Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project
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Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Northampton, MA J. Joseph Speidel Interviewed by Rebecca Sharpless October 10–11, 2002 Menlo Park, California This interview was made possible with generous support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. © Sophia Smith Collection 2006 Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Narrator J. Joseph Speidel, M.D., M.P.H. (b. 1937) worked in USAID’s Office of Population from 1969 to 1982 and served as its second director, from 1980 to 1983. He was president of Population Action International from 1983 to 1994, and director of the Population Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation until 2002. Speidel is on the faculty at the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy at the University of California, San Francisco. http://reprohealth.ucsf.edu/fs/bios/speidel-jjoseph.html Interviewer Rebecca Sharpless directed the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, from 1993 to 2006. She is the author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900– 1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). She is also co-editor, with Thomas L. Charlton and Lois E. Myers, of Handbook of Oral History (AltaMira Press, 2006). In 2006 she joined the department of history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Restrictions None Format Six 60-minute audiocassettes. Transcript Transcribed, audited and edited at Baylor University. Transcript has been reviewed and approved by J. Joseph Speidel. Bibliography and Footnote Citation Forms Audio Recording Bibliography: Speidel, J. Joseph. Interview by Rebecca Sharpless. Audio recording, October 10–11, 2002. Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: J. Joseph Speidel, interview by Rebecca Sharpless, audio recording, October 10–11, 2002, Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, tape 2. Transcript Bibliography: Speidel, J. Joseph. Interview by Rebecca Sharpless. Transcript of audio recording, October 10–11, 2002. Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: J. Joseph Speidel, interview by Rebecca Sharpless, transcript of audio recording, October 10–11, 2002, Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, p. 23. Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College J. Joseph Speidel, interviewed by Rebecca Sharpless Interview 1 of 2 Page 1 of 118 Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project J. Joseph Speidel Interviewed by Rebecca Sharpless October 10–11, 2002 Menlo Park, California Sharpless Today is October 10, in the year 2002. My name is Rebecca Sharpless and this is the first oral history interview with Dr. J. Joseph Speidel. The interview is taking place in the office of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2121 Sand Hill Road, in Menlo Park, California. These interviews are being sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation and I’m with the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. Okay, Dr. Speidel, thanks for seeing me this afternoon. We are here in the foundation’s amazing new building. It’s beautiful. Speidel We’re on leased land that Stanford is leasing to us for, I think it’s at least fifty years. Stanford was very clever in that they—when Leland Stanford left—created the university, he left a provision that they couldn’t sell property. And this used to be his farm, that’s why they call Stanford the Farm. It’s a huge area—I can’t tell you how many acres. And I am sure that it would have been enormously tempting to sell off bits and pieces over the years as all universities always are seeking money. But I am sure they are doing better by using it for purposes like ours. And by the way, if we ever decided to abandon this building, they would be able to claim it as their own. So— Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College J. Joseph Speidel, interviewed by Rebecca Sharpless Interview 1 of 2 Page 2 of 118 Sharpless That’s a good deal. Speidel I think it cost us maybe twenty million dollars to build, which, actually, is rather inexpensive for a building that has enough room for over a hundred offices. Sharpless And ecologically friendly and aesthetically attractive. Speidel We just got a gold award for—by a group that does objective assessments of how green your building is. And if it’s green enough, they give you a different color. They give you gold—platinum is the top and very few buildings ever get that. But anyway, I know you want to hear about me rather than the building. Sharpless Well, that’s okay. I am enjoying the building. Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me a little bit about your family and your growing-up years. Speidel Okay. Well, I’m a middle child for whatever that means with an older brother and a younger sister and my parents were academics, I guess. My mom’s—they’re both dead, but my mom had a Ph.D. in biochemistry, which was rather unusual for somebody born in 1908. And my father was a professor of orthodontia, and— Sharpless Where? Speidel Well, we’ll get to where we moved in a minute. (laughter) But he was also unusual in that he was always doing research and teaching, rather than in practice, and that was rather rare also. But I was born in Iowa City, Iowa, and moved successively to Indianapolis, Indiana, about—a little before first grade. And then down to New Orleans, Louisiana, for second through fifth grade. And my father became dean of the dental school at Loyola University Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College J. Joseph Speidel, interviewed by Rebecca Sharpless Interview 1 of 2 Page 3 of 118 down there—during that period—at a very young age, by the way. I would have to figure it out. But, that was—I guess he was in his early thirties. And then moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I did junior high and high school, and then headed east to one of the eastern Ivies—went off to Harvard, where I did undergraduate and medical school and school of public health, all three. I was—I started off as a chemistry and physics science major but at somewhere along the way decided that the complexities of advanced mathematics were not really where I was the strongest, and I’d taken a course from Carroll Williams on physiology and a course from E. O. Wilson, who’s one of the giants in the biology field—somebody who has three or four Pulitzer Prizes and is a very profound thinker. And that made me think that maybe the biological sciences were a good place to go. And so I switched over to medicine and was lucky enough to get into Harvard Medical School, which is probably the— well, the hardest thing I have ever done, (laughs) because it is rather selective. But, E. O. Wilson, I think, was something of an inspiration and I felt that I could go into research or even administration or into clinical care of some sort. So, there were a lot of options. I spent a lot of time putting off decisions about final careers. Sharpless What did your mother do with her Ph.D.? Speidel Well, she worked until the first child came along, and then when my father died when I was a junior in college, she went back to work amidst much grumbling about how far she was behind in the field. But she was one of these people who everything came easy to, not like me. I was probably much more a drone who would stick with it. But she was somebody who Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College J. Joseph Speidel, interviewed by Rebecca Sharpless Interview 1 of 2 Page 4 of 118 found things easy and probably didn’t understand how hard it was for some other people in life. But— Sharpless How did your family make—you and or your family make a decision for you to head to Harvard for your undergrad? Speidel I guess my mother thought I should try it, you know, apply. And I found like—my high school years were rather boring because it was a one-size- fits-all high school. And, so if you were a little brighter you were bored; if you were a little less bright you were frustrated. There was very little individualization. This was in the pre-Sputnik era before everybody got worried about academics. And even sadder was that they thought they were pretty good because people actually went on to Ivy League schools. But we were woefully ill-prepared compared to our colleagues who’d gone to Andover and Exeter and other prep schools, and even the best public high schools, the East Denver High School kind of place, or the Evanston High. Those folks were way better off than those of us who came out of Minneapolis’s high school system. Sharpless So you found yourself having to work hard once you got to Harvard? Speidel Yeah, the one thing that kind of saved me was that I was a great reader, so, you know, I did great on the SATs because I knew all the words, which was two thirds of the battle, I think, and the science wasn’t too bad. So, I was always—the standardized tests were always a big friend for me because somehow I was—I think I was bright enough to do well and not so bright I saw complexities and got wrong answers.