Health Sciences Center Library
Oral History Project
Interview with Larry J. Gordon, MS, MPH
March 16, 1999 et seq.
This is an interview with Larry J. Gordon, presently retired from state government and residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he is an Adjunct Professor at the University of New Mexico. Mr. Gordon has enjoyed one of the most distinguished careers in public health in contemporary New Mexico. He joined the New Mexico Department of Public Health as a sanitarian in Grant County, New Mexico in 1950 and worked in the field of public health continuously until his retirement in 1988 as New Mexico’s Cabinet Secretary for Health & Environment. He has been Director of the Albuquerque Environmental Health Department, was President of the American Public Health Association in 1982, and has filled virtually every position of leadership within both the Albuquerque and the state public health departments at one time or another in his distinguished career. This interview was begun on March 16th, 1999 and continued over four subsequent sessions. It was finally completed in June of 1999. I, the interviewer, am Professor Jake Spidle of the UNM Department of History.
SPIDLE: Regarding the technical details of this interview process: a rough transcript of this interview will be prepared and given to me for review and corrections. You will then receive a copy for your own review, making necessary spelling corrections, etc. and editorial changes as you see fit. Following those reviews, a final, archival copy will become the official record of the interview, and will be available for researchers and scholars in the future.
Just before we met this morning, Archives Manager Janet Johnson handed me this copy of your work, Environmental Health and Protection Adventures, and obviously I need to read this to fill in gaps or develop questions to pursue in our future sessions. That will be my homework prior to our next meeting.
GORDON: I took a copy of that and my resume and some articles and left them for you with a secretary at your department office a year or more ago.
SPIDLE: Looking at your vitae here, you’re clearly not an average public health staff member in terms of your New Mexico activities, let alone having been President of the American Public Health Association. Your accomplishments make it obvious that you’ve been involved in essential public health issues and developments at a national level in addition to keeping the state’s public health apparatus on the cutting edge. So, I want to interview you as a New Mexico public health figure, but at some point in the process, also, I’d like to address your national connections and service. Some graduate student may want to look at what you say about the development of environmental health in New Mexico in the 60’s, but somebody in Connecticut may want to know about Larry Gordon, who was a major figure in the APHA.
I’ve already said that I anticipate this interview may take two or three sessions, so let’s begin with a basic personal background: when and where you were born, what kind of family you grew up in, and so on.
GORDON: I was born in Tipton, Oklahoma in 1926, the second child of Andrew and Deweylee Stewart Gordon, who had variously been farmers, ranchers and schoolteachers. They both attended the University of Oklahoma and Texas Tech University, and came to New Mexico about 1928. They came here because they applied to schools and were hired at McGaffey, which was a school near Gallup, part of the county system there. The reason they chose that isolated location on top of the Zuni Mountain was because the school started earlier, and they could start getting paid earlier. When they arrived in Gallup, they had to borrow money from banker Glenn Emmons to buy groceries.
They taught school for a while. My father returned to the University of New Mexico and subsequently became an employee of the US Forest Service at Tijeras, later the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then the Soil Erosion Service, which was later termed the Soil Conservation Service. He worked for that Service and the Bureau of Land Management for many years, and then from the Army Corps of Engineers. His primary field was in range management and conservation.
In 1946, my parents became the first Ranch Managers of the New Mexico Boys Ranch and later resigned following a policy disagreement. They did some farming for a while, and in later years were successful with real estate interests. Both have passed away.
My brother, Ladd, and I had parallel careers. We both attended the University of New Mexico, and we both served in the Navy Hospital Corps as pharmacist’s mates. Following graduation from UNM in 1949, Ladd went to work for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish as an entry grade patrolman. He became superintendent of the bird farm at Carlsbad, was a wildlife biologist in the Gila Wilderness Area, became Chief of Information and Education for the Game and Fish Department in Santa Fe, and later Chief of Law Enforcement for the Department in Santa Fe. He was then appointed Director and served in that position for seventeen years, possibly the longest-running appointee in that position, except for Elliott Barker. Mr. Barker was a fine gentleman who lived to the age of 101 or so.
SPIDLE: Yes, I think he held that post some thirty years.
GORDON: Then my brother worked for the National Rifle Association for a while, subsequently retired following a number of years with Ducks Unlimited. He passed away prematurely from the toxic effects of tobacco at age 67. He had an illustrious career and a national reputation.
SPIDLE: Yes. When I saw his name in your manuscript, I recognized his name and knew who he was as a state official. It’s interesting that there’s such a pattern of public service in the family a generation before you and your brother became state employees, and that there’s an early environmentalism evident. I don’t think that term was even in use at that time, though.
GORDON: It was not a term of common usage. I suppose the closest to it was conservation, which isn’t the same.
SPIDLE: So you were reared in various parts of the state, weren’t you?
GORDON: I think I went to fifteen different schools in New Mexico and southern Arizona. They included McGaffey; a little place called Guam that no longer exists. Guam was an AT&SF station for section hands where the laborers lived, and their children attended the school. Coolidge, a trading post, was the nearest post office. And subsequently such schools as Magdalena, Tijeras, Five Points, Stronghurst, Eugene Field, and schools in Las Cruces and Roswell. I also attended Safford High School and Gila Junior College in Arizona, the University of New Mexico, the University of Oklahoma, and the University Of Michigan School Of Public Health.
SPIDLE: What were the dates you were at these schools, do you recall?
GORDON: I commenced attending Gila Junior College prior to graduating from high school, because World War II was raging and I was eager to get some college education. Safford High School awarded me a diploma in 1943. Then I was at UNM for a while one or two semesters. I then transferred to the University of Oklahoma bearing in mind they had three semesters a year during the war years; then back to UNM in 1944, where I joined the Navy and served as a Pharmacist’s Mate for almost two years. I was discharged on July 4, 1946. My brother was discharged in March 1946, and both of us returned to UNM in the fall of 1946. I included some news clippings about my brother along with information on my own career which I gave to the Medical History Library.
SPIDLE: Are you a UNM alumnus?
GORDON: Yes. I earned my .S. and M.S. here; the first in 1949, the second in ‘51. In 1953 I was sitting in the office of New Mexico State Health Officer Dr. James R. Scott one morning --- he was very fond of his environmental-type employees; he called us his boys. He looked around the room and said, Now Charlie Caldwell here (the director of the Division of Sanitary Engineering) has his MPH from the University of North Carolina, and Carl Henderson has a master’s from the University of Missouri, and Carl Jensen here has a master’s degree in Industrial Hygiene from Georgia Tech, and Jim Doughty here has a master’s degree in Public Health from the University of California School of Public Health at Berkeley, and Larry, what do you have? Well, Doctor, I have a master’s degree in Biology. He looked at me and said, Son, we got to get you off to school! (Both laugh)
They allowed me to choose the school of public health, so they sent me off to the University of Michigan, a very prestigious school at that time, and I earned my MPH there in 1954 and had the highest academic rating in my class.
SPIDLE: How interesting that when I ask where you were raised, it was all over the state. Think of the future relevance of that experience, when you knew personally so many corners of New Mexico. You actually started, in the tradition of your parents, as a high school teacher; where was that?
GORDON: At La Joya; the school no longer exists. It was an independent school district east of the river, south of Belen. My folks owned land near there a farm and ranch -- and that’s the reason I happened to apply there. Just as trivia, perhaps: the whole complex of Game Department reserves Casa Colorado, Bernardo and La Joya have been subsumed as the Ladd S. Gordon Waterfowl Management Complex.’
SPIDLE: Oh, I didn’t know that! I gather you decided rather soon that you didn’t want to continue as a teacher.
GORDON: I wasn’t really trained to be a teacher. It was a job that I was glad to have, but somewhere I’d seen a notice of an opening for a sanitarian. I didn’t know what that was, but the notice said you had to have a degree in science and own a car. I met those requirements. My then-fiancée, Nedra Callender, also had a degree in science, but didn’t have a car, so she couldn’t qualify. I applied and was hired by the Seventh District Health Department, with headquarters in Silver City. Fortunately I had a great boss, John C. Mitchell, who was what today would be called an MD/MPH. In those days it was a CPH,’ meaning a Certificate of Public Health; his was from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. I was fortunate to work for him, as he was a good mentor.
SPIDLE: So he was a professional public health man, as opposed to a local doctor who?
GORDON: New Mexico hasn’t had many of that type -- many states have where a retired physician feels qualified for a public health position. We have had, for the most part, District Health Officers who are actually trained in public health.
SPIDLE: This man clearly fits that mold, although I don’t recognize his name. How long was he there?
GORDON: He went there in the mid 30’s and retired in the 60’s. He probably had 30 years service at least. At that time, New Mexico had ten health districts; we now have six. Every one of the District Health Officers at that time had public health training.
SPIDLE: Do you know the name J. Roslyn Earp?
GORDON: Yes, I know the name, but never met him. He was apparently considered a giant in public health. Another was Godfrey. I’ve always had an institutional interest in public health history, and I used to listen to Dr. Mitchell telling stories. I later learned from Myrtle Greenfield and Carl Henderson. I thought the history was important, so I paid attention to them.
SPIDLE: They are important, and it’s only through people like you that we can get a real feel for that history. I want to come back and ask you about some of these people later, but right now let’s stay with you and your career. You went to Silver City, where you were interviewed; was that one-on-one?
GORDON: Actually, Dr. Mitchell came by our farmhouse one night at La Joya to interview me. Sanitarians were not specifically trained in those days; they just had to a brief period of in-service training with somebody else, and they had to have a degree in science. I worked out of the Seventh District Health Office in Silver City about two years.
SPIDLE: What were the facilities like there, at that time?
GORDON: The district office, as was typical of health offices in those days, was in the basement of the courthouse, literally under the sewer pipes. (Spidle chuckles) It didn’t bother me; I thought it was fine! I’m just telling you that’s the way it was. I was pleased to have a job at $225 a month plus six cents a mile for my car. When I was married in August of the year I went to Silver City that was May or June of 1950 Dr. Mitchell also hired my wife, Nedra, to analyze all the water and food and milk samples for that district because that was before we’d set up a transportation system, and we had no air service to fly the samples in to the state laboratory in Albuquerque.
SPIDLE: So those tests were done on the spot.
GORDON: Yes. And they were analyzed professionally in accordance with Standard Methods. My wife not only had her degree, technically in Biology, but actually in Microbiology, came to Albuquerque and trained with Myrtle Greenfield at the State Public Health Laboratory for several weeks before she started analyzing samples.
SPIDLE: In the basement of the courthouse. How many rooms? Three or four?
GORDON: There were about three rooms. Dr. Mitchell had an office, then there was a small room where the laboratory was, plus a couple of desks; one desk was mine and the other a reception area where the secretary and the public health nurse had desks. I was pretty naïve in those days, but I stopped one Saturday and discovered that frequently on Saturday mornings Dr. Mitchell gave physicals to the ladies from Hudson Street. I don’t suppose you know about Hudson Street, but Silver City was, and is, a mining town, and Hudson Street was the red light district. When we’d have guests from out of town, we would often drive them over to see Hudson Street.
SPIDLE: So this was good preventive medicine he was practicing, eh? (laughing)
GORDON: I don’t know if this was doing this on his own as a practitioner or as a public health officer. I never asked him. I suspect it was on his own.
SPIDLE: You’ve just made my point: where else would we be able to get a description of what District Seven’s health office was like in 1950, except by talking to someone like you who was there.
What kind of staff was there? There was the doctor, himself; you
GORDON: New Mexico was very forward-looking. I’d have to check Miss Greenfield’s book; I should know this. As I recall, there was a Dr. Carl Buck who did a survey for the American Public Health Association, and found that New Mexico was one of the first states to offer full-time public health services statewide. When I studied at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in the mid-50s, there were many states that still were not offering full-time public health services.
To return to your question, as early as 1935, New Mexico Statutes required that every health district, at a minimum, have a District Health Officer, a public health nurse and a sanitarian. Some districts had additional personnel. Such staffing was available in New Mexico earlier than a number of other states. The Seventh District had a health officer (a physician); a part-time clinician (Dr. Kaufman (sp?) a retired Tyrone physician who held clinics); I remember one public health nurse, Elizabeth Thorne, one clerk and myself in the Grant County office. There was also an office in Deming, part of District Seven, with a public health nurse, a clerk and a sanitarian. Lordsburg, also in District Seven, was serviced out of Silver City.
SPIDLE: So, in those two offices, there were probably a total of ten people for an area the size of Connecticut or so. What, specifically, were your job responsibilities as sanitarian?
GORDON: I think anyone who started out as a sanitarian in that era was fortunate in having broad responsibilities. I had responsibilities ranging from industrial hygiene at Kennecott, to food protection, milk sanitation we had a lot of dairies in those days. Solid waste disposal. Sewage treatment. Water supplies. Insect and rodent control. We did it all. I gained experience that helped me throughout my career.
SPIDLE: Sure! This gave you very wide exposure in public health, and you were learning by doing.
GORDON: To a large degree, yes.
SPIDLE: You got the basic science training, but the real special expertise in public health came a bit later. How did you, as a very young man, deal authoritatively with Kennecott Copper?
GORDON: It wasn’t difficult. Of course, maybe we weren’t doing the things that were later controversial. The major issues tailings disposal and air pollution and such we didn’t have authority in those days. I later got state laws enacted for those and other environmental health issues such as Occupational Health and Safety.
SPIDLE: You didn’t have big sticks to hold over their heads at that time.
GORDON: No. There weren’t many environmental health laws in those days, just state board of health regulations. They were enforceable, but they were not as broad and effective later statutes.
SPIDLE: Yes, I’m asking questions from a 1990’s perspective, whereas in the 1950’s environmental concerns weren’t as much in the public consciousness.
GORDON: That’s right. The beginnings of the environmental movement were largely coincidental with Earth Day, which we’ll get to later.
SPIDLE: our first tenure in New Mexico public health, then, began in Silver City.
GORDON: Yes, and about a year later I was invited to apply for a promotion to the state office in Santa Fe, where I became State Food Sanitarian’ under Carl Henderson, who was the Supervisor of Food Sanitation. I was also responsible for training all the new employees state wide, not just in food sanitation, but in everything involving environmental health at that time. In effect, I also became the training officer for the division of what was then called Sanitary Engineering and Sanitation. Charles Caldwell was the director of the division, and there were a number of other supervisors in the division.
SPIDLE: So that position was more administrative, as opposed to hands-on.
GORDON: It was both. I did field work with personnel; I did quality control, and I trained every field person who was hired. Those were enjoyable years.
SPIDLE: This was still was part of the basic learning, via doing, of public health.
GORDON: In 1953, Dr. Scott suggested I return to school, and I attended the University of Michigan School of Public Health and earned my Master of Public Health degree. I had been told that when I returned I would be promoted, but that did not occur. I found myself doing the same things, and became frustrated. About that time, in 1955, I was asked if I would be interested in being the Chief Sanitarian for what was then called the Albuquerque Health Department, and I accepted the position at a significant salary increase. When I announced to Charlie Caldwell that I was leaving -- I thought the world of Charlie, by the way; he was an excellent sanitary engineer. Charlie looked at me and said, Why are you leaving? I told him that, for one thing, they were going to pay me a good deal more, and I told him what the figures were. He said, Well, we could’ve matched that. I said, Well, why didn’t you say so yesterday? It was well that I accepted the position in Albuquerque, however.
When I came to Albuquerque I was treated well, but I found that I was the only person in the department, and one of the few in the state, who had any public health training; certainly I was the only one in Albuquerque, including the Indian Health Service or anyone else around. So it was professionally lonely. I don’t think anyone else in the city’s health department even had a degree.
It took me a while to start observing that the director, every day, came in and a lot of the staff would go over to the old Hilton Hotel now La Posada and drink coffee and talk about the wrestling matches the night before on television, and then the director would go back to his laundry, and another employee would go to his dog kennels, and another to his farm in Los Lunas, and I was left alone. And some of these so-called sanitarians and I use the title loosely in this case; they only had it as a job title would go out in the daytime and make inspections and collect inspection fees which never got to the city treasury.
Then, they’d recommend some piece of equipment or, I remember, one practice was to recommend lindane vaporizers to control insects. The vaporizers were later made illegal. They would return at night and sell the equipment or the vaporizers! Between 8:00 and 5:00 they’d recommend the item, and come back in the evening to make the sale.
This was not at all unusual. Albuquerque had the lowest food protection rating, by a US Public Health Service rating method we, in the state and possibly, the country. So I asked the Director if we could at least ask employees to return to the office by 5:00; at least to check in. And he said, Well, I don’t want them to do anything I don’t want to do. So I started training sessions, and devoted all day Fridays to training staff. I had guest speakers, I gave lectures and used training films, and it made most of the staff so mad they resigned. (Spidle laughs) I started hiring people with degrees in science. One employee who did not resign this was quite a bit later I looked out my office window one morning and saw Pat Haney down in the parking lot roaring of his city the engine vehicle, and I knew he was already drunk. So a very excellent employee that I had hired, Peter Griego, and I got in Peter’s personal car and followed Haney all day; he was a milk sanitarian. We followed him to Belen and he did nothing but go in a restaurant and have lunch. When he returned to the office I called him in, told him what I had observed, and said, Pat, do you want to resign or shall I just fire you? He said, Oh, you son of a bitch, I’ll just resign. So we got rid of the last incompetent that way. That was after I had been forced to get rid of my own boss, which I don’t recommend. His name was Wayne Stell, and I had finally appealed the things that were happening to the City Manager for action. I was subsequently appointed director of the department.
SPIDLE: This was called the Albuquerque Health Department?
GORDON: At that point it was called the Albuquerque Health Department, which was somewhat a misnomer because most of the programs were environmental health. That was not unusual for early-day health departments. We changed the name of it much later. In 1961 I developed and gained enactment of the New Mexico Municipal Health Act that specifies the jurisdiction, standards, responsibilities and authority for municipal health departments, and it’s still in use. It specifies that the department director must have a master’s degree in public health from a school of public health accredited by the American Public Health Association. A year or two later, I developed and gained approval of a joint powers agreement, approved by the City Commission, the County Commission, the State Board of Finance, and the State Board of Health that changed the name of the Albuquerque Health Department to the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Environmental Health Department, and changed that of the county’s department to Department of Preventive Medicine and Personal Health.
The City operation is still known as the Albuquerque Environmental Health Department. Later, the County opted out of the joint powers agreement, and now both the City and County have Environmental Health Departments.
SPIDLE: It sounds as though the Albuquerque Health Department was purely political patronage.
GORDON: Yes, it was created in the days of Mayor Clyde Tingley because, as I heard it, he didn’t think the state health department was providing suitable supervision to the dozens, if not hundreds, of dairy farms existing in the Albuquerque area in those days. The department began very narrowly with milk sanitation, a meat inspection program, and food sanitation, but most of the department’s employees were political hires and had no training or degrees. I was told that during the election season they’d just disappear, busy with political duties.
SPIDLE: Am I perceiving correctly that there are three health entities here? There’s the Albuquerque, the Bernalillo County. What about the District Health Office?
GORDON: The city functions on environmental health are handled by the Albuquerque Environmental Health Department; county environmental health functions are handled by the Bernalillo County Environmental Health Department. The District doesn’t become involved with environmental health matters in this area.
SPIDLE: So what the District Health Office is doing is vaccinations and that sort of thing, but not environmental health.
GORDON: That’s correct. The Albuquerque Environmental Health Department also has several County functions by virtue of agreements with the County. For example, the City handles the entire city- county air pollution program, the plague surveillance program, the insect and rodent control program, but there is also a County Environmental Health Department that performs a number of environmental health functions. It’s not unusual; we don’t have clear-cut governmental entities in this country. If I were playing god for a day, I would create another comprehensive city-county environmental health department, as I did in the 60’s.
SPIDLE: It would be rationalized. (laughs)
GORDON: Well, of course.
SPIDLE: One thing that occurs to me is that you rather slid into public health; it wasn’t a career choice. What was it that attracted you? That you realized what sanitarians and others were doing was important?
GORDON: I always enjoyed my work. I probably enjoyed it more in those early days than I did later on; it seems strange to say, even though I became New Mexico Cabinet Secretary for Health and Environment. I enjoyed it and never gave serious thought to leaving. It’s not what I was originally trained for. I really planned on a career in conservation, range management, or wildlife management. My brother and I both applied for federal refuge managers’ jobs, and we both rated very high on the tests. We thought we were both going to get those jobs, but were told that since our degrees weren’t in wildlife management, we didn’t qualify. It’s funny, especially in my brother’s case, that he couldn’t qualify for refuge manager but became Director of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish!
SPIDLE: When you came to Albuquerque in 1955, you’d been to school here, so you probably weren’t entering alien territory, but were doubtless conversant with some of the political heavyweights.
GORDON: I either knew them or knew of them.
SPIDLE: Because it seems to me that, although there was a technical dimension, the political dimension was always important.
GORDON: There’s always a political dimension in anything in government. I sometimes have trouble accepting that, but that’s how you get things done. Everything happens through the city council, the state legislature, the congress.
SPIDLE: So while you were developing a technical expertise, you were also beginning to develop that other awareness.
GORDON: I’m proud that in everything I did, I never took polls, so to speak. No one ever told me we needed an Albuquerque Environmental Health Department or, later on, one of the things I was proudest of: creating and directing the New Mexico Scientific Laboratory. Or creating the Environmental Improvement Agency or the State Health Agency or playing a role in creating the Department of Health and Environment. A lot of these steps were very controversial; there was no ground swell to get an Air Pollution Control Act passed or the Water Pollution Act, or Occupational Health and Safety, or the City Environmental Health Code. There was no public sentiment regarding these innovations. You just do these things and hope for public and political support.
And I lost a lot of them, too! I had some awfully good ideas that never went anywhere. (laughs) These were things that, as a professional, I thought needed to be done, and I did them. Some worked and some didn’t.
SPIDLE: Coming to Albuquerque after your public health training in Michigan, you were isolated to a large extent. How did you keep up what was going on in this very technical field you’d entered?
GORDON: The City was good to me in allowing me to attend and participate in national conferences. I started getting involved in the American Public Health Association and the National Environmental Health Association; the Conference of Local Environmental Health Administrators; the Association of Food and Drug Officials of the U.S. All these groups have journals or newsletters, so I didn’t find it difficult to keep current. In fact, we were ahead in many areas.
SPIDLE: Yes, that’s what strikes me as unusual about New Mexico. Poor and way off at the edge of things, and yet I get the sense that in public health, at least, it’s always been somewhat a leader!
GORDON: I think that’s true. Albuquerque was one of the first cities in the nation, believe it or not, to get a very good air pollution ordinance passed that I proposed back in the 1950’s. I should say, at the outset, that obviously I talk a lot about environmental health, because I’ve been more deeply involved in that than some other aspects of public health, although I was involved in those too. But environmental health is half of the field of public health in terms of expenditures and numbers of personnel. It’s larger than any other single component of the field of public health, and is largest single component of the field of public health.
SPIDLE: Now.
GORDON: Now. And I think it probably always has been. In the early days you’d have one sanitarian and one public health nurse. If you look at the objectives of the American Public Health Association when it was formed some 125 years ago, they were to promote personal and environmental health.
SPIDLE: And you probably touch more lives by cleaning up the water, or milk, than.
GORDON: You touch all lives, every one, and I think many other aspects of public health do too. Many other aspects of public health practice such as dental health, maternal and child health, nutrition and immunizations are really aimed at specific groups.
SPIDLE: I think the point you made about half the budget and half the personnel is critically important; I wouldn’t have guessed that proportion.
GORDON: One must analyze all the figures to determine what belongs in what category. What happens in the U.S. Public Health Service is not all public health; what happens in schools of public health is not all public health. Some is, but a lot is health care, and there is a difference. So you go through the figures and determine what part really is public health.
SPIDLE: I’d like us to discuss at more length in our next meeting the Albuquerque Environmental Health Department. For the rest of this session, please tell me about Dr. James Scott, Myrtle Greenfield, Jim Doughty, the structure of the New Mexico public health apparatus in the late 40’s and 50’s.
GORDON: Probably the main structure was having a state health director, a Laboratory Division, a Division of Sanitary Engineering and Sanitation (now termed the New Mexico Environment Department), and the Division of Nursing. There were, obviously, some support functions such as Finance, Purchasing, etc. Most of the programs, though, were delivered by public health nurses, sanitarians and engineers. Is that what you’re asking about?
SPIDLE: Yes. Let’s talk about the laboratory. It was physically on the UNM campus at that time.
GORDON: It still is. Myrtle Greenfield, of course, had been the only director. As I recall, the public health laboratory was established in 1919 one of the earliest things the first State Board of Health did. About the same time, the Board created a Division of Sanitary Engineering and Sanitation. Myrtle Greenfield stayed there until the mid-50s. I later had her appointed to my Albuquerque City Health Advisory Board. She was a task mistress. She ran her laboratory with an iron fist, did it right, and insisted on quality results in the entire operation.
SPIDLE: I got some testimony about her from Carl Henderson. I think he cut his teeth as a diener in that laboratory. But it was still a small operation.
GORDON: Well, it was a small state! And there was a small staff, compared to what we have today. I think it met the needs we had at that time.
SPIDLE: When you came back from your public health graduate work in Ann Arbor, did you feel as though you were going back into the country, or did you feel it was comparable to what was going on in other states?
GORDON: I had a couple of weeks of field work while at the University of Michigan and visited some Michigan counties, and I had no reason to think we weren’t doing things as well here as there.
SPIDLE: What about the constraints of money?
GORDON: Every state has financial constraints, and I think, considering our needs and problems at that time, we were able to address needs. You know, we’ve gotten to the point where we’re almost over killing in some areas. We’re spending huge amounts of money now to solve problems that have only small public health impact. In those days, when Charlie Caldwell gained enactment of the Mutual Domestic Water Supply Act in the late 40’s, the death rate from dysentery and diarrhea started decreasing rapidly. It saved lives. It wasn’t just, What are we going to do about radon? or something else that gets people alarmed without conclusive scientific evidence to support the alarm.
SPIDLE: In terms of bang for the buck.
GORDON: The safe water problem is still a concern. But providing safe drinking water to people in the rural areas of New Mexico so they no longer had to obtain drinking water from acequias, was a major step in public health protection.
SPIDLE: I’d like to ask a couple more questions about the laboratory. Given a small laboratory with a small staff in a small state with a small population, but with decently trained people and functioning well.
GORDON: I think we got the service, in quantity and quality, that we needed at that time for the scope of our services, noting, again, that was before I got the New Mexico Air Pollution Control Act passed, and the Water Quality Act, and the Occupational Health and Safety Act, let alone getting into radionuclide analyses. These statutes all required additional laboratory support. But while Miss Greenfield was there, I never had any concerns about the quantity or quality of services from the lab. We did have the problem I mentioned before, of small labs in outlying communities like Silver City. It took a few years to develop transportation systems for sending samples to the public health laboratory so that we did not need those local labs; everything started coming in to the central laboratory.
After Miss Greenfield retired, the state established branch labs in Farmington and Clovis. I think the Clovis lab has closed, but there’s still one in Farmington.
SPIDLE: One last question, about Myrtle Greenfield herself. I have an image in my mind of a stereotypical spinster whose life is her laboratory. Is that anywhere near reality?
GORDON: Very much so. She was a very serious person who didn’t suffer fools gladly; who put down anyone who crossed her. I thought the world of her; I thought she was a great lady.
SPIDLE: It’s interesting, because she was a couple of generations ahead of women as administrators.
GORDON: I’ve been told, and I’ve never researched this, that in some role she was in she had a lot to do with the creation of Centers for Disease Control. I do not know that for a fact.
SPIDLE: So, she wasn’t meek and mild;’ even though she was way ahead of most women in heading up such an enterprise.
GORDON: Not meek and mild, no.
SPIDLE: That’s interesting, and I appreciate the information. I’m going to go back and read what Carl Henderson said about her, because he worked in her laboratory and told me tales which today are horrifying: about dogs’ heads for rabies analysis being sent in wrapped in paper bags and transported by Greyhound buses! Was that era beginning to fade?
GORDON: es. Carl told me that sometimes the duties of the sanitarian were ill-defined. Carl was a sanitary engineer, but sometimes his duties were to paint the health offices or to cut off dogs’ heads, etc.
SPIDLE: The state laboratory, an essential part of the state health effort, was up to snuff’ in your estimation, then.
GORDON: In those years. I started to perceive problems after Miss Greenfield left. You know, when you respect someone a great deal, you don’t call them by their first name, and no one ever called Miss Greenfield, Myrtle; she was always Miss Greenfield.
SPIDLE: Did she turn over authority gracefully when she retired?
GORDON: Yes, I think she did. She had hired Dan Johnson, who functioned as deputy director prior to her retirement. I think it was about that time that she began preparing her book, A History of Public Health in New Mexico. I doubt that she worked on it earlier.
SPIDLE: Let me ask about a couple of other divisions of state health. We’re not talking now of things you did, but using you as a witness to what public health nursing, for example, was like at the time you returned from professional training.
GORDON: There were very well qualified, dedicated public health nurses. To my knowledge, then and now, most of them were trained in public health nursing. When I was first transferred into the state office in Santa Fe in 1951, the Director of Public Health Nursing was Portia Irick, and she ran a good shop, too, and a number of consultants in her office worked with public health nursing staff throughout the state. The ones I knew were very professional.
SPIDLE: What about the sanitation programs?
GORDON: In those days it was called the Division of Sanitary Engineering and Sanitation, and I’ll reiterate about Charlie Caldwell. He had worked with Dr. Mitchell in Silver City, then went in the Army as a sanitary engineer, and returned in 1946. I think he was appointed director of that division at that time. As a sanitary engineer, his prime interests were water and sewage, but he was very good and very supportive in all the areas covered by the division. He had Carl Henderson who had also been a sanitarian in Eddy County, and Jim Doughty (originally a sanitarian in Quay County) in charge of the milk sanitation program, which was very important in those days; milk, historically, had been a major problem as a source of disease.
Carl Jensen, who had a master’s degree from Georgia Tech, was in charge of what was largely a voluntary industrial hygiene program, but he accomplished a lot through persuasion. Industrial hygiene regulations were very weak. Later, in the’50’s, Robert P. Lowe, a graduate sanitary engineer from the University Of California School Of Public Health, was in charge of the sewage program; I think we called it liquid waste’ then. Another graduate sanitary engineer, named R. C. Steele, was a graduate of the University Of North Carolina School Of Public Health. They were all very top level people, all professionally qualified.
SPIDLE: It sounds as though this was a purely professional agency, the nasty hand of politics not intruding. You weren’t told to hire someone because his uncle could deliver such-and-such county.
GORDON: I was told that stopped with the passage of the federal Social Security Act. I’m not sure all this ties together; it was before my time. But I think it’s true, that health departments and welfare departments, in order to obtain federal money, were required to have a state merit system. So if there were any infringements, except for the directors who are always appointed by the governor or the Board of Health, I wasn’t aware of it.
SPIDLE: In local departments, though, such as Albuquerque, it was clearly a political entity.
GORDON: Completely. But at that time, Albuquerque’s health department wasn’t a part of the state agency. I don’t know how they ever hired me, or why Mayor Ken Schultz ever kept me at a much later date!
SPIDLE: Tell me about James R. Scott. You must have known Beatrice Chauvenet. I’ll never forget the phrase she used about Dr. Scott. She felt he was professionally strong, but petticoat ridden. (laughs) You didn’t see that dimension of him. Did he hire you?
GORDON: He may have had to approve my hiring, but Dr. Mitchell hired me for my first job in the department. The second job was a promotion by Carl Henderson. But it was Dr. Scott who sent me off to Michigan for an MPH, which I’ve always been grateful for, because that graduate degree in public health was, for me, the keys to the kingdom.
SPIDLE: Although, I hear from your testimony, that virtually all of the administrative heads already had solid training.
GORDON: Something similar to an MPH. If not an MPH, a master’s degree in Sanitary Engineering or in Public Health Nursing.
SPIDLE: In retrospect, then, there are no apologies to be made for the New Mexico Department of Public Health in its personnel and programs as of the 1940’s.
GORDON: No. I was privileged to work there; it was a foundation that served me well.
GORDON: Carl Henderson also knew Dr. Puckett, the Public Health Officer based in the Carlsbad area. Carl probably told you that Dr. Puckett was a pioneering public health physician who even wrote a sanitation textbook for use in the public schools. It was titled Sanitation Plus.
SPIDLE: I was just reading about his diagnoses of undulant fever. I have also been reading your autobiography, Environmental Health and Protection Adventures, and plan to use it as a springboard to our discussions. I find any number of interesting points in it.
GORDON: I originally wrote that for my family, but the more I developed it, the more I thought I’d make additional copies. I’ve thought about improving it with an eye towards publication.
SPIDLE: From what I’ve read so far, I would say it certainly merits publication. What especially interests me is that your career coincides with a critically important period in the development of modern public health. And you weren’t a bystander, but very involved in that development, which makes your testimony of real value in this interview process. The whole modern concern with environmental protection was begun by public health people starting to deal with related issues at the turn of this century.
GORDON: They called it sanitation, but it has enlarged in scope, and the term sanitation as used today is rather narrow and confining.
SPIDLE: I want to show you one more thing before we begin: you make a passing reference to [Dr.] Marion Hotopp a little brush with’ Marion Hotopp, a disagreement on policy.
GORDON (amused): Yes. She wasn’t my favorite person.
SPIDLE: I’d like you to take with you this from Doctors of Medicine in New Mexico, which I wrote in the 80’s. I naturally included a chapter on women physicians, and I think a really perceptive reader, at the end of the chapter, might say, Women really [did’ or didn’t’?] play a major role in [sic].
GORDON: There was one who became the first woman commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service; I’ll think of her name
SPIDLE: Here’s her picture Evelyn Fisher Frisbie, who was president [of the New Mexico Medical Society] in 1913 [wasn’t it 1915-16? J.]
GORDON: Actually I knew her better after she left the U.S. Public Health Service and returned to Albuquerque. I don’t think it was Dr. Frisbie; it was Dr. Estelle Ford Warner. Estella Ford Warner was commissioned in the PHS Regular Corps in 1932, quite some time before the Corps was opened to Nurses in 1944 and when a large group of women entered the Commissioned Corps. She did contribute a lot; she and her friend lived in a home in the North Valley of Albuquerque, which I think they had maintained during the entire time of her career as a commissioned officer in the USPHS. She was very highly regarded, by all accounts I ever heard.
SPIDLE: Yes, I’ve encountered her name several times, but she was a U.S. Public Health Service physician as opposed to a New Mexico one, so one doesn’t find much about her. One does, however, find information about Marion Hotopp.
Having looked over your biography, I think a natural way for us to proceed today is to concentrate on the period of your employment with the Albuquerque Health Department, trying to increase its professionalism, and in our next meeting we can proceed to discuss your first period in Santa Fe. The chronology for today, then, would be 1955 to 1968, and when you signed on it was the Albuquerque Health Department.’
GORDON: That’s correct. It started around the late 1930’s or early 40’s when then Mayor Clyde Tingley [who was really ex officio Chairman of the Albuquerque City Commission] appointed one city sanitary inspector to, ostensibly, regulate the hundreds of small dairies that existed then in the Rio Grande valley. None of the inspectors was qualified, but over the years there was a larger staff and they were variously known as Sanitary Inspectors and later the department was called the City Sanitation Department and sometime prior to my joining the department it was changed to Albuquerque Health Department. That was a misnomer, in that it wasn’t truly comprehensive as one thinks of a health department, but neither has the county health department ever been comprehensive; it has always emphasized personal public health.
SPIDLE: It’s clear that during your first 13 or so years’ tenure here, there were many jurisdictional problems from time to time, but there were a couple of details I wanted to ask about. For example, as the sanitarian in District VII, Silver City, you earned the princely sum of $225 per month, which was paid to you in seven different checks!
GORDON: Yes, they came from Deming, Lordsburg, Silver City, Grant County, Hidalgo County, Luna County and one from the state of New Mexico, and together they added up to $225. Of course I also received mileage at six cents per mile and per diem at six dollars a day, which I sometimes received all six dollars because I stayed overnight when I duties away from Silver City. I’d sleep in my car and clean up at a service station in the morning and go to work, so that per diem was gravy when you’re broke! I was very happy with that.
SPIDLE: Did all those seven checks arrive on time? You were fortunate about that. There’s also a reference to your doing plague surveillance as early as the 1950’s, in addition to your other duties in Silver City.
GORDON: Yes! We already had a plague surveillance program in New Mexico, and a consultant on it I think his name was Ken Nutter who was stationed in Santa Fe. There was a consultant in Santa Fe on almost every program in the field. Nutter was an assignee from the U.S. Public Health Service, and on one occasion a Life magazine writer and photographer came down and we made a trip into the Gila Wilderness area, which was then very difficult to get into. He took a lot of photos of what we were doing collecting specimens and blood from rodents and there was supposed to be an article in Life, but they never published it.
SPIDLE: It struck me that that was very early; I think that may have been the first wave of concern about plague.
GORDON: It was among the earliest, but by then we had found that plague was endemic to most of New Mexico.
SPIDLE: I remember talking with Dr. Ashley Pond in Taos, who authored a paper with Dr. Jonathan Mann about the first case of human plague in New Mexico; I don’t recall the date of that [the case or the paper? J.]
Returning to Albuquerque in the period 1955 to 1968, we talked before about the city’s health department at that time being very political and not at all professional.
GORDON: Yes, most department employees were political appointees with no college or special training, and were out doing jobs that really required specialized knowledge and training.
SPIDLE: You mentioned the programs you established at the beginning of restructuring the department, and you started with food protection. I don’t know if that was most important or whether you had to start somewhere.
GORDON: Food protection remains one of the mainstays of local health departments throughout the nation. It’s one of the largest environmental programs at the local level. In fact, nationally I’m involved in some consulting work right now with the CDC. If we look at food protection from a public health priority viewpoint, it’s really more important than air pollution or water pollution or solid waste and other issues that we’re spending enormous amounts on. In those days a large percentage of our personnel were involved in food protection, and there was a lot to do.
SPIDLE: Describe some of that for me. Was it gross contamination? Utter disregard for the fundamentals?
GORDON: es. We’d find such things as mice in a meat grinder; mouse droppings in all sorts of food establishments; roaches; cross-connections; unsafe water supplies; failure to properly sanitize eating utensils; poor refrigeration or, sometimes, no refrigeration. These were serious issues, not just whether food service workers had hairnets or not. I served as a Special Consultant to the U.S. Public Health Service during those years and assisted in developing a new national food code and a new national method of evaluating food sanitation programs. Under that methodology, Albuquerque was definitely the lowest in the state, and maybe among the lower in the nation. We had a long ways to go, starting from the bottom.
SPIDLE: One particular question about protecting the food supply in restaurants. Was there an ethnic dimension to that issue as there often is in New Mexico about many things?
GORDON: Not that I was ever aware of. We were evenhanded, and I don’t think ethnic differences ever came up. The food program, when we began, was regulating the restaurants and other food establishments in accordance with the state and local regulations. This caused some immediate concerns on the part of the organized restaurant industry, and they met with me