Jay Y. Gillenwater is a world-renown academic physician and a woodland gardener with an old-school belief in family values, friendship, and self-sufficiency. This portrait of a plain-spoken scientist, married to his childhood sweetheart, brings out the wisdom of an unassuming Southerner and the moral compass of an exemplary man, academic physician, and woodland gardener with an old-school belief in family values and self-sufficiency. 

“The Gillenwater Story,” by Eduardo Montes-Bradley, springs from the testimony of its protagonist, his family, friends, and hundreds of historical photographs and documents. But it goes beyond this one story to demonstrate how biography is a unique tool for understanding and representing the social history of our time. English | HD | 30 minutes. Available from Kanopy Streaming and Alexander Street Press, 

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

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Born in an East Tennessee industrial town during the Great Depression, Jay Gillenwater has witnessed fundamental transformations in society, science, and academia, from his grandparents’ Depression-Era financial collapse to his father’s role in the creation of the Oak Ridge atomic bomb facility to his own principled support for the first women physicians to enter his specialty.