100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren: #4

(Photo is of the staff in Bob Honts' Office, 1985, including yours truly on the left)

There is a special place in your heart where you keep your moments of greatness tucked away.

I had no idea what I was getting into in 1984 when I showed up at the Travis County Courthouse. The job interview was as assistant to then County Commissioner, Bob Honts, who honed his sagacity against the steel of Texas political icon, former Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock. Honts was, unbeknownst to me at the time, a “colorful” local legend characterized as a revolting show-off by his enemies and a slightly flawed genius by his friends.

When I walked into Honts’ office that day, he shook my hand, looked piercingly into my eyes and said, “I have to get back on the dais, so you have 20 seconds to tell me why I should hire you.”

I opened my mouth and words came tumbling out from some place I didn’t even know existed. “I have above average intelligence, more energy than I know what to do with and a low tolerance for boredom,” I rattled off breathlessly.

“Okay,” he quickly responded. “Will you take this?” He was pointing to a long list of numbers on a piece of paper he held in his fist, and which I later realized was salary levels, but at the time just looked like a bunch of impossibly small numbers.

As I leaned into the paper willing my brain to catch up to the moment and my eyes to focus, Honts, not one for pauses, pointed higher up on the salary level list and said, “How about this?” I just wanted to agree and get the hell out of his incredibly intimidating presence. “Okay,” I said in a quivering voice.

“We’ll process the paper,” he said, as he turned and walked out, back to that dais where issues I couldn’t have conceived of previously would become de rigueur for me over the next four years of my employment.

Within the week, I found myself sitting on the front row of Commissioner’s Court, pen and paper in hand, no idea what I was supposed to be doing. The first item on the agenda was the consideration of an oil lease on property Travis County owned. The prospective lessor, and his very handsome son (another story, another time), owners of an oil and gas exploration company in Ohio, had stated their proposal eloquently and the county attorney had recommended the contract.

Commissioner Honts waggled his fingers in my direction summoning me to the dais and whispered, “What do you think?” Good Gaud! He was asking me if I thought Travis County should sign the lease!

Having dealt with a fair share of oil and gas lease issues when I was married and living on a ranch in the middle of oil country in west Texas, the one thing I knew for sure was that everyone “lawyered up” big time.

“I think you should have an oil and gas attorney look at the lease,” I whispered back. Honts requested a delay and the county eventually made a lot more money off the lease than was originally proposed.

That was my first day, followed by many more filled with similar issues of intrigue. But my favorite, and the focus of this #4 of the one hundred things I want to tell my kids and grandkids, was STARflight.

(The first STARflight is pictured right. The inscription says, "To SueAnn - A STARflight all by herself - Bob Honts.)

It all started one day about a year into my “Honts experience,” as I was sifting through the two-foot pile of mail that came across my desk on a daily basis. On a magazine cover I saw a photo of a man standing in front of a helicopter, obviously a doctor as he was wearing the requisite white coat over blue scrubs and had a stethoscope draped around his neck. The caption on the cover said something like, “Dr. Red Duke and Lifeflight,” which I found out was a helicopter ambulance service associated with Herman Hospital in Houston.

Big Brother: A Novel by Lionel Shriver

A good friend, Charlena Vargas Prada, recently sent me an email asking for a quote for the back cover of her new book, Mrs. VP luvs Shakspeer. At the end of her email she said, “By the way, I’ve heard that Big Brother is good.” I had been sniffing around that book for a while myself, and Charlena’s book recommendations are reliable, so I ordered it up post haste!

Big Brother: A Novel by another one of those female writers with a male name, Lionel Shriver (pictured), is a story within a story, within a story and they’re all good. 

First, you have the story of Pandora and her husband and his two kids, a teen boy and a pre-teen girl from a previous marriage, and their strained family dynamics. This story, along with Shriver’s exceptional way with words would have been enough to lure me page-to-page.

Pandora has achieved some fame for inventing “Baby Monotonous,” custom-made dolls that look like, and when you pull the string in their back, talk like, whoever the purchaser specifies, repeating the phrases that characterize the person the doll portrays.

I found this piece of the book singularly titillating, making me wonder what phrases I would include if I did a doll, let’s say, of my husband. Maybe his doll would say, “It’s not in here,” because he can never find anything, or “Shit, that’s hot!” because he can’t seem to remember that pots on the stove are hot. It also made me wonder what my doll would say. 

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

Two things I learned from this book:

When nature turns on us, no amount of preparedness is enough.

When you lose air conditioning in a warm climate, civility goes out the window.

Five Days at Memorial is exactly that. It is about five days at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans, prior to, during and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This is a very sad story and a wake-up call for anyone who thinks they’d be okay in a storm of that magnitude. The answer is, no, you probably won’t. Why? Because as I said above, no matter how much hospitals practice emergency procedures, no matter how well-prepared the National Guard is, no matter how many times the Red Cross has served at natural disasters, each disaster presents a unique scenario for which there is no procedure.

At first it seems that Memorial Hospital is the place to be in a hurricane. Nurses and doctors bring in their families and pets and picnic baskets to “wait it out” in safety. They’d done it before. No big deal. But Katrina had other plans. 

The water soon got so high that the generators, illogically installed in the hospital basement, went out, and the hospital was without light, without air conditioning (imagine New Orleans in August without AC), without ventilators pumping oxygen into critically ill patients, without elevators in an eight-story building, without flushing commodes, and without drinking water.

(Photo is of Memorial Hospital during the flood)

When people started dying, they were moved into the chapel, and the heat spread the smell of decaying bodies throughout the hospital. When rescue helicopters tried to land on the top floor of the adjacent parking garage to rescue people from the hospital, there wasn’t a reasonable way to get the patients from the hospital to the helicopters. 

No one was in charge, and no one was communicating effectively from the outside to coordinate rescues. Every rescue effort was horribly overwhelmed and evacuations were needed all over the city. Families had no idea of the fate of their loved ones because there simply was no communication. People were asked to bring their boats to rescue people, but then they had to stop because of snipers and looters.

The protocol for evacuation was that the sickest went last, a policy that seemed both horribly right and wrong to me. Pets were euthanized because the rescue helicopters wouldn't transport animals. And then, one of the doctors makes the decision to euthanize eight patients she deems too ill to move, and one too overweight to move.