Oral History Program Phil Merrill Unknown Interviewer December 2, 2003 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Phil Merril Interviewed by Unknown Interviewer 2 December 2003 Copyright © 2015 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Merril, Phil, an oral history Unknown Interviewer, 2 December 2003, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Phil Merrill. The interview was conducted on December 2, 2003, in Layton, Utah. Merrill discusses his education and his experience in military. M: I’ll have you state your name. PM: Phil Merrill. M: And what year were you born and in what city? PM: 1950, and Grobe, Arizona. M: How old were you when you started college. PM: I was at junior college when I was 18, and through at least two years of junior college, I only got about 35 credits. By the time I was 19, or no, I only went there one year when I was 19 years old. Then I went on a mission for my church for two years, which interrupted the junior college experience. M: What junior college did you attend? PM: Originally it was a junior college in my home town, Mesa Community College, in Mesa, Arizona, and it was basically general studies, nothing out of the ordinary. About the only extra class other than general studies that I took was microbiology. At the time I wanted to become a Microbiologist, and it turned out to be one of my hardest classes, and I think I ended up dropping it, at least at the time. I had a pretty good experience, as far as the rest of the general studies, the teachers were really quite helpful, especially my English teacher, who made sure I did my freshman project. It was an essay program at 1 the time, and you had to have a written project done on that to pass your freshman English, and she wouldn’t let me stop until I had it finished, and that proved to be quite helpful actually in later years. Making sure that those basics like English, math, and chemistry were out of the way. M: Did you think it through? PM: Yes. I don’t think that I was ready for a major college experience. I was still living at home at the time, and I would just commute over to the college, which was just a few miles away. I didn’t have to worry about a lot of money, living outside the home and concentrated on my studies. M: Had you always had college as a goal? Did you always think you were going to go to college after high school? PM: I think that it was a goal. It was never necessarily communicated to me to, that I was supposed to go to college, but alternatives weren’t necessarily given to me. I think it was probably my mother that, in her own subtle way, made sure I took my $75 for tuition to the college on the day of registration. It had only been a few months since I had graduated from high school, so I was still used to going to school, and so I kept going. Probably the most significant, well I’ll probably have to talk about this in a different section of time, but the fact that mother just made sure that I had the money to go and register, and I went and just kept going to school, and kept learning. I didn’t really have a goal necessarily, other than the fact that I thought that I was going to be a microbiologist. M: What was your mother’s name? Did she go to college? 2 PM: She did go to college, she graduated from Eastern Arizona Junior College. At the time I think it was called something like Thatcher or something like that, but it was a two year college for the southeastern part of Arizona. M: And was in Thatcher? PM: In Thatcher, Arizona, and she lived in that part of the country and went to school and graduated with a junior college degree. M: Did your father go to college at all? PM: Yes, yes he actually graduated too, with mother’s help. I think that one of the reasons he stayed in college was because he met my mom there, and she encouraged him to stay, and instead of going off to work back in the late 1920s or 1930s, work was kind of hard, and she encouraged him to stay in school. M: So, initially it was microbiology. Did it change eventually, and what made your major change? PM: I have always done well, if we digress a little bit into high school. One thing that happened to me, I wasn’t really that good in high school. I thought that being in the 75th percentile was a good thing, and I thought there were only 25 percent ahead of me. But one thing I did well in high school, was I went into, they would call it an AP class now, but they didn’t call it that back then, but it was in biology, and, in Arizona they had grade 1 being an A, and 5 being an F. They would give .5s that are like an A++ if you did well in that class, I mean if you got an A in that class, your grade card would actually say .5 instead of 1. I got .5 in biology, and so that was one thing that I did well in high school. Better than math or even chemistry, or any of the other subjects. So I kept going that 3 direction, I just felt more comfortable doing that. Microbiology is a direct spin off from that. My dad, at the time, was in a company that was doing some research in microbiology and I wanted to be a part of that and so I wanted to learn how I could, and I found that it was a little more complicated at that level than to do microbiology. After I got home off my mission, I went back to junior college. It wasn’t full-time because I was trying to earn a living at the time. So I was working, I didn’t have time for school, but when I had time for school, I didn’t have time for work so I didn’t have any money, and so I would have to flip flop semesters. But I went and took a zoology class, which of course is more closely related to biology, in my opinion, and did quite well. M: And this was back at Mesa Community? PM: Mesa Community College, I had come home to Arizona after my mission in this time to continue my education. M: Did you graduate from Community College? PM: No, I got a total between Mesa Community College, and my family had moved to Safra, Arizona, or Thatcher, where Eastern Arizona Community College was, and I flip flopped between those two colleges, and between the year that I spent before my mission, and approximately a year or so after my mission, trying to pick up different courses. I got a grand total of 35 credit hours in junior college through the Arizona Community College system. Right about that time I got married. M: Was there any desire to go to any other colleges, or did you have a certain university that you felt like you wanted to study at or there really wasn’t? 4 PM: No, there wasn’t quite much. Even though I was from Arizona, I didn’t really have that much of a desire to go out to ASU or U of A, but my sister was going to go to BYU. At the time the acceptance rate at BYU was pretty good. This, we’re talking 1972, they weren’t quite as hard to get into as they are now. I was going to go to BYU with my sister. Basically the semester before I was to leave or the spring semester or winter semester, that’s when I met my future wife and, of course, decided not to go to BYU. I stayed in Arizona. My sister went on to BYU and graduated from there. We were going to live together and all that, we had it nearly all set up but then plans changed, and so I got married and immediately started going to work and didn’t have any opportunities to go to school at all at that time. M: So when was the next time that you went back to school? PM: Well, we were married for about two years, nearly three, and I was doing just general jobs of a person who had a high school diploma, but no real college diploma, you know, driving trucks, delivering produce, working for a gas company, working for a mine company. I was just more or less bouncing around. M: Did you always know that eventually you would go back, or at that time when you were just working, how was school, was it a priority? Did you think that you were ever going to go back or were you just planning on working? PM: No school wasn’t a priority. I wanted to try to better myself, I wasn’t against it, I just didn’t have any time or any money to do it. So the opportunity wasn’t there and I wasn’t making any great sacrifices to try to get more education. But right about that time, circumstances occurred, so friends gave me some information concerning the military. 5 Let’s face it, I was earning minimum wage, or a little bit more, depending on how long I had been with a company, and I wasn’t going anywhere fast. In retrospect, I was happy. I wasn’t alone, I was just living my life, but there wasn’t any great desire or fear that I had to go to college. My friends, and again my mother, who gently suggested that maybe I should try to go into the military, and she gave her suggestions in such a way that it made me think it was my idea to stabilize myself, maybe make—at that time to go into the military as a beginning private, an airman is eventually what I became in the Air Force. I was actually making a little bit more money right at the very bottom of the military than I was working the jobs that I was working as a civilian, and I was nearly 25 years old. So I was old compared to most people going into the military, and so I went into the military. Again, thinking that I wanted to be a Microbiologist. The Vietnam War was just winding down, so the draft wasn’t an issue, I never was drafted. I was always a number that was too high during the Vietnam War, and so just about the time they stopped the draft, I went into the military anyway, on my own. I tried to get in as a Microbiologist, but they didn’t have any openings, and then I wanted to go in as a Radiology Tech, somebody who would take x-ray pictures, but they didn’t have any opening for that, but they did have openings as a lab technician. So the schooling that I had, which included chemistry, and that’s microbiology, that even though I wasn’t that good at that, that I knew what I was talking about, and math because of those different classes, general algebra and things like that, that I was qualified to be a Lab Technician. So I joined the Air Force, I had a guaranteed job as Lab Technician, went it and started working as a Lab Technician. 6 M: Now the trainings that you had for that, was that through any university, or was it through—that the Air Force provided? PM: It was certification for the Air Force as far as Lab Technicians were concerned. It had a very good program, very concentrated, and in just a span of four months, they basically produced Lab Techs, which would take maybe a year or so in a civilian sector. But they had you working 24/7 because that was your job. You got paid to be a student. So I learned all about being a Lab Technician, even with the earnings of higher level certifications of civilian certifications, not just military certifications. I worked for nearly 4 years at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a Lab Tech. That’s when my education really took a turn. From simple military training to actual diploma, because right about the time I was ready to get out of the Air Force, I enlisted for 6 years, an opportunity came up to become a Physician Assistant. The Air Force was training Physician Assistants at that time in the late 70s and early 80s. The Air Force was one of the nation’s leaders, as well as Duke and some of the other Eastern schools in training Physician Assistants. So I thought, and I was accepted as a Physician Assistant Trainee and went to their courses in Wichita Falls, Texas. These courses were affiliated with the University of Oklahoma, but the instructors were actually associated professors or adjunct professors of the University of Oklahoma, and the course was accredited by the University of Oklahoma. As long as you had some, a minimum requirement of credits for college, and it just happened to be about 35 credit hours, which I had, plus whatever credit hours I earned as a Lab Technician. I did get some college credits for that too. They accepted me with the idea that I would earn X number of credits just going through the PA course and graduate with my Bachelor’s in 7 Science. What I needed, I think that there was a government class that I needed and maybe a history class or something like that, and I simply clepped those. I went to the education office at the Air Force Base, they didn’t even have to pay for these courses, they would just let you do it. You would take the official CLEP test, and challenge the course, and as long as you made a minimum score, you would pass that course and get credit for it, college credit for it. By the time I had gone through a lot of the PA training, which was very, very intense, it was the equivalent of approximately between 95 and 102 credit hours in just twelve months. So you got very good at taking tests, and Clepping the test, and of course that I had never even read a book, it wasn’t that difficult, and I would always at least make a minimum score and get those extra credits that I needed to finish off my Bachelor’s degree. You had one year of didactic training at Wichita Falls Air Force Base, Sheppard Air Force Base, and then one year of what we call phase 2, or what would be called a residency in medicine at a major Air Force hospital, where you get hands on training and you got credit for that, just like any PA program in the United States. By the time the second year ended, I had my Bachelor’s degree, a Bachelor’s in Science, as a Physician Associate from the University of Oklahoma. M: And all of these courses were paid for by the Air Force? Or were there any expenses? PM: Nope, everything was paid for by the Air Force, probably the equivalent of $75,000 worth of education, which was, that’s still a fair amount of money even now, but back then it was a very significant amount of money. M: Now, while you were attending school, you had to work as well, or did the military allow you to just focus on school? 8 PM: Yeah, your job was just going to school. M: So you basically get paid to go to school? PM: Yeah, in fact they even promoted me to a staff sergeant. I was only a regular sergeant at the time, and they promoted me to staff sergeant to go to school. So I actually got a raise to go to school. And another about this is this course was considered what they call an Officer Candidate School, which meant that I was promoted to staff sergeant, but if I graduated, if I got through the course, I would be promoted to a second Lieutenant or I would become an officer in the Air Force. M: Which means you’d get another raise. PM: Yes, a very significant raise. The course, you know, there’s not enough that I can say about how good the program was. As a student, it was the equivalent of having an endof-semester final every two and a half weeks in training. And we’re talking about anatomy, physiology, cardiology, chemistry, and all of the medical disciplines. M: How do you feel about that? Do you think that’s the proper way to approach it, or do you think that maybe the system should work… PM: That type of education? Um, it’s not for everybody. It was so intense that, and the requirement of study took up so many days and hours of the week that literally, I think I had a total of maybe eight hours a week that I could give to my family, and the rest of the week I was literally gone. Either at the library or in a book where nobody was permitted to bother me. I had to study just constantly, and the reason constantly to be able to stay up. Our class leader, who had the highest score in our trimester—there were three trimesters in about four months each for the year that first year—our class 9 leader, at the end of the first trimester, who had the best score, had a nervous breakdown and literally had to be carried away and never came back for the other two trimesters. He couldn’t make it, he broke. M: Was there any time for you to enjoy it at all? PM: No. M: Or when you look back on those years, is it just awful. PM: No, no, it scares me to think about the commitment, even today. The commitment is so total and so absolute; I don’t think it’s for everybody. M: How did that affect your learning, I mean was it something, I mean did you still have interest in the subject after, you know, it being so consuming, were you even hirable to do the Physician Assistant work after that? PM: Well, experiencing the pain of the effort wasn’t any fun, but the actual material never bothered me. I guess it’s because I’ve always had that, it was just something that I did a little bit better than anything else. And so I never lost, I never lost the liking for the information. But the experience was horrible. M: Was there any type of comradery between the students, or was it very competitive, I mean did you feel like you were at school, or was it just work? PM: It was comradery. Only, it’s the same comradery that people on the Titanic probably felt, because you needed somebody to lean onto, just to help support yourself. So it was more of a mutual society of support. The wives even got together and basically helped support the people that were having struggles. It was just a psychologically bruising 10 episode for everybody involved, even the people that were in the top of the class. They paid for their efforts. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this, it was probably something that I needed, because I was easily distracted as you can tell from my previous educational experiences, any good excuse and I was off someplace else, doing something else. I might have always had the ability, but never necessarily the will. But in an American military environment where you’re told to sit down and learn and shut up, you know, or else they’ll do whatever the military might do to you, that was probably good for me. I was made to sit down and study as hard as I’ve ever studied in my whole life, and learn more than I’ve ever learned in my whole life, and it might have been the only way I could have done it. M: And again, what were your ages starting with this? PM: I went in, I was 30 years old, I had just turned 30. I turned 30 in March of 1980, and I started school in June 1980. M: So it took you two years. PM: Yeah, I graduated from the didactic training the first year in ’82, and then the second year, which was much more relaxed, much more hospital oriented, more laid back like civilian hospitals are, I was a year there and graduated in ’83. M: So this course work was done in two years when it normally would be done in four. PM: No, actually, most PA schools are about 24-28 months long. I’ve never been to a civilian PA school, so I don’t know how intense their training is, maybe it might be the same, maybe medical schools in general are the same. I’m not sure. All I know is that in the 11 military, I was told to sit down and study as hard as I could, and that was the only thing that I did. Possibly the civilian schools are the same way. M: Do you regret not ever going to a civilian school? PM: Yes, yes, because I like to go to football games and basketball games, and go to dances and things like that, and there’s none of that in the military. I mean it is just a college draft building with very straight rows of desks and an instructor dressed in a military uniform in front. You sit there and every 55 minutes they give you a break to go and get a drink and go to the bathroom for 10 minutes, and then you’re back in class. You do that anywhere from 7 or 8 in the morning until 4 or 5 in the afternoon and then you go home and study until you can’t keep your eyes open that night, anywhere from 11 to 12:30 at night, and then go to bed and then wake up and start again. M: Would you do it the same. PM: Well, for me, it was probably the only thing that would work. If I had my choice, I would have run away fast and hid and done something easier. But I didn’t have a choice, I was in the military. They would have sent me who knows where if I would’ve dropped out. M: Is there anything else that you want to add about your college experience or lack of college experience, or anything like that? PM: Well, I suppose that it would have been nice to walk around a large college with grass triangles and things like that in the center, and have a college mascot and things like that. I miss that, I wish that I could have done something like that, but different things are good for different people. For me, even though I might have missed it, I know that I probably would have been distracted by that and probably not done as well. For the first 12 time in my life, I went from being a B student, or actually happy to be a C student, C+ student, to an A+ student. I actually was called, after I’d been away from the school and a working PA for about 3 or 4 years, I was called back to be an instructor in the same program. So I got to learn the other side of the equation. My responsibility was to make those 30 students in front of me learn in a very short amount of time. The amount of knowledge in just a few weeks that would usually take a semester, and so the pressure was on me in the opposite to make sure that the students get interested, that they didn’t drift, and that they learned what I wanted them to learn in a very short amount of time, and then test it. In fact, during that same time while I was instructing, I went on and got my Master’s degree in education. M: was that with the military, or how did that work? PM: This was actually a regular registration. I think it was again, coincidentally, through the University of Oklahoma because we were in Wichita Falls, Texas, teaching, but we registered with the University of Oklahoma. It was another cram course, even though it wasn’t military, we would spend 6 days, a Friday night, all day Saturday and all day Sunday for two weeks in a row, and that would be the equivalent of 1 semester of work. I did that for nearly 3 years, but this was official off-campus study through the University of Oklahoma. I earned my Bachelor’s degree with a 4.0. M: Your Master’s degree. PM: Oh excuse me, my Master’s degree with a 4.0 in educational psychology. M: Now what made you decide to go get your Master’s? Was it part of something that you needed for your job? 13 PM: Yes, it looked good in the military to continue your education as an officer, and especially if you went from getting just getting a regular Bachelor’s degree, which all officers are required to have, and going on to a Master’s degree, specifically in the field that you’re doing, not just basket weaving or something like that like a lot of military people will do. I actually went in to education, which I was doing at the time, and got my Master’s in education. M: How valuable do you think education is when you were going as well as today? PM: There’s no comparison. I was happy to earn maybe $2.50 an hour before I went into the military. Then as a recruit, as an enlisted person, I was very very happy to earn maybe $100 a week back in 1975, but because of my education and my experience as a college-educated, professional person as a Physician Assistant, I now earn so much more than that, and I could never have one it any other way. There’s no comparison, as far as my opportunities in life, things that I’ve been able to provide my family, and the type of work that I do that I enjoy, and I can do it anywhere I want. I’m not limited to a specific area as a provider of health care, everybody needs it. I can go anywhere and do anything I want as far as health care. So I’ve made a complete and total, you know, 180 degrees turnaround in my ability to do something. 14