Robert Cade - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Robert Cade was born in San Antonio, Texas on September 26, 1927. He was a fourth-generation Texan. Cade took an early interest in athletics, and ran the mile in four minutes, twenty seconds at Brackenridge high school, a very respectable time for a high school athlete in the early 1940s. He graduated from high school in May 1945, and served in the U.S. Navy as a pharmacist's mate during the last months of World War II through 1948. After being discharged from the navy, he enrolled in the University of Texas. He completed four years of undergraduate coursework in two calendar years, and graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1950. In 1953, he married Mary Strasburger, a nurse from Dallas, Texas, whom he had met while he was in medical school. After graduating with his doctor of medicine degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas in 1954, Cade interned at the Saint Louis City Hospital in Saint Louis, Missouri and did his residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. He also served fellowships at his alma mater, Southwestern Medical School, and Cornell University Medical College in New York, New York. In 1961, Cade joined the faculty of the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, Florida, as an assistant professor of internal medicine in its renal division.