History

In the early days of launching a medical school at the University of Calgary, the hunt was on for hard-working, thick-skinned recruits to help develop curriculum. More importantly, it needed people who believed the fledgling program would survive.

Calgary was just coming out of a Christmas cold snap in 1971 when a young doctor who met those criteria arrived from Oklahoma.

“I thought, coming into it, that it would be all applause and opportunity,” Dr. Clarence Guenter says of his arrival. “Of course, it turned out to be more difficult than that.”

Guenter had spent the previous five years at the University of Oklahoma developing a training program for respiratory disease specialists. He’d received a request from Lionel McLeod, head of medicine in Calgary, to meet him at a medical research meeting in Atlantic City. McLeod was on the hunt for Canadian-born doctors who were studying abroad, in the hopes they might be convinced to come back home.

The offer was tempting for 33-year-old Guenter and his wife, Marie, who were no longer sure the U.S. was the right atmosphere for their young family with the political climate unstable and the country struggling through fall-out from the Vietnam War.

“It was a very turbulent time in the U.S.,” he says. “There were riots on the campuses and students getting killed. We looked at each other and said, ‘Do we want our children to grow up in this or do we want to go back to Canada?’”

Guenter decided to take the meeting in Atlantic City. McLeod, however, failed to show. Despite the optics, and the disparaging opinions of most of his mentors, Guenter eventually connected with McLeod. Fueled by youthful enthusiasm and a minor rebellious streak, Guenter agreed to make the move to Calgary.

“I was never much taken by authority,” he says with a smile in his voice. “So when my bosses said, That’s a dead end’ or, as one of my mentors at Stanford said, ‘Choose wisely,’ meaning don’t go there, it wasn’t heavy for me because I was looking more at spontaneity and opportunity.”