Letters

Only in America

I just wanted to congratulate you on a wonderful story about Heval Mohamed Kelli (“Healing Hearts, Changing Minds,” autumn 2015). Something that was refreshing and moving to read after all the noise recently in the media about refugees. Made my day.

—Ravi Mangal Patel, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Emory School of Medicine 

What a great article about a young physician who is very likely to become a world leader in medicine.

—Omar M. Lattouf 74C 77G 80M 85MR 88MR, Atlanta, Georgia

The coverage of how Dr. Heval Mohamed Kelli started out in America as a teenage Syrian refugee is encouraging and exemplifies what honest people with purposeful goals can do when given an opportunity. Thank you for sharing this story.

—Arinita Ballard, Undergraduate Program Assistant, Emory University 

Great story. Very inspirational and motivational. “Only in America.”

—Michael T. Callen, Clinical Technologist, Emory Johns Creek Hospital

For the Record

I always look forward to your magazine, learning about where Emory is now and enjoying reminiscing about the Emory of the past. I noticed that a picture entitled “A Toast to Transformation” (“Century in the City,” autumn 2015) had a paragraph about the incredible gift from the Woodruff Foundation of Coca-Cola stock that transformed Emory’s future. The picture, of Emory students in 1982 (not 1979 written on the picture), didn’t mention what they were toasting.  It showed Emory students not toasting the gift of three years earlier—it was the students trying to create a Guinness World Record for the largest toast, “toasting away” Emory’s Wonderful Wednesday, a day of no classes every Wednesday started in the 1960s and a tradition that was going away with Emory’s transition from the quarter system to the semester system. Going away were two days
of classes, then a day break, then two days of classes, and then the weekend. We were smiling in the picture, but ohhhh, we were crying on the inside.

—Gary Glasser 84C 92MR, Atlanta, Georgia

Matter of Degree

In the story “Doctor Who” (autumn 2015),  you state that Karen Ventii 08PhD was in the cancer biology program. That is not correct.  That program did not exist in 2008. She is an alumna of the Biochemistry, Cell, and Developmental Biology Program.

—Carlos Moreno 98G, Associate Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Winship Cancer Institute and, Emory School of Medicine

Emory Memory

I was somewhat taken aback when the latest issue of Emory Magazine  (autumn 2015) failed to list my small accomplishments in class notes. While admittedly this summary offered is somewhat more than one could find space for in the notes, I rather imagined it would be edited for length and content and somehow find a nest in the earliest years recorded quarterly in the magazine. As you might guess, there are not likely to be many more times that I might merit a small notation in your excellent publication. I turn eighty-five in forthcoming January and the EmoryMemory begins to fade.  I was never one of the great scholars from Druid Hills, although I may have been the first Goodrich C. Dooley to ever appear on television; I slept in rather roughshod army barracks on the site where now CDC stores the world’s most deadly virus samples; fellow students and I sidestepped gingerly across the steam train railroad tracks in order to get to class; our mandated swimming PE was in the pool beside the tracks and we prayed for the train’s engineer to shove steam our way to heat the unheated water at 8:00 a.m. in the winter; I still bear scars from Pushball when push turned to shove; and some would claim that I was responsible for Emory’s first “pantie raid.” It was truly not my fault, but returning to my frat-house room at midnight from my WSB-radio and TV shift, I innocently revealed a news flash from AP, which indicated some “bad boys” at one of those awful Ivy League schools had staged a really big raid on the female dorm. I guess that news release fell into the wrong hands, for when I awoke the next morning it was all over the radio in Atlanta about how Emory students had unwisely followed their example. Naturally, I was shocked to learn that such a thing could happen at our seat of learning. I did spend an inordinate amount of time testifying to Jake Ward that I was in no way responsible.

—Michael McDougald 52C, Rome, Georgia