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Bassoon-playing gave him the lungs of a cross-country runner, and later, at Baylor University, he made the track team. In those days Paul was an English major. He lived on 50¢ a day—his parents could not afford to send him more. Summers he peddled Wear-Ever cooking utensils in north Texas towns.
During Christmas vacation of his sophomore year, Paul visited an aunt and uncle in Burnet, Tex. One evening he got back from church to discover that his two-year-old cousin had crawled so close to an open fireplace that his clothes had caught on fire. He nursed the little boy for 62 sleepless hours, but the child died. "It was the first time I had seen anyone die," Stapp recalls. "I decided right then that I wanted to be a doctor."
Pigeons for Dinner. Back at Baylor, Paul switched to science courses, got a job as fieldman for a biological supply company. ("I was always turning over rocks for scorpions, and the sight of a snake gladdened my heart.") More than once, Paul dined on pigeons caught on his boardinghouse roof, and when a course in histology required him to provide microscopic slides of guinea-pig tissue, he saw no reason to throw away the remains of the animals. He would cook and eat them. "If it breathed, it had protein, and if it had protein, I ate it."
Unable to pay for medical school after graduation, Paul stayed on at Baylor for his Master's degree in zoology, proctored and graded papers for a living. After a two-year teaching job, he moved on to the University of Texas, where he studied for a Ph.D. in biophysics. Five years later, at 29, John Paul Stapp, Ph.D., finally entered the University of Minnesota Medical School. In addition to studying, he taught and worked as a research assistant. Somehow, he managed to earn the degree he wanted most: Doctor of Medicine.
Meet the Future. In 1943, when he began his duty as an intern at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, life took on a new dimension for Dr. Stapp. "I had only seen pure scientists before, the prima donnas in universities working in their nit-picking ways at academic doodlings to impress each other. Now for the first time I saw science and men of science working as a team, bringing everything to bear—the enormous facilities of the hospital, their own talents and devotion—to the saving of human life."
In 1944 Stapp went on active duty as a first lieutenant in the medical corps, by V-J day had progressed, via half a dozen U.S. bases, to Randolph Field, Texas, known affectionately to those who served there as the "Worst Point of the Air." At Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., in one day during the first flush of demobilization, Dr. Stapp examined the eyes, ears, noses and throats of 600 men—"a nightmare relieved only by the thought that I might have been a proctologist."