Recording – 08-03-2024 06:55:13

00:02 This is Mark Swiontkowski MD speaking from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where we're at the annual meeting of the 20th Century Orthopedic association, and we're continuing our project of recording the oral histories of this organization. And I had the idea that all of the past chairmen should be interviewed. And I. I joined the organization in the last year of Steve Gunther MD the elder, and I'm privileged to have Steve Gunther MD the younger, who I think pretty much grew up in this organization, as his dad was a long term member. And then the grand poo bah, which was called the. I think it's still called the chairman, secretary chairman, secretary chairman, which is a five year term. It's a lot of work. And so I just wanted to talk with Steve the younger, and maybe let's start with, what are your earliest recollections when your dad used to bring you to this meeting?

01:09 Well, I was just like some of the kids here at the meeting. I was probably 15 years old, and we had a meeting out west, and I remember meeting Clint compeer, who we were talking about last night. He was sort of guy in the back of the meeting, making sure everything went well, which was really a lot of fun. And Jack Houston, who, you know, the name, famous sports guy. And he had, he being my dad had Jack Houston examine my knee. I tore my ACL wrestling in high school, so that was kind of neat. And he was having me push against him with my hip flexors and said, that's part of the instability. Your hip flexors are too weak. And he got a strength. And my dad loves to tease me about that. Well, I wasn't pushing hard that bad, but that was pretty novel and neat and just going to an orthopedic meeting and having all the families there and the Dambrosias brought their kids. So I grew up knowing the Dambrosias kids and everything. So it was a lot of fun for the family and the wives. It was mostly men at the time, had a lot more fun than other meetings because there was so much involvement. And the meetings were at resorts and people did outdoor things like riding horses and stuff. So it has been a great society for that reason, and that's how I grew up in it. And as you said, my dad was one of the leaders of the meeting, and he enjoyed the collegiality of it and the collaborative nature and involving families and being funny and having people involved instead of just purely academics. But he really also enjoyed the complexity of issues covered. He got bored with simplicity, so he loved learning from other people. And hearing about spine and then hand and then joints and then trauma. Some of your talks about fracture healing. So it's fun to be there with your dad and watch him get so excited about learning. It was kind of infectious learning environment, I would say.

03:01 How many meetings do you think you attended before actually your career devolved into orthopedic surgery that you became a member?

03:08 Probably ten. Wow. Or maybe five or six. Many. Because when I was in medical school, I think I came to one. I think in college I came to one and then a couple when I was younger. So I knew a lot of the people already had grown up with them.

03:23 Yeah. So you really have a lot of personal history that's beyond even the most senior members of, or at least equivalent to the people like Bob Hensinger, who's here, and Lanny Johnson, who's here that we've interviewed in the past.

03:38 Right. I've known all of them since I was a kid.

03:41 Right.

03:42 Which is pretty fun.

03:44 So you knew Lanny when he was still practicing arthroscopy?

03:48 I guess so. It was so long ago. He stopped. I think at age 50, 62 he stopped.

03:54 Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about your dad, who I loved hanging out with your dad. Had great respect for him. That was primary interest was hand surgery, but took call well into the late years of his practice and never backed down from that responsibility. And despite the fact that it's very difficult, enjoyed it. But tell us a little bit about your dad. I knew him as a lover of golf, a lover of hockey, all things Yale, was a key player in the Yale team. Tell us more about you.

04:35 A little background. So my grandfather, my dad's dad was in the Navy medical corps in World War Two. Actually, both of my grandfathers were. And he was out on a ship in world War two and came back. And then he went to the Campbell clinic in Tennessee to do orthopedic training. And he was general orthopedic surgeon in a small town in Troy, New York, near Albany. So that's how my dad grew up. And my dad went to Albany, Albany Academy, which was a military school that he went on to Yale. And he was one of the stars of the hockey team. I think he was one of the captains of the hockey team. And he had a lot of fun with Beno Schmidt, who later became dean of Columbia law school and president of Yale. And they did well. But my dad wasn't in, say, the top 10% because he played so much hockey, and they played a lot of pool at night. He loved his time, and he always looked back as, that is sort of the golden years. And it was sort of the golden years with my mom as well, I think. And they're dating before kids and everything. Then he went to medical school at Albany, and he had a child, and he went from, like, you know, hockey player fun guy to turning it on, intense, you know, let's be serious about school and everything. And then it just took an upward trajectory from there. So he went back to Yale for residency and trained with Wayne Southwick, who was the person that proposed him here at 20th century, I believe. And I actually did a rotation when I was at Dartmouth Medical School with Wayne Southwick at Yale, which was really a lot of fun. So, yeah, he did his training, and then he was in the berry plan at the time of the Vietnam War. So we spent two years at the Navy Bethesda Naval Medical center, and then he was considering going back to join his dad in Troy, New York, in a small town. So I don't think that would have worked well, him working with his dad. He was the big, new academic guy. My grandfather had a big ego. I don't think that would have worked at all. And he loved it so much. He spent an extra year at the Navy hospital, and then he was considering going back to Detroit. He got a new job from Bob Navizer, who was the other training. So I did my residency at Gw, right? So it was run by Bob Navizer, but the other half of the residency was at the hospital center run by my dad. My dad and advisor have a lot of respect for each other, but they didn't always get along because their styles were very different. But they, you know, they equally were. They were equally important, training residents and loved orthopedics and were excellent teachers. But the funny thing is that Nevisor's dad, who was chief at Washington Hospital center, hired my dad to be the chief at Washington Hospital center. So that was kind of. It's kinda of funny history there. And so my dad became a professor at GW, right? He's a professor at Georgetown, and he also taught at the uniformed services medical school. So he's a professor there. So he did one of the first hand fellowships in the country. He was really well routed. He was a chair back in the day when the chairs did everything. So he did cervical spine surgery. He did lumbar spine surgery. He did the big, nasty, total joints that his residents would go out into private practice, send back to him. I always asked him, wondered why he took those on. He did hand search, and he did lots of trauma. We had a great trauma rotation. We were Medstar. Washington hospital center had three helicopters, Maryland state helicopters, so they flew in trauma all the time. So we got great training there. So he loved the complexity. But he did a mini fellowship with Dan Reardon in New Orleans, and he did a mini fellowship with Kleinertz, Kentucky, so the two most prominent guys in the country. And he designed that on his own from the Navy. So he's before the fellowships, and he just made his own fellowship. So that's kind of the guy that he was. So he wanted more specialization, but he still wanted to broadly cover everything. That's why he loved this meeting so much.

08:27 Yeah.

08:28 So from then he wrote papers and, you know, academic stuff and everything. But he was my chair during my residency for five years, and he was a great teacher. He was a great teacher and he was a hard worker. And as a resident, as long as you worked hard, you were fine. As long as you worked hard and studied. But if you slacked, it wasn't so good. So he and Devise were very different. He was much more casual, but they both wanted you to work hard and have a passion for orthopedics. So it was really. It's really interesting. It's like the two different father figures in platoon, the movie.

09:00 Right.

09:01 That was my one father. So it worked great.

09:04 Yeah, it was interesting. Yeah. And always an athlete throughout his entire life.

09:09 Yeah.

09:10 I remember talking with him about these incredibly long roller blade races he used to do. I can't remember how long it was, but it was impressive. Miles.

09:24 Yeah, I think he did a marathon on roller blades once, but he, you know, he was a big hockey player. He was known to be the fastest guy in the rink and the best skater in the rink. He did, you know, skating at RPI when he was a kid and everything. RPI is right there.

09:41 Right.

09:41 Right next to where they live. So RPI was one of the best hockey schools in the country for many years. So when he was a little older, you know, he played hockey still. He played hockey into his mid seventies. He would come to some tournament and they would beat everybody, his team, until they got to the Minnesota team. And they knew all the Minnesota players in college in Minnesota, I think, beat them every year except for maybe one year, but he loved that and the camaraderie and everything, but he switched to rollerblading and then in line skating, and we just drove past the Pettit center, getting here from Kohler, the big, big indoor rink. Where they have the national championships. He used to come up quietly and compete in the national championships. I think he won it one or two years for his age group, which he loved. And he. He flew to Germany once with my mom to compete internationally. And he thought he was pretty good here. Right. He won nationals. He went there, and the Dutch just cracked. But he did pretty well against the Germans. He loved to compete.

10:41 Yeah, he loved to compete. And, of course, was a big advocate for the annual golf scramble at this meeting. And I remember how I was once on his team and he was very hard on himself. If he hit a bad shot, I mean, his Temper would come through and it was aimed at himself. Great golfer.

11:03 Yes. He grew up playing plenty of golf. I think he was the club champion as a kid, as an 18 year old or something.

11:09 Yeah, amazing.

11:12 Golf and hockey were his big sports. And then just working out, rollerblading and biking. He got into biking in his later years for fun.

11:20 Yeah.

11:21 You know, the other side of him that, you know, that you might want to record. It just popped in my head is how funny he was and how much he enjoyed, you know, having fun with people. And what made me think of that is the biking, because he would always dress up for Halloween. And he worked in downtown DC, which was heavily african american, and there were gunshots at 1 bar every night. And that made us busy as trauma of residents. But he would ride to work through that part of downtown DC on his bike in a silk jester suit for Halloween. And he was redheaded before he turned white. And these people from downtown, these african american people, look at him like, who the hell is that guy? He's in a gesture outfit. He's got red hair. He's on a bike. Somebody doesn't fit. They loved it. They loved him at the hospital, the old nurses and everything. They thought he was so funny. And he was the kind of person that was well known to everybody, like the orderlies and the people and the nurses and every different grade of worker there enjoyed him and enjoyed his collegiality with everybody and his ability to have fun and bring out fun in other people. So he saw that here.

12:36 Quick witted love to kind of tease people about their various foibles and. Yeah, just a really, really fun guy that really was an important part of this organization. And we lost him too soon to Covid, which is a real tragedy. And he's greatly missed. But I know you're a great golfer and former hockey player, and I, those two sports seem to go really well together. Probably better than any other.

13:11 Both lots of fun. I learned a lot from my dad. I was never his level of hockey or golf, but I had my own sports. I was a wrestler, and I played soccer in college, and I loved to ski. And I went to middlebury College in Vermont, so I skied a lot. Then my sister moved to Vail, so I went to Dartmouth medical school, so I skied a lot. And then we would visit Gwen and Vail. So one of the most fun things I did with my dad for many years was go ski. And he always looked up to me and Gwen because we were so much better at skiing than he was. And he loved to learn from us and follow us and everything. And he loved the challenges of skiing, the hard runs and everything. So, as my wife says, yeah, my dad went out during COVID but he was 79. And as she said, he left it all nice, right? He left it on the table. He left it on the court. And he, he went out kind of like a hero in a way. I mean, he was in ICU you and wasn't doing well, so he went out. But he went out the way he wanted to go. His father, my grandfather died in his sleep with a reading golf digest at age 77 of a heart arrhythmia. And my dad did not want to get old and have Alzheimer's and be in the corner and stuff. He would rather, like, have a heart attack after skiing a race or rollerblading or something. So sad to have him go. But he went out on almost his.

14:26 Terms, I think, greatly miss him. Well, thanks very much, Steve. I appreciate you being willing to chat with us, and thanks for being. This will be recorded for people that never got a chance to meet this great surgeon, great parent, great leader in our specialty, and just a great guy. Thanks very much.

14:47 Thank you.