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ORAL HISTORY OF DR. GENE CALDWELL Interviewed by Keith McDaniel December 5, 2012 MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is December 5, 2012, and I am at the home of Dr. Gene Caldwell. Dr. Caldwell, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us. Why don't we start out with where you were born and raised? Tell me something about your family and your upbringing. DR. CALDWELL: Okay. I was born in West Tennessee, near the Mississippi River, right near the Kentucky border. It was in 1932, the start of the Depression, and so most of my friends and family members were farmers. My father was a farmer. We had a 100-acre farm. That is very soil-rich land in Obion County, and so a hundred acres could support a family in those days. But, anyway, my experience was mostly rural as I grew up. MR. MCDANIEL: So, your dad was a farmer? DR. CALDWELL: He was a farmer. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you have brothers and sisters? DR. CALDWELL: I had one sister, and she was several years older, and she moved away when she graduated from high school in '45. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you worked on the farm growing up, didn't you? DR. CALDWELL: I did. MR. MCDANIEL: That was hard work, wasn't it? DR. CALDWELL: Well, I thought it was at the time, when I had to work as a kid, but, looking back on it, it wasn't that hard. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did your dad work the farm by himself, or did he have people that worked for him? DR. CALDWELL: No. In those days, he was a sharecropper. My grandfather owned the farm and he'd sharecropper, and we had mules and a tractor, and, when the war started in 1943, most of the able-bodied people got drafted, and so there was a real shortage of workers. I was only 11 at the time in '43 when most everybody left, but he thought it was safe. He thought it was not safe for me to drive the tractor, but he thought it was safe for me to ride the mule, so I actually started doing farm work at 11, driving the mules, harrowing, and doing things like that, and so I got a very early experience, and enjoyed it. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go to school? DR. CALDWELL: There was a little school near -- like our county, Obion County, only had 30,000 people but there were 13 schools. I went to a school at Woodland Mills, which had a total of 120 in all 12 grades -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and so it was a very small school but, looking back, it was a very good school, even in '35 or '37 when I was going, starting there, most of our teachers had college degrees. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? DR. CALDWELL: Of course, one reason for that is it was in the Depression and there weren't many jobs, and so people getting a schoolteacher job was good. But we had a very excellent school there, as I look back. MR. MCDANIEL: So, did you go through all 12 grades? DR. CALDWELL: All 12 grades, graduated from Woodland Mills. MR. MCDANIEL: In what year did you graduate? DR. CALDWELL: In '49 I graduated. MR. MCDANIEL: So, at '49, you were graduating; you had to decide what you were going to do with your life. DR. CALDWELL: I decided I was going to go to college, and I wanted to major in chemistry - that I thought then. Interesting story about what happened in schools then, I did not have enough math to get in UT, and so we looked at the book, I was president of the junior class, and we voted to have geometry my senior year so I could get credits to get in UT Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: The class added, the agreement was that I would get an A. If I would help them, they would be graded on the curve. Our principal was qualified to teach it, and so I had geometry, with my class all working to get me to college, which wouldn't happen this day and age, probably. MR. MCDANIEL: That is true, that is true. But there weren't but probably ten people in your junior class? DR. CALDWELL: Actually, we had the largest class they ever had at Woodland Mills, it was 19, and so, out of the 120, we had 19 of them in our class. The next class, the ones who graduated right before me, only had eight in their class. In fact, they didn't have enough for a senior play, and I got to be in the senior play twice. MR. MCDANIEL: You did? So, you graduated and you decided you were going to go into chemistry -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and so did you go straight to college? DR. CALDWELL: I went straight to UT Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. DR. CALDWELL: I was a basketball player and I got a few offers around from some of the smaller schools, but I wanted to go to UT Knoxville, and I did, and started out majoring in chemistry. But it only took a year to realize that was the last thing I wanted to do, was work in chemistry the rest of my life, so I changed and got a degree in soil chemistry agriculture. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: So, what did you expect to do with that? DR. CALDWELL: I don't know as we put that much thought into it then. Everybody was working in the farm industry, county agents, and so forth. There was a lot of work. I just assumed there would be a job, but I assumed wrong. But, at the time, I didn't worry much about that. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you graduated from UT -- DR. CALDWELL: In '53, I graduated. MR. MCDANIEL: -- in '53. Okay, and what did you do then? DR. CALDWELL: The Korean War, when I graduated, was still going on, so I joined the Navy. I went to Officer Candidate School and became a Naval Officer in the Navy for the next three years. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Where did you go to -- where were you stationed -- DR. CALDWELL: I decided the Navy because I wanted to get out and see the world. I had a great one year onboard a ship with a Senior Admiral, where we just went places that were nice, and, at the end of that year, I got a job that I could never expect, one of the greatest jobs I ever had. The Navy was losing the battle for recruiting. Big airplanes flying over Kansas all the time, and everybody wanted to join the Air Force -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- so the Navy started a program. They took 25 ensigns. They picked them; there wasn't a computer then. They picked 25 random picks, sent us to Chicago, all 25 of us, went to a public relations school, which lasted about three months, and then sent us back to our home state and made us public relations officers of the Navy. So, I came to Nashville and spent two years in Nashville as a public relations officer. There is no Navy in Nashville, but I had the greatest time I've ever had, and also wonderful training, not only to be a doctor, but as a politician. Everything I did in life was influenced by those two years of learning public relations, and it was really just luck, just luck. MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure. So, you served your three years in the Navy -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and then what happened? DR. CALDWELL: Well, while I was in the Navy, one of my jobs in Nashville, I didn't do much recruitment, I went to colleges to try to recruit people into the Officer Candidate Program, so I visited colleges all over the southeast. I had three states that I traveled and I visited these colleges, and I spent time trying to recruit. I had a quota of trying to recruit some doctors, so I went to all the medical schools around. I spent a lot of time in Alabama, and while I was there recruiting, I started looking at their program and I said, "I always did want to go to medical school." I even took organic chemistry as an elective in the College of Agriculture, so I had a pretty good way to go. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: So, anyway, I started looking at that, and I decided I wanted to go back and go to medical school. By that time, I was married, my wife was a teacher, and she agreed to teach until I got out of medical school, and so I went and did that, and so then became a physician. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go to school, medical school? DR. CALDWELL: UT Memphis -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you? UT Memphis? DR. CALDWELL: -- and I knew about all the programs, being in the Navy, so I was on active duty my senior year as a student. I didn't wear a uniform, but I got pay and was on active duty, actually, during my senior year, and for that I had to pay the Navy back a year, which was a real cheap loan. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly, exactly. So, did you stay in the Navy after those three years? DR. CALDWELL: Yes, I went to an internship at Boston Naval Hospital. I went through my residency in Portsmouth Naval Hospital, and then of course I gathered up three more years out of them, but I had already served my draft so I went back and spent three years in the Navy. Again, I wanted to see the world, and of course the Navy sent me to Memphis to the naval hospital, which is now gone, and so I ran the pediatric department at the naval hospital in Memphis. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: I spent ten years on active duty; six and a half of them were in Tennessee. MR. MCDANIEL: As a pediatrician? DR. CALDWELL: Yes, as a pediatrician in the naval hospital, and I was going to make a career of it. But, as the Vietnam War was winding down, it was obvious to me that the Navy was going to change their way of -- we gave all dependents total medical care then, and they were going to change that, and the naval hospital wouldn't have any children in them and I wouldn't be taking, so I decided that, while I was in Tennessee I'd get out and stay here, and so I came to Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you came to Oak Ridge. Tell me about how that came about. DR. CALDWELL: Well, I had always heard about Oak Ridge. Not always. After '43, I heard about it, and some members of my family, uncles, came up here and worked a while. One uncle came up here and stayed three or four years, and one year, as my crop was laid by, we laid by the corn, we had about three months and there wasn't much to do, and my dad left me in charge, and he came up here and lived with his uncle and worked in Oak Ridge for three years. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: He came back and told stories the rest of his life about life in Oak Ridge, so I grew up with the mystery of Oak Ridge. When I was about to get out of the Navy, I decided I wanted to be in a small town in East Tennessee. I didn't like the flatlands. I wanted to be in East Tennessee, and so, of all times, no one was hiring pediatricians then. I couldn't find any practice around here with -- MR. MCDANIEL: What year was that? DR. CALDWELL: -- that was '65, when I thought I was going to get out. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: So, I said, "Well, Oak Ridge. I'll go see them." I came by the Oak Ridge Hospital, stopped and asked the operator who was the best pediatrician in town, and she said Dan Thomas, and so I said, "Can you get him on the phone for me?" I got on the phone, talked to him and said I wanted to come out and visit with him, I did; I sold myself as a partner for him and Lewis Preston, who were at Children's Clinic -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and so I was ready to come back. But then, when I got back to Millington, I found out that because of the Vietnam War, I was frozen another year. So, I called Dan and told him, "Well, it looks like I can't get there," and he said, "Well, we weren't looking for anybody when you got here, we're still not looking for anybody. When you get out of the Navy, come on by and we'll take you in," and that happened. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you had another year in the Navy. DR. CALDWELL: I had another year -- MR. MCDANIEL: They wouldn't let you go? DR. CALDWELL: -- and that was the naval hospital in Memphis, although we were taking care of patients directly from Vietnam who were flying home. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: But it was a big hospital then. It's all gone now -- MR. MCDANIEL: Really? DR. CALDWELL: -- nothing there now, but it was a big hospital then. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you spent another year there, and then you moved to Oak Ridge -- DR. CALDWELL: Moved to Oak Ridge in -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- in '66? DR. CALDWELL: -- December of '66. I moved and started January 1. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, your wife came -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and now did you have children? DR. CALDWELL: I had three children at the time, and had two more after I got here -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- so we had five children. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where did you live first? DR. CALDWELL: One of my partners, Preston, was in the real estate -- he was a banker. He was a pediatrician, but he spent a lot of time banking, and he found a house up on Westlook Circle, which an anesthesiologist here owned, and she was moving, and so he thought I ought to have that house but I couldn't afford the house. But he said, "Well, move in. You can do it somehow." So, I moved in a house that, at the time, cost $30,000.00, and I thought I'd never get out of debt, and so I lived up there for 20 years. It was a great place to live. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, where is that? Is that off Outer? DR. CALDWELL: It's off of Outer. It's called the Peach Orchard section. It was one of the first privately-owned subdivisions in the town. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: Most of the houses were built in '60 and '61. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. I think I know where you're talking about now. DR. CALDWELL: It was a great place to live. It was five minutes to the emergency room, and then we didn't have any emergency room doctors and we had to see all of our own patients, and it was downhill, so I could push my Volkswagen off and ride all the way down there in case anything happened. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. So, we're going to kind of go through your work history, then we'll come back to some things. So, you went to work at the Children's Clinic -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and you worked there until when? DR. CALDWELL: Worked there until the end of '93. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that when you retired -- DR. CALDWELL: Well, I quit, I changed jobs. MR. MCDANIEL: -- sort of? You quit? DR. CALDWELL: Yeah, I retired, but then I went into other work. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you? Okay. DR. CALDWELL: Well, I was retired but I ran for State Representative, and that's when I became, after that, was as a State Representative -- MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. DR. CALDWELL: -- for six years. MR. MCDANIEL: Talk about that. So, in '93, you quit practicing -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and you decided to run for State Representative -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. I -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- for Oak Ridge? DR. CALDWELL: -- Oak Ridge area. First of all, in '93, I didn't do that right away. My wife had been involved in lobbying for children's causes. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: Ned Ray McWherter appointed her to what he thought was an honorary position in the National Association of Women Highway Safety Leaders. Well, she immediately made an organization in all 95 counties in the state of Tennessee. Not immediately, it took about a year, but she had one of the biggest -- they were organized, and they were working on seatbelts for children and adults, and drunk driving, not have drunk driving -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so I thought, "Well, she's saving more lives in Nashville than I am in Oak Ridge working as a pediatrician," so I decided I'd go down and join her, and I lobbied one year for the pediatricians of the state. Had things like trying to get easier access to vaccine, and a lot of issues. I told the pediatricians I would not lobby for anything involved their money or their pay, I would only lobby for things that had to do with child safety -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and had a very good time doing that. While I was there -- now I'm getting a mental blank, see? MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. That's all right. DR. CALDWELL: Dave Coffee decided to retire -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and, when he decided to retire, I jumped in and ran for office and, fortunately, was enough to win. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: Some people said I had raised enough patients to vote for me and that I won because I did, and there was some truth to that. MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure there was. Now, how long were you a State Representative? DR. CALDWELL: I stayed six years, and I voluntarily had decided six years because, at the end of six years, I would be 70 and I thought, "Well, I'll just voluntarily resign then because I'll be," and so I did. After six years, I had gotten much of what I wanted to do done, and so I retired and decided to take on other jobs. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, that was how many years ago? That was -- DR. CALDWELL: That was 2002. MR. MCDANIEL: -- okay, 2002. So, the last ten years or so, you've been doing other things? DR. CALDWELL: Well, for a while, my wife was vice chair of the state Democratic Party, and as someone said at ETEC the other day, they said, "Your wife was big in the Democratic Party," and I said, "Well, she was the Democratic Party," and she did have a lot -- she ran and she was on the National Committee, and I followed her around because she was on the Democratic National Committee, and I got to go to the White House, and all the states. I followed her around for a year or two after that before I actually ran for office, and so in 2002, she was still doing that and I did follow her around, but she died in 2004. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: So, I -- MR. MCDANIEL: You just -- DR. CALDWELL: -- moved back home then -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and then thought about things for a while, and then took on other jobs. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. I understand. Let's go back to when you first came to Oak Ridge, and what was it like being a physician, and specifically a pediatrician? So, this would have been in the late '60s through the '90s, early '90s. DR. CALDWELL: Late '60s and through the early '90s. I could not imagine being in a better place. The population of Oak Ridge -- when I moved here in '66-'67, out of 27,000 people, there were 3,000 Ph.D.’s lived in Oak Ridge, and I think half of those now live in Farragut somewhere -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. DR. CALDWELL: -- but anyway, and it was a close-knit town where everybody worked together, had an organization here called the Childbirth Education Association. There could not ever be again an organization like that. They had organized in teaching mothers about having a baby and how to raise a child, and so forth, and I became one of their strongest advocates because every time they wanted me to, I gave a talk, and I got to know everybody in Oak Ridge, and there were just a lot of wonderful people here. Plus, I didn't just take care of Oak Ridgers; they only counted for a third of our population at Children's Clinic. About the time I got here, most general practitioners, and there were very few family physicians and there were general practitioners -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- had decided that the one thing they could get rid of was their practice of children, and so in the surrounding five counties, it seemed like all at once they retired and all of them came to Children's Clinic, because we had been treating them in the emergency room for years anyway. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: We would actually go to the emergency room and see all of our patients then -- MR. MCDANIEL: Really? DR. CALDWELL: -- and so it was good public relations that I did -- again, good public relations. So, our practice grew really rapidly, and so I did not just take care of Oak Ridgers but the surrounding -- MR. MCDANIEL: All of -- DR. CALDWELL: -- five counties. MR. MCDANIEL: -- yeah, all the surrounding five counties. DR. CALDWELL: The other best part was, at that time, in the '60s and '70s, we had a lot of people that came here from other countries, especially places like Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Israel. They came here for advanced training in nuclear. They brought their family with them -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and somehow I lucked into becoming the doctor of choice for many of them, and so I got to treat people all over the world here. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? DR. CALDWELL: They would be here for a year or two and then they'd leave, and others would come, and so it was fascinating. When I was in practice, I might see one person who was a scientist at Oak Ridge, the next one was the grandmother from the mountains of upper East Tennessee, which I loved to talk to, and then the next one had a dictionary because they couldn't speak English, and they had a Japanese dictionary, and we were doing the dictionary translation. The chances were just unusual. MR. MCDANIEL: It was interesting. I guess it kept it from getting boring, didn't it? DR. CALDWELL: It was exciting. It was exciting, and most of these people I got to know. The parents I got to know pretty well. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah. Now, where was the building that you practiced in when you first -- DR. CALDWELL: It's still Children's Clinic -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- the same place? DR. CALDWELL: -- the same place, and we built on after I had been here a couple, three -- I've forgotten what year, but we built on and built it a little bigger, and had some more examining rooms so that we actually wound up with four physicians -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- after Preston retired, and then Dan Thomas stayed on for another few years, and then Charles Campbell came, and then we hired, later, when Dan Thomas left -- MR. MCDANIEL: Tanya Vargas? DR. CALDWELL: -- well, Vargas and Howard joined us. MR. MCDANIEL: That's right, that's right. What was the medical community like, I mean as far as other physicians and other medical professionals in Oak Ridge? DR. CALDWELL: Well, we had a lot of well-trained people, and I was lucky enough to be in -- as some other doctors said, Ralph Lillard picked who he wanted to be the next Chief of Staff five years in advance and things. That wasn't true, but there was a little element to it. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: So, I got into the hierarchy of things and became Chief of Staff in '80 -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- of the Oak Ridge Hospital, and, at the time, our Board of Trustees was absolutely great because most of the big names at the Lab, which they couldn't be in politics but they could be on the board at the Oak Ridge Hospital, and we had some of the greatest leaders, and it was just a tremendous thing. So, they decided we ought to become a regional hospital instead of small, community hospital, so we built on as a regional hospital. In order to do this, suddenly we needed 50 more specialists -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- so I, being Chief of Staff, helped recruit, and Ralph Lillard and I had more dinners with more people, and I became kind of important to the recruiting because the biggest drawback in recruiting was that a lot -- back then, it was mostly men were doctors, and wives, a few other wives -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- but the wives had heard about Oak Ridge and they were afraid to live here -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and, as a pediatrician with five children, I could testify greatly that there had never been a child in the history of Oak Ridge at that time that had been harmed by anything that happened in Oak Ridge plants -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so it was very convincing, I think, to them. MR. MCDANIEL: You were Chief of Staff you said in '80? DR. CALDWELL: Yes -- MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, '80 to -- DR. CALDWELL: -- '80 to '82, two years, Vice Chief for two years before. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now, who owned the hospital at the time? Was it just like a nonprofit? DR. CALDWELL: No, the city had turned it over to the Methodist Church -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay, okay. DR. CALDWELL: -- and it was the Methodist Medical Center -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- but it wasn't part of Covenant then. That became later when it became part of it -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and it was an individual Methodist hospital. MR. MCDANIEL: But, when you came here, the hospital was owned by the city, is that -- DR. CALDWELL: No, it had -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, it was -- DR. CALDWELL: -- already gone through that. MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, it had already gone -- DR. CALDWELL: In fact, when I came here, they had had a strike a couple of years before, and I thought, "I'm never gonna get any patients," because people from Clinton wouldn't come to Oak Ridge Hospital. Some of them that I talked to wouldn't come to Oak Ridge Hospital and said, "They've been on a strike, and I don't want to go over there. I want to go to Knoxville." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: So, I had to do some public relations in Clinton -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- that the hospital is not run by anybody. It's the doctors who are going to take care of you. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: So, anyway, we grew by leaps and bounds, and we did become a regional hospital for the five-county area. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. You mentioned a while ago that not one child has ever been harmed by anything from the plants. Was there anything unique about treating children in Oak Ridge, or was it just kind of the same as anywhere? DR. CALDWELL: It was the same as everywhere, except the parents were easier to communicate with and -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, and probably understood -- DR. CALDWELL: -- yeah, and I used to say, and still do, that my greatest accomplishment would be to take a guy who was a nuclear physicist who happened to come in with his child and convince him that his child really needed a $3.00 throat culture, and, when I convinced him that that was right, I thought I had had a good day. MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. Anyway, so you were very actively involved in your professional life. DR. CALDWELL: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk a little bit about your personal life in the community. Tell me about what it was like to live in Oak Ridge, to raise a family in Oak Ridge? DR. CALDWELL: Well, Oak Ridge is full of organizations. As you well know, they have a paper that's four or five pages thick full of everybody belongs to something -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and it was a community that was always involved in things. I wanted to be in the public life. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: I grew up on the farm, but I always admired the Junior Chamber of Commerce in the little town of Union City, because they seemed to have all the fun. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: But, when I moved here, I was too old for the Junior Chamber of Commerce, so I became active in the Chamber of Commerce after I had established myself two or three years. So, I didn't do a lot but I stayed on committees and so forth, and was very much involved and liked to be involved in the growth of the city's economic development. In the '80s, I started attending East Tennessee Economic Council, which is ETEC -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- which is gone through the years, but then, we could all meet around this table here. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: Now, we have 80 or so every -- MR. MCDANIEL: Every Friday morning. DR. CALDWELL: -- Friday morning at 7:30, so -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- it's an active community. The community is involved. It's like when I was State Representative, I had people, I had experts in every field all day long, but I knew them, and it was fun talking to them. I didn't have any problem understanding what the people of Oak Ridge wanted me to do. I didn't always do it, but I really had an understanding of what they wanted me to do. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. Now, what about your family? Your wife, was she involved in local -- DR. CALDWELL: She was involved in local things, like the doctors organization, and then got involved in politics and became, as I -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- every organization she joined, she would be president in a couple of years, and so we moved on and she -- MR. MCDANIEL: She was one of those, huh? Yeah. DR. CALDWELL: -- and then she got involved in state politics, which I didn't have time to do all that. But, through her and working together, we really had a great life. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what about your children? I mean what was it like for them to grow up in Oak Ridge? DR. CALDWELL: Well, they had some of the best chances for education at Oak Ridge High School and the other schools. The best school that ever existed is Cedar Hill, and they went through the sixth grade there, and then the high school, so education was great, and they enjoyed Oak Ridge a lot. MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure they were involved in other recreational activities -- DR. CALDWELL: Oh yeah, they -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- and lots of things like that. DR. CALDWELL: -- one daughter was in gymnastics, one was in dancing. There were plenty of things to do, Girl’s Club. I had one daughter, who is now deceased, she had a brain disorder, but she was one of the first members of the Girl’s Club here. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: You were talking a while ago about, as a State Representative, you understood what people wanted you to do. DR. CALDWELL: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: Give me some examples. Talk a little bit about your work as a State Representative, and some of the things, maybe some of the challenges you had or some of the successes that you had as a State Representative. DR. CALDWELL: Well, I had a few things I wanted to get done. One is the system of -- we were evolving then from babysitters to daycare, childcare centers. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: As we evolved, they didn't change. We still became just babysitters, and I thought babies, young children growing up in a place where they were just kept clean and kept nice and all that, they were actually getting harmed by this. The childcare was evolving then, and so I ran on improving childcare, and I remember the Democrats won over -- they had a national guy, who later did some polling for other candidates across the country, and they took a survey. They said, "No one ever ran for childcare," and I said, "Well, I am." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: They took a survey, and they were surprised that -- after they gave my name, they got a certain thing but, after they said I was running to improve childcare, my approval rating jumped by about 30 percent, so he was convinced that I could run on that issue. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, you know, you're a well-known pediatrician, and the -- DR. CALDWELL: Well, I tried, and the people knew -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- people knew you and respected you. DR. CALDWELL: -- and because these organizations knew that I would be active in that, and that was one of the issues. Other issues, I just wanted to improve the function of government. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I thought government ought to be improved, and so solving red tape problems was one of the nice things. The thing I didn't know I was going to get is they'd established a new corporation in state, the Tennessee Technology Development Corporation, and I was here interviewing people trying to decide who ought to be on that because it's going to be a statewide organization that would try to promote tech development. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: Well, my friend, Jimmy Naifey, decided I was from Oak Ridge and I ought to be on it, so I got to be one of the first board members of --, and that was something I didn't expect and it was great. It was one of the best things I've ever done, because I traveled the state for that, and helped Oak Ridge things and do some technology stuff, and get some development done here. It just was a life I really loved. MR. MCDANIEL: Was there anything in Oak Ridge specifically that people said, "We need for you to help us with this"? DR. CALDWELL: At the time, we were working on Roane State. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. Yeah, tell me about that. DR. CALDWELL: Yeah, that was one of the issues. I didn't run on that specifically, but it was one of the issues they wanted us to work on -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- although not everyone. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly. DR. CALDWELL: At the time, Oak Ridge was torn between they didn't really want a junior college, they wanted a college. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: Do you remember the College of Oak Ridge? MR. MCDANIEL: I remember hearing about the College of Oak Ridge. DR. CALDWELL: The College of Oak Ridge was one of those ideas that would have really been great, but it didn't come about. But people were afraid that if we got a junior college here, that's what they were called then, that we got this two-year college here, that we wouldn't get a regular college, and there were quite a few in that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: But they realized what was going to happen, so they finally all came onboard with Roane State -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and of course Randy McNally really helped response for that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, and at that point, Roane State, it had its big campus in Harriman -- DR. CALDWELL: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and people weren't sure, as you mentioned, there were some people that didn't want Roane State in Oak Ridge and some people did, and the folks in Oak Ridge thought they should have the four-year college, and it just -- DR. CALDWELL: The four-year college kind of went down before, so it didn't really get in a big fuss over that. But, anyway, at the end, everybody agreed that Roane State was going to be good for Oak Ridge -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure -- DR. CALDWELL: -- and we got it here. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and it has been, hasn't it? DR. CALDWELL: Yes, it has been -- MR. MCDANIEL: Very good. DR. CALDWELL: -- and bigger than most people thought. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly, and I guess you're probably pleased now that even the expansion for the health sciences program that they're doing out here now. DR. CALDWELL: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. One of the big things that happened in Oak Ridge I was a part of, the state decided to invest some money into the institute for Neutron Science -- MR. MCDANIEL: ORINS. DR. CALDWELL: -- computer science. There was about three centers that the state put money in here and built here, and it was one of the first of the last labs around to do something like that, and that promoted a lot of stuff happening in Oak Ridge, and Governor Sundquist then was one and, through his department, put money into three $10-million batches into putting these institutes up, and so it had a big influence on a lot of the other stuff that came here. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure it did. DR. CALDWELL: Being part of that was great, too. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. I understand. DR. CALDWELL: Now, I did not go to fix TennCare. I said it was too complicated and I'd already been practicing -- But, when I got to Nashville, I realized, and then I told the Governor this, I said, "You can't get money for education, you can't do anything unless you fix TennCare." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: "You can't fix TennCare unless you have the doctors on your side." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: "If you will let me volunteer, I will get doctors on your side if you will do some things I ask you to do," and this was not part of my job. This was a -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, this was -- DR. CALDWELL: -- volunteer job -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- so I traveled the state on behalf of the Governor. I traveled the state. I talked to -- MR. MCDANIEL: Governor Sundquist? DR. CALDWELL: -- this was Don Sundquist. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I went to boards and I went to county medical societies. I spent two years traveling the state, and I would do things like, "We need your help. What could we do?" besides pay you more money? I never talked about that. "What could we do with a regulation? How could we make it better?" Then, if I got some idea, I'd go back and discuss this with the Governor and others, and we'd get a lot of it done. We really did a lot. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? DR. CALDWELL: Don Sundquist gets a lot of things that people don't like him for, but he knew more about health care than any non-medical person I've run into. He really knew how health care should function, and I really had a good time working with him, and we did a lot of things for TennCare, trying to make it better and more doctors involved, and so forth. So, that was a thing I did, and very few people in the state know I was doing that because it wasn't part of my job. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I did become chairman of the Joint Committee on TennCare for the Senate and the House, I did become chairman, but it was a great part of my job. There were things I did with the Governor and to try to make it better for doctors, and I worked with the pediatricians, the organization of pediatricians, and the family care physicians. I worked with them all the time getting things done, appearing before their groups, "What can we do?" and so forth. Changed the rules some. We didn't have enough psychiatrists to go around, and they had made the rule that family physicians couldn't prescribe certain medicines. Well, that was not right -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so, in order to let family physicians take care of most of the problems of everyday life, I got that rule changed, and then immediately it did away with some of the shortage of -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- psychiatric care. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly, exactly. DR. CALDWELL: In fact, I have a plaque on my wall from the family physicians for being doctor representative of the year, or something. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: That's great. Okay, let's see here. There's several things I want to ask you about. One of the things that you've been involved with the last few years, I know, is the Emory Valley Center. DR. CALDWELL: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: Why don't you talk a little bit about how your involvement in that organization started, and tell me a little bit about it and how it impacts Oak Ridge, and maybe the region? DR. CALDWELL: To start with, go back very basic, when I was a pediatrician in the Navy, the three years I was in Memphis, children in the Navy are moved around a lot, and so a lot of behavioral disorders come up because of new schools and all that, and my partner in pediatrics there, we started a volunteer clinic for children's behavioral disorders. It wasn't anything fancy, but we made a huge difference. So, I became involved in that, and with that, I became involved in some more serious problems, not that these weren't bad, but more serious problems. So, when I was working in this, Nat Winston was head of the Department of Mental Health, it was Mental Health and Retardation then. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was that? I mean was it state? It was -- DR. CALDWELL: It was the state -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and someone called him and said I was interested in doing that. I was about to get out of the Navy, and so he did call. Nat Winston offered me the job of Superintendent of Greene Valley up here in Greeneville. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Somebody had heard me say I love Greene County because it's the most beautiful county in the state, and I thought about it but I decided I really didn't want that. We need to change and have children not put in mental institutions. MR. MCDANIEL: Greene Valley was an institution, wasn't it? DR. CALDWELL: Yeah, right -- MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so I did not take that job but I knew about Daniel Arthur then which had been started primarily for cerebral palsy and mental retardation -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and I said, "I really don't want to work at -- I want to work in a community where we can probably make that possible," to have people treated at home, and so it was kind of a changeover then, and I became interested in it because there wasn't anything else like Daniel Arthur around here. In the '60s, when I came, people were moving to Oak Ridge to get their cerebral palsy child or mentally retarded child in Daniel Arthur because there was no other place, and they were doing it for the other schools, and then this continued. Of course, I knew a lot of the patients there, a lot of people over there, and, as they grew up, the schools then took over to change the laws, mainstreaming and so forth, in the '70s. This all took a while, but pretty soon all the children were mainstreamed. But the clients that were over there, when they emptied out places like Greene Valley and emptied out some of these others, we had clients over there that then needed total care for and needed help with work and so forth, so -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, and that was -- DR. CALDWELL: -- Emory Valley Center became for adults then. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that's what I was about to ask. So, once they started the mainstream programs, where these children would be put in the regular schools, this became a center for adults who had those challenges, correct? DR. CALDWELL: One of the things to do was to get the jobs for them, work for them, and through the Daniel Arthur center and through the Emory Valley Center that began to mature. The other thing was, as these children were not in homes, like Greene Valley, which I don't know what the death age was but they didn't live much in 20's. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: Now, over at Emory Valley Center, we have 70-year-olds -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and they're still working every day. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: But this was just kind of an interest as I was a pediatrician, and after I got out and came back here, the question came up was Daniel Arthur going to survive Emory Valley Center. The building was -- MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me the difference between Daniel Arthur and Emory Valley Center. DR. CALDWELL: Well, Daniel Arthur was started for physically handicapped, cerebral palsy, and some mental retardation. It was kind of --, and there was a school there. There were no schools for the mentally retarded. Mentally retarded children weren't allowed in schools in the mid-50s, and the Oak Ridgers voluntarily started a school over there for -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so it evolved, and then, as it got some older, they started having the center over there where they could work. In '72, the city furnished a building over there, land for a building, and they built the building where they had the contract work things, doing things like repetitive work. MR. MCDANIEL: That's the Emory Valley Center? DR. CALDWELL: That's the Emory, and now that's the main part of it, is the Emory Valley Center. We have a program for early education children at risk, but the main program is the 140 adults we have over there, and about half of them work in the Center and have a great life because of this. MR. MCDANIEL: They also have group homes, they also run group homes. DR. CALDWELL: Yes, there's about 80 people scattered around in group homes, because many of these, their families are all gone, they are, and -- MR. MCDANIEL: Well, they're older. DR. CALDWELL: -- they are indeed wards of the state because there's no other -- and so as I got out of politics and did a few other jobs, what really happened is my longtime friend, Dottie Thompson, who I knew her husband in the Navy reserve and -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and I took care of their children, he had died in 2000 and my wife died in 2002, we began to socialize a little bit, and of course she has a daughter, and she was concerned about the building, so we went before the County Commission to see what they were going to do, and they said, "Well, we can't keep this building going. In about five years, it's going to be gone because we can't afford to keep it up," and there's a long story about it. But, anyway, the County Commission gave us a lot, land, they gave us money to buy the land next to it and said, "You all better get out and start raising money." Well, we didn't do that right away, but in 2009, she and I volunteered to start -- because of all the things that were happening and my interests and her interests, we became co-chair of the campaign to raise somewhere in the neighborhood of between $3 and $4 million, and we knew it would take a long time. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure -- DR. CALDWELL: So, we set out -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- and 2009 wasn't a good time to start raising money, was it? DR. CALDWELL: -- it was right in the bottom of a Depression, right. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: The worst time in the world. So, the first year, what we really had to do is answer the questions to all Oak Ridgers you'd asked, "What is it over there now?" because a lot of people didn't know. They didn't know that we had 140 adults working and jobs for them. So, again, with my public relations background, we spent a whole year just letting people know. We took the CD that you made for us at the Emory Valley Center, and took it around and showed it to every club that would listen to us. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: So, over the next year and a half, we spoke to 40-something different clubs, Sunday school classes -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- churches, Kiwanis Club, Rotary, whoever would listen to us, we'd go -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so that worked out well, and then we started in the campaign, and we're now $2.2 million out of $3.5 million we've decided we have to have. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, and so in December of 2012, you've got $2.2 -- DR. CALDWELL: That's right. MR. MCDANIEL: -- out of $3.5, so you're about -- DR. CALDWELL: We've got about a million -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- two thirds of the way there. DR. CALDWELL: -- a little over a million to go, and now we're going to try to finish that off in the next year, if we can. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly, which will be about the right time for them to -- DR. CALDWELL: Right, right, the -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- you know? DR. CALDWELL: -- the plans are not clear. They know that the building can't go on forever, and somewhere around the end of 2014, they're going to give it to the city for $1.00, and the city at first was going to tear it down, but we have changes in what they're going to do all the time. I'm not sure what's going to happen to it now, but it won't be appropriate for our use unless someone keeps it up, and they can't. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: So, anyway, we're coming out about right. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you've been working on that pretty heavy the last two or three years, haven't you? DR. CALDWELL: Right, and it's been a lot of fun because I like to be active in the community, and I sure am active in the community right now. MR. MCDANIEL: What's it like now, now that you look back on the last 45 years or so, from when you first came here to Oak Ridge to Oak Ridge today? I mean what kind of changes have you seen? DR. CALDWELL: The biggest change is that, for instance, when the population got to the age where there were very few babies born at the Oak Ridge Hospital and I was still in practice then, and we could see that going down. The Childbirth Education Association, which is one of the greatest organizations I've ever belonged to, all of a sudden they became grandmothers instead of mothers, and it sort of -- these things went slowly, but as the community got older, and that's what it is now, those 3,000 Ph.D.’s that were living here when I came, a lot of them are still here but they've been long retired -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- but they're still very active in the community. But the biggest change is I guess it's not community-centered as it once was. It's easy to go other places. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. I mean, you know, it's almost like Oak Ridge is almost like a bedroom community for Knoxville now instead of its own little cohesive community. DR. CALDWELL: Well, that's part of the answer, but some of the things do persist but I don't know how -- the Playhouse is something unique to Oak Ridge, and it's still good. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: You know, the organizations like the Civic Music Association, and things like that are still going, and still the Boy’s Club, the Girl’s, and so forth, they run tremendous organizations here, so it is still a great place to raise children. I don't know, there's just -- the whole world doesn't work like it used to. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, and maybe it's symbolic of just our society today, you know is -- DR. CALDWELL: That's right. Young people don't get out and join the Rotary Club when they're 25 now, or the Kiwanis Club, or anything. We spoke at all these clubs, and it's very clear that most of them have the senior citizens as members, and not easy to get young people. My children don't belong to organizations like that. They may be active in the community, but they don't belong to organizations like that anymore. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Exactly, exactly. Anything else you want to talk about, any stories you want to tell me about your time in Oak Ridge, or any comments you want to make? DR. CALDWELL: Well, my comment, you know, I sign all my Christmas cards I send out, "I'm the luckiest guy in the world and always have been," and I've done that for the last 50 years. But, anyway, I still consider that the accident that brought me to Oak Ridge, if that operator had said, "Well, I don't like the pediatricians here," you know -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- something like that, just little things that brought me to Oak Ridge, and then the things that came together at the time I was here, the community of people out in the counties deciding they didn't want to take care of children anymore, it's too much trouble at night, and so our practice growing, and the hospital expanding and becoming a regional hospital, and it is still -- there was just something yesterday about we're one of the top hospitals. Well, that goes back when we recruited people that were only board certified. I'm not sure we could do that anymore. But, then, we only recruited people that were board certified. The experience with the community has just been tremendous, and that's the reason I can't imagine anybody moving somewhere else to retire. This is the place to retire, right here. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, you know, and Oak Ridge through the years has evolved, too. It's a pretty great community now, and there are a lot of -- DR. CALDWELL: Oh, absolutely. MR. MCDANIEL: -- services that are provided for that age group, aren't there -- DR. CALDWELL: Very much so. MR. MCDANIEL: -- especially the medical services? DR. CALDWELL: That's right, that's right, and to have an A-rated, or whatever the top rating is, hospital in the local community where you can have access to health care, it is not that big around. If you go to the other 95 counties, there's of course a few, but there is nothing like Oak Ridge Hospital in most of the counties. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, sure. Exactly. DR. CALDWELL: So, the medical community is good here, and it's just a great place to live. MR. MCDANIEL: All right, all right. Well, good, good. I've got one more question for you. You're a physician, you're a politician, you're a longtime Democrat, what's your opinion of ObamaCare? DR. CALDWELL: Well, first of all, I did remove myself from politics because I started this fundraising, and I really have tried to stay out of a lot of things. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I do have experience, two years, with TennCare. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I know how to make care like that work. I can't always do everything I want to do, but I know how to make that care work, and Tennessee was reasonably successful in doing this. I think access -- and this is not about health care, as such. Everybody calls this the government is going to take over health care and tell you what -- it's about insurance care. It is not about health care. There's very little about that. The physicians are still going to be ultimately in charge of that. Having access to health care, though, in my experience, after 50 years dealing with people, families, is such a highly desirable thing that I can't understand why people say, "Well, we don't need that." They don't talk to families with young children that can't get health care, don't have access, and the common thing is, "Well, if they just save their money, they could get health insurance." They can't. That is just wrong. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: People in Tennessee, if you don't work for a big company, getting private health insurance is impossible for a lot, because if you've ever had asthma, you're not qualified to get health care. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: Even small companies that have health care and think, "Well, we've got it good and everybody can join," one person in that small company gets cancer, and the insurance company drops them the next time, the whole bunch of them -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- not the one with cancer, because they can't do that, but they drop the whole plant. This happens over and over. But access to health care is not being able to go to the emergency room, it's being able to be in the system and talk to somebody -- a nurse, a doctor, or whatever -- and get help for your family member that you want. It's such a big thing, we need to work on doing it. Now, whether ObamaCare or health care or the way they're doing it, I know that they could go through that plan and change a lot of things, and if both sides of the House would work together, they could do that, and maybe not cover everything but have access there. So, again, quality of life, access to good education and health care is absolutely essential for quality of life. MR. MCDANIEL: So, if there's a problem with the whole system, what do you think the problem is, the insurance? Is that where -- DR. CALDWELL: Well, it's not -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- you start? DR. CALDWELL: -- yeah. Without insurance, you can't have access -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. I mean -- DR. CALDWELL: -- and as long as insurance is able to exclude anybody they want to exclude, then you don't have access to insurance. MR. MCDANIEL: -- right. DR. CALDWELL: Now, again, I really want to repeat this again, when I was in TennCare, most people said, "Well, if they'd give up their beer, they could afford health care." That's not true. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: Well educated Ph.D.’s cannot get health care in Tennessee because they can't get insurance. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. DR. CALDWELL: Now, if you get your Medicare, you've got that, but we need something. We need to have access easier. Now, again, I have not kept up with every bit of the program, but I know that the physicians, and I've worked with a group of family physicians and pediatricians in the state, and if they would let them get together and design the program, it would work wonderfully. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: All right. Well, is there anything else you want to talk about? DR. CALDWELL: No, that's about it. I've said enough, I think. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, Dr. Caldwell, thank you so much. I appreciate you spending time with us. DR. CALDWELL: Thank you. [End of Interview]
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Rating | |
Title | Caldwell, Dr. Gene |
Description | Oral History of Dr. Gene Caldwell, Interviewed by Keith McDaniel, December 5, 2012 |
Audio Link | http://coroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/audio/Caldwell_Gene.mp3 |
Video Link | http://coroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/videojs/Caldwell_Gene.htm |
Transcript Link | http://coroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/Transcripts_and_photos/Caldwell_Gene/Caldwell_Final.doc |
Image Link | http://coroh.oakridgetn.gov/corohfiles/Transcripts_and_photos/Caldwell_Gene/CALDWELL_GENE.jpg |
Collection Name | COROH |
Interviewee | Caldwell, Gene |
Interviewer | McDaniel, Keith |
Type | video |
Language | English |
Subject | Health; Housing; Oak Ridge (Tenn.); |
People | McNally, Randy; Preston, Dr. Lewis; |
Places | Methodist Medical Center; Oak Ridge Hospital; Roane State Community College; |
Organizations/Programs | Emory Valley Center; U.S. Navy; |
Things/Other | Korean War; |
Date of Original | 2012 |
Format | flv, doc, jpg, mp3 |
Length | 50 minutes |
File Size | 169 MB |
Source | Center for Oak Ridge Oral History |
Location of Original | Oak Ridge Public Library |
Rights | Copy Right by the City of Oak Ridge, Oak Ridge, TN 37830 Disclaimer: "This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise do not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof." The materials in this collection are in the public domain and may be reproduced without the written permission of either the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History or the Oak Ridge Public Library. However, anyone using the materials assumes all responsibility for claims arising from use of the materials. Materials may not be used to show by implication or otherwise that the City of Oak Ridge, the Oak Ridge Public Library, or the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History endorses any product or project. When materials are to be used commercially or online, the credit line shall read: “Courtesy of the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History and the Oak Ridge Public Library.” |
Contact Information | For more information or if you are interested in providing an oral history, contact: The Center for Oak Ridge Oral History, Oak Ridge Public Library, 1401 Oak Ridge Turnpike, 865-425-3455. |
Identifier | CALG |
Creator | Center for Oak Ridge Oral History |
Contributors | McNeilly, Kathy; Stooksbury, Susie; McDaniel, Keith; Reed, Jordan |
Searchable Text | ORAL HISTORY OF DR. GENE CALDWELL Interviewed by Keith McDaniel December 5, 2012 MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is December 5, 2012, and I am at the home of Dr. Gene Caldwell. Dr. Caldwell, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us. Why don't we start out with where you were born and raised? Tell me something about your family and your upbringing. DR. CALDWELL: Okay. I was born in West Tennessee, near the Mississippi River, right near the Kentucky border. It was in 1932, the start of the Depression, and so most of my friends and family members were farmers. My father was a farmer. We had a 100-acre farm. That is very soil-rich land in Obion County, and so a hundred acres could support a family in those days. But, anyway, my experience was mostly rural as I grew up. MR. MCDANIEL: So, your dad was a farmer? DR. CALDWELL: He was a farmer. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you have brothers and sisters? DR. CALDWELL: I had one sister, and she was several years older, and she moved away when she graduated from high school in '45. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you worked on the farm growing up, didn't you? DR. CALDWELL: I did. MR. MCDANIEL: That was hard work, wasn't it? DR. CALDWELL: Well, I thought it was at the time, when I had to work as a kid, but, looking back on it, it wasn't that hard. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did your dad work the farm by himself, or did he have people that worked for him? DR. CALDWELL: No. In those days, he was a sharecropper. My grandfather owned the farm and he'd sharecropper, and we had mules and a tractor, and, when the war started in 1943, most of the able-bodied people got drafted, and so there was a real shortage of workers. I was only 11 at the time in '43 when most everybody left, but he thought it was safe. He thought it was not safe for me to drive the tractor, but he thought it was safe for me to ride the mule, so I actually started doing farm work at 11, driving the mules, harrowing, and doing things like that, and so I got a very early experience, and enjoyed it. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go to school? DR. CALDWELL: There was a little school near -- like our county, Obion County, only had 30,000 people but there were 13 schools. I went to a school at Woodland Mills, which had a total of 120 in all 12 grades -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and so it was a very small school but, looking back, it was a very good school, even in '35 or '37 when I was going, starting there, most of our teachers had college degrees. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? DR. CALDWELL: Of course, one reason for that is it was in the Depression and there weren't many jobs, and so people getting a schoolteacher job was good. But we had a very excellent school there, as I look back. MR. MCDANIEL: So, did you go through all 12 grades? DR. CALDWELL: All 12 grades, graduated from Woodland Mills. MR. MCDANIEL: In what year did you graduate? DR. CALDWELL: In '49 I graduated. MR. MCDANIEL: So, at '49, you were graduating; you had to decide what you were going to do with your life. DR. CALDWELL: I decided I was going to go to college, and I wanted to major in chemistry - that I thought then. Interesting story about what happened in schools then, I did not have enough math to get in UT, and so we looked at the book, I was president of the junior class, and we voted to have geometry my senior year so I could get credits to get in UT Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: The class added, the agreement was that I would get an A. If I would help them, they would be graded on the curve. Our principal was qualified to teach it, and so I had geometry, with my class all working to get me to college, which wouldn't happen this day and age, probably. MR. MCDANIEL: That is true, that is true. But there weren't but probably ten people in your junior class? DR. CALDWELL: Actually, we had the largest class they ever had at Woodland Mills, it was 19, and so, out of the 120, we had 19 of them in our class. The next class, the ones who graduated right before me, only had eight in their class. In fact, they didn't have enough for a senior play, and I got to be in the senior play twice. MR. MCDANIEL: You did? So, you graduated and you decided you were going to go into chemistry -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and so did you go straight to college? DR. CALDWELL: I went straight to UT Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. DR. CALDWELL: I was a basketball player and I got a few offers around from some of the smaller schools, but I wanted to go to UT Knoxville, and I did, and started out majoring in chemistry. But it only took a year to realize that was the last thing I wanted to do, was work in chemistry the rest of my life, so I changed and got a degree in soil chemistry agriculture. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: So, what did you expect to do with that? DR. CALDWELL: I don't know as we put that much thought into it then. Everybody was working in the farm industry, county agents, and so forth. There was a lot of work. I just assumed there would be a job, but I assumed wrong. But, at the time, I didn't worry much about that. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you graduated from UT -- DR. CALDWELL: In '53, I graduated. MR. MCDANIEL: -- in '53. Okay, and what did you do then? DR. CALDWELL: The Korean War, when I graduated, was still going on, so I joined the Navy. I went to Officer Candidate School and became a Naval Officer in the Navy for the next three years. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Where did you go to -- where were you stationed -- DR. CALDWELL: I decided the Navy because I wanted to get out and see the world. I had a great one year onboard a ship with a Senior Admiral, where we just went places that were nice, and, at the end of that year, I got a job that I could never expect, one of the greatest jobs I ever had. The Navy was losing the battle for recruiting. Big airplanes flying over Kansas all the time, and everybody wanted to join the Air Force -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- so the Navy started a program. They took 25 ensigns. They picked them; there wasn't a computer then. They picked 25 random picks, sent us to Chicago, all 25 of us, went to a public relations school, which lasted about three months, and then sent us back to our home state and made us public relations officers of the Navy. So, I came to Nashville and spent two years in Nashville as a public relations officer. There is no Navy in Nashville, but I had the greatest time I've ever had, and also wonderful training, not only to be a doctor, but as a politician. Everything I did in life was influenced by those two years of learning public relations, and it was really just luck, just luck. MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure. So, you served your three years in the Navy -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and then what happened? DR. CALDWELL: Well, while I was in the Navy, one of my jobs in Nashville, I didn't do much recruitment, I went to colleges to try to recruit people into the Officer Candidate Program, so I visited colleges all over the southeast. I had three states that I traveled and I visited these colleges, and I spent time trying to recruit. I had a quota of trying to recruit some doctors, so I went to all the medical schools around. I spent a lot of time in Alabama, and while I was there recruiting, I started looking at their program and I said, "I always did want to go to medical school." I even took organic chemistry as an elective in the College of Agriculture, so I had a pretty good way to go. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: So, anyway, I started looking at that, and I decided I wanted to go back and go to medical school. By that time, I was married, my wife was a teacher, and she agreed to teach until I got out of medical school, and so I went and did that, and so then became a physician. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go to school, medical school? DR. CALDWELL: UT Memphis -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you? UT Memphis? DR. CALDWELL: -- and I knew about all the programs, being in the Navy, so I was on active duty my senior year as a student. I didn't wear a uniform, but I got pay and was on active duty, actually, during my senior year, and for that I had to pay the Navy back a year, which was a real cheap loan. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly, exactly. So, did you stay in the Navy after those three years? DR. CALDWELL: Yes, I went to an internship at Boston Naval Hospital. I went through my residency in Portsmouth Naval Hospital, and then of course I gathered up three more years out of them, but I had already served my draft so I went back and spent three years in the Navy. Again, I wanted to see the world, and of course the Navy sent me to Memphis to the naval hospital, which is now gone, and so I ran the pediatric department at the naval hospital in Memphis. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: I spent ten years on active duty; six and a half of them were in Tennessee. MR. MCDANIEL: As a pediatrician? DR. CALDWELL: Yes, as a pediatrician in the naval hospital, and I was going to make a career of it. But, as the Vietnam War was winding down, it was obvious to me that the Navy was going to change their way of -- we gave all dependents total medical care then, and they were going to change that, and the naval hospital wouldn't have any children in them and I wouldn't be taking, so I decided that, while I was in Tennessee I'd get out and stay here, and so I came to Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you came to Oak Ridge. Tell me about how that came about. DR. CALDWELL: Well, I had always heard about Oak Ridge. Not always. After '43, I heard about it, and some members of my family, uncles, came up here and worked a while. One uncle came up here and stayed three or four years, and one year, as my crop was laid by, we laid by the corn, we had about three months and there wasn't much to do, and my dad left me in charge, and he came up here and lived with his uncle and worked in Oak Ridge for three years. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: He came back and told stories the rest of his life about life in Oak Ridge, so I grew up with the mystery of Oak Ridge. When I was about to get out of the Navy, I decided I wanted to be in a small town in East Tennessee. I didn't like the flatlands. I wanted to be in East Tennessee, and so, of all times, no one was hiring pediatricians then. I couldn't find any practice around here with -- MR. MCDANIEL: What year was that? DR. CALDWELL: -- that was '65, when I thought I was going to get out. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: So, I said, "Well, Oak Ridge. I'll go see them." I came by the Oak Ridge Hospital, stopped and asked the operator who was the best pediatrician in town, and she said Dan Thomas, and so I said, "Can you get him on the phone for me?" I got on the phone, talked to him and said I wanted to come out and visit with him, I did; I sold myself as a partner for him and Lewis Preston, who were at Children's Clinic -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and so I was ready to come back. But then, when I got back to Millington, I found out that because of the Vietnam War, I was frozen another year. So, I called Dan and told him, "Well, it looks like I can't get there," and he said, "Well, we weren't looking for anybody when you got here, we're still not looking for anybody. When you get out of the Navy, come on by and we'll take you in," and that happened. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you had another year in the Navy. DR. CALDWELL: I had another year -- MR. MCDANIEL: They wouldn't let you go? DR. CALDWELL: -- and that was the naval hospital in Memphis, although we were taking care of patients directly from Vietnam who were flying home. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: But it was a big hospital then. It's all gone now -- MR. MCDANIEL: Really? DR. CALDWELL: -- nothing there now, but it was a big hospital then. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you spent another year there, and then you moved to Oak Ridge -- DR. CALDWELL: Moved to Oak Ridge in -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- in '66? DR. CALDWELL: -- December of '66. I moved and started January 1. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, your wife came -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and now did you have children? DR. CALDWELL: I had three children at the time, and had two more after I got here -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- so we had five children. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where did you live first? DR. CALDWELL: One of my partners, Preston, was in the real estate -- he was a banker. He was a pediatrician, but he spent a lot of time banking, and he found a house up on Westlook Circle, which an anesthesiologist here owned, and she was moving, and so he thought I ought to have that house but I couldn't afford the house. But he said, "Well, move in. You can do it somehow." So, I moved in a house that, at the time, cost $30,000.00, and I thought I'd never get out of debt, and so I lived up there for 20 years. It was a great place to live. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, where is that? Is that off Outer? DR. CALDWELL: It's off of Outer. It's called the Peach Orchard section. It was one of the first privately-owned subdivisions in the town. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: Most of the houses were built in '60 and '61. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. I think I know where you're talking about now. DR. CALDWELL: It was a great place to live. It was five minutes to the emergency room, and then we didn't have any emergency room doctors and we had to see all of our own patients, and it was downhill, so I could push my Volkswagen off and ride all the way down there in case anything happened. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. So, we're going to kind of go through your work history, then we'll come back to some things. So, you went to work at the Children's Clinic -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and you worked there until when? DR. CALDWELL: Worked there until the end of '93. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that when you retired -- DR. CALDWELL: Well, I quit, I changed jobs. MR. MCDANIEL: -- sort of? You quit? DR. CALDWELL: Yeah, I retired, but then I went into other work. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you? Okay. DR. CALDWELL: Well, I was retired but I ran for State Representative, and that's when I became, after that, was as a State Representative -- MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. DR. CALDWELL: -- for six years. MR. MCDANIEL: Talk about that. So, in '93, you quit practicing -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and you decided to run for State Representative -- DR. CALDWELL: Yes. I -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- for Oak Ridge? DR. CALDWELL: -- Oak Ridge area. First of all, in '93, I didn't do that right away. My wife had been involved in lobbying for children's causes. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: Ned Ray McWherter appointed her to what he thought was an honorary position in the National Association of Women Highway Safety Leaders. Well, she immediately made an organization in all 95 counties in the state of Tennessee. Not immediately, it took about a year, but she had one of the biggest -- they were organized, and they were working on seatbelts for children and adults, and drunk driving, not have drunk driving -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so I thought, "Well, she's saving more lives in Nashville than I am in Oak Ridge working as a pediatrician," so I decided I'd go down and join her, and I lobbied one year for the pediatricians of the state. Had things like trying to get easier access to vaccine, and a lot of issues. I told the pediatricians I would not lobby for anything involved their money or their pay, I would only lobby for things that had to do with child safety -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and had a very good time doing that. While I was there -- now I'm getting a mental blank, see? MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. That's all right. DR. CALDWELL: Dave Coffee decided to retire -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and, when he decided to retire, I jumped in and ran for office and, fortunately, was enough to win. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: Some people said I had raised enough patients to vote for me and that I won because I did, and there was some truth to that. MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure there was. Now, how long were you a State Representative? DR. CALDWELL: I stayed six years, and I voluntarily had decided six years because, at the end of six years, I would be 70 and I thought, "Well, I'll just voluntarily resign then because I'll be," and so I did. After six years, I had gotten much of what I wanted to do done, and so I retired and decided to take on other jobs. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, that was how many years ago? That was -- DR. CALDWELL: That was 2002. MR. MCDANIEL: -- okay, 2002. So, the last ten years or so, you've been doing other things? DR. CALDWELL: Well, for a while, my wife was vice chair of the state Democratic Party, and as someone said at ETEC the other day, they said, "Your wife was big in the Democratic Party," and I said, "Well, she was the Democratic Party," and she did have a lot -- she ran and she was on the National Committee, and I followed her around because she was on the Democratic National Committee, and I got to go to the White House, and all the states. I followed her around for a year or two after that before I actually ran for office, and so in 2002, she was still doing that and I did follow her around, but she died in 2004. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: So, I -- MR. MCDANIEL: You just -- DR. CALDWELL: -- moved back home then -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and then thought about things for a while, and then took on other jobs. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. I understand. Let's go back to when you first came to Oak Ridge, and what was it like being a physician, and specifically a pediatrician? So, this would have been in the late '60s through the '90s, early '90s. DR. CALDWELL: Late '60s and through the early '90s. I could not imagine being in a better place. The population of Oak Ridge -- when I moved here in '66-'67, out of 27,000 people, there were 3,000 Ph.D.’s lived in Oak Ridge, and I think half of those now live in Farragut somewhere -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. DR. CALDWELL: -- but anyway, and it was a close-knit town where everybody worked together, had an organization here called the Childbirth Education Association. There could not ever be again an organization like that. They had organized in teaching mothers about having a baby and how to raise a child, and so forth, and I became one of their strongest advocates because every time they wanted me to, I gave a talk, and I got to know everybody in Oak Ridge, and there were just a lot of wonderful people here. Plus, I didn't just take care of Oak Ridgers; they only counted for a third of our population at Children's Clinic. About the time I got here, most general practitioners, and there were very few family physicians and there were general practitioners -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- had decided that the one thing they could get rid of was their practice of children, and so in the surrounding five counties, it seemed like all at once they retired and all of them came to Children's Clinic, because we had been treating them in the emergency room for years anyway. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: We would actually go to the emergency room and see all of our patients then -- MR. MCDANIEL: Really? DR. CALDWELL: -- and so it was good public relations that I did -- again, good public relations. So, our practice grew really rapidly, and so I did not just take care of Oak Ridgers but the surrounding -- MR. MCDANIEL: All of -- DR. CALDWELL: -- five counties. MR. MCDANIEL: -- yeah, all the surrounding five counties. DR. CALDWELL: The other best part was, at that time, in the '60s and '70s, we had a lot of people that came here from other countries, especially places like Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Israel. They came here for advanced training in nuclear. They brought their family with them -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and somehow I lucked into becoming the doctor of choice for many of them, and so I got to treat people all over the world here. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? DR. CALDWELL: They would be here for a year or two and then they'd leave, and others would come, and so it was fascinating. When I was in practice, I might see one person who was a scientist at Oak Ridge, the next one was the grandmother from the mountains of upper East Tennessee, which I loved to talk to, and then the next one had a dictionary because they couldn't speak English, and they had a Japanese dictionary, and we were doing the dictionary translation. The chances were just unusual. MR. MCDANIEL: It was interesting. I guess it kept it from getting boring, didn't it? DR. CALDWELL: It was exciting. It was exciting, and most of these people I got to know. The parents I got to know pretty well. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah. Now, where was the building that you practiced in when you first -- DR. CALDWELL: It's still Children's Clinic -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- the same place? DR. CALDWELL: -- the same place, and we built on after I had been here a couple, three -- I've forgotten what year, but we built on and built it a little bigger, and had some more examining rooms so that we actually wound up with four physicians -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- after Preston retired, and then Dan Thomas stayed on for another few years, and then Charles Campbell came, and then we hired, later, when Dan Thomas left -- MR. MCDANIEL: Tanya Vargas? DR. CALDWELL: -- well, Vargas and Howard joined us. MR. MCDANIEL: That's right, that's right. What was the medical community like, I mean as far as other physicians and other medical professionals in Oak Ridge? DR. CALDWELL: Well, we had a lot of well-trained people, and I was lucky enough to be in -- as some other doctors said, Ralph Lillard picked who he wanted to be the next Chief of Staff five years in advance and things. That wasn't true, but there was a little element to it. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: So, I got into the hierarchy of things and became Chief of Staff in '80 -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- of the Oak Ridge Hospital, and, at the time, our Board of Trustees was absolutely great because most of the big names at the Lab, which they couldn't be in politics but they could be on the board at the Oak Ridge Hospital, and we had some of the greatest leaders, and it was just a tremendous thing. So, they decided we ought to become a regional hospital instead of small, community hospital, so we built on as a regional hospital. In order to do this, suddenly we needed 50 more specialists -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- so I, being Chief of Staff, helped recruit, and Ralph Lillard and I had more dinners with more people, and I became kind of important to the recruiting because the biggest drawback in recruiting was that a lot -- back then, it was mostly men were doctors, and wives, a few other wives -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- but the wives had heard about Oak Ridge and they were afraid to live here -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and, as a pediatrician with five children, I could testify greatly that there had never been a child in the history of Oak Ridge at that time that had been harmed by anything that happened in Oak Ridge plants -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so it was very convincing, I think, to them. MR. MCDANIEL: You were Chief of Staff you said in '80? DR. CALDWELL: Yes -- MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, '80 to -- DR. CALDWELL: -- '80 to '82, two years, Vice Chief for two years before. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now, who owned the hospital at the time? Was it just like a nonprofit? DR. CALDWELL: No, the city had turned it over to the Methodist Church -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay, okay. DR. CALDWELL: -- and it was the Methodist Medical Center -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- but it wasn't part of Covenant then. That became later when it became part of it -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and it was an individual Methodist hospital. MR. MCDANIEL: But, when you came here, the hospital was owned by the city, is that -- DR. CALDWELL: No, it had -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, it was -- DR. CALDWELL: -- already gone through that. MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, it had already gone -- DR. CALDWELL: In fact, when I came here, they had had a strike a couple of years before, and I thought, "I'm never gonna get any patients," because people from Clinton wouldn't come to Oak Ridge Hospital. Some of them that I talked to wouldn't come to Oak Ridge Hospital and said, "They've been on a strike, and I don't want to go over there. I want to go to Knoxville." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: So, I had to do some public relations in Clinton -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- that the hospital is not run by anybody. It's the doctors who are going to take care of you. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: So, anyway, we grew by leaps and bounds, and we did become a regional hospital for the five-county area. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. You mentioned a while ago that not one child has ever been harmed by anything from the plants. Was there anything unique about treating children in Oak Ridge, or was it just kind of the same as anywhere? DR. CALDWELL: It was the same as everywhere, except the parents were easier to communicate with and -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, and probably understood -- DR. CALDWELL: -- yeah, and I used to say, and still do, that my greatest accomplishment would be to take a guy who was a nuclear physicist who happened to come in with his child and convince him that his child really needed a $3.00 throat culture, and, when I convinced him that that was right, I thought I had had a good day. MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. Anyway, so you were very actively involved in your professional life. DR. CALDWELL: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk a little bit about your personal life in the community. Tell me about what it was like to live in Oak Ridge, to raise a family in Oak Ridge? DR. CALDWELL: Well, Oak Ridge is full of organizations. As you well know, they have a paper that's four or five pages thick full of everybody belongs to something -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and it was a community that was always involved in things. I wanted to be in the public life. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: I grew up on the farm, but I always admired the Junior Chamber of Commerce in the little town of Union City, because they seemed to have all the fun. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: But, when I moved here, I was too old for the Junior Chamber of Commerce, so I became active in the Chamber of Commerce after I had established myself two or three years. So, I didn't do a lot but I stayed on committees and so forth, and was very much involved and liked to be involved in the growth of the city's economic development. In the '80s, I started attending East Tennessee Economic Council, which is ETEC -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- which is gone through the years, but then, we could all meet around this table here. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: Now, we have 80 or so every -- MR. MCDANIEL: Every Friday morning. DR. CALDWELL: -- Friday morning at 7:30, so -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- it's an active community. The community is involved. It's like when I was State Representative, I had people, I had experts in every field all day long, but I knew them, and it was fun talking to them. I didn't have any problem understanding what the people of Oak Ridge wanted me to do. I didn't always do it, but I really had an understanding of what they wanted me to do. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. Now, what about your family? Your wife, was she involved in local -- DR. CALDWELL: She was involved in local things, like the doctors organization, and then got involved in politics and became, as I -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- every organization she joined, she would be president in a couple of years, and so we moved on and she -- MR. MCDANIEL: She was one of those, huh? Yeah. DR. CALDWELL: -- and then she got involved in state politics, which I didn't have time to do all that. But, through her and working together, we really had a great life. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what about your children? I mean what was it like for them to grow up in Oak Ridge? DR. CALDWELL: Well, they had some of the best chances for education at Oak Ridge High School and the other schools. The best school that ever existed is Cedar Hill, and they went through the sixth grade there, and then the high school, so education was great, and they enjoyed Oak Ridge a lot. MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure they were involved in other recreational activities -- DR. CALDWELL: Oh yeah, they -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- and lots of things like that. DR. CALDWELL: -- one daughter was in gymnastics, one was in dancing. There were plenty of things to do, Girl’s Club. I had one daughter, who is now deceased, she had a brain disorder, but she was one of the first members of the Girl’s Club here. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: You were talking a while ago about, as a State Representative, you understood what people wanted you to do. DR. CALDWELL: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: Give me some examples. Talk a little bit about your work as a State Representative, and some of the things, maybe some of the challenges you had or some of the successes that you had as a State Representative. DR. CALDWELL: Well, I had a few things I wanted to get done. One is the system of -- we were evolving then from babysitters to daycare, childcare centers. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: As we evolved, they didn't change. We still became just babysitters, and I thought babies, young children growing up in a place where they were just kept clean and kept nice and all that, they were actually getting harmed by this. The childcare was evolving then, and so I ran on improving childcare, and I remember the Democrats won over -- they had a national guy, who later did some polling for other candidates across the country, and they took a survey. They said, "No one ever ran for childcare," and I said, "Well, I am." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: They took a survey, and they were surprised that -- after they gave my name, they got a certain thing but, after they said I was running to improve childcare, my approval rating jumped by about 30 percent, so he was convinced that I could run on that issue. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, you know, you're a well-known pediatrician, and the -- DR. CALDWELL: Well, I tried, and the people knew -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- people knew you and respected you. DR. CALDWELL: -- and because these organizations knew that I would be active in that, and that was one of the issues. Other issues, I just wanted to improve the function of government. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I thought government ought to be improved, and so solving red tape problems was one of the nice things. The thing I didn't know I was going to get is they'd established a new corporation in state, the Tennessee Technology Development Corporation, and I was here interviewing people trying to decide who ought to be on that because it's going to be a statewide organization that would try to promote tech development. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: Well, my friend, Jimmy Naifey, decided I was from Oak Ridge and I ought to be on it, so I got to be one of the first board members of --, and that was something I didn't expect and it was great. It was one of the best things I've ever done, because I traveled the state for that, and helped Oak Ridge things and do some technology stuff, and get some development done here. It just was a life I really loved. MR. MCDANIEL: Was there anything in Oak Ridge specifically that people said, "We need for you to help us with this"? DR. CALDWELL: At the time, we were working on Roane State. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. Yeah, tell me about that. DR. CALDWELL: Yeah, that was one of the issues. I didn't run on that specifically, but it was one of the issues they wanted us to work on -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- although not everyone. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly. DR. CALDWELL: At the time, Oak Ridge was torn between they didn't really want a junior college, they wanted a college. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: Do you remember the College of Oak Ridge? MR. MCDANIEL: I remember hearing about the College of Oak Ridge. DR. CALDWELL: The College of Oak Ridge was one of those ideas that would have really been great, but it didn't come about. But people were afraid that if we got a junior college here, that's what they were called then, that we got this two-year college here, that we wouldn't get a regular college, and there were quite a few in that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: But they realized what was going to happen, so they finally all came onboard with Roane State -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and of course Randy McNally really helped response for that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, and at that point, Roane State, it had its big campus in Harriman -- DR. CALDWELL: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and people weren't sure, as you mentioned, there were some people that didn't want Roane State in Oak Ridge and some people did, and the folks in Oak Ridge thought they should have the four-year college, and it just -- DR. CALDWELL: The four-year college kind of went down before, so it didn't really get in a big fuss over that. But, anyway, at the end, everybody agreed that Roane State was going to be good for Oak Ridge -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure -- DR. CALDWELL: -- and we got it here. MR. MCDANIEL: -- and it has been, hasn't it? DR. CALDWELL: Yes, it has been -- MR. MCDANIEL: Very good. DR. CALDWELL: -- and bigger than most people thought. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly, and I guess you're probably pleased now that even the expansion for the health sciences program that they're doing out here now. DR. CALDWELL: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. One of the big things that happened in Oak Ridge I was a part of, the state decided to invest some money into the institute for Neutron Science -- MR. MCDANIEL: ORINS. DR. CALDWELL: -- computer science. There was about three centers that the state put money in here and built here, and it was one of the first of the last labs around to do something like that, and that promoted a lot of stuff happening in Oak Ridge, and Governor Sundquist then was one and, through his department, put money into three $10-million batches into putting these institutes up, and so it had a big influence on a lot of the other stuff that came here. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure it did. DR. CALDWELL: Being part of that was great, too. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. I understand. DR. CALDWELL: Now, I did not go to fix TennCare. I said it was too complicated and I'd already been practicing -- But, when I got to Nashville, I realized, and then I told the Governor this, I said, "You can't get money for education, you can't do anything unless you fix TennCare." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: "You can't fix TennCare unless you have the doctors on your side." MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: "If you will let me volunteer, I will get doctors on your side if you will do some things I ask you to do," and this was not part of my job. This was a -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, this was -- DR. CALDWELL: -- volunteer job -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- so I traveled the state on behalf of the Governor. I traveled the state. I talked to -- MR. MCDANIEL: Governor Sundquist? DR. CALDWELL: -- this was Don Sundquist. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I went to boards and I went to county medical societies. I spent two years traveling the state, and I would do things like, "We need your help. What could we do?" besides pay you more money? I never talked about that. "What could we do with a regulation? How could we make it better?" Then, if I got some idea, I'd go back and discuss this with the Governor and others, and we'd get a lot of it done. We really did a lot. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? DR. CALDWELL: Don Sundquist gets a lot of things that people don't like him for, but he knew more about health care than any non-medical person I've run into. He really knew how health care should function, and I really had a good time working with him, and we did a lot of things for TennCare, trying to make it better and more doctors involved, and so forth. So, that was a thing I did, and very few people in the state know I was doing that because it wasn't part of my job. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I did become chairman of the Joint Committee on TennCare for the Senate and the House, I did become chairman, but it was a great part of my job. There were things I did with the Governor and to try to make it better for doctors, and I worked with the pediatricians, the organization of pediatricians, and the family care physicians. I worked with them all the time getting things done, appearing before their groups, "What can we do?" and so forth. Changed the rules some. We didn't have enough psychiatrists to go around, and they had made the rule that family physicians couldn't prescribe certain medicines. Well, that was not right -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so, in order to let family physicians take care of most of the problems of everyday life, I got that rule changed, and then immediately it did away with some of the shortage of -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- psychiatric care. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly, exactly. DR. CALDWELL: In fact, I have a plaque on my wall from the family physicians for being doctor representative of the year, or something. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: That's great. Okay, let's see here. There's several things I want to ask you about. One of the things that you've been involved with the last few years, I know, is the Emory Valley Center. DR. CALDWELL: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: Why don't you talk a little bit about how your involvement in that organization started, and tell me a little bit about it and how it impacts Oak Ridge, and maybe the region? DR. CALDWELL: To start with, go back very basic, when I was a pediatrician in the Navy, the three years I was in Memphis, children in the Navy are moved around a lot, and so a lot of behavioral disorders come up because of new schools and all that, and my partner in pediatrics there, we started a volunteer clinic for children's behavioral disorders. It wasn't anything fancy, but we made a huge difference. So, I became involved in that, and with that, I became involved in some more serious problems, not that these weren't bad, but more serious problems. So, when I was working in this, Nat Winston was head of the Department of Mental Health, it was Mental Health and Retardation then. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was that? I mean was it state? It was -- DR. CALDWELL: It was the state -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and someone called him and said I was interested in doing that. I was about to get out of the Navy, and so he did call. Nat Winston offered me the job of Superintendent of Greene Valley up here in Greeneville. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Somebody had heard me say I love Greene County because it's the most beautiful county in the state, and I thought about it but I decided I really didn't want that. We need to change and have children not put in mental institutions. MR. MCDANIEL: Greene Valley was an institution, wasn't it? DR. CALDWELL: Yeah, right -- MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so I did not take that job but I knew about Daniel Arthur then which had been started primarily for cerebral palsy and mental retardation -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and I said, "I really don't want to work at -- I want to work in a community where we can probably make that possible," to have people treated at home, and so it was kind of a changeover then, and I became interested in it because there wasn't anything else like Daniel Arthur around here. In the '60s, when I came, people were moving to Oak Ridge to get their cerebral palsy child or mentally retarded child in Daniel Arthur because there was no other place, and they were doing it for the other schools, and then this continued. Of course, I knew a lot of the patients there, a lot of people over there, and, as they grew up, the schools then took over to change the laws, mainstreaming and so forth, in the '70s. This all took a while, but pretty soon all the children were mainstreamed. But the clients that were over there, when they emptied out places like Greene Valley and emptied out some of these others, we had clients over there that then needed total care for and needed help with work and so forth, so -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, and that was -- DR. CALDWELL: -- Emory Valley Center became for adults then. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, that's what I was about to ask. So, once they started the mainstream programs, where these children would be put in the regular schools, this became a center for adults who had those challenges, correct? DR. CALDWELL: One of the things to do was to get the jobs for them, work for them, and through the Daniel Arthur center and through the Emory Valley Center that began to mature. The other thing was, as these children were not in homes, like Greene Valley, which I don't know what the death age was but they didn't live much in 20's. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: Now, over at Emory Valley Center, we have 70-year-olds -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and they're still working every day. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: But this was just kind of an interest as I was a pediatrician, and after I got out and came back here, the question came up was Daniel Arthur going to survive Emory Valley Center. The building was -- MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me the difference between Daniel Arthur and Emory Valley Center. DR. CALDWELL: Well, Daniel Arthur was started for physically handicapped, cerebral palsy, and some mental retardation. It was kind of --, and there was a school there. There were no schools for the mentally retarded. Mentally retarded children weren't allowed in schools in the mid-50s, and the Oak Ridgers voluntarily started a school over there for -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so it evolved, and then, as it got some older, they started having the center over there where they could work. In '72, the city furnished a building over there, land for a building, and they built the building where they had the contract work things, doing things like repetitive work. MR. MCDANIEL: That's the Emory Valley Center? DR. CALDWELL: That's the Emory, and now that's the main part of it, is the Emory Valley Center. We have a program for early education children at risk, but the main program is the 140 adults we have over there, and about half of them work in the Center and have a great life because of this. MR. MCDANIEL: They also have group homes, they also run group homes. DR. CALDWELL: Yes, there's about 80 people scattered around in group homes, because many of these, their families are all gone, they are, and -- MR. MCDANIEL: Well, they're older. DR. CALDWELL: -- they are indeed wards of the state because there's no other -- and so as I got out of politics and did a few other jobs, what really happened is my longtime friend, Dottie Thompson, who I knew her husband in the Navy reserve and -- MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- and I took care of their children, he had died in 2000 and my wife died in 2002, we began to socialize a little bit, and of course she has a daughter, and she was concerned about the building, so we went before the County Commission to see what they were going to do, and they said, "Well, we can't keep this building going. In about five years, it's going to be gone because we can't afford to keep it up," and there's a long story about it. But, anyway, the County Commission gave us a lot, land, they gave us money to buy the land next to it and said, "You all better get out and start raising money." Well, we didn't do that right away, but in 2009, she and I volunteered to start -- because of all the things that were happening and my interests and her interests, we became co-chair of the campaign to raise somewhere in the neighborhood of between $3 and $4 million, and we knew it would take a long time. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure -- DR. CALDWELL: So, we set out -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- and 2009 wasn't a good time to start raising money, was it? DR. CALDWELL: -- it was right in the bottom of a Depression, right. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: The worst time in the world. So, the first year, what we really had to do is answer the questions to all Oak Ridgers you'd asked, "What is it over there now?" because a lot of people didn't know. They didn't know that we had 140 adults working and jobs for them. So, again, with my public relations background, we spent a whole year just letting people know. We took the CD that you made for us at the Emory Valley Center, and took it around and showed it to every club that would listen to us. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: So, over the next year and a half, we spoke to 40-something different clubs, Sunday school classes -- MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: -- churches, Kiwanis Club, Rotary, whoever would listen to us, we'd go -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- and so that worked out well, and then we started in the campaign, and we're now $2.2 million out of $3.5 million we've decided we have to have. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, and so in December of 2012, you've got $2.2 -- DR. CALDWELL: That's right. MR. MCDANIEL: -- out of $3.5, so you're about -- DR. CALDWELL: We've got about a million -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- two thirds of the way there. DR. CALDWELL: -- a little over a million to go, and now we're going to try to finish that off in the next year, if we can. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly, which will be about the right time for them to -- DR. CALDWELL: Right, right, the -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- you know? DR. CALDWELL: -- the plans are not clear. They know that the building can't go on forever, and somewhere around the end of 2014, they're going to give it to the city for $1.00, and the city at first was going to tear it down, but we have changes in what they're going to do all the time. I'm not sure what's going to happen to it now, but it won't be appropriate for our use unless someone keeps it up, and they can't. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure, sure. DR. CALDWELL: So, anyway, we're coming out about right. MR. MCDANIEL: So, you've been working on that pretty heavy the last two or three years, haven't you? DR. CALDWELL: Right, and it's been a lot of fun because I like to be active in the community, and I sure am active in the community right now. MR. MCDANIEL: What's it like now, now that you look back on the last 45 years or so, from when you first came here to Oak Ridge to Oak Ridge today? I mean what kind of changes have you seen? DR. CALDWELL: The biggest change is that, for instance, when the population got to the age where there were very few babies born at the Oak Ridge Hospital and I was still in practice then, and we could see that going down. The Childbirth Education Association, which is one of the greatest organizations I've ever belonged to, all of a sudden they became grandmothers instead of mothers, and it sort of -- these things went slowly, but as the community got older, and that's what it is now, those 3,000 Ph.D.’s that were living here when I came, a lot of them are still here but they've been long retired -- MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: -- but they're still very active in the community. But the biggest change is I guess it's not community-centered as it once was. It's easy to go other places. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. I mean, you know, it's almost like Oak Ridge is almost like a bedroom community for Knoxville now instead of its own little cohesive community. DR. CALDWELL: Well, that's part of the answer, but some of the things do persist but I don't know how -- the Playhouse is something unique to Oak Ridge, and it's still good. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: You know, the organizations like the Civic Music Association, and things like that are still going, and still the Boy’s Club, the Girl’s, and so forth, they run tremendous organizations here, so it is still a great place to raise children. I don't know, there's just -- the whole world doesn't work like it used to. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, and maybe it's symbolic of just our society today, you know is -- DR. CALDWELL: That's right. Young people don't get out and join the Rotary Club when they're 25 now, or the Kiwanis Club, or anything. We spoke at all these clubs, and it's very clear that most of them have the senior citizens as members, and not easy to get young people. My children don't belong to organizations like that. They may be active in the community, but they don't belong to organizations like that anymore. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Exactly, exactly. Anything else you want to talk about, any stories you want to tell me about your time in Oak Ridge, or any comments you want to make? DR. CALDWELL: Well, my comment, you know, I sign all my Christmas cards I send out, "I'm the luckiest guy in the world and always have been," and I've done that for the last 50 years. But, anyway, I still consider that the accident that brought me to Oak Ridge, if that operator had said, "Well, I don't like the pediatricians here," you know -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- something like that, just little things that brought me to Oak Ridge, and then the things that came together at the time I was here, the community of people out in the counties deciding they didn't want to take care of children anymore, it's too much trouble at night, and so our practice growing, and the hospital expanding and becoming a regional hospital, and it is still -- there was just something yesterday about we're one of the top hospitals. Well, that goes back when we recruited people that were only board certified. I'm not sure we could do that anymore. But, then, we only recruited people that were board certified. The experience with the community has just been tremendous, and that's the reason I can't imagine anybody moving somewhere else to retire. This is the place to retire, right here. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, you know, and Oak Ridge through the years has evolved, too. It's a pretty great community now, and there are a lot of -- DR. CALDWELL: Oh, absolutely. MR. MCDANIEL: -- services that are provided for that age group, aren't there -- DR. CALDWELL: Very much so. MR. MCDANIEL: -- especially the medical services? DR. CALDWELL: That's right, that's right, and to have an A-rated, or whatever the top rating is, hospital in the local community where you can have access to health care, it is not that big around. If you go to the other 95 counties, there's of course a few, but there is nothing like Oak Ridge Hospital in most of the counties. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, sure. Exactly. DR. CALDWELL: So, the medical community is good here, and it's just a great place to live. MR. MCDANIEL: All right, all right. Well, good, good. I've got one more question for you. You're a physician, you're a politician, you're a longtime Democrat, what's your opinion of ObamaCare? DR. CALDWELL: Well, first of all, I did remove myself from politics because I started this fundraising, and I really have tried to stay out of a lot of things. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I do have experience, two years, with TennCare. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: I know how to make care like that work. I can't always do everything I want to do, but I know how to make that care work, and Tennessee was reasonably successful in doing this. I think access -- and this is not about health care, as such. Everybody calls this the government is going to take over health care and tell you what -- it's about insurance care. It is not about health care. There's very little about that. The physicians are still going to be ultimately in charge of that. Having access to health care, though, in my experience, after 50 years dealing with people, families, is such a highly desirable thing that I can't understand why people say, "Well, we don't need that." They don't talk to families with young children that can't get health care, don't have access, and the common thing is, "Well, if they just save their money, they could get health insurance." They can't. That is just wrong. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: People in Tennessee, if you don't work for a big company, getting private health insurance is impossible for a lot, because if you've ever had asthma, you're not qualified to get health care. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: Even small companies that have health care and think, "Well, we've got it good and everybody can join," one person in that small company gets cancer, and the insurance company drops them the next time, the whole bunch of them -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. DR. CALDWELL: -- not the one with cancer, because they can't do that, but they drop the whole plant. This happens over and over. But access to health care is not being able to go to the emergency room, it's being able to be in the system and talk to somebody -- a nurse, a doctor, or whatever -- and get help for your family member that you want. It's such a big thing, we need to work on doing it. Now, whether ObamaCare or health care or the way they're doing it, I know that they could go through that plan and change a lot of things, and if both sides of the House would work together, they could do that, and maybe not cover everything but have access there. So, again, quality of life, access to good education and health care is absolutely essential for quality of life. MR. MCDANIEL: So, if there's a problem with the whole system, what do you think the problem is, the insurance? Is that where -- DR. CALDWELL: Well, it's not -- MR. MCDANIEL: -- you start? DR. CALDWELL: -- yeah. Without insurance, you can't have access -- MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. I mean -- DR. CALDWELL: -- and as long as insurance is able to exclude anybody they want to exclude, then you don't have access to insurance. MR. MCDANIEL: -- right. DR. CALDWELL: Now, again, I really want to repeat this again, when I was in TennCare, most people said, "Well, if they'd give up their beer, they could afford health care." That's not true. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. DR. CALDWELL: Well educated Ph.D.’s cannot get health care in Tennessee because they can't get insurance. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. DR. CALDWELL: Now, if you get your Medicare, you've got that, but we need something. We need to have access easier. Now, again, I have not kept up with every bit of the program, but I know that the physicians, and I've worked with a group of family physicians and pediatricians in the state, and if they would let them get together and design the program, it would work wonderfully. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? DR. CALDWELL: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: All right. Well, is there anything else you want to talk about? DR. CALDWELL: No, that's about it. I've said enough, I think. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, Dr. Caldwell, thank you so much. I appreciate you spending time with us. DR. CALDWELL: Thank you. [End of Interview] |
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