Features
‘Mac’ Comes Back
A onetime bricklayer, railroad worker, and semipro quarterback—orthopaedic
surgeon and Rochester graduate C. McCollister Evarts returns to lead the Medical
Center. By Mark Liu ’87
It was the fall of 1952, and Mac Evarts thought he had just lost his chance
at medical school.
Evarts was interviewing for admission with George Whipple, the Nobel Prize–winning
founding dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry. Evarts had worked a grueling
summer schedule: 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. in railroad maintenance (because he needed
the money), then 4 p.m. to midnight as a hospital orderly (because he needed
something medical on his résumé).
When Whipple asked Evarts what he had done that summer, Evarts proudly stated
he was an orderly. But Whipple responded, “No no, what did you do,”
and pointed to Evarts’s hands, which were raw, hard, and calloused.
“I remember thinking in those few seconds: ‘I’ve blown my
medical school career,’” says Evarts. Deflated, the son of a steel
mill worker and gym teacher admitted he had driven spikes and tightened bolts
on a railroad section gang between Buffalo and Erie. Not exactly surgeon’s
work.
Whipple replied: “You’re going to like it here.”
C. McCollister (Mac) Evarts ’57M (MD), ’64M (Res) did, indeed,
like it at Rochester. So much so, that 20 years after graduation, he returned
to head the Department of Orthopaedics. And in 2002, Evarts arrived at the Medical
Center a third time to serve as an advisor to the Medical Center CEO after retiring
from a distinguished medical and administrative career.
But after the sudden resignation of former CEO Jay Stein in 2003, Evarts was
named senior vice president and vice provost for health affairs and CEO of the
Medical Center.
Evarts, who earlier this year underwent the kind of hip replacement surgery
that he helped pioneer as an orthopaedic surgeon, now sits atop the institution
he once worried wouldn’t accept him as a student.
Much has changed since his student days. The Medical Center campus itself is
bigger by more than 2 million square feet, including the addition of a new hospital
building, medical education wing, cancer center, ambulatory care center, biomedical
research buildings, and other facilities. Hospital outpatient visits have increased
more than five-fold, with clinical revenues now over $1 billion and a medical
school that ranks in the top 25 percent in the country.
Leading all that might sound like it requires the skills of a juggler as much
as those of a medical scientist, but Evarts brings a multifaceted background
to the executive office. He is a surgeon who first got his hands dirty as an
apprentice bricklayer. A CEO who learned leadership and decision making as a
quarterback and as a medical officer on an aircraft carrier. A onetime attending
physician who reluctantly agreed not to play in a rugby league because of the
risk for injury, but who played semipro football while in medical school. A
man who colleagues say maintains a meticulous attention to detail, but also
was rumored to have hidden in laundry carts to sneak past monitors at the School
of Nursing, where he courted the woman who would become his wife of 49 years
and counting.
In other words, this is someone who knows when to take worthwhile chances,
and no risk was bigger than one he took early in his career.
After his residency, Evarts joined the Cleveland Clinic’s orthopaedics
department in 1964 and had to learn quickly: Within hours of arriving, he had
a caseload of 35 patients. Then again, everything was quick about his tenure
in Cleveland. Soon he rose to attending physician. Five years later, he was
running the department.
Such a quick rise was “very unusual,” says Ken DeHaven, professor
of orthopaedics at Rochester who was an intern at the Cleveland Clinic. But
Evarts, who never needed much sleep, understood the merits of dedicated practice
and training.
“You could just see the tenacity of the guy,” says H. Royer Collins
’57M (MD), a renowned orthopaedic surgeon who went to medical school with
Evarts (and still remembers “getting clocked” by him during a “friendly”
game of touch football). “He’s got a purpose and he’s going
to accomplish things.”
Evarts also had a vision that would shake the establishment. While still in
his 30s, Evarts traveled to Europe for six months to study a radical new technique:
total hip replacement. He returned and made the Cleveland Clinic one of only
a half dozen places in the country to offer the surgery.
“It was a gamble,” says Collins. “The establishment looked
at it, well, let’s just say not favorably.”
In fact, even after performing several procedures, Evarts and his colleagues
were giving a lecture about total hip replacement to several hundred orthopaedists
when trouble began brewing. One surgeon stood and said, “I think what
you guys are doing is criminal. These operations are all going to fail.”
Things might have gotten difficult if not for a patient who stood up and methodically
walked up the steps of the auditorium. He reached the top, then started down.
At the bottom, he told the audience he had been laid up for six months, unable
to walk. Total hip replacement was the reason he could climb those steps.
Eventually, says Collins, the procedure became the gold standard. Evarts had
gambled and won, and soon Rochester’s Medical Center came calling. Evarts
agreed to look at the orthopaedics program and, true to form, spoke his mind.
He said Rochester should create a department for orthopaedics in order to give
the University the stature it needed to advance in the field. He was told how
unlikely that was, and Evarts returned to the Cleveland Clinic. But the next
call from Rochester carried the news that it was making orthopaedics a separate
department and it wanted Evarts to lead it.
Evarts couldn’t help but feel a pull. “Here it was, my own school,
and an opportunity to form my own department,” he says.
Success would depend heavily on the people Evarts chose to surround him. In
that respect, he knew the score.
From his early days playing sports, Evarts understood teams and winning with
them. As high school quarterback in his hometown of Fredonia, New York, he led
his school to back-to-back undefeated seasons. On the basketball court, he helped
his team win the section championship. He found time to play baseball and run
track as well, and he afforded college by receiving a National War Memorial
Scholarship at Colgate University—one of only 13 in the nation, given
for both academic and athletic accomplishments.
Even when he lost, he won. As a first-year med student, rather than attend
an anatomy class he had already taken, Evarts spent Saturday mornings earning
spending money by playing in the old semipro football league. But a serious
ankle injury in one game brought him to the emergency room back in Rochester—and
dangerously close to his classroom. So he made up a story to tell the nurse
on duty.
“The story wasn’t any good at all,” he admits. The nurse
didn’t believe him, but she also didn’t report him. Her loyalty
led to a date a few weeks later.
“It was the end of my football career, but the beginning of a lifelong
relationship,” he says. He married that loyal nurse, Nancy Lyons ’54N,
two years later.
Loyalty has always mattered to Evarts, and it showed in his first recruitment
efforts at Cleveland. His former classmate Collins was practicing in Boston
when Evarts asked him to join him to head the first sports medicine section
in the country. Collins said no—a trifling obstacle for the likes of Evarts.
“He called me every night for two weeks, an hour and a half after I went
to bed,” Collins says. “He knew he was waking me up. I told him,
‘Will you knock it off?’ He said, ‘I won’t stop calling
until you at least come up for a visit.’” Collins did more than
visit. He joined the department.
In building the orthopaedics department at Rochester, Evarts’s loyalty
was returned. Surgeon Richard Burton, recruited by Evarts to Cleveland to direct
the hand surgery program, joined him in Rochester as well. Likewise, DeHaven
was happy in Cleveland but decided he had to follow Evarts’s lead.
“When it came down to the bottom line, there was only one person in the
world I knew what I could expect from in a chair,” says DeHaven, who says
Evarts’s integrity earns him such loyalty.
Many who know Evarts say his strength in recruiting comes from not being threatened
by talent.
“Like a good quarterback, he knows he needs good folks around him,”
Collins says.
And, colleagues say, Evarts trusts people to run their divisions the way they
see fit.
“Some people delegate to lighten their load. He delegates so the team
can accomplish more,” Burton says.
Accomplish they did. Burton went on to lead a group that developed a pioneering
surgery for arthritis of the thumb, becoming internationally renowned for what
is now known as the “Burton procedure.” He also served as president
of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand and as director of the American
Board of Orthopaedic Surgery.
DeHaven, who served as president of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgery,
launched Rochester’s sports medicine program at a time when the field
was in its infancy. The program trained orthopaedists who went on to become
team physicians for the Boston Red Sox and other teams, save the careers of
Olympic gold medal winners, and treat pro tennis players such as Jennifer Capriati
and Martina Hingis.
Evarts had a transforming influence on orthopaedics at Rochester, according
to Jules Cohen ’53, ’57M (MD), a senior faculty member when Evarts
arrived. There were very good clinicians at the time, says Cohen, but Evarts
“brought it to a whole new level” by establishing an academic component
and building a research enterprise that brought the department to national prominence.
To Cohen, one reason Evarts works so well with people—and gets so much
done—is that he’s “someone who is willing to be disagreed
with. He’s a listener, and he’s a convincer.”
Other institutions were convinced as well. In 1987, Evarts was recruited to
become CEO, senior vice president for health affairs, and dean of the College
of Medicine at Pennsylvania State University. Under Evarts’s guidance,
the organization’s faculty and research funding tripled. Just as telling,
Evarts made a donation to Penn State that was the largest ever from one of its
senior administrators.
He retired from Penn State in 2000.
Now, back in Rochester, Evarts envisions a new Health Sciences Park, which
would represent a major expansion for the Medical Center and a new way of making
care more convenient for patients.
Beyond another professional challenge, moving back feels like a homecoming
to Evarts. He and his wife are closer to their beloved camp in the Adirondacks,
where the two honeymooned (it was all they could afford). Ever the leader, Evarts
has been known to rally almost the entire family—three kids and 10 grandkids—to
tackle big projects like repainting the camp or replenishing the woodpile.
Sure, he takes time out for woodworking (“If you know how to deal with
a good piece of cherry, you can deal with a femur,” he says). But he is
someone who “is always busy,” says Burton, whose own camp sits near
Evarts’s.
Ultimately, being closer to the camp means being closer to the family. Evarts
is always quick to credit the people around him for his success, and he’s
not about to forget his most important team of all.
Mark Liu ’87 is editor of Rochester Medicine.
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