UW-Green Bay friend Sandmire publishes autobiography
Making a Difference: One Man’s Journey is the title chosen by award-winning medical doctor Herbert Sandmire for his new book.
The autobiography covers Dr. Sandmire’s 50-plus years in obstetrics and includes personal observations from his days growing up as the son of a tenant farmer to receiving the 2010 Distinguished Service Award presented by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. He also writes about being an Air Force medical officer in Alaska, and delivering babies for the wives of Green Bay Packers players. (Note: Jim Taylor fainted; Bart Starr did not.)
The book is spotlighted in Dian Page’s column in the Tuesday, Aug. 2, edition of the Green Bay Press-Gazette – click here to read more.
Sandmire and his wife, Crystal, received the University’s highest community honor, the Chancellor’s Award, at May commencement in 2006. Then-chancellor Bruce Shepard said the Sandmires “illustrate the tremendous, positive force that engaged citizens can be for a developing university.”
Dr. Herb and Crystal Sandmire mingled with student scholarship recipients at a UW-Green Bay reception. (2007 file photo)
The Sandmires have supported UW-Green Bay since its inception more than 40 years ago. Dr. Sandmire was a community lecturer in Human Biology at UW-Green Bay from 1968 to 1989. Crystal Sandmire, who earned a degree in Communication and the Arts at UW-Green Bay in 1980, was a charter member of the UW-Green Bay Founders Association. She served on its executive committee and was an officer.
The couple also holds distinction among the thousands who make annual financial contributions to UW-Green Bay. Records indicate that, at 42 years and counting, they have the longest uninterrupted string of annual giving for private individuals who help support the University and its students.
They established the Dr. Herbert and Crystal Sandmire Scholarship at UW-Green Bay. Additionally their gifts to the University have assisted various athletics initiatives, the Founders Association, the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts, two capital campaigns, and the Phuture Phoenix program.
Dr. Sandmire has had a long career in medicine devoted to serving patients, scholarship in and service to the profession, and the development of future physicians. In 1971, Sandmire founded Green Bay’s Planned Parenthood Clinic that provides young women with privacy and guidance in matters of contraception and pregnancy. “Our medical clinic’s continued provision of women’s reproductive services has not come without protest — our offices have been picketed regularly for the past 37 years,” he says.
In the Press-Gazette article, he noted the remarkable changes in medicine since his med-school enrollment in 1949.
“When I walked through the doors of the University of Wisconsin Medical School for the first time … we didn’t even know the structure of DNA,” he says. “Sixty years later, the entire human genome has been mapped.”
A copy of Making a Difference: One Man’s Journey can be obtained for $19 by writing Sandmire at 201 St. Mary’s Blvd., Green Bay, WI 54301.
