reminiscence – Page 4 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

History Lessons in the Ramshorn Journal

I think I found a pair of articles from the mid-1970s in the Huston-Tillotson College Ramshorn Journal that might have a connection to each other, even though the authors didn’t know it at the time.

One of them was written by yours truly and published in December of 1975, entitled “H-TC Sponsors Education Seminar.”

The other is a New York Times editorial from January 1976 which was reprinted in the May 1976 volume of the Ramshorn Journal and was written by Christopher F. Edley, a very successful lawyer and, at the time, the Executive Director of the United Negro College Fund.

Both were written about the same time, in the era of the civil rights struggles. I’m not comparing myself to the brilliant and accomplished Mr. Edley. And I’m just going to admit that I really don’t remember much about the trip to Houston for the Education Seminar about which I wrote my article, despite my being a participant. But I think it’s hard not to notice the language I used in my description of the importance of what the education seminar was all about. While much of the text is rather dry, when I discuss what was emphasized, I sound a little more intense. I may not remember much of what we specifically did and said but I caught the tone.

When I say the trip was not a guided tour, I mean that both faculty and students were serious about what the main message was for us—as black people. We had to measure up in a way that implied that we had to be better than best. That whole section starting with “Throughout the program, our people were reminded that any person who aspires to a position with any company must fulfill particular criteria.” It was as if I were saying we had to be perfect to make up for being black. We had to be the exemplars.

The individual must exhibit creativity, aggressiveness, ambition, self-confidence, initiative, dedication, maturity, and an ability and willingness to cooperate and effectively communicate with other people. The individual must punctual and reliable. Industry demands nothing less than high-gear performance. But they pay handsomely for that high-gear performance.

As I read this now, I get caught up on all the exhortations to be scrupulous, alert, and so on because, after all, we’re in a corporate jungle which is all about survival. I could have recast the last sentence above as “But they pay dearly for that high-gear performance”—which refers to the candidate, not the one doing the hiring.

I admit that how I wrote the story may reflect my reaction to rather than the reality of the emphasis of speakers at the seminar. But I did get the impression that I, as a black person, would be held to a higher standard than a white person. And I was uncomfortable about that.

When I turn to the New York Times article by Mr. Edley, I again am impressed with the struggle for fairness and justice, which didn’t seem forthcoming. He expressed the same sense of unfairness that I felt in Houston. The tone is almost one of outrage. He described the black people who were going to college in those days as most likely being the first ones in their families to go to college.

That’s what I was.

Mr. Edley was expressing frustration about blacks and browns just being able to get to the door of opportunity. I got the message that the struggle would go on forever—even if we got in the door. We didn’t just have to prove we were equal. We had to prove we were better.

Anyway, as I read the articles I wrote for the Ramshorn Journal 50 years ago, I begin to realize why I had no memory of having written them. It gradually becomes less strange that I still don’t really remember much of my time at Huston-Tillotson College, one of the historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in America. But I needed that experience, even if I did pay dearly for it.

Click in the gallery; click on the picture, click the icon with an “i” in a circle, click view full size, click the plus sign to enlarge the image.

24th Anniversary of 9/11 Attack on America: A Reminder of Our Connection to Each Other

I’m thinking about the upcoming commemoration of the 24^th Anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attack on America. There will be the annual event in New York City.

In Muscatine, Iowa, there will be the annual Patriot Day ceremonies sponsored by the City of Muscatine and the Muscatine Fire Department. After the morning ceremony, the Memorial Stair Climb will begin at 8:52 a.m. at the Muscatine High School football stadium bleachers.

The KCRG news reported on August 7, 2025 that 3 more World Trade Center victims were identified last month by DNA testing. The New York medical examiner’s office continues testing the remains recovered from the wreckage.

Like many people, I remember where I was and what I was doing when the attack happened in 2001. I was the general hospital psychiatric consultant on duty at the hospital at the time. I was hustling up the stairs back to my office after responding to a consultation request.

I happened to glance at the big television screen on the wall of the main floor lobby in the south part of the hospital. I watched in horror as a newscast showed the fire and smoke coming from one of the towers, which I later learned came from the plane crashing into the building. The rest of the day was full of reports of the attack.

When we visited New York City in 2017, we saw the Memorial & Museum Plaza as well as the Survivor Tree, the Callery Pear. It was discovered at Ground Zero, scarred and scorched but alive and replanted at the Memorial in 2010 after being nursed back to health at the city nursery. It is still alive and well today. It remains a symbol of strength, hope, and a reminder of our connection to each other.

Big Mo Pod Show: “Hickory Smoked Blues”

Today, the Big Mo Pod Show was about how blues music can you help you “exorcise your demons” as Big Mo himself put it today. Isn’t that what it’s always about? And I can’t explain how that even works.

But I don’t always understand how it works. I’m going to admit I’m not sure at all how one song last night by Toranzo Cannon would help anybody, and that’s “I Hate Love.” Of course, it’s contradictory and ironic. I’m not going to pretend I know what blues music is all about and how it can sometimes heal your inner soul pain.

But a lot of people believe that blues can help you get past the pain and it seems that it works paradoxically. I don’t always get it. But I’ve been listening to the Big Mo Blues Show for years.

That reminds me. We had a couple of guys install motorized window shades yesterday and one of them was a blues musician. He plays bass guitar and I gather he plays in local bands. He wore the best hat; it’s a fedora! Sena and I sort of ribbed him about it, but I had a fedora like that once, decades ago. It was gray with a narrow leather band. I don’t have it anymore.

I told him that I wore it while I was interviewing for residency. I wore it to dinner in a hotel in St. Louis, Missouri and a woman passing through the hotel restaurant looked at me and said with a grin, “Wear that hat!”

Sena reacted as if she’d never heard that story before. The fedora guy thought it was funny. Fedora man had that style to him that I think is fairly common in musicians. They look and may act in a way that makes you notice them. I don’t think you can always tell what somebody does just by the way he or she dresses. But when he told us he was a musician who liked the blues, that didn’t surprise us.

What did surprise us was that he didn’t recognize the name of a prominent blues musician in Iowa and a lot of other places—Kevin Burt. But he did have a sense of humor.

I think most blues musicians have a kind of slant sense of humor. It probably comes out in some of the music. I’m more drawn to blues music that makes me chuckle. On the other hand, I liked one song on the blues show last night they didn’t discuss today on the pod show. It’s not funny and I had a hard time finding the lyrics for it. It’s “I’ll Always Remember You” by the Robert Cray Band. I found a couple of sites I think got the lyrics below wrong and didn’t make sense. The way I heard the song the lines went like this:

“Old clothes and worn-out shoes
Empty bottles and a book that’s way past due.”

The line I keep finding that I think is wrong is the second one, which is often written as “Empty bottles and I put this way past due.”

I think the line “a book that’s way past due” makes more sense because it conveys a sense of regret, waste and loss and promises not kept and opportunities lost and probably a half-dozen other ideas that you probably can’t easily encapsulate. It evokes sorrow that is only partly fixed by the letter’s promise— “I’ll always remember you.”

That may not completely heal you, but it’s a little like something I read about kintsugi. It’s about mending broken pottery with gold in a literal sense. In a metaphorical sense, it’s about repairing what might be broken emotionally broken in us and, despite not being the same as we were before we were broken, we’re somehow still functional and healed though not perfect. A psychiatry resident blogger wrote about that.

One More Time: Another Ramshorn Journal Editorial

This is the 2^nd editorial I wrote in 1975 about fraternities during my freshman year at Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University, one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs). There are a couple of misspelled words (“incidence” should be incidents; “altruish” should be altruism).

On the whole, it’s a more developed piece than the editorial about college hazing. I thought then and still think that Help Week should be substituted for Hell Week.

ramshorn journal vol 38, dec 1975 Click the image; Click the little icon circle with i; hover over the image and click the plus sign to enlarge.

I Was a College News Reporter After All

It turns out I was a news reporter for the Huston-Tillotson College Ramshorn Journal after all! I wrote a few of them, including an editorial about Greek fraternity hazing in 1975. I’m including it in this post below. It has an apparent typo in it (“Motherhood” should be brotherhood).

It’s typical for fired up freshman writing. I see lots of youthful idealism, energy, and a drive for change. How did I forget so much of what I was over the last 50 years?

I wrote “Is Hazing Necessary” (the question mark is missing) because I saw it going on in my freshman year. I can’t remember whether the fraternity members gave me flak about it or not. But I guess I can’t say it didn’t happen just because I can’t remember it.

Hazing still happens, as I found out when I did a quick web search today. I still don’t know why. Even The University of Iowa had an incident in November of 2024.

I don’t know how I lost such an important part of my past. And I don’t know what led me to recover it. I do know that if Sena hadn’t pursued the search after I was ready to forget it, I wouldn’t have these fragments of my personal history now. And I’m grateful to Huston-Tillotson Downs-Jones University Library for their help.

Ramshorn Journal Oct.1975 (page 4) Click the image; Click the little icon circle with i; hover over the image and click the plus sign to enlarge.

In Memory of Leonard Tow, Founder of the Tow Foundation and Humanism in Medicine

I just found out that Leonard Tow died on August 10, 2025. In humility, I express my gratitude and respect for his creation of the Tow Foundation, a big part of that being the Humanism in Medicine Award, of which I am one of the many recipients over the years. I hope this great tradition goes on forever, a reminder to doctors, patients, and families of the great rewards and greater responsibilities in medicine.

I thank Dr. Jeanne M. Lackamp, now Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, Psychiatrist in Chief for University Hospitals and Director of the University Hospital Behavioral Health Institute for nominating me and Dr. Jerold Woodhead, Professor Emeritus in Pediatrics at University of Iowa Health Care for placing the pin in my lapel. That was in 2007.

Leonard Tow established the Humanism in Medicine award to foster the development of humanistic doctors. They exemplify compassion and respect for others, humility and empathy.

That is how I will remember Leonard Tow.

Pondering a Mystery in My Past at Huston-Tillotson University

I found a photo of me in the Downs-Jones Library files at Huston-Tillotson University (formerly Huston-Tillotson College) today. It’s the featured image for this post. I was going down memory lane looking at old pictures of former classmates and teachers at H-TU and—there I was. It’s a photo of me in 1975, and it looks like I’m sitting in the Downs-Jones Library on campus posing for the picture. I don’t remember sitting for it. I had hair then and afros were in style.

I was a little worried about copyright issues just downloading or printing the image until I finally noticed the icons for doing both on the web page. I guess they wouldn’t be there if it were prohibited.

What’s also funny is that the caption above my picture says “James Amos—Reporter.” This meant that I was contributing to the college newspaper, The Ramshorn Journal. Funny thing is, I couldn’t remember writing anything for it.

I tried to find copies of the Ramshorn Journal for 1975, but there were only records for issues published in the early to mid-1960s. I guess I’ll never know what I wrote, if anything.

I’m surprised there would be any photos of me at all since I didn’t graduate from H-TU but transferred to Iowa State University and graduated from there in 1985.

I clipped out my photo from a few others. The group included the sponsor of the Ramshorn Journal, the editor, and the typist. That makes it looks I was a part of the staff. I’ll be darned if I remember doing anything for it. If I had written anything, I would think I’d have kept copies. But I have no documents proving it. I don’t have copies of the Ramshorn either. I’m a writer by inclination and habit so this is a mystery.

As I looked through yearbooks, I couldn’t find anyone I could ask about it either. That makes sense because it was 50 years ago. On the other hand, if there are digitized issues of the Ramshorn Journal from the 1960s, there might be some later issues kept somewhere in the library. Maybe there’s something with my byline on it.

If I get curious enough about it, I might ask somebody at the Downs-Jones Library if they could check on it.

Big Mo Pod Show: The Yellow Butane Curse and Other Fun Things

I got off my schedule last week on listening to the Big Mo blues show, but as it turns out, he was gone last Friday. I heard last night’s blues show and heard Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Riviera Paradise.

So, of course that was not on the list of songs for the pod show today, but Big Mo did mention that Riviera Paradise and the name of the collection, which was In Step was related to Stevie Ray Vaughn’s having been successful at staying sober from substance use disorder for a year. The name In Step was evidently related to his going through a 12-step program to achieve sobriety. I learned about Stevie Ray Vaughn early in my residency (if I recall correctly) from a University of Iowa psychiatrist who is now the chair of the psychiatry department.

Big Mo Pod Show 072 – “The Yellow Butane Curse”

The name of today’s pod show was “The Yellow Butane Curse” which is about superstition. I’m not sure if this means that blues music enthusiasts are prone to being superstitious, but Big Mo did admit to believing that yellow butane lighters were unlucky for him.

This is probably going to seem like a disconnected transition but I missed last week’s pod show (“He plays what can’t be written down” see below), which was not the usual format of song talk but an interview with a successful local musician, Merrill Miller. I don’t know anything about him except what I learned in the podcast. I got a kick out of listening to a couple of musicians just more or less shooting the breeze about living the musician’s life.

Merrill mentioned playing in places like Strawberry Point, Iowa. I don’t have a musical connection to Strawberry Point, and I never went anywhere there that was connected with music like Merrill did. In fact, the only reason I was in Strawberry Point was because I was part of a survey crew staking Highway 13 between there and Elkader to straighten out some of the many curves in the road. We didn’t have much time to listen to music.

One piece of Iowa history they talked about was the issue of black musicians not being able to find a place to stay in this area because of racism. They had to find somebody they knew who would put them up while they were in town for a gig. Funny where a rambling, relaxed conversation will sometimes lead you.

I had few connections to music while I was growing up. My mother tried to teach my little brother and I how to play piano. It was an old out of tune piano. I managed to learn where the “middle C note” was—and that’s about all I recall about it. I took guitar lessons and got pretty good at making buzzing notes with it. Man, I could make that guitar buzz, although my teacher got a good laugh out of it—and couldn’t get me to break the habit. I could blow into a harmonica (what real musicians like Merrill and Big Mo call a harp), but I couldn’t kidnap any notes out of it. I tried picking notes on a banjo for a short while, had a second stab at the guitar, and got not much more than callouses on my fingers before moving on to non-music making careers.

You can be glad about that. Now about that suggestion that I have for a tee shirt design about my favorite faux sponsor created by Big Mo, Mayree of the legendary Mayree’s hand battered catfish; it’s better because it’s battered. I wonder if there’s any movement on that.

What Dr. Melvin P. Sikes Said

While yesterday’s post on Dr. Melvin P. Sikes was mainly about my personal impressions of him as a teacher, there are a couple of web resources which gives a little more texture about him apart from my imperfect memory and limited experience.

One of them is a formal course outline and evaluations he and another teacher wrote in 1975, which was the year I first encountered him when I was a freshman at Huston-Tillotson College at that time. I know it seems like a tough read, but I was pretty impressed by what teachers said about him in the evaluation part of the document entitled “Report on Teaching in Multi-Cultural/Multi-Ethnic Schools (1974-75).”

The pdf document is 39 pages long, but I suggest focusing on the student teacher evaluations of his course. That starts on page 19. They all praise it, without exception. Many note that he didn’t really just lecture. One of the evaluators called him “supercalifragalisticexpialadoches!” Not sure if that’s spelled just right (it’s on p.33 so you can check it yourselves), but the point is well made—he was viewed as an extraordinarily gifted teacher.

Dr. Sikes’ comments start on pp.35-39 (Attachment D, entitled “Teaching in Multi-Cultural/Multi-Ethnic Schools; EDP F382 -Summer 1975l Professor Melvin Sikes) and I think that’s also worth reading. It’s short and without lofty, academic terminology.

The reading list caught my eye. I looked for Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” which had been published in 1952, but it wasn’t on the list. That book has special meaning for me personally, because when I encountered Dr. Sikes in 1975, I was a freshman at one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Huston-Tillotson College as it was then known. I was born and raised in Iowa and had never been in the southern United States. I sort of identified with the unnamed protagonist because the first section of the book deals with his experience at a southern black college.

It was a culture shock. I never saw anyone like Bledsoe. In fact, I never personally met the president of H-TC (now Huston-Tillotson University as of 2005), who was Dr. John Q. Taylor King, Sr. at the time. My main connection was Dr. Hector Grant, who recruited me while he was visiting Mason City, Iowa in connection with support from a local church. I still don’t know what happened to Dr. Grant. It’s like he dropped off the face of the earth.

Anway, I wanted to share another item I pulled off the web about Dr. Sikes. It’s a newspaper article about him published in the West Texas Times issue published May 4,1977. It’s in the collection of the Texas Tech University on line, with the link to the main front page story “Judge Orders Officials to Clean Up the Jail,” interestingly enough. It automatically downloads a pdf of the newspaper issue to your computer when you click the link. I’m just going to try to summarize it and pull some quotes.

The title of the story about Dr. Sikes is down the page, “UT’s Dr. Sikes Helps Students Know Themselves and Others.” The story begins with an anecdote about an interaction Dr. Sikes had with a teacher. It involved a black student coming to her with a complaint that a white student had hit him and he used bad language in describing it. The teacher was going to discipline the kid about his bad language, which Dr. Sikes questioned.

Sikes thought the teacher should have first gotten more information about what the student actually experienced in the encounter. The implication was that if she had listened first, she might not have jumped down his throat about his bad language.

The author of the news article writes that, according to Sikes, “I want my students to be more flexible, to understand that people are first people,” the professor likes to say. “I want them to grow out of looking at a color of a skin and making determinations, good, bad, or indifferent.” He goes on to say,

“I don’t even want them to look at blacks and say, ‘these are great people.’ I just want them to look at blacks and say ‘these are people.’

Quotes from Sikes:

“Before you can deal with another in a meaningful kind of way, you have to find some meaning and purpose in your own life—which means defining yourself….”

About teaching:

“Yes, I was lucky, I was taught by my parents, to some degree. But then I had teachers who taught this to me… And much of whatever I am… is the result of teachers and their concern—black teachers, white teachers.”

About our differences:

“If we’re all the same, we can’t make unique contributions because the contributions would be the same.”

The author of the story points out that Dr. Sikes often took student teachers to Huston-Tillotson College to see predominantly black students. The author also writes that Dr. Sikes mentions something about politics which rings a bell.

“He [Dr. Sikes] talks about the politicalization of education, and says that educating has been taken away from the educator and usurped by the politician.”

On teaching the teachers:

Dr. Sikes says: “People don’t realize how important you are and you don’t realize how important you are. You’re molding and shaping human lives, millions of lives, who will become, depending upon how you mold and help shape or help them become.”

“Now the doctor deals with his patient for a short length of time, and the patient dies and he buries his mistake, or he lives and he’s all right. But we can’t bury our mistakes. They walk around and haunt us and other people…sometimes their living is death. But people never realize that it’s teachers—we are the ones who have power.”

And finally, about Mel Sikes himself, one of his students says,

“Sikes is intense, loquacious and supremely personal. He immediately grabs you and talks on a person-to-person wavelength. He tells his students a lot about himself, his struggles as a black and as a radically caring person. He says he would die if it would help all people relate better. And he would.”

There was a lot more to Melvin Sikes than a lemon-yellow leisure suit.

Pride or Rhetoric? What Would Dr. Melvin P. Sikes Say?

I noticed the headlines about the DEI flap at The University of Iowa, the one with the official apparently spilling the beans about University of Iowa’s DEI program not going away despite being illegal while maybe being unaware of being filmed. I’m not going to retell the story.

However, it does remind me of a time back in the 1970s in the days of affirmative action when I was a freshman student at Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin, Texas.

I learned about tenacity to principle and practice from a visiting African American professor in educational psychology from the University of Texas. It was 1975. Dr. Melvin P. Sikes paced back and forth across the Agard-Lovinggood auditorium stage in a lemon-yellow leisure suit as he talked about the importance of bringing about change in society.

He was a scholar yet decried the pursuit of the mere trappings of scholarship, exhorting us to work directly for change where it was needed most. He didn’t assign term papers, but sent me and another freshman to the Austin Police Department. The goal evidently was to make them nervous by our requests for the Uniform Crime Report, which Dr. Sikes suspected might reveal a tendency to arrest blacks more frequently than whites. He wasn’t satisfied with merely studying society’s institutions; he worked to change them for the better. Although we were probably just as nervous as the police were, this real-life lesson about the importance of applying principles of change directly to society was awkward.

Nothing like confronting social issues head on, right?

We would have preferred a term paper. We sat in the police station looking at the Uniform Crime Report, which was the only resource we could get. I think we were there a couple of hours; it felt a lot longer than that. The officer who got us the paperwork was polite, but a little stiff and wasn’t really open to anything like an interview or anything close to that. I can’t remember what we came up with as a write-up for what felt like a fiasco. I’m pretty sure we didn’t bring about anything even close to change. It was a humbling experience. Maybe that was the point but I’ll never know.

Dr. Melvin P. Sikes was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen although he didn’t see combat. He was the dean of two historically black colleges, a clinical psychologist, and a University of Texas professor. He died in 2012 after a long and successful career as a psychologist, teacher, and author.

I found a podcast about him which was sponsored by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health and which aired February 15, 2024. It’s an hour long, but there are segments of interviews of him in 1972 that I consider fascinating. A couple of times he says something which I wish the interviewer had allowed him to expand on. The gist of it is that we need to have a system of education which allows people to speak from the standpoint of pride rather than rhetoric. I think what he might have meant is that it would be wonderful if we felt secure and confident in ourselves to express our minds sincerely. The word “rhetoric” makes me think of talk that is persuasive, even impressive, but maybe insincere. I think it still fits today.