This paper explores a lesser known facet of the campaign to define and integrate primary care within the curricula of research-oriented medical schools in the United States. Among veterans of United States medical schools founded during the 1960s, especially public medical schools, it is a commonplace to claim that they owed their existence to the widespread fear of a physician shortage. Moreover, given the successful campaign to transmute "general practice" into "Family Medicine" during that same decade, such a claim often conflates the two trends: this cohort of medical schools, it is said, gave a crucial boost to the rise of primary care. At the University of Massachusetts Medical School, founded in 1962, for example, hallowed institutional lore decrees that the school was created to produce more primary care physicians, especially in the specialty of "Family Medicine." Oral histories, in concert with institutional records and personal papers, point to a more complicated story. The rise of “primary care” was hardly uncontested, even at a publicly-funded school championed by a Democratic legislature and by organized labor. Indeed until the mid-1970s, it was difficult even to define the concept. The obstacles faced by Family practitioners at the University of Massachusetts arose not only from the “usual suspects” in Internal Medicine and Obstetrics-Gynecology. The new specialty’s gravest battles were fought, in a classic example of professional boundary disputes, against its ostensible friend and, arguably, close relative, the field of Community Medicine. Community Medicine’s investment in “Community-Oriented Primary Care” positioned it to directly compete with Family Medicine for resources and for residency recruits. The outcome at UMass Medical School, where Family Medicine eventually became the senior partner in a combined department of Family Medicine and Community Health, points to the benefit of using institutional history to identify underappreciated aspects of broader issues, in this case, competing approaches to primary care education and health care delivery, as well as the challenge of integrating primary care into research-oriented medical schools.