| Summary: | Paul, Jill Ann, Mrs. Wallace (Ele) and Cathy Jo Bailey. Benz, Gerald Olson and I) the principal of the high school suffered an unfortunate accident which kept him out of the classroom a good bit of the time. As a consequence, we ended up teaching ourselves the courses we were enrolled in. That, not being totally satisfactory, we enrolled in Bismarck High School for the final half year of our high school careers. We three graduated from Bismarck High School and were the last - I believe - seniors to attend Moffit High School. That was 1943. World War II was 18 months old at the time of our graduation in May 1943, and the entire male population of the graduating class of Bismarck High School (all who had reached their 18th birthday) gathered at the Northern Pacific Railroad station in Bismarck a few days later to entrain for Fort Snelling in Minneapolis, where most of us entered the army, navy or marine corps. I was assigned to the infantry basic training course at Fort McClelland, AL, arriving in the sunny South at the end of June 1943. The next four months were the hottest hours and days a North Dakota boy could imagine. I had been assigned to the Army Specialized Training Corps but infantry basic training was required before being assigned to a college - so the four summer months in Alabama were followed by assignment at the end of October 1943 to NDAC, Fargo, ND. Summer in the South - winter in the North! After five months in college, the Department of the Army determined it needed more ground forces than students and we were suddenly assigned to the U.S. Infantry for further training in preparation for overseas assignment. I spent the next eight months at Camp Gruber, OK, and went overseas with the 42nd Infantry (Rainbow) Division, arriving in the south of France at Marseille in November 1944. My unit was committed to battle on Christmas eve, 1944. We advanced (and alternately retreated upon occasion) across the Alsace-Lorraine, Southern Germany to the Czechoslovakian border, where we were on VE Day, May 9, 1945, in a little village called Tittmonig. The next few months were far different from the preceding months - we were assigned to occupation in the Tyrolean Alps of Austria. My return to the United States was across the North Atlantic in March 1946. As a landlubber from North Dakota, I could not imagine water towering so high as it did during those nine days it took to plow through the Atlantic winter storms. My discharge came after a few days hospitalization at 101 Camp McCoy, WI. My brother, Erwin, came to Camp McCoy to ride home with me and we rode the famed "Hiawatha" to Minneapolis - the fastest ride either of us had ever had in our lives - up to that time. The University of Grand Forks was home for the next few years and then I transferred as a junior medical student to the University of Illinois School of Medicine in Chicago. North Dakota winters have, at times, been considered bad but the worst possible winters I have ever put in in my life were those in Chicago, when water and ice blocks from Lake Michigan blew up on the outer drive as we drove down to the medical school in the mornings. Upon graduation from medical school in June 1953, I decided it was time to leap further into the unknown. Two days after my graduation on June 20, 1953, I married a pretty little nurse from Kenosha, WI. Her name was Eleanor Reed. She had trained and then worked at the Illinois Masonic Hospital in Chicago, where I worked as a medical student to fill out and add to the G I Bill benefits. Ele and I decided that Chicago's winters had provided all the excitement we could absorb so reluctantly (!) we headed west on our honeymoon and one week later arrived in Salt Lake City, UT -where we were to spend the next three years in internship and residency training (in General Surgery) at the Latter Day Saints Hospital in Salt Lake City, UT. My greatest ambition had been to go into Family Practice, but I also wanted to practice as a surgeon. Following my residency in Surgery at Salt Lake City and four months after our first-born, Paul Reed Bailey, had arrived we moved back to Wisconsin to the twin cities of Nennah-Menasha where I engaged in General Practice for three years. Finding the General practice of medicine not as fulfilling as I had anticipated and following the suggestion and urgings of one of my preceptors in surgery in Salt Lake City, I decided to go back for further training. In 1959 Ele, Paul, our one-year-old baby, Cathy Jo, and I moved to Dallas, TX, where I entered specialty training in colon and rectal surgery at the Baylor University Medical Center. Once again we moved to the sunny South in the summertime! We certainly were not sure of our wisdom in such a move during the next few months but after spending two years in Dallas and after having our third child, our second daughter, Jill Ann, we decided we liked Dallas very much. Baylor University Medical Center was one of the best hospital complexes, both in terms of physical facilities and of consultative capacities, I had every seen. On July 1, 1961, I opened my office for the practice of Colon and Rectal Surgery in Dallas, TX. Since that moment my family and I have had a busy and fulfilling life. Ele worked in her capacity as an RN during those first lean years as my practice developed. My interest in academic medicine was secondary to my desire to practice clinical medicine but was still keen. I became an Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, TX, and have continued in that capacity on a part-time basis since then. Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.
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