Interview with C. Milton Young, July 7, 1979

OF: I’m Olivia Frederick with the UL Oral History Center. Today July 7, 1979, I’m talking with Dr. C. Milton Young III at his office at 250 E. Liberty in Louisville, Kentucky.

Dr. Young was born in Louisville Kentucky on November 13th, 1930. He now resides at 739 Southwestern Parkway in Louisville. His parents were Dr. C. Milton Young, Jr. and Hortense Houston Young. [Buzzing in background.]

Would you like to answer that buzzing if that’s yours?

MY: No.

OF: Dr. Young, would you first tell us a little about your education and your medical training?

MY: Well, I was born in Louisville, Kentucky in the house of Dr. J. C Lattermore, 15th and Walnut, which is now Mohammad Ali. I was educated in the 1:00city schools. I spent my initial two years of college at Howard University in Washington, D. C., subsequently transferred to the University of Louisville in 1950, I believe it was. In fact, I was, I believe, the first black undergraduate student at the University of Louisville, and my mother was the first graduate student at the University of Louisville. They had phased out the old Municipal College at that time and I entered in the summer session. Subsequent to that, I graduated the University of Louisville with an AB degree in biology. Went to Fisk University for a brief period of time in graduate school, got drafted for 2:00the Korean War. Spent two years in the Army, then went to Meharry Medical College in the School of Medical Laboratory Technology because I was too late to get into medical school when I got out of the Army. Spent two years in the School of Medical Technology, became a registered medical tech and then subsequently entered School of Medicine at Meharry and graduated in 1961.

OF: When did you first begin to professionally use the Red Cross Hospital?

MY: During my… time as a resident in internal medicine I would do histories and physicals for some of the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital and that was 3:00approximately 1962. I began my medical practice officially in 1965, and I would have a patient or two at Red Cross Hospital at that time. OF: I see. I know that your father is also a physician in the practice in the city. Do you have any memories of the hospital as a child or growing up in Louisville that you might recall? We have very few records, you know, on the hospital for that period.

MY: Well, as a kid, I would remember riding out to the hospital. Course, it was not in its present form.

OF: In what way did it differ physically?

MY: Well, there was a whole building that wasn’t there. It was actually two buildings that had been sort of joined together. And I would go out and just sit 4:00down in the very small vestibule there and sit on the front steps or things while my father was inside working and that would be my first remembrance of it. I was a patient there at one time, I guess it must have been 1936 or 1937, to have my tonsils removed. And then of course just back and forth just periodically. I truly don’t remember when the new addition was built because I think…

OF: Nineteen forty-nine was the fundraising campaign and was built in ’50, 51.

MY: Well see then that’s the reason, because when I graduated from the University of Louisville undergraduate school I left town for approximately… I guess 9 years, away getting an education or being in the Army, etc.

OF: As I understand it, the hospital was founded because blacks were unable to be treated by black physicians in the city’s hospitals, other hospitals.

MY: That’s correct.

OF: Is that true?

MY: That’s correct.

OF: You served on various staff committees at the hospital after you came to the city and started practicing. Can you tell us something about what sort of things you did, say on the executive committee or the accreditation committee?

MY: As far as the committees, actually there were not enough physicians there to have a lot of committees, in a lot of instances we served as committee of the whole. I truly can’t remember exactly what committees… I’m sure that during the 6:00period of time I probably served on every committee, one time or another.

OF: Do you recall what sort of things the executive committee dealt with? What sort of problems internal or?

MY: Well, basically being understaffed across the board basically, we were having a problem with getting new equipment, new beds, just revitalizing the whole situation. There’s been a sort of a decline in the usage obviously when the other hospitals integrated and basically the older doctors, the ones who had been here all along were the ones that used it mainly. There was a sort of a 7:00little cliquish situation going there, too, when the new doctors would come in with “new fangled ideas.” Sometimes there was a little abrasive encounters. We did manage though, the newer doctors that did come in, to update a lot of things, including the laboratories and things of that nature. So, there was a little influx of new blood, so to speak. But basically, the hospital was still used by the older population patient-wise and by the older doctors.

OF: It seems to me that from reading through many of these records that you were instrumental in effecting some of these modern changes, particularly during your year as medical director, which was from about 1972 to 1973. What I’m going on is primarily is a report you submitted to the board with your resignation in 8:00June of 1973 in which you list the accomplishments for that period, and you talk about the laboratory which had been modernized and that sort of thing. I was a little surprised in reading that report, though, to find things listed like, oh, as the cost of such things as refurbishing of air conditioning, repainting of the second floor, which seem to me to be more administrative than medical in nature. Why was this?

MY: Well, the administrative procedures where very cumbersome, there were little fiefdoms, as it were, throughout the hospital. And I was approached to get involved on a more consistent basis and… one of the prerequisites that I said 9:00was that if I have to go to all the committees, it was almost like a one or a three man show so to speak. If I have to touch base with all committees and use the usual process, up through administration, to the board, back down through administration, that, you know, it would take years to do it. So it was a situation where I told them, I said, “If we can form a three man committee to effect changes for the betterment of the hospital, then I would accept the position.”

OF: I see.

MY: But I would not have time for a lot of committee meetings because I was trying to maintain my own practice and everything else. And that, through that 10:00particular ad hoc committee-type approach that we could probably get a lot of things done in a very short period of time because things were very critical out there.

OF: ….critical {inaudible}.

MY: So I told them that I would do it on that particular basis.

OF: Who where the other people that served on this committee with you?

MY: Waverly Johnson, who was the administrator and… there was fourth member on there. I truthfully don’t remember at this particular time, I will remember shortly, but I don’t remember right now.

OF: Alright.

MY: So, in using that particular approach, where the power of the board was basically invested in this three man committee that we didn’t have to touch all the bases, anything that required an expenditure of money, naturally, we 11:00consulted with the chairman of the board. Mr. William Summers, Reverend William Summers. Just sort of expedite the matter.

OF: In going through these records, I get the impression that the hospital did suffer from real administrative problems, and I’m really haven’t been able to define what these were. Do you have any opinions on this? You sort of hinted at this in the statements just now…

MY: There was an old way of doing things, and a new way of doing things. People have a tendency to be satisfied with something that is running well enough to suit them. At the time, we were in a “survival mode” as it were, and of course to turn that sort of thing around to get into a growth situation you just had to 12:00do radical surgery. And the radical surgery was that… The committee would come up with ideas, and if feasible, would approach… can’t really think of how to say it. Approach the board with an idea, if the board accepted the idea they would say, “do it” and it cut down all of the proposal writing and things of that nature.

OF: Did the board at the Red Cross Hospital take a more active role in the internal operations of the hospital than most hospital boards do, do you think?

MY: I think they did, basically, because again manpower-wise we were just very, 13:00very short. There were 4 or 5 members of the board that truly were interested in getting the thing off the ground. Very interesting how the hospital happened to fail, we failed because of success.

OF: In what way?

MY: Well, there were certain conditions that had to be met by some of the doctors who did not generally use the hospital. They had to have certain laboratory requirements and things, things that hospitals should have, even a small hospital. And of course, they would not come, in fact, I would not go, unless these changes were made. And so a lot of times, it was just a shoot from the hip situation. Well, make a long story short, the refurbishing of the second 14:00floor, the painting, air conditioning, new beds, the whole -- even the relocation of the nursing station and things of that nature, were done and were fairly well-accepted by everybody, but when the increase in patients came, then it started showing the weakness of the system. The kitchen, who was very well able to prepare meals for 25 to 35 people could not handle 57 people. The purchasing got thrown off, the new types of instruments and the new types of just adhesive tapes and things created a load on the central supply. We had to enlarge it. Then it started to show that it could not handle the flow. The admitting office, could not handle things because of the increased amount of 15:00paperwork. Business office was just inundated with the new insurance claims and forms and things of this nature. So, the whole system began to show cracks. We opened up floors that had been laying dormant, so then we had an immediate nursing problem, we had to acquire nurses. And, of course the final event, as it were, was when we had the malpractice insurance went right through the roof. Not just necessarily for the Red Cross or Community Hospital, as it was called at that time. Well I think it went from -- Mr. Johnson can probably give you the exact figures. It increased almost 500%, overnight. We were paying $8,000 one 16:00night and when the next premium came we were up in the $30’s and the hospital just could not support that type of cost increase.

OF: In a related matter to what you were just talking about, what do you think should or could have been done differently by the board of directors or the administrator to have prevented these problems or to have dealt with them. Do you think there was anything they could have done differently?

MY: No. I think again, it was a matter of little David and a lot of Goliaths and I think the handwriting was basically on the wall for a small general hospital. We may have at one time turned into a different type of hospital: a nursing 17:00home, or something of that nature.

OF: There was talk of this wasn’t there? At various times?

MY: There was quite a bit of talk about converting into either some type of specialty hospital, or minimal care hospital where what we used to call it in the Army, walking wounded, people that didn’t require a lot of extensive surgery and things of that nature. There was a time when we had anticipated buying Parkway Medical Center, which is right next to the medical arts building, and we went into that negotiation heavily because then we would have had a hospital. We would have just moved, physically moved, Red Cross Hospital to Parkway Medical Center which would have given us a lot of advantages. Number one, of all the doctors right next door. That’s why right now when you see a hospital being built or even some of the old hospitals, they are building up office complexes beside them, to assure themselves there will be an adequate supply of physicians.

OF: I believe there were negotiations also conducted at some point to acquire the old Nortons Hospital.

MY: That is correct, We would have scaled it down and used more the newer portions of it. We tried all sorts of things…course then you come into a money situation. But I just think that we were probably just too small. I think that was the whole thing in a nutshell.

OF: Getting back to that 1973 report to the board. You indicate there were several proposals which you wanted to see carry through, which you believe were vital to the institution. For instance, the Community Hospital or Red Cross Hospital affiliation with the Park Duvall Neighborhood Health Center, you described as having been hanging fire for several months. Was any sort of arrangement ever worked out between these two facilities?

MY: No. No. There was a lot of rhetoric and a lot of meetings. I think basically, that fell through on personality problem more so than anything else. There were some members of the board, and some members of the Park Duvall board, who although on the surface, appeared that each institution would help the other, because we had beds where a lot of times individual could… very short term stays or very minor procedures would have helped both institutions. But it just… There were several members involved in the negotiations that just sort of rubbed each other the wrong way and it postponed any agreement.

OF: Another proposal which you indicated might be financially lucrative for the hospital was a pap smear contract from the state department of health. Do you know what happened there, why that was never carried through?

MY: It got caught in a political bind there. The state department of health had been farming these things out all around the state, and our pathologist at the time, who had the facilities to do all of these, plus we had a gynecologist who had done these type of preparations down at Vanderbilt, and we thought we could utilize -- she was actually acting as a house officer at the time, and we could actually utilize her capabilities to provide an income to the hospital.

OF: Uh hm. Another suggestion or proposal that you indicated you thought might be helpful was a metabolically or metabolic clinic under the auspices of Dr. Pearlstein?

MY: Yes, he, Dr. Pearlstein, needed at the time, access to some beds. He is into diabetics, he’s into weight reduction and things of that nature, and the evaluations on these individuals did not require a super amount of sophisticated equipment but it did require them to be on site as it were. Of course, when he’s competing for beds in the other hospitals it just sort of disjoined the thing. Whereas if he could put them all in one place then it would, you know, it would 22:00facilitate his and plus add income to the hospital.

OF: I take it that sort of arrangement was never worked out?

MY: Well, we never really pursued it vigorously. It was something that had been discussed between Dr. Pearlstein and myself and as a possibility, and I was just, again, laying things out as to some of the alternatives we might have had.

OF: I see. Earlier, you touched upon the affect of integration of health facilities in Louisville. I would like to ask you, I guess, to address yourself directly to that. In what ways do you think the integration of the health facilities affected not only the Community Hospital but the healthcare of blacks in Louisville in general?

MY: Well, I think it improved it because for the first time, blacks had access 23:00to black physicians had access to…top grade technical expertise. One of the problems, and one of the things I used to chide the older physicians out there, is that their egos were not necessarily in good shape because anytime that they… They were isolated, I’ll put it that way, and any contact that they had with white physicians was in a consultant type attitude, so to speak, which means that each time they had any contact with one, they were calling one for some help. Of course over a period of years where you never meet anybody necessarily equal, ‘cause anytime you ran into them they were coming to help you...

OF: Right.

MY: So, it sort of damaged the ego, so to speak, and a lot of those doctors did 24:00not feel very comfortable in the Jewishes, Nortons, and all these other things, because, in the one-on-one situation, they had all this 30, 40 years of deprivation…

OF: Differential behavior. {Inaudible}

MY: and the whole bit, and it got in the way in a lot of instances.

OF: Interesting. At one Board of Directors meeting, C. Whitney Young, in a very emotional discussion of the hospital’s financial problems and the threat of closing, the moment of passing of black-run institutions. Did you share this sort of sentiment, believing that the black community suffered a loss in the passing of the hospital? In anyway?

MY: I think it suffered an emotional loss. Not necessarily a medical loss, but an emotional loss because Community Hospital, I believe…this I’m sure can be 25:00checked, was the largest employer of blacks in the state of Kentucky. Blacks employing blacks.

OF: Mm-hm.

MY: Which means that one of our quote “major institutions” went down the tubes.

OF: {Inaudible.} What impact do you think the Federal health programs, which started in the 1960’s, had on the hospital?

MY: Well, it had a positive and a negative effect. The positive effect, it was that there was large numbers of indigent individuals who could now afford medical care, which added to the bulk of individuals that you had to draw from, the pool. The negative effect is that the requirement to qualify for third party payment through the government put a very, very heavy burden on a very small institution.

[END OF SIDE 1]

[BEGINNING OF SIDE 2]

MY: Do you ever play those back to be sure you’re recording? {Laughs}

OF: Getting back to some of the internal problems the hospital had, it seems to me that during the latter years of the hospital’s existence, that administrators had difficulty in obtaining competent support staff for the physicians, do you think this is a correct assessment?

MY: Very definitely.

OF: Why do you think that was so?

MY: Well, the salaries and the type of individuals that we actually needed. We actually needed stronger individuals than would probably be required for a larger institution, because this individual nursing director and things of that nature did not have the luxury of a large stair-step type of thing where a lot 27:00of people where focusing in on a particular problem. It would come straight from the nursing station straight to the Board of Directors.

OF: I see.

MY: And not the…I’m sorry not -- the nursing director, and it was not the siphoning process or the filtering process there, so. When you’re dealing on a one-on-one situation, the individual has to be very, very competent and secure in their own knowledge, and these type individuals can command a much larger salary than we could pay.

OF: Was the keeping of records a problem which existed at the Community Hospital. Did, does that sort of problem exist at all hospitals or was, you know, particular or peculiar to Red Cross? I’ve found many, many references 28:00to…to the Chiefs of staff and Medical Director sending out memos to the physicians who used the hospital to keep their records, that this was a problem getting payment back from Medicaid and Medicare funds and this sort of thing.

MY: That’s a general problem….

OF: I suspected as much…{Laughs.}

MY: Yeah. It was more crucial at Red Cross Hospital because we are drawing from a smaller pool, just like a physician when he first starts out into practice, he’s seeing five or six people a day, if four or five people do not pay him it’s much more of a larger economic impact than if he’s seeing thirty people a day and if four or five people don’t pay him, then he can absorb that, he can wait. We did not have the luxury. One of the problems that they had in the, well, even prior to my getting there, was that individuals would bring patients out and 29:00just really neglect doing the discharge summary and things of that nature, which third party payers would like to have done before they will give you any money. So if a person had twenty-five or thirty charts that needed dictating, it was a much greater impact on a fifty-seven bed hospital than four hundred and fifty bed hospital.

OF: Uh-huh. I suppose the Federal health programs -- Medicaid and Medicare – also increased the amount of record keeping that had to be done.

MY: Definitely. There’re more I’s dotted and T’s crossed when you’re dealing with Uncle Sugar, as they call him.

OF: Can you tell me something about the utilization committees and how they worked, that were set up to deal, as I gathered, to deal with the patients treated under Medicaid and Medicare programs, are these, they were staffed by physicians and administrators, weren’t they?

MY: Right, well, all hospitals have these, let’s say a sort of check on abuse. If a patient does not need to be in the hospital, or if they, I think the Federal Government has a rule that if a patient is there for seven days that the chart has to be reviewed, to make sure the patient truly needs to be there longer than that and there are automatic review points, I think 7 days, maybe 14 days, and then 21 days. Of course, we had to have committees to show that the chart was reviewed.

OF: I was astonished at -- when I encountered this – that -- it just seems like a tremendous demand to be made of physicians to do this sort of thing, this very time consuming process.

MY: And if you don’t have a large staff, you know, again, you find that one 31:00doctor will be on three and four committees, and of course it just takes an inordinate amount of time, and was one of the things that kept a lot of the doctors from coming out there. Because, at Jewish Hospital I’m presently on one committee, occasionally I’ve been on two committees, but basically it’s just a one-committee deal. And, so, an hour and a half or two hours once a month is much better than, you know…..

OF: Certainly. There seemed to be a very close sort of working relationship between the Jewish Hospital and Community Hospital. Is this true that a lot of the physicians served on, or used both facilities and if so, why was this, do you think?

MY: Well, a lot of the doctors who served as consultants to the doctors at Community, at Red Cross Hospital, were on the staff at Jewish, and they had a 32:00long history of having come out there, come out there to do operations and do consultant work.

OF: So just a long-standing, long-term relationship?

MY: Long standing, right.

OF: What was the hospital’s relationship with the Hammer Clinic?

MY: The Hammer Clinic…was negotiating or wanted to negotiate, to use the facility for first trimester abortions and… negotiation really didn’t come through to any great degree. There were some done there, but we could not and would not support the type of volume they were anticipating, so it basically 33:00went by the wayside.

OF: I see. Well, you anticipated many of my questions {laughs} and I, we’ve discussed most of them. Is there anything that comes to your mind, any kind of problems or defense associated with the hospital during your years of working there that you think would be helpful to people studying the hospital? Or Louisville?

MY: Well, one of the things, that, sort of observations that I would make at various periods of time, is that…I don’t know if you’ve come across it or not, but in the past the women’s auxiliary did a yeoman amount of work in raising monies and things and holding teas and providing volunteer type services and things. And I think that probably your picture could not be complete until you 34:00can delve into some of the things that they were doing. Because they were much more important to Red Cross Hospital than the average auxiliary is to any other hospital. Much more important.

OF: I had not gleaned that from the records yet. Who would be someone associated with the women’s auxiliary, do you think, that might tell us something about that?

MY: I think you probably are going to have to talk to Mr. Waverly Johnson, or Mrs. Dean… And I’m sure they can give you names of individuals who over the years, you know, just rendered the yeoman service.

OF: Um-hmm.

MY: I don’t even know if there is any recounting of the individuals that started the hospital, do you have the big pictures of the, is it two sisters or two brothers?

OF: Two brothers, I think, we don’t have any pictures though.

MY: Well there some pictures in the hall, in the lobby there, of the individuals… There’s another name I’ll put out here, Stewart Pickett. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard his name or not…

OF: Yes.

MY: But I believe his father was Dr. Pickett. Stewart may know a lot of little background material that may have I’m sure…

OF: Matter of fact they just conducted some interviews with him last month, during June.

MY: I think his father was a physician here, and maybe through what Pickett saw, he may know some things that obviously I wouldn’t have access to, because prior to 1963 Red Cross Hospital was a building where my father went.

OF: Uh-huh.

MY: You know, after that, then I became involved myself. Little things like -- when I went out there, and they approached me to be Medical Director, I think it was basically because number one, I can be very out spoken, number one. Number two, I have a fairly large practice, and the theory was at the time if I would start bringing some of my patients there, that the other doctors might drift back plus the people that I used as consultants would start drifting back. And maybe… But, we were ill-placed to begin with. If this hospital had been, oh say, West of Twentieth Street, it would probably still be in existence now. Just like 37:00I made them put me on a dollar a year salary, because I said you can’t fire a volunteer, but if you know, don’t like what I’m doing then, of course, this gives you the option of saying that your services are no longer needed.

OF: There was talk of relocating, even after the hospital closed its doors. Was anything ever done by anybody in an effort to re-establish another hospital after it closed?

MY: I think that was basically just wishful thinking. To open up an institution, in this day in time, or to move an institution requires a tremendous amount of paperwork and this is where we were the weakest. Proposal writing, grant writing, filling out the forms, you know, immediately, when it became obvious 38:00that we were getting ready to close, then some of the health agencies around town, here are going to be 73 beds thrown out on the open market. Who’s going to get them and, all of these types of things. So there was a lot of backroom rhetoric about, what, who, several institutions talked about absorbing the hospital, because they would automatically get seventy-some approved beds.

OF: So there is competition for beds?

MY: Oh, definitely. Just cutthroat competition. What we had proposed over at Parkway Medical Center was to have two floors of hospital and three floors of skilled care so that the person could make a transition within the same building from an acute problem to a long-term convalescent problem and never leave the 39:00building, which would have been perfect really.

OF: Would there have been an outpatient clinic sort of operation also?

MY: Yep. We had an outpatient clinic, and we saw a lot of the people in the neighborhood, the staff doctors. See, prior to my going there they had no staff doctor. They had one back in the 50’s for a while, who was a young physician who, for room and board and nominal sum just stayed out at the hospital. He was a bachelor, so he had no real…so it sort of worked out that way. But that, once he grew, so to speak, and actually had to move from there… I think when I came was the first time we had physicians in the building at night. Because one of the things, that.. and I have to admire the earlier physicians because if 40:00anything happened at that hospital at night, you had to get up and go. You see, this is one of the luxuries that the modern hospital has, they have staff physicians in the building at all times, so consequently you can get that half-hour head start as it were on any critical problem that comes up. And not having an emergency room there, so we never had the luxury, even say at five o’clock or three o’clock, unless some doctor was just making late rounds, you know. By noon the place was devoid of doctors until maybe eight o’clock the next morning.

OF: Mm-hm. Yeah, I can see where that would be a problem.

MY: Intolerable situation, particularly if you have a large number of people there. But, the system, the cracks, in the old walls as it were started showing when the volume did increase.

OF: That’s very interesting, and now that you’ve pointed that out, I can see 41:00that in material that I’ve looked at already.

MY: Mm-hm. Yeah, well, they were not equipped to handle, emotionally or physically equipped to handle large numbers of people.

OF: It does seems to me that there was a hardcore group of very dedicated people both on the board, among the physicians in the community and even the support staff, there was a hard core, who very dedicated and made substantial sacrifices over the years to promote the welfare of the hospital and to try to save it.

MY: Going to Red Cross Hospital was in itself a sacrifice. Most of us would not put a patient in danger. If a patient obviously required the services of a larger hospital, then, naturally, we would not take them to Red Cross Hospital. So, I don’t think the patients did any suffering because they were fairly well 42:00filtered out, there.

OF: That’s interesting.

MY: Yeah. Uh, but to go out on Shelby Street, if the bulk of your practice was at Jewish Hospital, Nortons Hospital and Methodist, then to make that trip out to on Shelby was a “trip,” quote, unquote. And again, I think there were a small group of dedicated doctors who wanted to preserve something that was…strictly belonged to the black community. And there were other, like I say, whites who sweated equally side by side trying to, you know, keep the facility going. What we probably needed more than anything else was a large donation, maybe in a couple of a million dollars worth, to truly have an efficiently run small 43:00hospital. And you can parallel the problems that Community Hospital had to the problems that Western Jefferson Hospital out here has. You know, it takes a while for people to say that’s my hospital. Consequently so they have wards closing down out there even though it’s a brand new facility.

OF: Mm-hm. I’ve been reading about that in the paper.

MY: Doctors have to get in the habit. I can go to, I put, 99, 44/100th percent of my patients at Jewish Hospital. If I have a patient at Nortons sometimes I’ll find myself over here doing office work and say, “I forgot to go to Norton’s.” You know, that type of thing, so, it’s…we’re all creatures of habit.

OF: Sure. There’s just a certain number of hours in each day, and they have to 44:00be allotted in the most effective way.

MY: Sure. But people like Dr. Jesse Bell, Dr. Walls and my Father, Dr. Rabb, you know… just put their life’s blood into that hospital. But again, when they came along, that was all they had and of course you get familiar with what you do have, so consequently, it works out. I think in 1927 there were over fifty-some black doctors here in Louisville.

OF: That many. I’m surprised.

MY: There was almost a moratorium up until the fifties, late fifties, that we can’t really say that a new black doctor came to town.

OF: Why do you think that occurred?

MY: Well, again, I think it was a cliquish situation, number one. Number two, almost all of them without exception, were general practitioners, so they were competing for the same patient. And, anytime anyone else would come in town they just saw it as competition, so they would...

OF: Sort of closed ranks I suppose.

MY: Yeah, closed ranks and painted some very bleak pictures of life in Louisville and we have not overcome that. In fact, Dr. Maury Weiss, who was a cardiologist here, and I we recently got together and we sent a letter to the president of the Jefferson County Medical Society asking them to use their resources to identify, locate and attract black doctors to this community. Because the Falls City Medical Society, which was the traditionally black 46:00society, we just don’t have the resources to do the mailing, and the, you know, secretarial things, the things that you have to do to locate, get doctors to come and see and to tell them. Because, right now there are only two black internists in the state of Kentucky, myself and Dr. Ralph Morris. There is only one board surgeon, there is only one surgeon, black surgeon, in the state of Kentucky. There are only three black doctors, what we call primary physicians here at this particular point in time.

OF: And you think it’s because of this negative image?

MY: Well, negative image and I think basically, right now it’s because there is just no image at all out there. People just don’t think of Louisville as a place to practice medicine. We are probably more wide open than probably eighty 47:00percent of the other cities in the United States with an industrial base and everything else. So, a physician in this town could probably very easily you know, get established and all of the hospitals have open staffs, so you could pretty much go where you wish. But again, unless this message gets out to the medical schools and the places where black physicians are in training, they just won’t even think about us.

OF: Uh-hmm. That’s interesting. To get back to the Red Cross Hospital for just a minute, you were talking about the hard core dedicated group among the physicians, you named some of those. Who do you think among the board members formed a part of this dedicated group?

MY: I think if you go back through the years, the names would change. Henry Heyburn was on the board for years and years and years. My mother, Hortense, was 48:00on the board for a few years during the critical stages of it. Certainly, Reverend Summers just did yeoman work, chairman, and just general supportive. Levalle Duncan…Whitney Young… I really better quit naming names, because I know I’m going to forget.

OF: {Laughs.}

MY: If I were to see the rosters I, but there were a small group…

OF: I think the Tachaus, some of those things…

MY: Yes, Yes , the Tachaus. Of course, I only am familiar with the last group, as it were. John Clark from General Electric was on there, I think, Attorney 49:00Darrell Owens {unintelligible.}. There was a lot of people put in a lot of time and when we first opened up the new floor and everything else and had the lobby refurbished and the rugs down and the new laboratory, there was a general upsurge in, you know, feeling of well being. We had no way of knowing that with all these new facilities we were going to attract more patients and that was what was going to kill us.

OF: That’s ironic and really very sad.

MY: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

OF: Well, I thank you Dr. Young, I think you’ve given us a lot of useful information.

MY: Well, I hope so. People I think should know about institutions like that because, again, they are just part of history.

OF: I think so too.

MY: Do you have pictures of the institution?

OF: We have some, but…no. I guess mostly what we have are just newspaper 50:00pictures, things that were in the Courier or the Defender. I can’t think of any other pictures or photographs that we have. Do you know of the existence...? You mentioned two that hung in the hallway.

MY: Yeah, no I was just talking about general pictures. Photography is one of my hobbies

OF: Oh!

MY: And I took a lot of pictures out there, not necessary of people but just of the facility. I’ll see that you get them

OF: Well, we can have them reproduced and return them to you.

MY: Well, I have no, particular use for them, so -

OF: Oh, ok. Fine. Certainly.

MY: Give you the negatives also.

OF: Ok, very good, thank you.

MY: But if any questions were to come up, but I think if you talk to Reverend Summers and Mr. John… Waverly Johnson, Ms. Dean, they can probably give you names of eight or ten people who were out in the community that don’t have a paper alliance with the hospital but who had great effects on it.

OF: Well, thank you. I’ll try to get in contact with them.

[END OF INTERVIEW.]

PAGE

PAGE 1