Dr. John C. Grammer Jr.

Dr. John C. Grammer, Jr., Dallas physician, died Tuesday, April 19, from complications following open-heart surgery. He was 85. He practiced cardiology in Dallas for 35 years, most of it as the founding Director of the Coronary Care Unit at St. Paul Hospital. In 1985 he participated in the first heart transplant operation in Dallas since 1968.

The son of John C. Grammer from Pittsburg, Texas, and Elizabeth Miller Grammer, from Dallas, he was born in Brenham and reared in Pittsburg and Coleman, Texas. He graduated from Coleman High School at age 16 in 1942 and was enrolled as a “Fish” at Texas A&M, drilling with the Corps of Cadets in the hot June sun, just a few days later. He loved his experience at A&M, where as a member of “C Troop” in the Corps, he was surely one of the last Americans to be trained as a horse cavalryman.

Already determined to be a doctor, he rushed through college in only two years and enrolled in one of the first classes at the brand new Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. He was awarded his M.D. in 1947, not quite 22 years of age. He later said that he took up smoking a pipe, a lifelong pleasure, in order to look old enough to be a doctor. He also earned a Master’s Degree in Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

During the Korean war he served as a lieutenant in the Navy Medical Corps. Finding life dull at the Naval hospital in Corpus Christi, he resorted to the only sure way for a Navy doctor to get a transfer, volunteering for service with the Marine Corps. He served as Battalion Surgeon at the Marines’ Cold Weather Training facility at Sonora Pass, California, and in M*A*S*H-type Evacuation Hospitals.

After the war he practiced internal medicine in Midland, Texas, for twelve years. Then, following advanced training in cardiology at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego, California, he joined the staff of St. Paul hospital in Dallas as the first Director of its new Coronary Care Unit, a position he held for thirty years. He also maintained a private cardiology practice and in 1985 was the cardiologist involved in the first Dallas heart transplant operation since the early and unsuccessful transplants of the 1960’s.

He served on the clinical faculty of Southwestern Medical School, as a visiting professor at the University of Missouri Medical School at Kansas City, and for many years taught a popular course on Critical Coronary Care, attended by nurses from all over Texas. One aspect of the course, his humorous yet helpful enactment of various heart arrythmias—a kind of dance, with his arms and legs representing the four chambers of a misbehaving heart--was filmed in 1974 and distributed as “Living Arrythmias.” It was shown at medical meetings across the country and lives on today as a You Tube phenomenon. Grammer published papers in several medical journals, including Circulation and The British Heart Journal, and a chapter in a medical textbook, Laboratory Medicine.

Though he enjoyed both teaching and research, Grammer’s principal interest was always in clinical practice and his patients, many of whom became close friends. After closing his Dallas practice, he continued to accept temporary positions at hospitals in Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama for several more years, fully “retiring” only at age 82. He had been a doctor for sixty years. Even in his final illness he enjoyed discussing details of his case with his own doctors, some of whom had been his students.

He was a man of broad and always expanding interests. Though a product of dry, flat West Texas, he taught himself to be an excellent downhill skier (while serving at the Marine Cold Weather camp) and sailor (while taking medical training in San Diego). In his sixties he took up fly-fishing, a hobby that took him all over the West and into Alaska several times. He read Civil War history extensively and toured battlefields throughout the South, and was a lifelong devotee of Texas history and folklore. A lover of jazz, he was a fine clarinetist who once fulfilled a fantasy by sitting in with the famous Preservation Hall Band in New Orleans.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Jessica Turpin Grammer, and is survived by his two sons, John Grammer of Sewanee, Tennessee and Robert Grammer of San Antonio, Texas, and by five grandchildren. Burial was at Hillcrest Memorial Park on April 21. A memorial service is planned for 2:00 p.m. May 28, at Central Christian Church in Dallas. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the American Heart Association or a favorite charity.