Contact: Sammy McDavid
MSU's newest physician, Dr. Richard Holmes (r), with Dr. Robert Collins, Longest Student Health Center director
Dr. Richard E. Holmes, a Mississippi State alumnus who holds a special place in the university's 125-year history, is among new faces on the Starkville campus as the 2003 spring semester gets under way this week.
A former Birmingham, Ala., physician now on staff at the John C. Longest Student Health Center, Holmes is working at the school that he entered as its first African-American student in July of 1965. The Chicago native, a specialist in emergency room medicine, was raised in Starkville.
Holmes replaces Dr. Mike McIntyre, who left earlier this year to practice in, ironically, Alabama.
If not personally, Holmes is well known to most of the university community by virtue of the cultural diversity center on President's Circle that has carried his name since 1991. Three years later, he and his wife Judy endowed a minority scholarship fund that also was named in his honor.
"We are especially happy to have Dr. Holmes join the Division of Student Affairs and the Longest Health Center, not only because of who he is and what he means to MSU, but also because his services are especially needed at this time," said Jimmy Abraham, the division's interim vice president. "We know how much Dr. Holmes cares for this university; now he will be caring for it in another very important way."
Abraham said McIntyre's departure during the summer and a temporary leave taken by Dr. Sheila Crowley left the center with only two full-time physicians during the fall semester. Prior to the semester's start, Dr. Robert Collins, the center director, reluctantly announced a temporary suspension of routine physical examinations so that he and Dr. Mike Mabry could give full attention to the facility's acute-care services.
While Crowley recently returned to duty, Dr. Laurin Watras, a former full-time health center physician who had been working part time, has retired from the university.
Collins said Holmes begins work at a time when the university is completing a major expansion of its campus health-care facility.
"It's a happy coincidence that we now have a home that is more than twice the size of the original health center that opened the year Dr. Holmes enrolled," Collins said.
"The critical skills and experience he brings will be of immense benefit to the university community we all serve," Collins added. "Mississippi State means a lot to Dr. Holmes and, in his new role, he will come to mean even more to Mississippi State."
Holmes received a general liberal arts degree from MSU in 1969. He went on to earn a graduate degree in community college education with emphasis in microbiology and nutrition. He also completed 17 hours beyond the master's level as he waited to be accepted to medical school at Michigan State University, from which he graduated in 1977.
Like so many other students during the '60s and '70s, Holmes' college education was interrupted by two years of military service in the United States Army.
Though born in Illinois, an 18-month-old Holmes and three of his family's 10 children came to live in Starkville in the mid 1940s with their grandmother, Eliza Hunter. Shortly before she died in 1956, Hunter asked her physician, Dr. Douglas Conner, to take care of Richard, the youngest. Conner and his wife, already the parents of two, agreed to her request.
Conner, a prominent leader of Starkville's African-American community, died several years ago. He and Hunter have been praised by Holmes as "two of the greatest motivators in my life."