Vol. 15 No. 17 - February 18, 2015
FEATURE
Dr. Carl Voyles – still practicing medicine at 92
Submitted
Dr. Jennifer Bencie, administrator of the Manatee County
Health Department, with Dr. Carl Voyles.
ANNA MARIA – Dr. Carl Voyles graduated from medical school the year the first baby boomers were born, but unlike many boomers who are contemplating retirement, Voyles is still practicing medicine at the age of 92.
Manatee County commissioners will honor Voyles at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 24, by proclaiming Dr. Carl Voyles Day.
“I do things I enjoy, and I enjoy helping other people,” said Voyles, who works at the Manatee County Health Department two half days a week and one full day a month.
Voyles graduated from Duke University Medical School in 1946 and interned in cardiology at Johns Hopkins. At the same time he served in the Navy on inactive duty.
“After I finished my internship, I went on active duty,” he recalled. “I went to California for flight training so I could be a flight surgeon.”
As a captain in the Navy, Voyles served two tours in Vietnam, where he received the Legion of Merit Medal for his work; the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.; Newport, R.I., where he was chief of medicine at the Naval War College; Iceland; and Maine, where he saw submarine duty.
Some famous patients he treated during his career were Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the first lady of China until the Communist Revolution in 1949; President Lyndon Johnson and Washington, D.C. dignitaries.
Moving to Florida
After retiring from the Navy in 1984, Voyles moved to Florida and worked at Bay Pines Veterans’ Hospital in St. Pete, before moving to the the Island and beginning his 25 years with the Manatee County Health Department, where he has worked in the juvenile detention center and the county jail and now treats immigration and naturalization patients and TB patients.
“I enjoy working in public health, and I’m a good bargain for them because I’ve been doing it for so long,” he said.
It was on the Island that Voyles met his wife, Joan, while on one of his regular walks by the Island Community Center.
“I saw a light and went inside where people were forming a club for artists,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m a writer,’ and I became a founding member of what is now the Artists’ Guild.
“Joan became president, and I was on a committee with her. We were at her home doing work, and I asked her on a date. She said no, but then I called again and she said yes. One thing led to another, and it’s been the best 25 years of my life.”
Author
Voyles is also the author of three books, “Vignettes of Vietnam,” about his experiences in Vietnam; “Voyage in a Red Canoe,” a novel about Vietnam; and “Angles and Dangles and Other Sea Stories,” about submarine duty in Maine.
In addition to working at the health department, Voyles stays active.
“I plays golf two days a week; it keeps me active,” he said. “I watch all the Duke basketball games and do two flights of stairs for every time out.”
He’s thought about retiring from practicing medicine, but said, “I enjoy working. In January, I renewed my license for another two years. I might retire after that.”
Saving Lolita
The Miami Seaquarium is famous as the birthplace of the oldest known manatee in the world, Snooty, 66, a Manatee County resident since 1949.
It’s famous for Flipper, the dolphin.
And now it’s famous for Lolita, the killer whale.
Until now, Lolita has been the only member of her 80-member subspecies – southern resident killer whales - not protected under the Endangered Species Act, because she lives in a pool, not in the wild. Lolita was captured from a pod of whales about 50 miles north of Seattle in 1970 and performs daily with trainers in a pool at the Seaquarium.
But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has decided that Lolita will now be included in the endangered species listing that protects her family, concluding on Feb. 4 that captive animals cannot be assigned separate legal status from their wild counterparts. They took into account that most of the comments they received favored including Lolita in the endangered listing; many also urged that Lolita be returned to the Pacific Northwest and eventually released into the wild.
Lolita’s 85-year-old mother is a southern resident killer whale that lives in the wild with her pod, called “L25.” When a recording of the pod’s unique sounds, including her mother’s, were played for Lolita, she responded to them, according to PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which petitioned NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to include Lolita as a member of the endangered southern resident killer whale species in 2013.
PETA wants Lolita to be moved to Washington, and at least temporarily, be penned in a cove and cared for by humans, but allowed to verbally socialize with her whale family on the other side of the pen, but the Miami Seaquarium is not proposing to move her, according to NOAA.
To do so would require a permit from NOAA Fisheries, which would perform a rigorous scientific review before allowing the move. Releasing a whale which has spent most of its life in captivity raises many concerns, including disease transmission, ability to find food, difficulty in social integration and behavioral patterns developed in captivity that could impact wild animals. Previous attempts to release captive killer whales and dolphins have often been unsuccessful, according to NOAA.
If she remains in Miami, Lolita could be prohibited from performing by the NMFS, which enforces the Endangered Species Act, said Jared Goodman, an attorney who is the director of animal law for PETA, adding that Lolita has had no orca companions since 1980, although she performs with dolphins.
How could this affect Snooty, another endangered, Florida captive marine mammal?
Goodman said that due to Snooty’s advanced age and the fact he was born in captivity – both inapplicable to Lolita – PETA would be unlikely to argue for his release into the wild unless his pool at Parker Manatee Aquarium in Bradenton was too confining, as they say Lolita’s 35- by 80-foot pool, 20 feet deep at the deepest spot, is (Lolita is 20 feet long).
But don’t delay; go see Snooty anyway. No one knows what 66 is in manatee years.
