Autobiography of Charles Walter (Chuck) Garner

I left Vigor in 1960 for Harding University to prepare for a career in the Church Ministry; but that didn’t work out. During my first year at Harding, two things happened to me. One, I discovered that I did not want a career in Church Ministry, as high a calling as that is, and Two, the Abilene Christian University band performed at Harding while on tour; I knew that I had to play in that band. So I transferred to ACU and switched my major to chemistry and haven’t looked back on either decision.

I graduated from ACU (located in Abilene, Texas) in 1964 and entered graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin majoring in biochemistry. I married Ruth McNiel of College Station, Texas, after I had been there for two years. I left UT in 1969 with the PhD degree in hand and started a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in Houston at Baylor College of Medicine in biochemistry. I wanted to teach as well as do research so I left Baylor in 1972 when the three years were up for a relatively new, rapidly growing university, the University of Central Florida, near Orlando. That position only lasted one year as their enrollment growth flattened the day I arrived.

I was fortunate quickly to land a position at Texas Tech University School of Medicine on the flat plains of West Texas in Lubbock, teaching biochemistry to medical and graduate students. I divided my time between teaching and research on my love, the insulin receptor. Teaching at Tech was a wonderfully rewarding though, at times, stressful, experience. After 24 years at TTU, I retired in 1997 at full rank, in part to pursue an opportunity to teach chemistry to undergraduate students at my alma mater, ACU, which I did for seven years. After retiring again in 2004, Ruth and I returned to Lubbock.

Somewhere in my TTU experience, I became enamored with the notion of teaching in the Caribbean at one of the several US-style medical schools there. I was fortunate to obtain a position at one of them on the tiny island of Saba (pronounced Say-ba) just east of the US Virgin islands. I am there for six months out of the year (in two-month blocks). I teach medical biochemistry and medical genetics and still love it.

In addition, Ruth and I have three children and a growing number of grandchildren. Along with the grandchildren and our Caribbean experiences, we have a small mountain cabin in New Mexico that we built with our own hands back in the early 1990’s. After all, it is necessary to replace the Caribbean sand and West Texas dust in our lungs with cool, clean mountain air.

We stay very busy and are always in eager anticipation of whatever is next on the menu. True retirement is still elusively in the future.

Looking back, I see that I have lived a charmed life, full of interesting experiences. Who would have predicted that of me while I was at Vigor? Certainly not I.

Chuck Garner, Lubbock, Texas, May 2008