DR. CHARLES SPRAGUE, 1937 FOOTBALL TEAM CAPTAIN & ALL SWC

[MrMustang1965]

Dr. Charles Cameron Sprague became dean of Dallas' medical school in 1967, and with quiet strength led the campus through the growing pains of adolescence to the international recognition now granted the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

Dr. Sprague, president of UT Southwestern from 1972 to 1986, died Saturday at his Dallas home after a four-year battle with cancer. He was 88.

A memorial will be at 2 p.m. Thursday at First Presbyterian Church of Dallas, 408 Park Ave. Burial will be private.

Dr. Sprague oversaw the development of UT Southwestern, which now trains more than 3,000 students, residents and postdoctoral fellows each year.

Among its more than 1,150 faculty members, 12 belong to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, and 58 have been honored as being among the best medical specialists in America, according to university officials. Four are Nobel laureates.

U.S. News and World Report recently ranked UT Southwestern among the country's top 20 medical schools for research. The school is also known for its Nobel Prize-winning research in cholesterol metabolism.

Dr. Sprague's efforts reached far beyond the UT Southwestern campus. His legacy includes work to lift Parkland Memorial Hospital from an outdated, deteriorating place where indigent care was provided at the least possible cost to taxpayers to a hospital noted for its burn and trauma centers. He was also known for his medical skills. Early on, he demonstrated the potential for a promising academic career in blood diseases.

Dr. Kern Wildenthal, UT Southwestern president, said Dr. Sprague "was one of the great natural leaders I've ever encountered."

Open and trustworthy, Dr. Sprague had the consensus-building talents needed to lift a good but small medical school into the big leagues. He increased the number of students and the types of training available by adding allied health and graduate schools. He also expanded the faculty and facilities dramatically.

"If Charlie Sprague said that he had analyzed the situation and come to the conclusion that this is what needed to be done, people just believed him and would follow him," Dr. Wildenthal said.

Despite his accomplishments, Dr. Sprague steadfastly attributed his successes to luck.

"My whole life has been dictated by circumstances," he once said.

But he succeeded in too many endeavors throughout his life for chance to be the driving force. He was dean of the medical school from 1967 to 1972 and president of UT Southwestern from 1972 to 1986. After retiring, he became chairman and chief executive officer of Southwestern Medical Foundation, the medical school's fundraising arm. At the time of his death, he was the foundation's chairman emeritus.


'Everybody liked him'

It was Dr. Sprague's personal style that accented his many accomplishments.

"Charlie was a radiant, highly extroverted personality," said longtime Dallas journalist Lee Cullum. "He made a point of knowing everyone ... and everyone knew him and everybody liked him. He had a great ease about him. He never seemed to be working. It all seemed so natural."

Dr. Ron Anderson, Parkland's chief executive officer, said Dr. Sprague always saw a bigger picture, rather than just the singular responsibilities of his job.

"He always had the best interest of the entire community," Dr. Anderson said. "When you dealt with him, you knew he was coming from a higher plane."

Dr. Sprague recruited Dr. Anderson to help turn Parkland around. Dr. Anderson remembers the first time he saw Dr. Sprague away from the campus that Parkland shares with the medical school.

At the time, Dr. Anderson was leading foundation officials from New Jersey on a tour of Dallas agencies that help the homeless. He spotted the medical school president serving food to the homeless at the Stewpot.

"He was a fellow who really lived his witness, instead of just talking about it," Dr. Anderson said.


Parkland improvements

To build a better medical school, Dr. Sprague needed to upgrade Parkland so professors and students would have a proper place to practice cutting-edge medicine. But the Dallas County Commissioners Court held Parkland's purse strings.


Dr. Sprague fought to get $80 million in bonds to update and expand Parkland.

While Dr. Sprague had a gentle manner, he also understood bargaining from a position of strength.

In his autobiography, Splendid Touch, the late civic leader Ralph B. Rogers told how Dr. Sprague could be direct. The medical school president once cornered Mr. Rogers at a cocktail party to ask him to accept an appointment to the Parkland board of managers. When he declined, Dr. Sprague replied: "I'm not really asking you to accept the appointment. I'm telling you to do it."

Mr. Rogers did.


Turned on to medicine

Dr. Sprague was born in Dallas and graduated from Oak Cliff High School, now W.H. Adamson High School. The youngest of eight children, he was from a family of athletes. Sprague Stadium in Dallas is named for his family. His father, George Sprague, was mayor of Dallas from 1937 to 1939.

Dr. Sprague attended Southern Methodist University on an athletic scholarship. He was an All Southwest Conference tackle and football team captain in 1937. He was also captain of the basketball squad and a member of the track team.

A twist of fate steered Dr. Sprague toward a medical career midway through his junior year at SMU.

"I'd never been in a doctor's office until I had football knee injury," Dr. Sprague said. "I became enamored with medicine."

In 1940, he graduated with degrees in science and business administration. He was accepted to two medical schools, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Baylor University Medical School, which was then in Dallas. But because he had to borrow tuition money from his older brother, he had little say in which school to attend. Tuition at Baylor, a private school, was $400 a semester, while at the state school it was $50 a semester. He earned his medical degree from the latter in 1943.

After an internship at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and a residency at a New Orleans hospital, he was ready to enter private practice. But because his family lived in Dallas and his father was the former mayor, he didn't want to return to his hometown.

"I wanted to make it on my own," he said.

In 1948, before he could find a medical practice to join, Dr. Sprague found himself in academia. He taught for two years at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. The chairman of Tulane's department of medicine then asked Dr. Sprague if he would take additional training so that he could head Tulane's hematology department.

In 1952, he rejoined the Tulane faculty with a considerable background in blood diseases.


As a leader

Ten years later, on a flight back from a Chicago meeting, the head of a committee searching for a new dean asked: "Charlie, did you ever think about being dean?"

"I laughed," Dr. Sprague recalled. "No, as a matter of fact, I've never been in the dean's office."

In 1963, after conferring with university officials about the direction of the school, Dr. Sprague agreed to be dean of the Tulane medical school. He was attracted by promises of better things to come.

"We made some very extensive plans that would have moved the school across the river, built a new campus and a new university hospital," he said.

But those plans never materialized. And in 1967, the dean's post at UT Southwestern opened.

Some of the most powerful men in Dallas – James Aston, head of Republic Bank and treasurer of the Southwestern Medical Foundation; Mayor J. Erik Jonsson and his co-founders of Texas Instruments, Cecil Green and Eugene McDermott; developer John Stemmons; and George MacGregor, then president of the medical foundation – had lunch with Dr. Sprague at the Petroleum Club.

"Charlie said he was half scared," the late Mr. Aston later recalled. "He was trying to persuade us that he was the man for the job, and we were trying to persuade him to leave the job at Tulane."

Dr. Sprague came to Dallas that July as dean and professor of internal medicine. The next spring he presented the University of Texas System Board of Regents a plan to build a life sciences center in Dallas that clustered medicine and teaching-related professions in an environment of research and patient care. His plan was approved.

There were setbacks. In 1974, Dr. Tom Shires, chairman of the medical school, resigned to take a similar post at the University of Washington. Ten physicians in the surgery department left with him.

Ms. Cullum also credits Dr. Sprague with anticipating a precipitous decline in state and federal funding in the 1980s.

"I think he understood that sooner than anyone else did," she said. "He saw that the community had to pick up an enormous load."


Giving back

After retiring in 1986, Dr. Sprague became chairman and chief executive of the Southwestern Medical Foundation. He became chairman emeritus in 1995.

That same year, the Oak Cliff Lions Club gave Dr. Sprague its Humanitarian Award for his commitment to his work and his community. He estimated he spent about 20 percent of his time volunteering, including in homeless shelters, women's shelters, the Interfaith Housing Coalition and First Presbyterian Church of Dallas.

"Helping others, I think, is a responsibility to the community, and I find it very enjoyable," Dr. Sprague said at the time. "We need to help out more, but a lot of people don't even do it at all, and they drain the community instead of giving back to it."

In 2000, Dr. Sprague founded the Sage Society to raise money for a job-placement service through Senior Citizens of Greater Dallas.

That same year he received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Science from the Health Industry Council of the Dallas-Fort Worth Region. He served as honorary chairman of the World Health Forum 2000, which is sponsored by the council and co-sponsored by the World Health Organization and the International Federation of Hospitals. He also served as chairman of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

His wife, Alayne Sprague, said, "He was certainly the love of my heart, and he inspired me because he was always willing to give back to the world with his work and his life."

His daughter, Cynthia Cameron Sprague Hardesty of Plano, said: "I'm really grateful, not simply for the opportunity that he provided for me in terms of seeing the world and learning and meeting a wide variety of different people. I am really grateful for the relationship he had with my kids."

In addition to his wife and daughter, Dr. Sprague is survived by four stepdaughters, Laura Reynolds of Mesquite, Victoria Nelson of Cohasset, Mass., Susan Nelson of Pittsboro, N.C., and Betty Heckman of Buffalo, N.Y.; two grandchildren; and seven stepgrandchildren.

Memorials may be made to First Presbyterian Church Foundation, 408 Park Ave., Dallas, Texas 75201, or the Southwestern Medical Foundation, 2305 Cedar Springs Road, Suite 150, Dallas, Texas 75201.