Daniel McKendree Tucker, MD – 50th Reunion Essay

Daniel McKendree Tucker, MD

207 Lampkin Str., NE

Atlanta, GA 30312

dmtuckermd@gmail.com

Spouse(s): Jean Tucker

Child(ren): Dawn McKendree Clark Tucker; Justin McKendree Adams Tucker; William McKendree Daniel Tucker

Grandchild(ren): Fletcher Steimer (2008); Joaquin Tucker (2009); Elroy Durand Tucker (2012)

Education: University of Florida College of Medicine, MD degree, 1975

Career: Physician, Psychiatrist, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist

College: Davenport

I am privileged to be alive, and humbly so, appreciating good health, wholesome work, and abiding love, altogether a wealth of circumstance embracing the cycle of life. Professionally my work has been compatible with all I believe, whereby as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I have been allowed an avenue toward minor and timely tweaks that can redound with impact over generations ahead, and to be continually surprised and optimistic by human development itself.

Late in our Yale years, amid deep doubts and ambivalence about what to do with The War facing us, being an Admiral’s son with father untimely deceased, and knowing from our prior conversations neither he nor I believed the Vietnam War was properly chosen, I objected to warfare and killing as a conscientious objector and applied for CO status. I found voice for these convictions, argued before a draft board more than they wanted to hear, appealed, finally succeeding with the Presidential Board approving (a “good thing” Nixon did, I remind myself), and sought work in the health field expecting a life of civilian alternative service that was to become my path. I pursued medical training, chose psychiatry and specialty work with young people and their parents, and have enjoyed the liberty to choose treating people in need, remaining somewhat oblivious of the business side of medicine.

Yale education years were filled more off than on the curriculum, but with a history major focus on histories of civilizations, colonialism, and social psychology, I idealized a schema for the impact upon persons in formation of oppression, intimidation, submission to coercion, required obedience to authoritarian codes, in turn inuring behavioral scripts of broken faith, mistrust, crushed identity, and the arduous toil of life. Working with families that convey our social inheritance (as well as our neurobiologically expressed DNA codes, distinct but mutable), I came to believe that the timely tweaks referred to above could be the real stuff of preventive medicine—a notion that still satisfies.

I continue to believe in democracy, “if we can preserve it”—its fragile path of civic republicanism in democracy (see roommate Jim Sleeper), citizens having responsibility to rise to the need for an inclusive, respectful, welcoming, and livable society, constituted and ordained by the governed. My roommates John Willingham and David Schwartz have likewise taught life generously, endured my changes, been faithful sounding boards, redirective as friends can be, and been there for the long haul.

I learned true love with my wife and friend through all time, Jean Tucker. Fortunately, Jean has the gift of humor, and I hail her as my wisdom. Three children light our lives: Dawn (with grandson Fletcher), Justin McKendree (with wife Corina and grandsons Joaquin and Elroy), and youngest Will (William McKendree Daniel Tucker—catching three generations of names, with his newly-wedded Brittany, who may know the future of this tribe!). Each are solidly on their paths. As I was generously adored and securely nurtured by my mother and father. Dawn, Justin, and Will in their turns emerge as providers of security to their loved ones, extending into their relationships, living life with others.

Other Activities – I have enjoyed teaching in four medical schools. Ages 46–48 I studied at the Yale Child Study Center, an NIMH research fellowship, and have always enjoyed mentoring and teaching medical students, residents, and fellows, committed to the best of the old ways, becoming a better listener, while embracing of the better of the new ways. I mentored in the Louisville-based “Bulldogs in the Bluegrass” internship program (Rowan Claypool, Yale 1980, involving also progressive Congressman John Yarmuth, D-KY, Louisville, Yale 1969, whose vision is clear toward the greater good)—jointly leavening the loaf of imagination that Kentucky could be a place for young Elis to choose their futures. I stepped away at late career from being chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Florida to study autism at the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta, caring for children affected by that spectrum of disorders, and their parents. This trajects the road ahead, God willing and the creeks don’t rise.