"He was a lot more interested in literature and art than he was in bones and tissues," agrees Dr. Paul Davidson '50, another Columbia friend.

By Coles' own admission, he struggled through the first two years of medical school.

But he continued making house calls in Paterson with Williams, and when he was able to visit patients in the wards during his third and fourth years, Coles hit his stride.

He graduated in 1954--the year that Brown v. Board of Education struck down racial segregation in public schools.

Down South

After being drafted into the military--as all doctors were in those days--Coles found himself at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss.

It was an eye-opening experience for Coles, who grew up in an all-white Dorchester neighborhood and had never been in the South.

In 1960, on a trip to a conference at Tulane Medical School, Coles got caught in traffic on the way into New Orleans. Apparently, the police had blocked off the roads into the city.

Coles was frustrated that he would be running late. "Then I heard a storm of epithets," he says.

The epithets were directed at Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old girl who, with the help of federal marshals, was trying to become the first black student to attend the Frantz School.

Coles's wife, a schoolteacher named Jane Harrowell, encouraged him to go into the school and meet Ruby. "Here is a girl going through a social crisis," Coles says. "I was wondering, 'What was happening to her?'"

What Coles found when he talked to Ruby was shocking even to him, a trained child psychiatrist.

Ruby held no ill will toward the angry white people who cursed at her and tried to block her from entering the school. In fact, she prayed for them and felt bad that they were so unhappy.

Today, Ruby Bridges Hall remembers just being happy to have found a friend in Coles at a time of great loneliness.

"Bob is like a father to me," she says. "I owe so much to him."

Coles was fascinated by how a child in such a difficult situation could maintain such an outlook on life. He had noticed this optimism when treating victims of a polio epidemic at a Boston hospital in the late 1950s.