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Today's Featured Biography

Carl Lopez

Rutgers Medical School 1981
Surgery Internship: SUNY at Stony Brook NY 1982
Residency: General Preventive Medicine and Public Health (Chief Resident) 1993
Master of Public Health 1984
Boarded 1985 GPM and PH
Fellow, American College of Preventive Medicine 1987
Medical Director, Doctors Care Northeast, Columbia SC
Chief Patrol Surgeon, South Carolina Highway Patrol

After graduating from BHSS I attended NYU's School of Engineering in the Bronx, and left with a D- average after a year or two. Lived in a commune in Mamaroneck NY for a while, worked variously as a yellow cab driver in NYC, a draftsman, motorcycle messenger (for the Cosmic Messenger Service in Manhattan, delivering scripts to soap stars, art to museaums, articles to Paris Match, and who knows what else everywhere else), as an assistant foreman in a plastics injection molding factory, and in a yacht yard in Rye NY.

Deciding that the lack of a college education would condemn me to boring jobs, I entered Bronx Community College, working four days a week as a cabbie and attending classes the other three. Straight A's allowed me to transfer to Adelphi University in Long Island where I met and married my wife Flo, a Marine Biology major. I graduated cum laude with a BA in psychology. I was accepted into Rutger's Medical School and Flo into Graduate studies in microbiology at Adelphi, so we rebuilt an old, very rusty, River Queen houseboat on the south shore, motored it to Staten Island, and stayed there for two years, Flo commuting east and me west.

An interesting thing about that houseboat... when we bought it the seller's wife was crying. We thought it was because she'd miss the boat. Later we figured out she felt guilty because she knew that the water was kept out of the hull by rust. Period. We rebuilt that hull, welding new steel plates to the bottom, and coating everything with fiberglass (which almost put and end to my brand-new marriage... crawling under a hull and sand-blasting it for 12 hours straight, and not understanding why my new wife was so strenuously objecting to dumping 50 lb bags of sand into the sandblaster. Hey, I was doing all the hard work!!).

Later we sold the boat to a couple of drifters... Vietnam War vets who had spent one too many times crawling through VC tunnels. The steel plate in the skull bit sort of made them not-quite-right. About two years after we left NY for the sunny southern climes we heard that the boat had sunk, and is now the only charted shipwreck in Staten Island waters.

The US Army paid my way through college, so I paid them back by moving to Fort Jackson in Columbia SC after an internship in surgery. Our oldest girl was born in New Jersey while I was a freshman med student. She just graduated with honors from the College of Charleston's Honor College with a BA, majoring in studio art, minoring in english. She'll be heading to graduate studies in Florida or California in a year. My youngest is now a junior at College of Charleston, majoring in history with a minor in Film Studies.

Along the way I decided I needed a full residency and finished a program in General Preventive Medicine and Public Health. I was on the faculty at the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine and set up and managed the first website for a PM residency ever, as well as one for the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine. I finaly figured out that a professor of medicine without clinic hours (mine was a research oriented position) wasn't going to make enough to send his own kids to college, so I went back to my job in the real world.

Along the way, Flo decided she wanted a job with some security and got her BSN, and is now working for the state, case-managing disabled children.

Here I am, empty-nest syndrome and all, trying to keep up an active interest in digital photography, and waiting for the next ten years to pass so I can finally retire with Flo. We just celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary and are about to take a cruise out of Charleston to the Bahama's with the kids ("kids"? They're 22 and 19 years old!!). Last chance to spend time together for a while.

I didn't really enjoy my time at BHSS, but there were some really great and interesting student-type people there. I remember being a "reporter" / distributor for Sans-Culottes (anyone have any old copies?), marching against the war, and wishing the "pool-mural" was a pool rather than a mural. I remember the transit strike, roller-skating and biking to school, and how weird the railroad yards looked from the overpass, with the rails all rusty from lack of rolling stock to polish them. I also remember "our" mayor, John Lindsay, at the graduation ceremony.

Good luck to you all.

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