Guest of the Taliban Dan Harris '93, ABC News, leads press corps into Kandahar.
	Alumni Trustees Nominated
	It's the Faculty, Stupid Survey of Colby alums yield informative and positive results.

ALUMNI PROFILES
William '51 and Ellen Kenerson Gelotte '50
Star Gazing

Susan Monk Pacheco '67
Doctor in the House

Allen Throop '66

Nancy Heiser '75

Don McMillan '84

Thomas Warren '82
Something Fishery

Brian Post '97
A Natural Observer

Clay Surovek '98

When she was a child of 8 or 9, Susan Monk Pacheco '67 decided that when she grew up she would follow in the footsteps of her father, a physician in Glen Rock, Pa., a small farming community. This was a natural aspiration for a kid who happened to be following in her father's footsteps--literally--at the time.

"He was the family doctor," Pacheco said. "His office was in our house. He made house calls, he even did home deliveries. Sometimes he would take me with him."

The youngster got enough exposure to decide she liked the taste of medicine. As the family moved from Glen Rock to Philadelphia and then to York, Pa., Pacheco didn't waver.

She arrived at Colby in 1963, elected to study biology and joined a small but close-knit group of majors, most of them on the same career path. They worked with professors Allan Scott and Robert Terry in biology and Evans Reid in organic chemistry, among others. "We studied together," she said. "It was a lot of work but it was a lot of fun."

She applied to medical schools and found that a woman pursuing medicine in the 1960s could be at a disadvantage, though not at Colby, she said. "I never felt that I was second rate there because I was a girl in science," she said. "That was a very positive thing for me. Through my career I haven't always felt that.

"When I went for my med school interviews, one guy at one of the places asked me how come I wasn't in love," she recalled, "inferring, I guess, that if I wasn't in love that was sort of strange, and maybe if I were in love I wouldn't be applying to med school."

Her love life not withstanding, she was accepted at several medical schools and elected to enroll at her father's alma mater, Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. She settled on pediatrics because she found she liked dealing with parents and the fact that most children have a single illness whereas many older patients have multiple problems. She went on to become--and still is--a general pediatrician, working in an inner-city clinic in Dayton, Ohio (where her husband, Jaime, is an oncologist), and teaching at Wright State University School of Medicine. Pacheco sees 20 to 30 patients a day, mostly urban poor. Cases range from preventive medicine to acute care, asthma to child abuse.

She enjoys working with parents, but her young patients are a particular pleasure, she said. "Kids are very honest. They're not like adults. They haven't come up with all the layers yet."

Not that there aren't frustrations: "You know this country has a long way to go as far as its poor and health care go. . . . I hope I'm making an impact, but I'm to the age now where I'm seeing children of my patients, and poverty is to some degree a vicious cycle. Especially poverty without education."

She sees the children of adolescent mothers growing up to become adolescent mothers themselves although she finds some encouragement when teenage mothers grow with the responsibility of parenthood.

But that isn't the only aspect of her career that is cyclical.

Pacheco's daughter, M. Cristina Pacheco '96, followed her mother's path to Colby and into medicine. Christina is a resident in pathology at the University of Cincinnati.

Susan Pacheco said her dad has passed away but lived long enough to see that the medical mantle had been passed down to his daughter, and to a son.

"Was he proud of you?" she was asked.

"Yeah," she said. "He was, actually."

--Gerry Boyle '78