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Hello from Michigan, where I have resided for the last 42 years. I must admit that living in the Midwest was not part of my vision of the future, but then again I am not sure I ever had a grand scheme. As they say, life is what happens when you are making other plans.
After leaving O’Dowd, I enrolled at Cal the following fall. Although I decided to take the prerequisite for a career in medicine or dentistry, I actually majored in Speech (now called Forensics), which was a combination of English, journalism and speech courses. I stayed at Cal for four years and had a wonderful undergraduate experience. I became a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, even though I lived at home in Oakland for the first three years due to financial constraints. I was involved in many campus activities, including Cal Club as well as the Megaphone Society. I was a yell leader for three years (folks in the Midwest do not have a clue about what a Cal yell leader did in the early 1960s – they think that is where old gymnasts ended up) and was head yell leader during the football season when President Kennedy was assassinated during Big Game week. I am sure we all know where we were during that pivotal event. I also continued to work at Simon Hardware in downtown Oakland during the summers and holidays. By the time I moved to Michigan, I figured that I had works the equivalent of two years full-time in the hardware business.
I began my education in the School of Dentistry at the University of California San Francisco in the fall of 1964. I later was accepted into the Curriculum II program at UCSF, which allowed me to specialize in orthodontics at the same time I was finishing my dental studies, receiving my DDS degree and my orthodontic specialty certification simultaneously. I loved living in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury District during such a tumultuous time. During the last two years, I played guitar in a band named after a then little-known comic book character (The Incredible Hulk). It was great fun, with a highlight of our band playing at the freshman welcoming dance at Cal. I also was involved in guitar masses at the Newman Center at UCSF, a major focus of my social life.
At this point, I had a choice, private practice or something more. I had taught and tutored while in dental school and had been reasonably successful academically, so I thought an academic career was worth pursuing. I had no idea what I was in for! I received a post-doctoral scholarship from the National Institutes of Health, so that I was supported financially during my post-doctoral studies. I decided to attend the University of Michigan to work on a doctorate in anatomy. For my PhD dissertation, I carried out studies altering the growth of the face in rhesus monkeys, a work that was completed in 1972. I continued working with monkeys until the late 1980s and then focused primarily on clinical studies of facial growth.
About two months after I arrived in Ann Arbor, I had arranged to take a blind date to a play. An hour before the play, I heard from my blind date that she was ill and could not go. I had organized the first guitar masses in Ann Arbor and again was active in the Newman Center on campus. I knew a coed from Alpha Phi sorority who was involved with me in guitar masses; I thought that she was engaged because she wore a diamond ring on her left ring finger (it turned out that the ring had been her grandmother’s, and she had a wart on her right ring finger). So I called her at her sorority and asked if there was anyone there who could go to a play on campus with me within the hour. She responded immediately and put Charlene Beach on the phone. Charlene told me no, she had a class the next morning at 8 am. After some sweet-talking on my part, with a promise (that I kept) of returning her home by midnight, I pick her up 25 minutes later. The rest is history – Charlene and I are celebrating our fortieth anniversary in February 2010—all because of a wart!
Charlene is a native of Ann Arbor who is the president of a small publishing company and also has been the business manager of our private orthodontic practice for the last 30 years. She is a good golfer and loves to produce mosaic art. Charlene is a former elementary school teacher who left to become a mom at the time of our daughter’s birth.
How about me? After I finished my doctorate, I became an assistant professor in the department of Anatomy in the U of M’s medical school and also was appointed as a research scientist in the Center for Human Growth and Development, an interdisciplinary research unit on the Ann Arbor campus. Ironically, one of the reasons that I chose dentistry over medicine was that dental school did not require an embryology as a prerequisite (I did not like zoology (or vice versa) very much at Cal.) Naturally, the first course that I taught as an anatomy faculty member was embryology to medical students.
I love what I do because it is so diverse. I began teaching in the dental school in 1975 and have been there since that time. I joined the Orthodontic department in the early 1980s and have been teaching orthodontics to residents and dental students ever since. I also opened a private orthodontic practice in downtown Ann Arbor in 1971 and practiced by myself until 1989 when I took the first of several partners. We see patients in an historic 1889 Victorian mansion adjacent to the U of M campus, a building with Queen Anne-style architecture reminiscent of San Francisco.
Ann Arbor is a great place to live. If you look at the frequently occurring lists of “best places to live,” Ann Arbor typically is mentioned. Normally the University of Michigan has outstanding athletic teams, although Michigan football is in somewhat of a lull presently (to put it nicely). I have been able to divide my time between the university, where I hold an endowed professorship, and my private practice that I share with my daughter and two other partners. I have published a lot on the effects of orthodontic and orthopedic treatments and have been able to use my speech skills to lecture in 35 countries on all five continents (participating in the freshman Speech Contest at O’Dowd really paid off). Charlene and I love to travel. In fact, I am writing this blurb on a plane traveling home from a vacation in the Cayman Islands, which we have visited usually with our family on 17 occasions.
The last fifty years have gone by very quickly. As someone once said, the closer you get to the center of a roll of toilet paper, the faster it goes. That sure applies to me since I left Bishop O’Dowd. My family and I have been blessed with love, good health, and a wonderful lifestyle in Michigan. We have a summer home up north in Traverse City, which is a 4-hour drive from Ann Arbor. We spend much time in TC during the summer, with lots of golf and water sports. Our house is located on East Grand Traverse Bay of Lake Michigan, with good fishing right outside our door. When God was creating “God’s Country,” fortunately He not only put much of it in Northern California, but also some in Michigan.
That’s about it for now. It will be wonderful to see you all in September. Jim
