When young Robert Painter opened the door to the deliverymen outside, he might be greeted with a load of fresh ice cream, maybe some milk. Maybe a severed raccoon head.
Whatever waited on the other side of the door, Painter took it in — that was his job. A medical student in Indiana, he lived at a state department of public health building, hired to be there when deliveries came in. Among other materials, he and another student took turns receiving dairy products that were due for safety inspection and wild animal brains needed for rabies tests.
Painter, now a Hartford city councilman nearing the end of his six-year run, held three jobs during medical school. He lived at the department and took in deliveries, day or night, but he also worked the nurses’ library and got some medical experience as an extern at a local hospital.
But the department of health job had an extra perk — he could eat whatever ice cream passed health testing. As for the heads of the raccoons or squirrels that came in, a sliver of brain was tested for the rabies virus; not as savory, but interesting to a young medical student.
That wasn’t the first time Painter held a job that he didn’t just clock out of at 5 p.m. In college, the state employed Painter and a number of other college-aged workers to test water quality around Indiana. So during the week, Painter and co- workers would road trip across the state, mobile laboratory in tow, and test rivers and streams for pollution levels.
Clean And Green
This was in the 1950s, the days when the river by Gary, Indiana, reversed flow every morning when residents flushed their toilets. The environmental landscape was less thoroughly charted than it is now, and Painter and his coworkers were bringing back some of the earliest official data on pollution levels.
“It was the beginning of the modern attempt to clean our environment,” Painter said. For him, it was the perfect opportunity to explore his home state. Painter and the little crew of workers would collect water data over a series of days, camp out in towns’ fire stations or city halls, and, in their spare time, explore the area.
Most of Painter’s early jobs took place out-of-doors: In elementary school he had a paper route, taking armloads of newspapers literally hot off the press —“When we got the papers they were warm, like right out of the oven.” But the first job he held was yard boy for his father’s office.
This era pre-dated cushy motor-powered lawn mowers, so Painter had to go over the hilly terrain with a manual push lawnmower. And the longer he put off mowing, the longer the grass and the tougher the job.
“It was definitely an early lesson in pro- crastination, which I didn’t learn too well,” he said, chuckling.
In high school he was a lifeguard at the local pool of his hometown, earning 65 cents an hour and whatever loose change he picked up from the floor of the bath house. Typical of lifeguard jobs, the hours could be dull, but Painter said in an emergency you had to be ready to switch gears at a moment’s notice — bored one second, on high alert the next. It was good training for an eventual career in medicine.
All Heart
Painter spent most of his adult life in private practice in Connecticut, but not before taking part in a history-making procedure in Houston.
In 1968, Painter was one of the small team of surgeons who performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States. Transplanting a heart had sparked a public furor at the time, causing debate over when to declare a person officially dead and the theological implications giving one person’s heart to someone else.
Painter said the lead surgeon, Denton Cooley, performed the operation against the direct orders of his university, Baylor College of Medicine.
“We locked the doors at midnight and did it,” he said. “It was a different time. These days, you could never get away with that.”
