Paul R. Mico,MPH,DPA (1924-2019)

Military Service

Sgt. Paul Mico in one of the many foxholes he helped dig in World War II.

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He was assigned to the 29th Infantry Division, a squad sergeant, at 19 the youngest of 14 men, “or boys,” he said. “We shipped overseas and ended up in England. All of us expected to win the war and come back as heroes.”

They practiced at sea-onto-beach assault landings, never really believing they were going to make one themselves. They were then joined by the First Infantry Division, veterans of North Africa and Sicily.

They were famous; we were greenhorns. We didn’t like them and they didn’t like us. The night of June 5th, 1944, both divisions were boarded ships and started moving toward the coast of France. The night was dark and stormy; we were so seasick we wanted to die.

The weather was severe enough that General Eisenhower decided to cancel the invasion—but not for long. Paul recalls,

A few hours later, we were sent back across the English Channel for what would be the official June 6th invasion of Normandy. Historians disagree on how many of us were killed on D-Day; estimates range from 3,000 to 5,000. Heroes? Not any longer. . . . I realized that service is a willingness to die, if you must die, in order that someone else may live. I was petrified of dying. I confronted that fear every day, but promised myself that I wasn’t going to do it there (wherever I was) or now.

Mico took part in four campaigns: Normandy (Omaha Beach, the Hedgerows, and the Breakthrough at St. Lo); then across Northern France and Belgium, including the Liberation of Paris and of Belgium, and the Hürtgen Forest; the Ardennes, known as the bitterly cold Battle of the Bulge. Finally, the Rhineland Campaign into Germany. He said, “I dug foxholes all the way from Omaha Beach to the Rhine River and beyond.”

The war changed him, he said.

I no longer wanted to be a hero. I often wondered, what would have happened if D-Day had been on June 5th instead of June 6th? I had a full-blown case of post-traumatic stress disorder; back then it was known as a Section 8, which was associated with a lot of anger and fighting. All we had to do was walk into a beer joint and as soon as someone made a derogatory remark about our outfit we started fighting.

Higher Education and Early Community Experience

A judge, tired of seeing the young Paul in his courtroom so often, gave him the longest sentence he could, but offered to let him work it out in college. With enough points for 5 years of G.I. Bill, Paul enrolled at Ohio State University, earning a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in health and physical education. “I owe that judge big time!” (as quoted in an interview with the Golden Gate University magazine)

As an undergraduate at Ohio State, he was captain of the 150-pound football team during the 1949-1950 seasons when it was still part of the Big-10 Football conference. He worked in the county public health service in Ohio until 1956, then as Director of Health Education for the Wyoming Department of Public Health, a position he took sight-unseen based on the area’s reputation for hunting and fishing opportunities. It was there he was introduced to the Indian Health Service and Mayhew Derryberry, who encouraged him to pursue an MPH, facilitated this with a PHS stipend, and brokered Paul’s admission with William Griffiths to do his degree at Berkeley. Martin Paley, MPH, a classmate of Paul’s, spoke of the strong bond of that cohort of MPH students, of which only a few have survived. Paley became the Executive Director of the San Francisco Foundation, a leading philanthropy in Northern California.

Recognizing his keen understanding of work with the Indian Health Service, Professors Griffiths and Beryl Roberts hired Paul at the end of his MPH degree to serve as the Field Director of their Navaho Health Education Project, a 3-year Indian Health Service program, stationed in Tuba City, Arizona. The primary goal of this project was to improve the delivery of health services to the Navaho.

I had the inspiring privilege, as a 4th-year undergraduate at Berkeley, to serve as a research assistant on their main study, one of the first randomized controlled trials of interventions. These interventions showed that health education communications increase post-natal and infant care hospital visits and home care among Indian women. I developed an admiration for and commitment to pursuing the MPH degree and to working with poor countries.

Professor William Griffiths invited him back (see Mico & Green, 1999), and by the course in group dynamics by the faculty member who later became his wife, Helen Ross, EdD, MPH. Later still his previous Indian Health Service mentor, Mayhew Derryberry, who retired from the U.S. Public Health Service’s Office for Health Education to become a Visiting Professor of Health Education at UC Berkeley.

Following his time in Arizona, Paul Mico moved to Washington, D.C. From 1962 to 1964, he served as the Director for the Community Action Studies Project, with the National Commission on Community Health Services. He organized 22 communities to develop and demonstrate health-planning methodologies. This contributed to the passage of Public Law 89-749, The Community Health Planning Act. Following this, he became the Director of Health and Social Planning, Action for Boston Community Development, and helped develop the Neighborhood Health Center, which became the model for Senator Ted Kennedy’s Neighborhood Health Center Act. He also organized 10 poverty areas in Boston for the Head Start Services from 1966 to 1968.

Mico was President of Social Dynamics, Inc. from 1966 to 1971, where he organized and delivered behavioral science training programs. He developed and promoted community change programs, such as the Hawaiian Community Action Programs and the National Health Service Corps, recruiting health workers to set up and operate health centers in isolated rural communities.

In 1974, Paul began providing consultation and community planning support as the President of Third Party Associates, Inc. This included providing training and consultation for several international projects primarily in South East Asia, together with his wife, Helen S. Ross (Mico & Ross, 1975). Together they also authored their second textbook, Theory and Practice in Health Education (Ross & Mico, 1980). Both of their books were translated to the Chinese language. He also wrote Developing Your Community-Based Organization and, with James M. Kouzes, developed the Domain Theory to explain organizational behavior in human service organizations (Kouzes & Mico, 1979). In all, Mico has published 40 titles in the public health field.

Later in 2006, he became President of InQ Educational Materials, Inc. and Styles of Thinking, where he provided training materials for management training programs. His frequent change of companies reflected his striving to keep up with the rapidly changing professional needs for training and communication tools across the span of his entrepreneurial and professional career.

Paul received SOPHE’s Distinguished Fellow Award in 1986, and he served as the President of the Society in 1989.

It is fitting that Paul will be honored in this journal in that he and Dr. Noreen Clark (late of the University of Michigan) negotiated the move of SOPHE’s publishing house from Wiley to Sage Publishing almost 30 years ago. Both of them were honored with SOPHE’s Distinguished Fellow awards in 1986 (Mico) and 1987 (Clark). No doubt many of the SOPHE members of that decade have the three-bound volume SOPHE Heritage Collection on their bookshelves, also thanks to him. I’m sure each of us has our own special remembrances of Paul—his warm, sparkling smile—and how he fit into our SOPHE experience. Certainly, there is not too many persons we know who not only stormed Normandy Beach and then went on to receive a doctorate at 90!

Paul received his Doctor of Public Administration at age 91. In his dissertation, “Revisiting Domain Theory: Case Studies from San Francisco,” he reviewed the validity of the original Domain Theory by carrying out new case studies of major nonprofits in San Francisco.

He said of this long practitioner role and ultimate doctorate in public administration at age 91, “Eventually, I started taking classes at Golden Gate University, completing the coursework for the doctorate in public administration but was running out of time on the dissertation.” He did come back much later to Golden Gate University, finishing and receiving his Doctor of Public Administration at 91 years of age.

Paul is survived by his children Roxy Mico, Frances McCurley, Mary Mico, and Michael Mico; two stepdaughters, Holly Sisneros and Robin Ross; and numerous grand, great-, and great-great grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.

Among his publishing contributions, he took the ratings of SOPHE peers to ascertain the articles considered most worthy of continued visibility and utility and reprinted them in an anthology titled The Heritage Collection of Health Education Monographs (Mico, 1982).