News and Progress
Retired Kansas City obstetrician keeps connected to MU, his alma mater
From rooting for Tiger athletic teams to giving to the School of Medicine, Dr. Gene Schillie has been one of the University's most loyal supporters.
April 25, 2005
Dr. Gene Schillie, BS Chem '52, BS Med '53, is a former trustee of the Jefferson Club. Although he now lives in Mission Hills, Kan., he keeps up with Mizzou by following Tiger athletics and subscribing to the Columbia Missourian.
Dr. Gene Schillie grew up in Huntsville, Mo., and he remembers traveling to Columbia for Tiger football games with his father and grandfather as early as 1937, when he was only 9 years old. He remembers watching All-American quarterback and Heisman trophy finalist “Pitchin’” Paul Christman lead the Tigers to victory. After that early taste of Tiger spirit, Schillie was hooked.
“I always knew I was going to Mizzou,” Schillie says. “Way back in high school and even in grade school, I didn't even consider anywhere else.”
More than half a century after his introduction to Mizzou, Schillie has continued to support the University with gifts to MU Libraries, the Thomas Jefferson statue on Francis Quadrangle, the solar car in the College of Engineering and two gifts to the School of Medicine: an endowment for use at the dean’s discretion and an estate gift to establish a professorship.
“I wanted these gifts to be used for the general good of the medical school, but I also thought that the faculty needed some help,” Schillie says. “You need good faculty, and faculty needs to be compensated reasonably well if we’re going to compete with other schools.”
Schillie, BA Chem ’52, BS Med ’53, didn't start college with medicine in mind, but he joined the University’s premed program after a chemistry professor suggested a career in medicine. “She saw that I might have some affinity for that kind of work, and she encouraged me to pursue it,” Schillie says. He went on to become an obstetrician/gynecologist in Kansas City, Mo.
Schillie met his wife, Beatrice, BS Ed ’53, at a student volleyball game, and they were married while both were still attending Mizzou. Schillie was in one of the last classes to graduate from the University’s two-year medical program, which became a four-year program in 1955.
“The spring I graduated, you could hear the bulldozers digging the hole for the new hospital on campus,” Schillie says. “Our two-year program was hard, hard, hard, but we knew then that there were even better things in store for the classes to come after us.”
I enjoy what I've been able to do, and I wish I could do more.”
Schillie retired in 1995 after 37 years in private practice. Over the years, he has remained connected to Mizzou as a former trustee of the Jefferson Club, by traveling with the alumni association’s Tourin’ Tigers, by purchasing season tickets for Mizzou football and basketball, and by subscribing to the Columbia Missourian, which he says he has received for the past 45 years. He says he continues to hold a fond spot in his heart for Columbia and Mizzou and that his gifts to the School of Medicine are an expression of his gratitude.
“I wanted to do something to make sure the medical school gets some significant benefit out of my lifetime,” Schillie says. “After you’ve had a long, successful career, you want to repay what you got.”