The Cleburne Police Department in 2016 achieved a level enjoyed

by few departments then and now when they earned the Texas Police Chief’s Association’s Best Practices Recognition. Last month they were re-recognized by the program thus joining an even smaller group of Texas law enforcement agencies.

With COVID-19 safety pro-tocols st i l l in ef fect, Texas Recognition Program Director Max Westbrook, himself a former Austin police officer, was unable to attend Tuesday’s Cleburne City Council meeting in person. Instead Westbrook congratu-lated Cleburne Police Chief Rob Severance during the meeting via Zoom on CPD’s new status.

Participation in the program, which is str ict ly voluntar y, requires a department to meet more than 100 standards ranging from use of force to vehicle pur-

suits to administrative matters. The program, Westbrook said, is the “new gold standard” for law enforcement agencies.

Having attained its original recognition four years ago, CPD was reevaluated last month by onsite inspectors for re-recog-nition status. CPD, Westbrook said, met and/or exceeded the best practices standards.

“Of the 2,400 police depart-ments in Texas only 167 have the recognized status,” Westbrook said. “Only 94 have been re-rec-ognized. That means your police department is a leader in law enforcement in the state and one of the best departments in Texas. You should all be very proud of your department.”

Former CPD Cpl. Bryan Proc-tor served as the department’s program manager throughout CPD’s original application pro-cess in 2016. The task involved combing t hrough a moun-tain of folders, files and policy

He was a pioneer in many ways, and his work helped change the face of medicine forever, but Dr. Samuel L. Kountz Jr., never became a household name. Kountz overcame many obstacles to become a pioneer in of the most important new medical fields of the late 20th century, organ trans-plantation.

He was born in a small town near the Mississippi River in East Arkansas in 1930 to a minister father. After Kountz spent most of his early school years in a one-room school with few facilities, his father sent him to a small boarding school.

Kountz had dreams of

becoming a doctor, but his path after graduating high school in 1948 was a difficult one. The state’s medical school did not yet accept African-American applicants and entering any college was a struggle. Cases across the South winded through courts on these issues, including Texas. Kountz struggled to find a college or gain admission but eventually attended what is now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He graduated third in his class in 1952.

With the successful admission and 1952 gradu-ation of Dr. Edith Irby from UAMS, Kountz’s own path to enrollment and a medi-

cal education was made much smoother. Kountz received a masters degree in biochemistry from the University of Arkansas in 1956 and his medical degree from UAMS in 1958.

To complete his for-mal medical training, or

residency, Kountz found a position in California. There he became part of a team led by surgeon and researcher Dr. Roy Cohn, who was experimenting with kidney transplanta-tion. In 1959, he assisted Cohn in one of the first kid-ney transplants performed in the United States.

The earliest transplants were between identical twins to avoid the problems of immune systems reject-ing the new, life-saving organ. The team realized the immediate problem for the procedure since so few people had twins. For the rest of their careers, Kountz and Cohn care-fully analyzed the problems

of type-matching, slowly learning to overcome the problems of matching organ tissues to avoid rejec-tion. By the mid-1960s, their discoveries greatly expanded the numbers of people who could donate a kidney to save the life of a family member or even someone they were not directly related.

By 1970, Kountz and the Stanford team celebrated their one hundredth successful procedure. How-ever, funding cuts in 1971 led Kountz to move to the University of California at San Francisco to continue

Funny things that happened

on trips

Obstacles fail to deter Kountz from finding way to save lives

BY MATT SMITHMSMITH@TRCLE.COM

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2020 | cleburnetimesreview.com | Email: mfaram@trcle.com

LIVINGINSIDE | B3Lions donate to MOW

INSIDE | B3Local piano students participate in national auditions

WELDON REEDCOLUMNIST

Anytime you take from 17-28 students on a seven- to eight-day backpacking trip, various things are going to happen. Some of these incidents can be good; some can be bad; some can be entertaining.

Thank the good Lord, we never really experienced anything bad, but we did witness some humorous events. Three notable ones come to mind.

One involved two bril-liant students on a Smoky Mountain trip. We had just finished an eight-day trek on the Art Loeb trail, about 40 miles in total and rather grueling.

We were now in a campground in Smoky Mountain National Park just outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Jim Black, the geology teacher on this trip, had driven into town to pick up some things while I stayed with the 17 students.

I was sitting with my back to a tree, reading a book when I heard a com-motion going on. I glanced up, and two of the guys had picked up a large limb to break up for a campfire that night.

Now this limb was about 8 feet long and as big around as my knee. Evi-dently, these two were not the sharpest knives in the drawer because each had picked up one end of the limb and was holding it tightly against his chest.

Then the two of them took off, running right at a large tree, thinking the smaller limb would break in the middle.

I immediately hollered “No!” but it was too late. Bam! They smashed into the large tree, which f lung them backward about 10 feet, f lat on their backs.

I ran to them to see if they were injured — you know, broken sternum, broken ribs, etc., but the Lord looks after his idiots. Neither was injured.

Then I picked up the limb, walked over to a big tree with a fork in it about head high, inserted the limb about one-third of the way, and jerked hard on it, breaking it in two nearly at the halfway spot.

When Jim returned from town and heard my story, he was so impressed that he drew the ludicrous limb-breaking attempt on the back of the T-shirts that we always bought for the students after each trip.

Never a dull moment!On another Smoky trip,

something laughable happened once more. We had been hiking for about four days on the Art Loeb Trail outside of Brevard, North Carolina, a 40-mile trek, and we had four more days to go.

Herb was the geology teacher on this trip, and he and I were just strolling down the trail after supper to walk off some of that wonderful backpack meal that we had just enjoyed (probably mac and cheese,

SEE REED, PAGE B3

Monica Faram | Times-ReviewAn emblem on a Cleburne Police Department vehicle recognizes the department’s Best Practices Recognition Program designation.

SEE BRIDGES, PAGE B3

SEE CPD, PAGE B2

CPD attains elite statusDepartment adopts duty to intervene standard

Monica Faram | Times-ReviewCleburne Police Chief Rob Severance, left, and Records Supervisor/Accreditation Manager Rhonda Dempsey display the award the department received from earning the Texas Police Chief’s Association’s Best Practices Recognition.

DR. KEN BRIDGESTEXAS HISTORY MINUTE

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