2. Call to
Action
Out of the blue, Dr. SGA called me in the
Spring of the next year, 1987. Would I like to come to San Antonio, Texas, April
17-19 for an IPT organizational meeting? He wanted to get things going. I had
written him after our first meeting in July of 1986 about my interest in IPT and in
helping get it into the mainstream of medicine. And now it was happening!
Dr. SGA reserved guestrooms for us at the
Travelodge on the River, alongside the San Antonio River Walk, and arranged for a big
meeting room with a boardroom table. He called our gathering "Project
87". Carefully and thoroughly, he had prepared folders for all of us, including
an agenda and even a page of poetic "Inspirational Notes". He even
made a "Project 87" banner for our meeting room. We were a small group. In addition to me,
Dr. SGA had invited a patent attorney, Melvin K. Silverman, whom he had met at a similar
Miami Beach convention in 1985. And Mel, who practiced in New Jersey and in Fort
Lauderdale, had invited two people as well, Ana Arriaga and Jeff Bernard. There was
some hope that San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros might show up -- he had met Dr. Perez Garcia y Bellon 2
in
December of 1986. But he didn't come.
Dr. SGA [I have called him
"Steve" since we first met] presided over the meeting with
seriousness and grace. Things accelerated. By the second day, it became
apparent that we were going to start a company. With Steve's personal connection to
the doctors in Mexico who had discovered IPT, we were in a position to have exclusive
rights to their technology and know-how. And if we succeeded in getting IPT accepted
into the mainstream of medicine, we would certainly become very, very rich. We
fantasized about having our own corporate jets.
Mel took control of the more business
oriented parts of the meeting -- plans for patent applications and the mechanics of
forming a corporation. I had been through some patent adventures, but this was my
first experience with corporation forming. Things took on momentum; decisions were
made, shares were allocated. Dr. SGA would be President, Mel would be Vice President,
and I would be corporate Secretary and Treasurer and Director of Scientific Research.
I don't remember what Ana and Jeff were going to be. They never participated
again, leaving just Dr. SGA, Mel, and me.
Dr. SGA had had a vision of a
receptionist answering the phone and saying "SANA International". I
suggested that it might sound more dignified to call it SANA Institute, Inc. And so
it became.
We all paid Dr. SGA our portions of the
meeting room rental, and got on our separate planes. I flew back to Tucson, now a
corporate officer for the first time.
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