Many people dream of writing a book when they retire. Few actually do it—especially at the age of 93. But Richards Lyon, a physician who has a passion for the topic of learning styles, has published a memoir called A Process Mind: A Timeless Journey of Identifying Problems and Creating Effective Solutions.
Lyon's family lost their money in the crash of 1929, so he worked his way through Stanford as a hasher. At first, he felt at a loss in the academic world. He envied the students he came to call "Quick Memorizers," people who could easily learn enough to pass a test. Lyon, on the other hand, had what he calls a "Process Mind." He felt he needed to understand something fully in order to remember it. "I was known as the guy who asked the dumb questions," he says, laughing.
At one point, Lyon was convinced he'd failed an exam, only to learn he'd gotten the top grade: Instead of memorizing the formulas, he'd managed to derive them all during the test. He concluded that his laborious learning style (hard work, determination and persistence—or HWDP) did pay off. Lyon received his bachelor's degree in engineering and entered medical school. Classmate Arthur Jampolsky, MD '44, the founder of San Francisco's Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, calls Lyon one of the class leaders. "He truly thought outside the box."
After serving as a Marine at Iwo Jima, Lyon became a urologist at the UC-San Francisco Medical Center and the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland. His subspecialty, pediatric urology, was in its infancy, as were many of his patients. Procedures and devices taken for granted today didn't exist. When Lyon needed something, he often had to build it himself.
In A Process Mind, he describes innovations ranging from scales that weighed patients who couldn't stand to stockings that prevented blood clots. In 1968, he won the grand prize for clinical and scientific investigation from the American Urological Association. Oscar Salvatierra, a professor emeritus at the Stanford School of Medicine, says Lyon was "the complete physician. He paid attention to all aspects of his patients' lives. He's one of the top doctors I'd hold up for my students to emulate."
When Lyon retired at 67 to Napa, Calif., he published books on wine and wildflowers before completing A Process Mind. He and his wife, Carol, have three daughters. And for eight years, he's acted as an online mentor for a pediatric surgeon in Lahore, Pakistan. "We even pass X-rays back and forth on the Internet.
Susan Fry, ’91, MA ’92, is a writer in Los Gatos, Calif.
