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This year’s parade marshal for Cotulla…
VETERAN SURGEON LOOKS BACK ON MILITARY CAREER
Dr. Richard Hood to be honored at Independence Day festival
By Marc Robertson
From a sleepy crossroads town in rural southwestern Kentucky to the frozen landscapes of the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific, Dr. Richard Hood has known many homes in the 70 years he has dedicated to medicine.
The retired US Navy lieutenant and US Air Force colonel who gave two decades of service to his country in three conflicts and then fifty years to family medicine will be honored as the grand marshal of the annual Independence Day festival parade hosted by the Cotulla Main Street Program on Saturday, July 1. The day’s events kick off with the traditional parade through the city at 10 a.m. and continue with games, food, refreshments and live entertainment at Veterans Park downtown. The day concludes with a fireworks display over the La Salle County Courthouse after sundown.
This year’s parade honoree is the owner of the Hood Medical Clinic that has branches in Cotulla, Dilley and Pearsall, and is a nationally recognized thoracic surgeon and a founder of the practice’s nationwide society, as well as an experienced and frequently published professor who helped conduct some of the world’s first open-heart surgeries.
Dr. Hood looks back on his career and reminds his staff of the many changes that he has witnessed in medicine. There were few antibiotics, if any, available when he joined the service, and no medicines at all for blood pressure. A great number of the drugs and surgical procedures that are considered commonplace today were in their infancy during the Second World War.
Hood was 17 years old when he volunteered to join the US Navy in 1943. At that time, the global conflict was at its peak, and it would be another two years before hostilities would end in the European and Pacific theaters of war. As soon as the war ended, however, Hood volunteered for Navy pilot training and went on to join an officer candidate school. When he returned to civilian life as a medical school student in Louisville, Kentucky, he was ahead of his peers by having accrued college credit in military service.
The young medical student graduated in June 1949 and immediately returned to the US Navy as a lieutenant in order to fulfill his internship in military service through a program available in the postwar years. He was undertaking his surgical residency when the Korean conflict escalated in the early 1950s. Hood was promptly dispatched overseas, eventually landing at his new posting on the Aleutians, a chain of inhospitable islands that mark the boundary between the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. The site between Alaska and the Soviet Union played a critical role in the early years of the Cold War, as the United States developed its atomic energy project and conducted tests. Hood recalls the island chain as being far from common perceptions of the Pacific. There were no sandy beaches and palm trees with hammocks, he says, and those stationed on the outpost experienced continual subzero temperatures and recorded 40 consecutive days of snowfall.
Upon returning from the Pacific, Hood asked for a transfer to the newly formed US Air Force, which had in 1947 become a separate branch of the US armed forces after being founded as the US Army Air Corps. Transfer in hand, Hood applied for and was accepted to the new USAF medical program. He promptly traveled to Riverside, south of Los Angeles, where he awaited his residency at the University of California.
Hood spent the next five years at the US Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles, where he further developed his specialty in thoracic care and surgery. His California stint was followed by a series of military postings to air bases across the US, and by the time he arrived at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, its Wilford Hall Medical Center had become one of the largest and busiest in the country, with more than 1,200 beds and all medical specialties. It was during this period that Dr. Hood – who was by then a full colonel – attracted the attention of the US surgeon general, who sent him to California for extensive work on the development of the heart-lung machine that would save thousands of lives in the years to come. At the same time, Dr. Hood was called upon to speak and teach at countless facilities and medical schools across the country, and published vital papers on modern medicine. He went on to travel the world on behalf of both the US Air Force and American medical development, addressing audiences in Europe and Asia.
At Lackland AFB, Hood was put in charge of running the Wilford Hall training program and overseeing the facility’s heart-lung unit. It was the position that marked the pinnacle of a military career that was drawing to a close in the same year as conflict between North and South Vietnam was escalating. Again, Dr. Hood was sent into a war zone and again helped oversee medical services for armed forces personnel. Although he notes that he was not put in direct line of harm from enemy action in the conflict, his duties took him in and out of a war zone where perils prevailed and a number of his contemporaries became casualties.
Retirement day came in November 1968, but Col. Richard Hood was far from ready to hang up his stethoscope. A chance visit to Cotulla helped persuade him that he could serve further in civilian life, and for almost forty years his clinics have since helped improve the quality of life among a population in the South Texas Brush Country that was underserved for generations. Additionally, Dr. Hood established a nurse training program and maintained his affiliation with professional organizations that continued to rely upon his wealth of knowledge and experience. Ultimately, he was honored for service and innovation as well as his esteemed position as a founding member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons.
While he appreciates the honor he is being accorded as grand marshal of the Independence Day Parade in Cotulla, Dr. Hood says he believes much credit is due to the hardworking men and women who have supported his drive to answer his country’s call and then to serve the needy in his later years.
The family doctor, business owner and published expert considers himself fortunate to have enjoyed good health throughout his career but often finds cause to stop and reminisce on those who have departed.
“When you’re in a conflict zone, or when you’re being moved from one military installation to another, you meet a lot of people who are given all the same chances and opportunities, and a great many who are less fortunate,” Dr. Hood says. “And then sometimes you ask yourself why you’re the one who makes it through when others didn’t, why the man who was just next to you didn’t come back. I find myself asking that often, and it’s the one question I’ve never been able to answer.”
Dr. Hood says he has always felt welcomed by the people of South Texas, despite being a transplant from Kentucky. His brother likewise joined the military and his two sisters married into the service. None of those from his generation, he says, ever returned to the little collegiate community of Murray in which they had been raised. The feel of a small town, however, the wholesome nature of the environment and the goodhearted soul of the people with whom he has worked and whom he has been able to serve have encouraged him to continue his practice for many years past the date at which others might have retired.
“I’ve been very happy,” the doctor says of both his successful career and his life in South Texas. “When I came here, I felt that this was the type of town I was born to live in.”