Staples doesn't stock pocket protectors, so the doctor orders them in half-dozen packs on eBay. Baumgarten, top-of-the-line pocket protector brand, he says. Clear plastic so you can see what's inside. When he's hosting That! Medical Quiz Show, his pocket protector holds a pedometer, two nail files, business cards, spare change, a small toothpick and three pens: blue, black and red. At the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where he is professor of neurosurgery and director of the Jackson T. Stephens Spine and Neurosciences Institute, he also carries a phone card and numbers for dictation services. He has a third pocket protector for tuxedos and a fourth for vacations. He won't leave home without one.

You may recognize his signature double greeting "Hello, hi!" from the quiz show, with the same rising inflection every time, but he uses it in person, too, at UAMS. The double salutation isn't scripted. "Hello, hi!" is pure Dr. Pait. It's on his voicemail, for friends, family, strangers and colleagues, and when he shakes your hand the first, second and third meeting.

A quality pocket protector is one constant in the force that is Dr. T. Glenn Pait, both nationally recognized spine surgeon and whimsical radio show host.

The show, he says, is a way to combine his passion for broadcast with 25 years of practicing and teaching medicine. That! Medical Quiz Show began airing on KUAR and NPR stations around the United States in September 2012.

On the set, Pait visibly relaxes, talking with his hands, joking with contestants and bobbing his head along to synthesized sound effects. He's so comfortable hosting that the show's co-producers, daughter Kelly Pait and her boyfriend David Gold, say they are planning more live tapings with audience interaction.

Teaching -- the quiz show especially -- is a way to meet people and challenge his brain, Pait says, two medically proven methods to maintain youthfulness. Strangers have begun to stop him in public, greet him with "Hello, hi!" and comment on the show, a question or contestant. Often the show's questions drive him back to the hundreds of books and medical journals lining his office and study.

He wants to be known as someone who is driven, he says. The quiz show, along with a steady supply of Starbucks, moves him forward.

To appreciate how driven he is, look backward.

Pait grew up in Eustis, Fla., a small town about an hour northwest of Orlando. At recess he stayed inside with a speech pathologist to correct the stutters and mispronunciations that plagued him as a child.

Pait lived with his father, a mechanic and police officer in the neighboring town of Mount Dora, and his mother, a housewife who struggled with chronic illnesses. Neither finished high school. The house sat on cinder blocks at the end of an unpaved road, "so if a hurricane came through you could hear the wind under it," he says.

"And the dogs would hide under it and you could hide if somebody was chasing you."

His father and older brother spent hours working on cars together, carrying dirt and oil to the dinner table under their fingernails. They were the mechanically gifted.

"My brother would take an old car and he'd take it apart. Just to take it apart. I never really developed that desire," Pait says.

As a child, Pait was given the kind of freedom to escape -- whether under the house or to his grandparents' place down the road. Later, it was the office of Dr. Williams, a family friend and general practitioner in Eustis.

"'I need to see the doctor!'" he'd say to the nurse, who would let him into Dr. Williams' office, where the boy would ply the physician with questions about general anatomy and physiology.

"I'd start going through his books, the ones that I could reach," Pait says, "and I couldn't read any of them, but I thought some of them had some pretty interesting pictures."

So Pait says he knew, as he looked at the grease on his father's hands and the exhaustion in his eyes from working two low paying jobs, that he'd go to college to become a doctor.

Pait's second escape came later, at the age of 15, a harebrained scheme with a friend and a moped to get hired at a local radio station. They drove to every 250-watt station in central Florida, until WLCO-FM, 1240, took them in. Pait worked his way up to disc jockey. With every hour on-air, Pait developed a David-Brinkley speaking cadence he projects today.

"I found my voice on the radio," Pait says.

Everyone has a Dr. Pait impression, said Dr. J.D. Day, chairman of the department of neurosurgery -- the residents he instructs at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences most of all. Impersonations are almost a necessity when faced with an award-winning neurosurgeon who wears red high-top Converse in the operating room and, when he's frustrated, drops a made-up swear word -- "Hakarockie!"

"It's his persona, his expressions," Day says. "Everybody can do a Glenn Pait impression."

Students and colleagues don't take Pait's medical credentials lightly. In the past 15 years, he has been ranked nationally as one of America's best doctors by CNN/Time, Best Doctors, Inc. and Consumer's Research Council of America's Guide to America's Top Physicians. Pait performs hundreds of neurosurgeries each year and continues to publish academic research and medical histories (the most recent, a yet-to-be-published paper on President John F. Kennedy's spine surgeries).

He developed a close relationship with the late financier and philanthropist Jack Stephens, who donated $48 million to UAMS for the Spine and Neurosciences Institute Pait now directs. Stephens and Pait co-authored The Spine and More -- A Health Guide to Playing the Game and maintained a friendship until Stephens' death in 2005.

To this day, Pait swears he says "Good morning, Jack" aloud as he walks into the Institute each day, and "Good night, Jack" as he leaves in the evenings.

"Jack was an incredibly special individual, just incredible," he says. "Everytime we were together, regardless of what it was, I was honored. I was truly in the presence of a great individual."

Day says Pait's connections, as well as a seemingly infinite stream of innovative solutions, are invaluable at UAMS.

"He comes up with a lot of things that 99 of 100 people would never think of to do," Day says. "He knows a lot of people I don't know, and a lot of the history. He's probably the most valuable partner I could have."

He's a nerd, says Betty Patterson with a laugh.

She has been Pait's executive assistant for nearly 17 years and still can't place what makes him so ... Dr. Pait. But she wouldn't work for anyone else, she says.

Pait's team begins with his mentors. After Pait graduated from the University of Florida in 1973, he took a gamble applying for a position in the lab of Dr. Albert L. Rhoton Jr., whom Pait calls the "father of microneurosurgery." The job interview was essentially a rapid-fire anatomical quiz, Pait says ("'Where is the caudate nucleus, anyway?'"). Pait earned a fellowship with Rhoton and studied at George Washington University School of Medicine under Dr. Hugo Rizzoli, the medical center's first full-time professor and chairman of neurological surgery.

"When I go into the operating theater, my mentors are with me," Pait says. "I would hope my residents, when they leave, they take a little of me with them. And if they do that, I will have been a great success."

BROADCAST MEDICINE

The second part of the equation is Pait's wife of 41 years, Carol, the daughter of his first employer at WLCO 1240 in Eustis.

"I've known him since his voice was changing on the air," Carol says.

After Pait graduated from Florida in 1973, he married his high-school sweetheart. Medical school was "kind of like trying to take a drink of water from an open fire hydrant," Pait says, and he couldn't have done it without the support of his best friend. Her job raising their family, during a flurry of jobs and residencies, was more complex than his.

"I walk in, and I'm home," Pait says. "This is a hospital. It smells like a hospital. She had to make her own environment. She had to find a friend; she had to find the grocery store."

"Yeah, there was a lot of single parenting," Carol says. "Those years went so quickly but they were really busy. There's a lot you just kind of do on your own."

Carol learned to sleep through Pait's late-night calls to the operating room, and Pait was home with their three daughters, Allyson, Kelly and Kathleen, when possible.

Pait tears up, a little, quoting a note he saved that Allyson sent him when she was 6. "Daddy, I love you, please come home soon because I miss you. But I know you're helping people."

"Here's the thing. None went into medicine," he says of his daughters. "I think they saw the incredibly long hours and its demand."

Any free time he had, Pait gave to broadcasting.

"That small radio station was really a foundation," Pait says. "It's with me every single day."

He delivered medical economics reports for the Business Radio Network in Washington. Later, while on staff at West Virginia University School of Medicine, he co-hosted Doctors On Call, a community service program on West Virginia Public Television. In Little Rock, Pait has voiced Here's to Your Health on public radio since 1994 and answers Arkansas viewers' medical questions on KTHV, Channel 11's "Medical Mailbag" segments on THV This Morning.

For Pait, broadcasting isn't a chore. It's a release.

"It's a creative outlet for him," says Tom Brannon, THV-11's morning meteorologist and Pait's sidekick on the quiz show. "As a doctor, he sees a lot of things happen to people, and has to put them back together. It is a hobby of his, but also something he can pour creative energy into."

THAT! MEDICAL QUIZ SHOW

In 2012, Pait was ready for a new way to combine medical education and radio. The seeds for his current program began as conversations around the dinner table with daughter Kelly and David Gold, Carol Pait says. Together the four developed the show, which tests three contestants' medical knowledge in entertaining categories like "Gross Anatomy" and "Illnesses of the Rich and Famous."

"That show started off as a way to educate people, to increase medical literacy," Pait says. " If you have better health, you'll do better things."

At the end of the day, Pait orders iced coffee. He used to order lattes, pumpkin spice when in season, or require a resident to buy him one as penance for negligence. But last year he began to suspect the sugar and unfiltered coffee were raising his low density lipoprotein cholesterol. Out with the lattes and in with the iced coffee.

It might be 7 p.m. or it might be 10 p.m. He has already called Carol, of course, so she knows whether to hold dinner. He leaves his orange Chevrolet Avalanche in the driveway and walks into the garage to say hello to Sophie, Penny and M, two Corvettes and a 1958 MGA, respectively.

Sophie is as red as his operating room sneakers. He sinks into her driver's seat and revs the engine. He's suddenly, uncharacteristically, silent, and he's not thumbing a radio dial. He's listening. He revs the engine once, twice, several times. There's something about that growl. It takes him back, to summers in central Florida, to the grease on his father's and brother's hands.

He doesn't diagnose cars, but the neurosurgeon says he appreciates the similarities between an engine and a human brain.

"If you don't give it the right fuel it's not going to take you there," he says. "They are both multiple parts put together for one task. And they are both very complex."

And complexity -- whether a human brain or a Corvette's small-block V8 -- is only a collection of simple concepts thrown together, Pait says.

The secret, then, is there are no secrets. It's all simplicity, in the final analysis.

And that, incidentally, is the un-secret to success.

High Profile on 08/17/2014