Phone calls

Wendy and I were among the first to get our phone number on a "Do Not Call" list that ought to have protected us from what are best described as junk phone calls. These irritating calls habitually come at meal times. It didn't do any good. Junk phone calls are as obtrusive as ever, but now most speak with recognizably American accents, revealing their origin beyond the reach of Canadian regulators. "This is Lisa calling to warn you are paying too much interest on your credit card account..." Lisa still calls, but never gets beyond "This is Lisa...", or just "This..." before I hang up. There's no way to block these calls because Call Display tells me they come from an unlisted number. It's the same with a few other irritating calls, the caller is immune to call-blocking.

Not all unexpected phone calls are unwelcome. I reflected on this recently when I had a half dozen irritating calls one day, including one from Lisa or one of her family.  When the phone rang again  and Call Display told me it was a government number, fortunately I didn't snarl "What is it this time!" but politely saluted the caller in my usual fashion. That call came from the Governor General's office and was to inform me that I had been admitted to the Order of Canada.  It was the latest of a dozen or more life-affirming phone calls I can recall with the good news that I've been selected as recipient of an award, and a confirmatory letter will follow.

On a sunny summer Saturday in 1964 when we were living in Burlington Vermont,  Stuart Morrison phoned me from Scotland. Wendy and the kids were already in the car, we were about to set off somewhere exciting. I almost didn't bother going back indoors when I heard the phone ringing. Stuart was calling  to invite me to join the staff of the Usher Institute of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. By then we had been living in the USA long enough to know beyond dispute that though we were happy in Vermont, we didn't want to settle for life in the USA, didn't want our kids to become American, to acquire American values and customs. That call gave us the opportunity to choose between moving to the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, and Edinburgh, where both of us had lived for a while before we met and married. It was a no-brainer, despite the much lower salary in Edinburgh.

Two other phone calls out of  the blue were invitations to edit important books. Both calls are engraved in my cerebral cortex. One day in late winter of 1977 Steve Jonas phoned me from New York to tell me that the selection committee of which he was chairman had ranked me first among the candidates to become editor in chief of the Maxcy-Rosenau reference textbook of public health. I wasn't even aware that I was a candidate. I felt unqualified to edit a massive reference book I regarded as quintessentially American. Reluctantly, after much arm-twisting, I agreed.  Everyone seemed well pleased with the result and despite being more aware than anybody else of gaps and defects in the book (no chapter on health economics for instance) I'm happy with it.  It gave me a platform from which I made statements on important issues in public health practice, science, and policy. Some of my statements have become part of the language and lore of public health. This book consolidated my position as an internationally recognized authority on public health and led to other invitations, most of which also started with phone calls. The best of these was from Kerr White, at the time the president of the International Epidemiological Association. He called one day in 1982 to invite me to become the compiler and editor of a Dictionary of Epidemiology, to be sponsored by the IEA and published by Oxford University Press. Working on this was probably my most pleasurable professional activity. It put me at the centre of a worldwide network of aficionados, people who care deeply about precision and accuracy in use of technical terms.  Interestingly, more than half don't have English as their mother tongue.

On balance, despite junk calls and long-winded bores, I'm grateful to Alexander Graham Bell for his useful invention.