordes of hardworking active people.

No so where my son lives along with many exPats — Lamma island, a 20 minute ferry ride from the city.   Walk home from the ferry and you’ll see a bunch of fat asian guys sitting around drinking and smoking.  Who are they?  They are the descendants of the tribes that lived there initially.  Either they own the place or they are continually supported and don’t need to work.

I looked at them and said, my God it’s the rez.  My son said, yup it’s the rez.