Former Section Chair Dr. Jonathan B. Kotch was honored with the 2008 Martha May Eliot Award at the Annual Meeting in San Diego in October.  Dr. Kotch has been an educator, an advocate, and a major scholar since his career began in 1978. The following is a summary of his acceptance speech : 

Life is a series of stories.  When our stories intersect, we make history.  Those intersections multiply and create the networks that support the relationships that keep me going.  Thank you all for being a part of a network of relationships for me.

You have heard of “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon.” My talk today is entitled, “Six degrees of Helen Wallace,” whose presence here today is a great honor.  First, I am going to ask Barb Levin to pick one of these three cards, each of which represents an MCH faculty member who was a mentor to me, and who previously received the Martha May Eliot award. They are Arden Miller, Naomi Morris, and Earl Siegel.

Barb has chosen Arden Miller, so let me walk you through the steps from Arden Miller to Helen Wallace as a way of framing the story of how I chose a career in MCH, which led me to where I am standing today.

As a medical student I had the opportunity to work in a mission hospital in Liberia. Dr. Jim Stull, the medical director of Phoebe Hospital, and I saw 75 clinic patients each and every day.  It suddenly dawned on me that I was seeing the same patients every day, not the same individuals, but the same cases of schistosomiasis and gastroenteritis, day in and day out.  That is when I realized that the only way to improve health status would be to prevent these diseases before they happened.

I still needed to satisfy myself that I was not cut out for clinical pediatrics, so I arranged for a four-week elective with a private practice in Ukiah, Calif. At the end of the elective I concluded I needed to shift to public health.  On our way back to New York, Anne and I stayed with friends in San Francisco. While there I flipped through the phone book and ran my finger down the list of departments under UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. When I got to Maternal and Child Health, I thought, “That is something a pediatrician ought to be able to do.” So I called for an appointment and the next day met Helen Wallace, who recruited me to MCH during the hour she spent with me. When I decided to choose Carolina over Berkeley, it was only because it was closer to New York.  I told my mother I would only be away for a year.  I lied.

Now, the connection to Arden Miller.  Arden was the MCH faulty member who sat me down on his sofa when I visited Chapel Hill for my interview and said, “Jonathan, we want you to come to Carolina.” After finishing my MPH and my residency, I joined the faculty.  Arden invited me to travel with his CDC-funded local health department project, which later became a publication describing high performing local health departments that provided personal health services. Our team visited outstanding health departments in Memphis, Seattle, Newark, and Contra Costa County. Whenever he was in the vicinity, Arden would visit Helen, and this time he took me with him. Thank you so much, Helen, for being the one who opened the door to MCH for me. God bless you.

I have been very lucky, but luck is being ready when the opportunity presents itself. As Wayne Gretzky said, skate to where the puck is going to be. In our case, I see a major opportunity on the horizon, and we have to be ready. It was Judith Katzberg and Debbie Allen who reminded me that I had previously advised the Section not to be polite. APHA was concerned about getting a seat at the table, so they were polite.  And they didn’t get a seat. They didn’t even get a stool.

So don’t be polite. Make some noise.  And don’t let the good seduce you from pursuing excellence.

I have some more thank you's before I step down. I need to thank the MCH members of the committee, Dot Browne and Lisa Kavanagh.  I need to thank the chairs of MCH at UNC who supported me, from Naomi to Arden to Milt Kotelchuck to Pierre Buekens to Bert Peterson. My fellow MCH Department faculty, represented here by Dot and Pierre, were a tremendous support. And then there are the students, current, recent and long term graduates. It is my greatest thrill to follow my students as their careers develop, and as they become leaders in our field. Many of them are here today. Thank you all again for this great honor.

(Below) Jonathan and his grandson