My first contact with Columbia was in the small cotton town of Cleveland, Mississippi, home to Delta State Teachers College. In 1924, the state legislature created this school to train teachers for the public school system. Delta State operated an elementary school to provide practice teaching for the students under supervision of outstanding teacher-trainers. The first principal and several of the teacher-trainers at the Hill Demonstration School were graduates of Columbia Teachers College. The tuition was $1.00, payable by the month. This fee eliminated a number of applicants and caused my mother to take an extra job to send my older bother and me to the "Dem School." The quality of the education provided by the Columbia Teachers College graduates was simply outstanding. Every member of my graduating class went on to college after finishing the local public high school. One received degrees from Harvard and Oxford and one from Yale, Columbia and the Universities of Birmingham (U.K.) and London (U.K.).

Although I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been admitted to one of the best biomedical institutions in the world, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and privileged to have had the opportunity to experience the uniqueness of the most alive city on the planet, I believe that the greatest blessing bestowed on me in my lifetime was to have been guided during the early part of my educational journey by the completely competent and totally devoted Columbia Teachers College graduates at the Hill Demonstration School of Delta State Teachers College in Cleveland, Mississippi.