For several years, a fellow-professor at Texas State and I wrote columns for a few healthcare-related journals. It was an opportunity to put my thoughts in writing and have those thoughts challenged by my co-author and the readers. This constant challenge reinforced my beliefs and sometimes changed them. My teaching college students for over 40 years also challenged me to find new ways to teach difficult material.

My interest in healthcare administration started when I had a part-time job at Lubbock Medical Center during my undergraduate years at Texas Tech University. The hospital administrator, Jack Geddes, convinced me to pursue a hospital administration graduate degree at The George Washington University rather than a law degree. I learned a lot from Kurt Darr and the other faculty and my roommates while in Washington, D.C. and then from Frank Iacobell during my administrative residency at the Hutzel Hospital in Detroit. My first “real job” was working for Manny Perez and Lauren Bowytz at Valley Medical Center of Fresno. In Fresno, I started teaching part-time in an external degree program in health administration for St. Mary’s College in Moraga.

After two successful years in Fresno, I joined the Humana corporate office in 1979 as process manager working on process improvement and quality assurance at the department level in the company’s 100 hospitals. Process Management also had responsibilities for accreditation, identifying preferred vendors, and capital expenditure requests. In Louisville, I started teaching part-time at Webster University in Jeffersonville, Indiana. In 1985, I left Humana and enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Kentucky to pursue college teaching full-time.