Dr. Glen F. Baker was ready to retire in 2020 when he was asked to help expand the Arkansas Department of Health's covid-19 testing capability quickly. He accepted the challenge, taking on the task in the face of various time constraints and supply chain problems.
Now, days from his 92nd birthday, Baker is still working three days a week.
In a ceremony at 9 a.m. June 7, the day he will celebrate another trip around the sun, the Arkansas Department of Health public health laboratory building will become the Glen F. Baker Public Health Laboratory.
Baker is flattered but a bit out of his element.
"I normally don't look for visibility and that sort of thing. I kind of prefer to just have things move along calmly and quietly," he says, "but it's nice of them to do it."
Baker didn't know what he wanted to do when he joined the U.S. Navy at age 17, just ahead of the Korean War. He grew up on a farm in Jackson County, and he knew he didn't want to follow in his father's footsteps.
"The testing they did when I went into the military kind of pointed toward a medical career," Baker says.
He was a medic, assigned to an epidemic disease control unit.
"We did a lot of testing, for outbreaks of diarrhea, we did food analysis for bacteria, milk testing for bacteria, every food item that came onto the base we tested for infectious agents," he says. "That experience was enough to turn me on, to see that pathology was a different field, one I would rather be in than general medicine."
His unit was dispatched to the U.S. Marine Corps training facility in Parris Island, S.C., during an outbreak of meningitis. He was also witness to the public health sector's response to an outbreak of H2N2 flu in the 1950s, which would serve as a framework for managing the covid pandemic years later.
"When we had the significant outbreak of flu, they had to develop the flu test and the mechanism to handle the high-volume samples," he says. "When the coronavirus came around we simply had to activate those kinds of programs. We had equipment on board, but not enough to manage the expanded workload. We had to expand personnel and expand the equipment and train a whole series of analysts to handle the expanded workload."
When he was discharged from the Navy, he enrolled in pre-medicine at the University of Arkansas. He completed that in just three years. He went on to what was then the University of Arkansas College of Medicine, finishing in 1959, and then started a residency in pathology.
Four years later, he began practicing pathology at St. Bernard's Hospital in Jonesboro.
A decade after that, he was recruited by the College of Medicine as a pathology and dermatology professor.
Over the years, Baker served as chairman of the pathology department, associate dean for clinical affairs and interim dean for the college of medicine, vice chancellor of managed care and laboratory director at Arkansas Children's Hospital, as well as medical director for the American Red Cross of Arkansas.
"I retired from the University and I hadn't been gone away very long when the Health Department called and they had dropped their federal license to do clinical laboratory work," Baker says. "They asked me if I would come out of retirement and assume the responsibility as director of the laboratory at the Health Department and I agreed to do that because the public health laboratory is critical in my mind to fulfill a mission of health; we do all the environmental testing of water, milk and food and we do all the infectious disease testing -- it's a broad spectrum laboratory, doing over a million tests a year, and it's critical for the citizens of Arkansas that we have a public health laboratory."
The lab's license was revoked in 2005 because of mishandling of specimens and the circumvention of a process that helped ensure the accuracy of lab test results. Baker says he retrained all of the laboratory's personnel.
"The lab received all the certifications to function as a full-service laboratory," he says.
Baker and his wife, Dorotha, have two children -- LeMon Baker, who retired from a career in finance, lives in Greers Ferry; and Connie Melton, director of the Health Department's Center for Health Protection, lives in Little Rock.
To relieve stress and to stay in shape throughout his career, Baker played tennis and ran.
"I did long-distance running. I lived in Robinwood and I would run in the morning to the university and run home at night. That's eight miles one way," he says. "On the weekend, my wife's parents lived on Horseshoe Lake by West Memphis and that lake is 15 miles in circumference and I would run that."
Baker looks forward to the ceremony in his honor but maintains his humility.
"I don't know that there's anything special," he says, "just what needs to be done is done. I identified and tried to manage the issue and solve the problem and move on to the next issue."
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Dr. Glen F. Baker was barely 17 when he entered the U.S. Navy, where he began the path to a career in pathology. At almost 92, he continues working three days a week in his office in the Arkansas Department of Health Public Health Laboratory building that will soon bear his name. (Special to the Democrat-Gazette)