Maverick Veterans’ Voices: Interview with Dr. James Campbell Quick

.

Interviewee: Dr. James Quick

Interviewer: Melissa Gonzales

Date of Interview: April 29, 2013

Location of Interview: Arlington, Texas

Transcriber: Diane Saylors

Special Collections UTA Libraries

GONZALES: This is Melissa Gonzales. Today is Monday, April 29, 2013. I am interviewing Dr. Jim Quick for the first time. This interview is taking place at the University of Texas at Arlington Central Library located in Arlington, Texas. This interview is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and is part of the Maverick Veterans' Voices Project.

GONZALES: So would you please give a description of your current post as faculty here at UTA?

QUICK: Oh. My current position is as Professor of Leadership and Organizational 00:01:00Behavior in the Department of Management. I hold the John and Judy Goolsby-Jacqualyn A. Fouse Endowed Chair in the Goolsby Leadership Academy, and I'm a Distinguished Teaching Professor here. In addition, I have an appointment at Lancaster University Management School in England, and I have for about seven years. So that's about 20 percent of my time.

GONZALES: Do you ever get to travel?

QUICK: Oh, absolutely! Yeah. So I've been in England quite a bit of the last seven years.

GONZALES: When were you awarded the Distinguished Teacher Award here at UTA?

QUICK: I went into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2008, and then this year I became a member of the Academy of Distinguished Scholars.

GONZALES: Can you tell us what the difference is?

QUICK: It's a significant difference. The two big engines--using an Air Force 00:02:00analogy--the two big engines in the profession of higher education are teaching and research. Both are essential for especially major research universities. The Academy of Distinguished Teachers is focused on the teaching mission and the Academy of Distinguished Scholars is focused on the intellectual contributions in the research mission of the University. And, again, both are really important.

GONZALES: Where are you from originally?

QUICK: I was born in Albany, New York. I grew up in Rochester, New York, and went to college at Colgate University, and halfway through my education in my sophomore year, I was living with six of my fraternity brothers. We lived above the Sergeant's quarters, the guy that was in the ROTC unit on campus, and he encouraged the group of us to join ROTC.

My dad actually was instrumental in that because he'd served as a Private and a Corporal in World War II, and then as a Lieutenant and a Captain in the Medical Services Corps. He said, "With Vietnam going the way it is, you're probably going to be in one way or the other, and they pay the officers better." (laughs) "So I would talk to the sergeant," and actually he ended up recruiting one, two, four of the seven of us that lived above his family in the two-story house.

GONZALES: So you mentioned your father was in the military.

QUICK: He was. He was before World War II. He did not serve a career. He was in--I still have his uniform for World War II. He was a Medical Services Corps officer. Actually, he was a Corporal of the Guard in Boston Harbor, and then he got sent off to OCS and got a commission. His Captain was a graduate of Tufts 00:04:00University. My father was a 1933 alumnus of Harvard College. So the two were both from the Boston area, and the Captain from Tufts said, "You need to go get a commission," and so he did.

And then in World War II, he ran a hospital train in Italy, the central part of Italy. One of the nurses actually wanted to put up a sign, "You fall, we haul." (Gonzales laughs) And he wouldn't go along with that. (laughs)

GONZALES: Were there any other family members that were in the military?

QUICK: My Grandfather Faust, actually who was the inspiration for my brother and I in terms of our professional careers, our grandfather Faust, our maternal grandfather--I still have the commission he received as a 1st Lieutenant in the Medical Corps in World War I.

However, the governor of the state of New York would not release him from his teaching duties at Albany Medical College and said, "We really need you here to 00:05:00teach doctors, so I'm not going to release you for service."

GONZALES: So you'd mentioned that Vietnam was sort of an influence in joining the Air Force ROTC. Would you have done so had there not been a pending draft?

QUICK: That's a good question. I'm not sure I would have although I do recall at one point when I was about ten years old my father and I used to watch the Long Gray Line, which was the histories at West Point. And I remember thinking, you know, I'd like to be an officer like my father was an officer in World War II. But it was not a main driving focus.

GONZALES: Can you tell us the difference between Army ROTC and Air Force ROTC?

QUICK: I'm not sure how much difference there is. I think there is some difference clearly. The service cultures have a difference, and I really saw 00:06:00that during my service on the Defense Health Board from 2008 to 2011. Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, called back about thirteen of us to serve on the Defense Health Board for the psychological health of our troops because of the spiking suicide rate starting in about 2006 or '07, and the real difference in the services has shown up in that data.

Suicides across all four armed services were going up, but in particular, in the Army and the Marine Corps, they were going up faster, and those are the guys that are really engaged in the fight. So it's much more physical, it's upfront and personal. When I took a Combined Air Warfare Course in our post-graduate school at Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, we had an Army Colonel lecture us, and he said, "You guys playing video games up in the sky don't 00:07:00understand what it's like to wipe somebody's brains off your glasses."

So that really communicates I think partly the cultural differences between the services and the combatants in the Army are the Enlisted Corps primarily whereas the point of the spear in the Air Force, the pilots are all commissioned officers now. Didn't used to be in World War II. They had enlisted pilots then. But all of our combat pilots now in the Air Force are commissioned.

GONZALES: Was there a particular--well, you mentioned that you were influenced into joining the Air Force--so did you join the Air Force upon graduating from college and after your time with the ROTC?

QUICK: ROTC. I was in--it was actually a relatively new two-year ROTC program, so I was in ROTC in my junior and senior year. I went to ROTC summer camp between my 00:08:00second and third year of college six weeks, and I used that opportunity to really change some of my habits because I played interscholastic and intercollegiate sports up through my first year at Colgate. I played La Crosse my first year, but my second year I played no intercollegiate sports, focused on my studies, and gained thirty pounds. And in those six weeks of ROTC routine, I lost thirty pounds and I got on what's now the forty-seven-year tradition of regular exercise three to six days a week.

GONZALES: What did the camp involve? What was a day in the life of the camp that you attended?

QUICK: I got up early in the morning and we went out and then we did PT before 00:09:00breakfast. Then we ran and then we had classroom activities, we had some drilling--physical drilling--and then we studied at night. So they were full days. And I did have some time. I read War and Peace during my six weeks there, so I had that tucked aside for any times when I absolutely wasn't involved in something.

GONZALES: What did you major in while you were at Colgate?

QUICK: That's a good question because I didn't realize when I started because it was a liberal arts school that I needed a major. And after a couple of years, they said, What's your major? And I said, "Liberal Arts," and they said, No, no. You've got to have a major.

So in my case, the decision process was philosophy and religion, which I absolutely loved, but words were really hard. I had a reading issue as a younger 00:10:00kid, and so reading and words were harder for me than numbers. Numbers were always easy. So it was either that or mathematics, the numbers. So I said, "I'll take math as a major, and then I'll take as much philosophy and religion as I can take."

So I graduated with honors in theoretical math and a commission in the Air Force, and then the philosophy and religion was--actually I still have about half of those in the books I used then, and I use them today to teach my doctoral students in ethics, integrity, moral values, those kinds of things.

GONZALES: So after you graduated, did you go for additional training somewhere?

QUICK: No. I was the only one of the fourteen of our graduating seniors that had a direct duty assignment. So from Colgate University in late May of '68, I had 00:11:00to report within thirty days to Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, Texas.

Most of the rest of my--the other thirteen got delayed for educational deferments or for pilot training assignments, things like that.

GONZALES: I noticed on your CV that you had responsibilities as an Officer in Charge of the Data Processing installation at Ellington Air Force Base.

QUICK: Yeah.

GONZALES: What did that entail?

QUICK: Well, that proved to be interestingly a real challenge because I replaced a Captain. I was a Second Lieutenant, of course. I replaced a Captain, who had in many ways been an absentee Officer in Charge. He got himself into school assignments a lot, and he'd go off to classes and do different things. He was not super engaged.

The installation when I took it over was being checked out by the auditors on the base. We had regular conflicts with our customers. I mean, we didn't have a 00:12:00choice about our customers, but there were a lot of conflicts there. And so I inherited a little bit of a hornet's nest, a real challenge I thought.

The other interesting part was that in addition to my commission in the Air Force and my Theoretical Math degree, I had a letter of introduction to Hilde Bruch, who was Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Baylor Medical School. She had come from Vienna, where she had studied with Freud, and my brother's and my maternal grandfather, the one that was on medical faculty at Albany had done pioneering work with another of Freud's disciples and did--the last twenty-five years of his career was primarily working with hyperactive kids. So I really not only loved my grandfather but was fascinated by the work.

So I decided I would follow at least that part of the pathway in psychoanalysis. 00:13:00So I had a good meeting with Dr. Bruch at Baylor, and she said, "You'll have a very successful analysis with demand." So I worked with Hunter Harris during my active duty period in the Air Force. What that really did was get me focused on what became a lifelong interest in emotionally healthy workplaces.

During the four years at Ellington, the spin-off value of that was--and I didn't understand it was an organization development intervention I was doing, but the people in the Department of Management at the University of Houston were watching what I was doing and said, Wow! You're transforming this--you're doing an OD intervention," and what I was doing was applying psychoanalytic kinds of ideas thinking and working with people, and we went from a really problematic 00:14:00data processing installation to the best in the command.

GONZALES: Do you recall your first days in the service? Was it different than--I mean, transitioning from college-going straight to Ellington Air Force Base?

QUICK: Oh, it was a big change, and, yeah, and my top sergeant I think was convinced I was not going to make the transition because he'd been running this computer shop for probably five years or something like that when this OIC had been there. And he just--he didn't have a lot of regard for officers. He also didn't like black people, women, civilians. He had a lot of stuff, but he's really good with computers. I mean, he just really was. And if you were in 00:15:00uniform, the other kinds of issues would kind of go away. So it was a real leadership challenge for me to get to know him and get to work with him and get him to be highly effective but also not cause me problems. That took about two years.

GONZALES: Wow!

QUICK: Yeah. It was a serious challenge. But it benefited me significantly and actually during the course of those two years, toward the end of the two years, the Air Force Institute of Technology selected me--I don't know how many were selected, but I got a letter of invitation to go to Georgia Tech to earn my master's degree at the expense of the Air Force in Information Technology, which was a really nice offer, but I was very clear that I was going to Behavioral Sciences for graduate school, not to Information Technology. They selected me 00:16:00based upon my honors work in theoretical math and my mathematics degree. So it was a great opportunity but not one that was right for me.

GONZALES: And from Ellington where else were--where did you go after that for duty stations?

QUICK: Well, actually what happened, I never expected to continue on after my four years of active duty. I earned my GI benefits, GI Bill, went back to graduate school at the University of Houston directly into the Ph.D. program.

Kind of a funny serendipity was that I had three recommenders: one of my Colgate professors. I'd taken a couple of post-baccalaureate courses at Rice, and Dean Richter at Rice did a recommendation for me, and then Jim Rentschler, who was a Lieutenant Colonel and my headquarters boss in Georgia at headquarters Air Force Reserve. He was going to do a recommendation, and the University of Houston 00:17:00said, We have two of your three recommendations and will make a decision if you want. I said, "No." I checked out with Col. Rentschler to find out what's going on. He had transferred to the White House Communication Service.

So when I finally caught up with him, he said, "Oh, that must have got lost in the transition. I'll find it. And he never did find the form, so what he did is he wrote a letter of recommendation on White House stationery to the graduate school. (laughs) And I got a call from Sam Smith and he said, "We just got the letter of recommendation from the White House. You're in." (Both laugh)

And so halfway along the way, I picked up an MBA in graduate school because my advisor at that time said, you know, "You could take one more marketing course and get an MBA," and I said, "Why would I do that?" He said, "In case we throw you out of the Ph.D. program." I said, "Good idea."

So as I started the Ph.D. directly from a bachelor's degree in service, they 00:18:00would not let me teach a course because I hadn't had any business education, and I had the GI Bill, so I really didn't need to work but I have a strong work ethic. And a friend of mine in the Air Force Reserve, who I'd known from Ellington, he had a job in mobility and logistics that he needed help within what's now Tenth Air Force out here at Carswell, and it was at that time-based in Houston and was called Central Region.

And so I went to work for Lloyd for about a year and a half, two years in the reserve program when I was in graduate school and just loved it. It worked out really well. My major professor really wanted me more involved by that time in other activities at the University. So I had a five-year break in service between the middle of graduate school and the end of my first three years here 00:19:00at UT- Arlington. And I got tenured after three years, very unusual, a longer story that we don't need to go into.

But anyway, that five-year break in service, I got a letter from the Air Force that said, We're going to revoke your commission. And I called a friend of mine at personnel. I said, "Jerry, I don't want to lose my commission," and he said, "Well, join the Unit Reserve Program." I said, "I can't do that because of my family and university commitments." He said, "How about a flexible reserve program?" I said, "Sounds good."

And so in 1980, my friend in personnel at Carswell got me into what's known as the Individual Mobilization Augmentee program, and I was assigned to Kelly Air Force Base, our largest Air Force maintenance depot, and then attached to Carswell. And that began what turned out to be twenty wonderful years.

GONZALES: So did you ever go overseas for work that had to do with the Air Force?

QUICK: No, I never had an overseas assignment. I never did. Never went to Vietnam during the heat of the conflict. Didn't avoid it, just didn't get called, and during Operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield in '90, '91, that period, I was at Kelly and never went over to the sandbox. We were busy at Kelly and I served there, so that was what I did.

GONZALES: What were your duties there at Kelly?

QUICK: Depends. My first two weeks of active duty, I got a call from Col. Livers in Information Systems that put me in Information Technology because of my background as a Data Processing Officer. He called and he said, "I see you have 00:21:00a Ph.D.," and I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "When you come down here, do something useful."

And so what I did for the next two or three years is organizational assessments and diagnoses and interventions for him in information systems. So he actually wanted to use my professional and doctoral expertise, not just my information technology duties. And so that began what turned out to be twenty years of internal consulting effectively at the depot.

From that assignment when I got promoted to Major four years later, Gen. Brainin moved me over into mobility logistics because of my background, and Lloyd Milliman at Central Region. And that assignment, again, worked out really, 00:22:00really well, created an opportunity for me to do strategic planning in my next assignment as a Lieutenant Colonel.

And then John Burris, who followed Howard Brainin as our senior Reserve officer, a one-star General, John Burris ultimately became a two-star General, but he in 1986 became my mentor. We connected really well, and so his objective was to get me into the general officer corps ultimately. That didn't happen, and I retired a Colonel and I'm very happy with that. But that was his trajectory for me.

GONZALES: What are some of your more memorable experiences on air bases?

QUICK: I would say probably the biggest deal was after Bill Clinton, President 00:23:00Clinton signed the closure order for the San Antonio Air Logistics Center. It absolutely stunned the city of San Antonio. It stunned all of us at the base. We had thirteen thousand people working at Kelly. We were carrying 40 percent of the logistics maintenance workload for the U.S. Air Force, and they were going to close us.

And I went to the commanding General, a two-star. At that point, I was a brand new Colonel. I was working for the CFO, so I was a senior reserve guy in financial--and the Air Force was, again, grooming me for future senior leadership. So it was a good assignment, and I went to the General though, and I said, "You know, I think you need a good psychologist and not necessarily for 00:24:00you because most of these thirteen thousand people are going to be fine." I said, "I'm worried about the one, two, or three that go get a weapon and want to know who's in charge," and he said, "Well, that would be me," and I said, "Yes, sir." And he said, "How quick can you get a psychologist?" and I said, "How quick can you create a position for that psychologist?" He said, "That's done." He said, "You get the psychologist."

And so I went to the Surgeon General's office of the Air Force in Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, DC. Worked with the chief of clinical psychology and he gave me two ideas of people we could recruit, and we recruited a really good clinical psychologist, Freudian trained too. Charlie was a good clinical psychologist. And I said, "Charlie, I will teach you the organizational stuff," and in the six-year closure process of the San Antonio Air Logistics Center, we 00:25:00had not a single fatality. We had a number of known saves.

But what we did is we identified--because it's 1 to 3 percent of any human population that's the real problem, and if you can identify those people early and quickly and get them the help they need, you can avoid all kinds of disasters. And that's exactly what we did. I said, "Charlie, we're looking for the 1, 2, or 3 percenters." And this is human science. It's not rocket science, so you don't have to be a trained psychologist to know something's wrong with somebody, or they're in trouble. And so we relied a lot on the senior leadership, supervisors throughout the base, and within probably six months, we'd identified three- or three hundred and thirty people that really needed--it wasn't all psychological. It was some financial help and other kinds of resources.

So that six-year closure process ended up being a really big victory for a lot of people. We saved over--we avoided over thirty- three million dollars in costs because of complaints that never happened, again, because of good prevention work. So essentially, what we did was we took my brother's and my theory of preventive stress management and we put it to work.So there's not one thing to look for, okay. It may be how they talk, it may be how they behave, it may be how they act, and so that's what you check out.

We had more than one supervisor that would come to Charlie and say, Doc, you got to talk to so-and-so. They're talking funny. And what that meant the supervisor 00:27:00wasn't exactly sure, but something wasn't right, and so Charlie would get into the conversation. And what sent a powerful, powerful message, we're sitting in the general's conference room when he introduced Charlie to his senior staff, and he said, "This is Doc Klunder. He's here to oversee the mental health of the closure process." And so that sent a huge message to those thirteen thousand people, the general has a shrink too. And so that legitimized the importance of taking care of people through the process.

GONZALES: I'm sure that helped alliviate the stigma of sometimes--

QUICK: Big time! Big time! Yeah, because there is still a stigma for some people, and by Jim Childress, two-star General, sending that message, right, took care of the stigma.

GONZALES: So did your family move with you from base to base, from appointment to appointment?

QUICK: No. No. Well, no, because I was in Houston for six years, and then my last twenty years was at Kelly, but interestingly, my wife's grandfather, B. Grimes, worked at Kelly for, like, fifty years. Uncle Elbert worked there for thirty-five or forty years, so there was a family history in San Antonio at Kelly on my wife's side that we really didn't know about until we got into it, and by the end of my career, she said, "You know more about my family at Kelly than I do." (laughs)

GONZALES: So I notice that you received your Ph.D. from Harvard in 1985 or--

QUICK: No, no. No, no, no. What I did in 1985 was to take a post-doctoral course 00:29:00with Herbert Benson in the Harvard Medical School on behavioral medicine. Herbert Benson is the Harvard faculty member that discovered the relaxation response.

Walter Cannon, who in 1915 at Harvard Medical School framed what became known as the stress response, he initially called it the emergency response. Then he called it the fight or flight response. Then he called it the "stress response". And we know through the fifty years of research from sixty, seventy years of research from 1915 through the end of the twentieth century how stress can play a role in harming us psychologically, medically, behaviorally.

What Herbert Benson discovered is there's a flip side to the stress response, 00:30:00which is the relaxation response. And so there is a positive story in stress as well, and that part of the story that didn't really come out well until the last fifteen or twenty years.

Ken Cooper, interestingly, who started the aerobics movement over in Dallas--Ken Cooper was not at Kelly Air Force Base, but he was at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. Back in 2008, he was sharing a funny story with me. (laughs) He said he was afraid that he'd get court-martialed by the Air Force because he was always trying to tinker with things and change things. Very bright innovative guy and Ken Cooper has an MD, but also like my brother, a Master's in Public Health, so his aerobics approach is anchored in Preventive 00:31:00Medicine and Public Health, which is exactly what my brother's and my Preventive Stress Management model is anchored in as well.

So Ken Cooper was telling me in 2008 at the Rotary Club of Dallas when he was getting ready to talk and I was getting a couple of autographed books before the speech, and he said, "Yeah, I was at San Antonio too and I was at the Brooks Air Force Base, and I thought they were going to court-martial me but they gave me the Legion of Merit when I left the service," which is one of our highest--it's about our fifth-highest decoration. And my wife, at dinner that night, she said, "Did you tell him that you have one too?" And I said, "No, I didn't go there."

But the serendipity out of that Legion of Merit was our DFW Airport changed the rules about a year and a half or two years ago, and those of us with Legion of Merit, Purple Heart on our license plates do not pay parking fees. Just sign the 00:32:00parking ticket.

GONZALES: It's a nice perk.

QUICK: It's a serendipity. Yeah, it is. It is.

GONZALES: (laughs) So in addition to the Legion of Merit, do you have any other awards or citations?

QUICK: In addition to the Legion of Merit, I have the Meritorious Service Medal, Air Force Commendation Medal, Presidential Unit Citation, and Outstanding Unit Award from my service at Ellington because of our unit's support of the Johnson Space Center and the NASA Mission. So we got recognized at that point. Small Arms Marksmanship Medal, so I have a full series and two National Defense Ribbon with a bronze star.

GONZALES: Excellent. So you're referred to as Doc Quick for your Stress and Organizational Psychology expertise. What influenced your decision to focus on this area of psychology?

QUICK: Well, interestingly, in my first few months of graduate school my second 00:33:00year--not my first year but my second year--my major professor was offering a course of study--it was a book by Robert Conn and his colleague 1964 called Organizational Stress. I just got fascinated with it because my major study was in Organizational Behavior in the Business School, and then my support study was Clinical Psychology Micro-sociology. Now, the business faculty didn't so much like that at first. But given my psychoanalytic background and my interest in the human side of the enterprise, if you will, I said, "That's what I want," and my coursework professor said, "That's what you'll get." And so it worked out very well.

So the role organizational stress--the roles conflict role ambiguity stuff really resonated with me, and I picked up on it and I loved it and had a good 00:34:00year. Then at Christmas break my brother and I, he was in the MD/MPH program at the same time I was doing the MBA/PhD. And so we're playing squash at the University of Rochester, where he was doing his medical studies. I was telling him how excited I was about this organizational stress stuff, and he said, "I could tell you some stuff about stress from the medical standpoint you wouldn't understand organizationally," and so that began the conversation and within six months my brother said, "We need to take the public health functions of prevention and move them over into your organizational stress stuff and create a concept called "preventive management." And then we later called it "preventive stress management".

Now we've broadened it to other chronic problems in organizations such as sexual 00:35:00harassment, workplace violence. All of those can be managed with the public health functions of prevention. And so we did. We formed a partnership and we continue to publish today and write together today. He's actually on the Harvard Medical School faculty as an Adjunct. He's CEO of an international health consultancy right now.

But that concept of "preventive stress management" went into the Dictionary of Psychological Terms in 2007, and our original book, which was 1984 with McGraw-Hill, just came out with the American Psychological Association in its third edition this year, 2013. So the concept is in its fifth decade.

Oh, and the other serendipity out of the Robert Conn connection was in 1985 in addition to going to Harvard for a post-graduate--we had an International Stress Conference here at UT- Arlington two and a half days and the book that came out in '87 from that conference was the one that put my brother on kind of the international stage. But the closing talk at that conference was given by Robert Conn from the University of Michigan. So I got to know him personally.

GONZALES: So when you decided to look into Organizational Psychology, had there been any work before that? I mean, was it stressed in working environments to look into this or even preventative measures at all?

QUICK: No. No, no, no. Nobody was--no. Actually, Gary VandenBos, who's head of publications and communications for APA--Gary connected with my brother, and I 00:37:00probably in the late '80s, and he said, "You boys are ten years ahead of your time. You're just ahead of your time." And APA got with a pretty serious prevention agenda in the 1990s. But Gary VandenBos became a big supporter and benefactor of my brother's and my work and my work over the last twenty-five years.

"Organizational psychology" as a term did not come into existence until 1964, and the two people that coined organizational psychology in that year were Edgar Schein at MIT that worked with off and on some over the last twenty years, and actually, his Ph.D. from Harvard came from the same academic department that my 00:38:00brother did his undergraduate studies in, Social Relations.

And then the second psychologist that used Organizational Psychology was Bernie Bass the same year, 1964. Up until that point the term, "organizational psychology" had not existed.

GONZALES: I was just thinking about when you had talked about sexual harassment in the workplace and other issues that come up with stress, and you see, whenever you're working in the lab, is this really that OSHA poster describing what to identify, what to do and everything, and I kept thinking about when I remember seeing this go up and just people talking about it more within the public, and I don't remember--I'm just trying to think of going back to, like, the early '90s and late '80s, and nobody really stressing that much at that point or at least hearing too much about it in the news.

QUICK: Yeah. It was kind of undercover but it really came out in the '90s, and what 00:39:00really got my attention when I went to a depot in Sacramento, Sacramento Air Logistics Center, to see the pioneering work done by a lady, Air Force psychologist, I began mentoring her, helped place her at Harvard Medical School for a post-doc. Joyce Adkins had taken my brother's and my work from the early '80s unbeknownst to us, and she'd adapted it at Sacramento and convinced the General to create an organizational health center. And I was studying three days out there in '95 what she was doing.

And the last morning, very early, there was a rape of a civilian employee by a male contractor, and of course, they had to get engaged in all that and deal with that issue. And as I was sitting there reflecting on that while everybody 00:40:00else was doing what they needed to do, I said, "We are in a very dangerous place because Air Force depots are dangerous places." Most people don't get hurt, but the physical safety, the hazards of the environment are big issues because you're around dangerous equipment. And I said to myself, "This is not an industrial accident. This is a malicious motivated behavior. What got missed that allowed this to happen?"

And I came back here to UTA and immediately went to Myrtle Bell in my home department and said, "Myrtle, you're concerned with sexual harassment you've been telling me." I told her about the incident. I said, "You and I need to build a model for the preventive management of sexual harassment because, again, 00:41:00it's not an accident. And anything that has a life history like that, you can intervene from a prevention standpoint."

And so we published about three or four pieces on that--our model. She had the indicators and things, and then the other thing I did was use our thinking to develop a sexual harassment policy at Kelly Air Force Base in the San Antonio Air Logistics Center for Gen. Childress and he put that policy into place.

GONZALES: So tell me about your time serving on the Department of Defense Health Board.

QUICK: In some ways that was a frustrating experience simply because the horse was out of the barn. We came in and began serving at Secretary Gates' request 00:42:00after the spike was already underway with suicides. And there were thirteen of us, psychiatrists, myself, psychologists, nurses. So there were thirteen concerned in the psychological health side of what was going on with our servicemen and -women.

What I have realized in retrospect from that service is I was kind of misplaced, if you will, and we slid into the long war. The huge advantage I had at Kelly Air Force Base was when Bill Clinton signed the closure order. That set up the risk over the next six years, and so I knew what could be coming if we didn't manage it well.

And so by having a leadership that was a good leadership and understood the 00:43:00risks involved and the concepts, halfway through (laughs) the six-year closure process, the CFO, who is the best boss I ever had in my life in the Air Force, Phil Steely was wonderful. But he comes to me--CFO comes to me halfway through the process and he said, "Jim, we probably overdid it with the prevention because we haven't had anything bad happen." (laughs) I said, "I understand, but I'll tell you the same thing Colin Powell told George H. W. Bush. "Light and lethal is good, but heavy and lethal is better." I said, "I would rather be here at the three-year point with no mad things happening, having over-invested in preventive interventions and activities than being here cleaning up from twenty or thirty suicides that were completed." I said, "I just am much happier to be here at where we are."

What I realized halfway or two-thirds of the way through my three years of 00:44:00service with Secretary Gates was that we were at the other end. If we had known how long the operation was going to be in Iraq, then we could've done some things on the front end to prevent, but we were so far down the road and we had by the time 2008 and '09 came along, we had broken the U.S. Army. I mean, almost literally broken it, and so now we're seeing the symptomatic effects turning out the suicides, and, again, it's not like it's 50 percent of the force. It's still single-digit problems.

And the other thing I said was in one of our meetings in Washington, I said: We haven't studied or know what are the distinguishing characteristics of the top 10 percent of our servicemen and -- women that have been engaged in the fight, 00:45:00exposed to the same kinds of issues, and they're doing fine. What accounts for the difference?

So part of it was the risk exposure and I just got really, really frustrated that we were exposing these young men and women to so much risk. We, in a sense, went to the fight with too few people, and if we'd known how long and how tough a fight it was going to be, then we should've sized the force differently.

GONZALES: So what is your approach in addressing stress management and motivational leadership?

QUICK: (laughs) It's really a prevention approach, and it's hinged on a couple of things. And, again, the good news story of stress is that not all stress is bad. And for a long time in the mid-twentieth century, that didn't emerge. The risks 00:46:00associated with bad stress became very evident before we fully understood that.

What's important to understand--and Ken Cooper intuitively did that with aerobic exercise because exercise is stressful. Nobody runs and does all kinds of exercise without getting their heart rate up. I mean, my brother's and my dad was a marketing executive, and he was not a stress expert, but intuitively he did very well and lived his life very well. And he said, "You want to be able to get your blood pressure up under the right conditions." He actually expected to be dead at the age of sixty because of his paternal history. His grandfather died at forty-eight. His father died at fifty-four. Our dad ended up dying at eighty-five, twenty-five years after his expected demise. And the important 00:47:00parts of that were the way he lived his life, which was good prevention. He didn't exercise per se, but he had a regular walking program just to save gas money and get fresh air, whatever. And Ken Cooper's research shows it's at the low-intensity level that we get the greatest cardiovascular benefit. So challenge stress is actually good for us. It makes us stronger, improves us, and physical activity, and exercise is an important part of that.

Another great advantage our dad had was that he had his wife all the way through the very end. Both his father and his grandfather had lost their wives prematurely. And so for especially males, the loss of a spouse can be a huge risk factor. Our maternal grandfather, while he lost his wife relatively early, 00:48:00he reinvested in all of his family relations and ended up outliving them by about thirty years, lived to almost one hundred and two. Yeah.

So good prevention I think is important. Thinking positively but not extreme optimism, that can get you in a lot of trouble. Realistic optimism is important. And then managing your energy in a good way. Regular exercise, prayer, meditation, the relaxation response of Herbert Benson. And then having good friends that you confess/confide in and talk about all of the things going on in your life.

GONZALES: You've mentioned your maternal grandfather throughout this, and I believe he did influence your career.

QUICK: Significantly.

GONZALES: How so?

QUICK: He was second-generation German immigrant, so when I inherited Freud's 00:49:00autographed photograph that he gave to my grandfather's psychoanalyst, it was inscribed as, (speaking German) "--in 1929. Freud. Given to McCord." I still have the photograph at home. And I said to my grandfather actually when I got that was, "What's that mean?" He said, "Well, it means 'In fond remembrance of Berchtesgaden,'" because he grew up speaking German in his home and English at school.

So his grandfather Faust had come-- John Faust come to America to get ahead. And he went to Vet school at night and ended up as a member of the Cornell--Vet school faculty told his four boys they could be any kind of doctor they wanted to be. (laughs) And so there was a high bar, a high standard.

Now, our grandfather never used a whip on us in any way. I mean, just did not. His Grandfather Faust literally had done that with his boysat times, which was 00:50:00dysfunctional. But our grandfather simply set a high bar, a high standard, and invited--invited us to live good professional lives. And so he became a real role model.

I just got a nice note from the dean's office. I'm the first member of the College of Business faculty to be in the Academy of Distinguished Scholars. So that's pretty special. And I got a very nice note from the dean's office about that, "And we're really proud of you." And I said, "Thank you very much. And what you don't see is the grandfather whose shoulders I stand on because he created a role model and a set of standards that really set a high bar." And, again, it was an invitation, not a requirement.

GONZALES: Did you form any close friendships while in the military? And do you still stay in touch?

QUICK: Yes, I did. Phil Steely, the best boss I ever had, he retired--let's see--he retired the year after I did and lives in Dallas. We've stayed in touch some. John Burris, who was my mentor, he retired as the second-highest-ranking general officer in the Air Force Reserve, two-star General. My wife and I went to his retirement in 1994 at the Pentagon, and then in 2004 my wife and I went to his and his wife's fiftieth wedding anniversary in Alice, Texas, which was really wonderful to see the Burrises and the family again and be together.

And then just three weeks ago, I called John Burris because I'd been concerned. He's just been diagnosed with Parkinson's, and he's doing really well. He's going to turn seventy-nine this year. So we had a good talk. He was out in the fields. He's on his third career. He had a very successful civilian career as a lawyer, very successful military career, 2010 Texas State made him one of their distinguished alums and has a great profile of him. And I expect next year the family will have a great eightieth birthday party for John Burris. So staying in touch with him. And then I'm part of the Reserve Officers Association, Military Order of the World Wars in this area, and so I have made some new colleagues and friends through those connections.

GONZALES: Do you work at all here with the UTA Veterans Association?

QUICK: Not so much. I know Alexa Smith-Osborne does wonderful things. I make referrals to her. She and I see each other periodically. I do do some things for ROTC both the Maverick Battalion. I gave a commissioning address a few years ago, and I worked with our Air Force ROTC Detachment 845 co-located at TCU, and so I'm the advisor for the Flying Mavs. And the Flying Mavs is the service organization of the Air Force ROTC Cadets here at UTA.

GONZALES: Given your experience with consulting with stress management in the military, what advice would you give our current cadets here at UTA before they graduate?

QUICK: I would give them encouragement to look for the opportunity, to be engaged, to look for the ways in which you can serve. I never anticipated having an Air Force retirement. And, again, I saw opportunities, I looked for opportunities where I could serve, make a positive contribution, touch lives, save lives, change the world, and it worked out well.

And I never got ahead of myself. I was always closely engaged, so it was paying attention to my more immediate environment. How can I help? How can I serve? What can we do better?

And when I put on the eagles in July of 1995, retired in 2000, but put on the eagles in 1995 and asked Phil Steely within my first two weeks, how'd it go? And 00:55:00he said, "Great!" He said, "Them eagles look great on you." And I said, "And they feel good," and I said, "I know I've won the game. I absolutely have." And I said, "If I become a general officer, that's great, and if I don't, I'm still going to retire a very happy man."

We had an alumnus, actually, from UT-Arlington that preceded me at Kelly, and he was disappointed that he didn't become a general officer. And I understand that. But then I had really good coaching from John Burris and very realistic, and he said, "We're going to do all we can to set you up to getting your general officer corps, but we can't guarantee it."

GONZALES: Is there anything you would like to contribute to the interview that I haven't asked you already?

QUICK: Not that I can think of.

GONZALES: Okay.

QUICK: Is there anything else you think of?

GONZALES: Not off the top of my head. We seem to have covered quite a bit of ground.

QUICK: Yeah. I'll finish with a kind of one crossover story. Because I didn't go to West Point in 2007 in uniform, I actually asked my host there what the UOD was. He said, "What is that?" I said, "Don't you Army guys refer to the uniform of the day?" (laughs) And he told me how to dress.

But I got to take the Goolsby Leadership Academy message there. Had a great exchange and we began formally our collaboration, and my military background was part of--I think the contribution that made the connection, and when I got to West Point, they said, Have you ever been here before? And I said, "Yeah, I was here in 1966 as part of the marching band for Colgate University, and we beat 00:57:00Army in the last one minute of the game." And I said, "We were so excited and glad to leave town in one piece." (Gonzales laughs) Yeah.

So it was forty-one years later that I got to go back and take the Goolsby Leadership message from here, and then it was in 2010 that I had the opportunity to return the favor and host COL Sean Hannah here as a Goolsby Distinguished Visiting Professor, and he spoke in the Lone Star Auditorium.

And I was telling Sean on the way out from that--and he was, of course, in his dress uniform that day--and as we were walking out I said, "The Goolsby kids came up to me, several of them, and said, You and COL Hannah sound just alike. (Both laugh) And I said, "Sean, we come out of the same history and military tradition."

Great leadership is not about giving orders. It's about inviting people to do 00:58:00good work, getting to know them. I've issued less than a dozen and received less than a dozen direct orders in thirty-two commissioned years.

GONZALES: Well, I want to thank you, Col. Quick, for participating in our Project.

QUICK: Thank you very much.

GONZALES: You were very informative and very helpful. And I want to thank you for your service as well. And thank you, again, for contributing to the Maverick Veterans' Voices Project. Thank you.

QUICK: Thank you for your time.