Dr. C.D. Williams is as modest as he is amicable -- not only soft-spoken but plain-spoken. As he moves through the hospital during a recent weekday, he engages in warm exchanges with staff and others. It's easy to see why Williams is so popular. An old-school farmer with a sixth-grade education would be comfortable with him.
Matter of fact, Williams -- cardiovascular surgeon and director of surgery for Arkansas Heart Hospital, where he began the open-heart surgery program -- is a farmer ... of sorts. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening at Belle Maison, the palatial west Little Rock home where he and his wife, Leslie, live with their dogs.
The couple were seeking room to garden at the time they bought the house. "Leslie likes to raise flowers; I like to raise food," Williams says.
And, they don't mind playing hosts. Belle Maison had already been the site of numerous social events before becoming the Arkansas Symphony Designer House, the 25th incarnation of a biennial fundraiser for symphony programs and music education in Arkansas. The house is the crown jewel of a scenic, secluded 40-acre property that also includes a guest house (into which the Williamses moved for the renovation), a lake and gardens. Spaces have been reimagined by a group of designers headed by Larry West Jr., Designer House chairman.
With its grand, two-story living room, gathering area off the kitchen and meandering back porch that overlooks the lake, Belle Maison is the perfect vehicle to showcase the work of some of the state's most talented designers -- work that could be described as, well, music to the eyes.
Williams' relationship with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra came about through Virginia Flynn Crow and Dr. Joe Crow, who took the Williamses to the symphony a year or so ago.
"I was really impressed," Williams says. "The symphony is a teamwork concept, just like heart surgery is. A little bigger, a little bigger crowd. It's more like a hospital. But the symphony seems like a nice thing for us to have here in town.
"Between that and Larry [West] encouraging us" to donate their home as a Designer House site, the Williamses thought this would be a good opportunity for Belle Maison to undergo needed updates. "So we jumped in there," Williams says. "But moving all your stuff out of your house is not a minor event." It took about five months to move everything out of the home.
"We have stuff spread around the county," Williams says. "I hope we find it all."
Hosted by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Guild, the house was originally set to open to the public for tours April 10-May 10, with several ancillary events scheduled throughout that period. Due to the covid-19 outbreak and resulting cautionary measures passed by federal, state and city authorities, the tours have been postponed. New dates have yet to be announced. "We are deeply indebted to the Williamses for allowing us to extend our stay on their property until we are able to safely host tours and events," spokeswoman Jane Dennis wrote in an email.
A MAN WITH HEARTDonating his home for charity fundraising isn't all for which Williams, 79, is owed a hearty thanks.
"Dr. Williams is the father of modern cardiovascular surgery here for our state," says Dr. Bruce E. Murphy, chief executive officer of Arkansas Heart Hospital. "[He] has had a very illustrious career, mainly reflected in the fact that he's operated on [literal] generations of families that had coronary disease and valvular heart disease in Arkansas. He was successful in that there was almost nothing he wouldn't take on."
Murphy also describes Williams as "a kind of an old fashioned ... doctor that rounded on his patients twice a day, sat on their bed, talked to them for 10 to 15, 20 minutes, knew his patients well ... and was able to, frankly, have unbelievable outcomes for many years."
Dr. Joe Bates -- associate dean for public health practice at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' Fay Boozman College of Public Health, professor of epidemiology at the college and senior adviser to the secretary of health -- describes Williams as "a highly accomplished surgeon and an excellent diagnostician."
That's a notable legacy, especially considering that Williams not only harbored no childhood dreams of becoming a doctor but went to medical school on a suggestion.
Raised in Booneville, Williams was born one of five children of Paul X. Williams, a lawyer, judge and politician, and Frances Elizabeth Hays Williams, a mother who was a dietitian at the state tuberculosis sanatorium in Booneville.
During Williams' childhood, his father went off to fight in World War II. "I was partially raised by the woman that lived across the street," he remembers. That woman, Inez Radford, had been a college professor on the East Coast but had moved back to town to take care of her aging parents.
She taught Williams how to read. "When I got ready to go to school, they sent me down to the schoolhouse and handed me a little reader and said, 'Read [in] this book as far as you can.' I got to the mid-10th-grade level and they said, 'We're starting you in the second grade, boy.' I was the littlest kid in my class for a really long time." Also a piano teacher, Radford even taught Williams to play. Her influence was such, Williams says, that "I always had to make all A's. ... You set your own curve, I think."
But it wasn't all academics for Williams. Growing up in a little town, he played multiple sports ... football, baseball, basketball. "If you didn't, it wouldn't be enough people on the team," he quips. He also ran track and even played in the school band.
After his high school graduation, Williams headed to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, not knowing what he wanted to do in life. Meanwhile, he'd enlisted in the Arkansas National Guard. One summer at Guard camp, Williams' family doctor, who happened to be the commanding officer, asked the young undergraduate student why he hadn't considered going to medical school.
"I said 'Well, because I never thought about it.' He said, 'Check it out.'"
A STAR (PHYSICIAN) IS BORN
So Williams signed up for premedical courses the next semester. He found himself enjoying the classes and at home among his professors and classmates.
"The quickest you could get into med school was to get 100 hours of college in three years behind you," Williams says. "So at 21, I was in med school." He was the next to youngest student at what is now UAMS.
After earning his medical degree in 1965, Williams headed to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas for his internship. He returned to the University of Arkansas Medical Center for a four-year, internal-medicine residency while simultaneously doing a general surgery residency at Parkland. Then it was on to a two-year cardiovascular surgery fellowship at New York University Medical Center that he completed in 1973.
It just happened that he went into heart surgery, Williams says. "I just kept moving toward things that seemed interesting to me.
"[It] was fortuitous timing that we happened to come up with coronary bypass [surgery] when I was right toward the end of my general surgery residency," he recalls. "The heart-surgery world changed once we got started doing coronaries because the number of people having surgery jumped up so much. ... The first medical report of coronary bypass surgery in any numbers, other than one case at a time, came out in 1968. So in 1971, I was doing heart surgery training at NYU, which was one of the few places in America that was teaching people to do coronary surgery. I think we might have known how to do it back then; it doesn't really seem like we knew too much. But of course, it was a brand-new field."
After the fellowship ended, Williams, as he puts it, "got ready to go out into the world and make my living." He took a job at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, starting an open heart surgery program. "It was a very good place for me to be, but they didn't have a cath lab, which means they couldn't turn out many heart surgery patients."
Deciding to return to Little Rock, he contacted the then-head of the surgery department at UAMS, a heart surgeon himself.
"He sent me a nice letter that said, 'The last thing we need in Little Rock is a heart surgeon; we've got way too many already,'" Williams recalls with a chuckle.
But return to Little Rock Williams did, and set about his pioneering work. During the years 1976-77, he restructured the open heart surgery program at then-Baptist Medical Center and started the open heart surgery program at what is now CHI St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center. A decade later, he began the open heart surgery program at the former Doctors Hospital in Little Rock.
Williams attributes these accomplishments to his being in the right place at the right time. "Somehow we got some programs going, and got real busy."
In 1997, 10 years after starting the open heart surgery program at Doctors, Williams went to Arkansas Heart Hospital and did the same thing.
SETTING THE STANDARD
Dr. Jerry M. Herron, retired from internal medicine and pulmonary critical care, remembers the days when there were only three cardiologists in town, let alone heart surgeons. Back then, patients went to Houston for heart surgery by Dr. Denton Cooley, the man who became famous for the first implantation of a totally artificial heart.
"We really needed a cardiovascular surgeon here," says Herron, whose wife, Betty, is Symphony Guild chairwoman. He tells how, when the Little Rock cardiologists heard Williams was coming, one of them checked him out with Cooley ... who said that if Williams was coming to Arkansas, there'd be no more need to send patients to Texas.
"And sure enough, he set the standard," Herron says of Williams. "He's just a good bedside physician, a wonderful surgeon and a good medical doctor, too."
Dr. Kent C. Westbrook agrees. The distinguished professor of surgery in the department of surgery at UAMS has known Williams since the two competed against each other as high-school football quarterbacks ... Williams for Booneville High and Westbrook for Clarksville High.
"When people have a difficult heart problem, they want to at least talk to [Williams], even if they can't get to be his patient," Westbrook says. "The doctors in the state respect him enormously."
Murphy certainly does. When it came time for Murphy's own father to have heart surgery, he sent him to Williams. "That was many years ago, and my dad's alive and well and doing just fine."
What does Williams consider to be the biggest triumph of his career? "Every patient that does well is a triumph," he says. His biggest challenge has been getting older and seeing all his referring physicians retire. "Young doctors like to work with young doctors. So my present challenge is, trying to figure out if I need to keep practicing," he says.
Since the early days of his career, Williams notes, heart surgery technology has become so much better.
"When I was a medical student at UAMS, and a medical resident at UAMS, the word was, if you have a valvular disease and you go to heart surgery, your chance of dying was 100%. Now your chance of dying with those things is far less than 5%."
PAYING IT FORWARD
Williams has also worn a longtime hat as an educator, serving as director of a number of medical programs and divisions throughout the years. He's currently a lecturer and associate clinical professor of surgery at UAMS. Shaping young doctors has been important to Williams, and so has the work of others who help shape minds. Williams sponsors a mentor award, named after his childhood mentor, Inez Radford. The award, which carries a $1,000 prize, is given to an outstanding teacher in Booneville.
His own awards and accolades include being presented with the 2018 Dean's Distinguished Alumnus Award from the UAMS College of Medicine. "I think he's one of the really great physicians that have come out of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in the last ... 60 years," Westbrook says.
When it comes to matters of the heart, it's not all medical with Williams. He has been married for 15 years to Leslie. The couple have seven children between them, five of which are his. Williams also has 10 grandchildren; the youngest lives in Little Rock and, he says, "takes up a fair amount of our time."
"We have another grandchild that lives in Dallas, that thinks just visiting us and driving our tractors is the best thing that ever happened to him. He just loves it. He's learned how to drive by driving a tractor with Grandpa," says Williams, who also has two great-grandchildren.
He looks forward to the time Symphony Designer House tour and event ticket holders, too, will also be able to visit and see Belle Maison in all its re-created glory.
"We just hope it will be real successful because of all the effort that [we've seen] going into it."
SELF PORTRAIT
Dr. C.D. Williams
• DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: March 18, 1941, Fort Smith
• BEST ADVICE I'VE EVER RECEIVED: My grandfather wrote me a letter when I was 9 years old [and said] when you give a public speech, you should always refer to the Bible. That way, maybe people would think you'd actually read it. He had a sense of humor. Also, Joe Bates, who is a public health doctor in town, told me before I went off to Texas to do my surgery ... "You need to come back to Arkansas to practice. The state of Arkansas has spent a lot of money on your education. And you owe it to them to come back."
• I WISH MY PATIENTS WOULD REALIZE: That health doesn't come out of a pill bottle and that they are really the ones responsible for their health. And if you don't take care of yourself, it doesn't make much difference what the doctor does. The outcome will not be very great. Now there are some people that know that really well, and there are some people that don't act like they understand that at all. But I'll see patients in my office day after day that are taking 20 different prescriptions. I don't even know how their body can function, much less be healthy. So I wish people would take better care of themselves.
• ADVICE I GIVE MEDICAL STUDENTS: Be real open-minded here and try to see a bigger picture than just a specific drug for a specific ailment because that'll be changing pretty soon. The new drugs will displace them. Many of the operations I did as a young doctor aren't even done anymore. Everything changes and you've got to be ready to change with it.
• FANTASY DINNER GUESTS: Dr. Rene Favaloro (of Argentina, the father of coronary surgery); Dr. Denton Cooley, (noted heart surgeon); Dr. George Reed (retired heart surgeon from New York, who taught me how to do technical surgery); Charles X. Williams (my grandfather); Inez Radford (childhood mentor); Dr. Bill Snyder (a lifelong friend and surgeon).
• MY GUILTY PLEASURE: Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I wish I didn't eat a bunch of sugar, but it's really hard to stay away from those things -- especially if somebody throws one out in front of you. Leslie gave me one for Christmas that weighed a pound.
• ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Servant-leader.
High Profile on 03/29/2020