Milton Henry Anderson – 50th Reunion Essay

Milton Henry Anderson

College: Berkeley

March 2018 (with help from Mortie Meekle and Juan Valdez)

What I learned after Yale. This is not in chronologic order.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc? This is not true, it is not science.

Blood is really thicker than water. Read “Hillbilly Elegy”, J. D. Vance.

Try to get your money up front, if possible. Even cheap hookers know this.

It only takes one psychiatrist to change a lightbulb, but the lightbulb must really want to change.

The words “I’m from the government, I’m here to help you,” should make you want to run for the exits. As scary as “the check’s in the mail,” or “I’ll respect you in the morning,”

None of us has a 70-year warranty. We are all out of warranty. RIP to all the classmates who have left us before their time.

A good criminal defense attorney can save a killer from death row. A great defense attorney can reduce a sodomy charge to following too closely.

Darwin spoke of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Survival of the fittest is not about who is best to reproduce, it is only about who actually reproduces.

Ontogeny is not the recapitulation of phylogeny!

Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans (John Lennon).

Aside from medical school, residency, and service in the US Navy, the above wisdom is about all I have learned. When we graduated from Yale in 1969, there were no AIDS patients, no CT scanners, no MR scanners, and no opioid crisis. Al Qaeda and ISIS did not exist, and the Vietnam War was winding down. If you’re reading this, you survived it all like I did.

Now at 71 years old (March 2018), I am retired, living in Georgetown, Texas, with my wife of 35 years, Donna. I have worked in the emergency departments of hospitals in Houston and Austin for 40 years. My daughter Erica is a CRNA and married to Joey, a trial lawyer in Austin. They are parents to my first granddaughter Ellie, now one year old. My daughter Stephanie is on active duty in the US Army, and is a physician finishing an EM residency. She is married to David, a surgery resident, and living in San Antonio. Their daughter Quinn was born in March 2018.

My son Anthony is a mechanical engineer with Schlumberger and living in Houston. He is six feet six, single, and terrible at basketball. He is a great son

My son Nicholas is a data analyst on active duty in the US Air Force, single and living in Dayton. He is six feet seven and hates basketball. He is also a great son.

All my children were born in Texas, and I have been a lucky man.