INTRODUCTION

My arrival as a breathing, screaming infant 45 minutes before midnight on the 31st of December, 1919 must have been one way for my mother and father to celebrate New Year’s Eve that they wouldn’t forget. I don’t remember the event but my good fortune to have been born to my parents and in the United States of America is a blessing beyond measure.

In the eighth decade of my life I have resolved to write a piece about my adventures for the benefit of my children and their posterity. It has been a source of regret for many years that I know so little about my antecedents. There are fragments of information in family Bibles and a few photographs but my curiosity about our roots cannot be satisfied by existing records. I knew my maternal grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins somewhat. On my father’s side I had the same fragmentary knowledge. Yet, what is it to know these relations? How can we really know these dear people whom we visited occasionally for holidays. With family scattered to Oklahoma from Wisconsin and Illinois as so many American families are scattered these days, it wasn’t possible for children to have substantial contact with faraway relatives.

Perhaps this is one way to convey something of what I was, what I’ve become, thought, felt and experienced in my years. Achievements and failures, joys and disappointments should be a part of the record. Reflections on personal and external events are also pertinent to an account of my life. It has been a privilege to live in these momentous times that span most of the 20th Century. Sometimes it is hard to believe so much has happened in these years. My birthdate is almost 20 years closer to 1865 and the death of Abraham Lincoln than it is to the present. Advances in science, technology, transportation and in every other aspect of life have been staggering. A century of wars and human travail of the worst description is drawing to a close with the bright hope of Peace and Freedom for the next century. This has also been a century of accomplishment and promise for a better life for more people. Still there are millions of ill-housed, ill-fed, sick and oppressed people around the globe. Yet the business of saving our planet and its inhabitants lies before the coming generations. There is no assurance that the next century will be better for life on earth and there are foreboding indications that matters will deteriorate as man seems bent on plundering the planet with little but growing concern for the safety and health of our earthly home. I’m a rather optimistic person but many trends of the day are a severe challenge to that attitude. Sometimes I find myself wishing it were possible to look back decades, even centuries later to see how it all comes out. I must of course be satisfied with imagination and hope.

It is a daunting undertaking to write autobiographically. One might be considered presumptuous to think that his life’s tale is worth the telling. Yet everyone has his story and who is to say whether or not it would be of interest to others, even one’s children. I am assured by my children that they want my story told. It will be an interesting excursion for me revisit my past and it may even be illuminating in ways unanticipated, at least for me.

I intend to follow a somewhat chronologic line as an armature for the body of my life. There will be many people in the cast, of course. Every personal history involves an intricate interweaving of countless other personalities of every description, every age, many races and nationalities in many parts of the nation and of the world. Naturally the background of my life is in largest part prosaic and unremarkable. On the other hand, I have had the good fortune to have had some great adventures and mountain-top experiences. People are above all other elements in the embellishment of my life, particularly those of my immediate family spanning five generations from my grandparents to my grandchildren. Let us begin.

↑ BELOIT, WISCONSIN, 1919-1924    

My father, Frank Damon Ratcliffe (see Appendix B), went to Beloit to work as a young engineer after graduating from the University of Illinois in 1915. There he met my mother, Nanette Thompson, through mutual friends at Christian Endeavor at the Congregational Church. In time they became engaged to be married. Frank went overseas in the Navy during World War I and returned to Beloit in early 1919. The couple were married on 15 March 1919. I happened on the scene nine months and two weeks later. My brother Allen Thompson Ratcliffe arrived 23 January 1921 and sister Nancy Jane joined us 9 January 1923.

It is a remarkable phenomenon for all of us that the most crucial time in our lives from the standpoint of personality and character development and many other dimensions of learning is nowhere in our memory. The first three or four years are a blank page except for a fragment here and there of early memory. I can identify a few such fragments of those early years because we moved to Olney, Illinois in the first months of 1924. I remember kindergarten particularly for the fragrance of an apple and for the lovely taste of chocolate milk in tiny glass bottles. I remember the first time the altered and lost taste for mashed potatoes attended a cold. Another time I strolled down a country lane in early dawn and heard the morning doves. There was a little sled in the snow. My favorite toy was an owl named Guzzie Whoo Whoo. I recall a Christmas tree with wax candles which Dad lit for a few minutes at the beginning of presents. I know we were surrounded by loving family and relatives.

When we moved to Olney I was four. At lunch on the drive down, I had my first iced-tea which I spilt.

↑ OLNEY, ILLINOIS, 1924-1926    

Olney was a town of 6000, my father’s home. There we became acquainted with Grandfather John Ratcliffe, a banker; Grandmother May, Uncle Allen, Dad’s brother, a dentist and his wife, Aunt Essie, the parents of our cousin Suzanne who was a few months younger than I. There were Uncle Bill and Aunt Marg Allen, the siblings of Grandmother Ratcliffe; they never married.

Our father worked out of the St. Louis office and commuted weekends to Olney. I remember his going off by train on Sunday afternoons. We lived in what seemed to be a colossal frame house in a very pleasant, tree-shaded neighborhood. I fell in love with trains which passed behind our garden. Their immensity and the romance of the bridge, the tracks and the gigantic steam locomotives left a deep impression on a small boy’s mind. We had red currants and gooseberries in our garden with many flowers. Olney was famous for its white squirrels not found elsewhere. On hot June nights green-backed, iridescent june bugs flew around the street lights. People sat on their front porches on summer evenings or strolled around and visited neighbors. This must have been typical of small town America well back into the 19th Century and the memory of it is precious. The best little dining room in town was called the Green Lantern on Main Street; it was a treat to go there on great occasions.

When our funny little car left town to go to Flora or Grayville where Allen, Essie and Suzanne lived we travelled muddy country roads and it wasn’t unusual to get stuck or have a flat. One night Essie came down with what proved to be appendicitis. Everybody was frightened. That was a scary event in those days, fraught with peril of life itself when 25% of the patients died. We drove Essie to the Olney Sanitarium where our neighbor, Dr. Frank Webber, operated on her successfully. The Sanitarium was an ancient red brick building where I first experienced that old hospital smell which arose from the phenol (carbolic acid) which was used to clean and sterilize the instruments and floors. Hospitals don’t smell that way anymore. That was very soon after the dawn of aseptic surgery which developed under the famous Scottish surgeon, Joseph Lister of Edinburgh. He was one of the first surgeons to believe in the germ theory of disease and surgical infection around 1870. For a long time into the 20th Century rank and file surgeons refused to believe that bacteria were the cause of infections and it was well after Lister before eminent American big city surgeons, some of the highest repute, would wear sterile gowns, gloves and masks. Before Lister, operators worked in stylish frock-coats to dramatize their expertise. It’s a tribute to the durability of the human being that everyone under the knife didn’t die before “Listerization” (spraying the operating room with phenol and sterilizing instruments with phenol).

The Ratcliffe Grandparents lived a few blocks down Elliot Street from us and Uncle Bill and Aunt Marg lived on the way. Grandmother had become blind from glaucoma. When we were going anywhere, I remember Grandmother sitting, hat on head and all dressed for the occasion fully an hour before we were to leave. I think I got some of that timeliness from her. We used to sit at her feet to hear stories about her father, Congressman William Allen who, according to her, was Speaker Pro Tempore of the House of Representatives. She also told of seeing her father and Abraham Lincoln in the family living room when she was a little girl. Allen and Lincoln were longtime friends who apparently fought together with Ulysses Grant in the Blackhawk Indian Wars in northern Illinois. So she said. Grandfather Ratcliffe, when we knew him briefly, was very ill with tuberculosis. My only memory of him is that of a pale, quiet man sitting in a chair with blankets about him. The day he died in 1926 I remember as the day we children had button mushrooms for breakfast. Everyone was hushed and that was all we knew. A few years later Grandmother gave me a Bible which I still have. She died in 1934 when our family was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

One Christmas morning Dad was called out (volunteer fireman) because a neighbors house had a fire caused by candles on the Christmas tree. We were so proud of him. Another time, during a brisk summer thunderstorm, two year old sister Nancy cried out to her doll, “My God, Phoebe, hear the thunder!” I can almost hear her now. Nancy was everyone’s doll.

I must have started first grade in Olney in Cherry Street School. We learned numbers by counting kernels of corn. It was fun in May to have Maypoles and May Baskets of flowers plus a parade. We also had the supreme pleasure of being able to go to school barefoot when the weather was warm. There was a tiny mom and pop grocery across from the school and we could get a bag of assorted candies for a nickel, if we had one. Around the Fourth of July there were wonderful goings-on at the Fairgrounds. Sulky races, side shows, fragrant foods, picnics, flags and speeches by the local politicos. Frankfurters never tasted so good.

My first heroine was the pretty little daughter of Dr. Webber, Doogie. She seemed heavenly to me. Like Tom Sawyer’s Becky Thatcher; I wonder what ever happened to her. For heroes no one could match a local young man, Frank Schildt, who flew biplanes in the Army and would occasionally pop into town for a family visit via the airfield, a grassy pasture. He also had an open air jalopy and would take us children for a ride.

Uncle Bill and Aunt Marg lived in a rambling house with a franklin furnace, a hand-pump for water from a well and a marvelous garden of vegetables and fruits. Uncle Bill could grow anything.

↑ SPRINGFIELD, MISSOURI, 1926-1927    

Dad’s company, Fairbanks Morse, manufactured enormous diesel engines for municipal power plants, oil drilling operations and so on. He was transferred to the division dealing with power plants in Missouri so we moved to Springfield where we lived in an apartment. I went to second grade at Phelps School just behind our abode. We became close family friends of the Hughses who lived above us. Bill and Betty were best friends and our parents were also very close. Rick and Amy. We kept in touch with them for many years after we moved to Tulsa in 1928 and they to Kansas City. (Much later, when I was 16 and Betty 13 I had a great crush on her from which I recovered in due course.)

It was on the grounds of Phelps School that Dad started Allen and me in baseball, the dearest sport of our lives.

Mother had to go to the Mayo Clinic for gallbladder surgery and we stayed in friends’ house while she was away. In May, 1927, the world was electrified by the first transatlantic flight from New York to Paris by Charles A. Lindbergh in “The Spirit of St. Louis” which now hangs in the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

I’m not sure just how long we lived in Springfield but Dad was transferred to the Oil Field Division with his office in Tulsa, Oklahoma in late 1927. Mother and the three of us returned to Olney and lived in Uncle Bill’s and Aunt Marg’s house until May 1928 when we joined Dad in Tulsa.

↑ TULSA, OKLAHOMA 1928-1938    

Mother and the three kids took the train from Olney via St. Louis to Tulsa in late May, 1928. Mother half-thought there’d be red indians on the platform when we arrived. No such luck. Dad was there and took us to the hotel for a couple of days before we could move into our new house in the Avondale subdivision. Nancy came down with a terrible cold and fever. No antibiotics, of course, in those days. She pulled out of it nicely. People did get well from colds and strep throats before antibiotics.

Our new house was in a nice edge-of-town development. Three bedrooms and one bath, standard for those times. A nice yard and the family were to spend 14 good years there. That was the scene for us children to grow into adults. I have so many happy thoughts and admiration for the experience in Tulsa. The city of about 130,000 people seemed to have good, solid middle western family values by and large. Family, church and school. Of course, the black people lived over on Greenwood on the other side of town and schools and churches were segregated in those days. Blacks were about 10% of the population. It is very different in Tulsa now, of course. Somehow our parents inculcated in us an attitude of great respect for blacks; I remember many times getting up and giving a black woman my seat on the bus. Of course we were from the north and didn’t have the traditional southern prejudice toward blacks.

I started in 1928 at Sidney Lanier school five or six blocks from home. There were no school busses and we thought nothing of walking. Times were hard at the onset of the Great Depression. Mother had a college degree in Home Economics and took a position as director of the cafeteria at Henry Barnard elementary school in an adjacent district. We were able to transfer to that school where I went through grades four through six. I still remember teachers like Mrs. Ruble and classmates like Jack Stevens, Marjorie Robertson, Ed Skinner and many others. It was an idyllic time then and as I remember it now. Tragically, in the summer of 1932 Jack and Ed were camping out in Ed’s back yard. There was a .22 pistol somehow; you know what happened. Jack and Ed were in our scout troop and were very close to me. Jack’s funeral with the scouts present in uniform brought an unforgettable sadness to all. That whole summer found me plunged into such a sadness as I had never known and which I can never forget. We would go out for a customary summer evening drive in the country; I would look at the sky of dying day and think of Jack “up there”.

After that summer I went to Woodrow Wilson Junior High School, again in walking distance. As early as I can remember I was a serious student, perhaps too serious. I couldn’t allow myself to miss a word on the weekly spelling test at Barnard. I don’t know how I got that way because our parents never pressured us to study at any time I can remember. There was peer pressure from my school mates who seemed similarly inclined and who inspired me to try harder. I remember many teachers at Wilson. There was wry Mrs. Yarberry in trigonometry, Mr. W.B. Wise in algebra, “Pop” Hake in Latin and others. “Red” Downs and Carl Sears were the Physical Education teachers and coaches who inspired a spirit of sportsmanship in all of us. The whole atmosphere was that of striving to learn and to excel. This was a public school, mind you. It could hardly have been better for scholarship. It was a combination of good home and good school. Today everyone blames the public schools for the woes of education but that may be a “bum rap” in part; what is equally to blame is the attitude in many homes where parents don’t provide a role model. No books, no reading, too much TV, no inspiration, no expectations. The multitude of broken homes is no help.

During the summers, in the throes of the depression, Allen and I enjoyed baseball camp at Wilson under Carl Sears. The weather was hot as blazes but we loved it. I remember once when Allen and I were on the same team. He was baserunner on third and I hit a triple. That was my only distinction in baseball but Allen went on to be All State Oklahoma highschool catcher, University of Cincinnati catcher and was offered a contract by the Cincinnati Reds. That was later, of course, during the war, and Allen went into Naval Aviation where he played with such Hall of Famers as Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr at Chapel Hill Preflight where he was Battalion Commander of 2000 Cadets.

Summers also saw us at a scout camp where we went for two weeks for $25. We swam and hiked and sang at campfires. There was a stream running clear, cool Ozark water where we learned something about swimming. No one had pools in those days and we never became stylish swimmers but we survived. My children taught me better form but they say I swim too long in the same place.

There was also Sunday School and church. Dad took us to the former at 9:30 every Sunday where we met friends from all over town, many of them in our scout Troop One. After Sunday School we went to church with our buddies and sat in the balcony. Dad sang in the choir faithfully. Dr. William Kerr was the minister, a most impressive and dignified man who was a pioneer in Oklahoma history from the first days in 1907 when the Government opened the “Cherokee Strip” in the great Oklahoma land rush. He also helped found what became Tulsa University. He brought to his pulpit some people who had a profound effect on me. Dr. Clothier was a medical missionary in the Cameroon, Africa; our church supported him. His sabbatical visits brought us a lot of inspiration and did nothing to dissuade me from my nascent ambitions to be a doctor. There was also a doctor who was working at Point Barrow, Alaska. All in all the church experience imparted a certain focus in life for me. I’m not a churchgoer now and my philosophy regarding religion is confused to say the least. I regard the Bible as a beautiful allegory with a great deal of intrinsic wisdom quite in common with the tracts of the other great world religions. Schweitzer spoke of “reverence for Life” which says it pretty well. I don’t know what makes one person a pessimist and another an optimist but I’ve always been one of the latter; maybe some sort of “religious faith” impels me in that direction. In any case, I’d rather err on the side of optimism. Perhaps life breaks one at a certain point in the other direction but so far I’ve been spared that. Who knows the future?

After Wilson Junior High, I went to Tulsa Central High School for the 10th, 11th and 12th grades. At that time there was only one senior high school in Tulsa. It was in the center of the city and a good long walk or a bus ride. The atmosphere of academic striving continued there and I think we received excellent preparation for college. There again I remember great teachers. In mechanical drawing I learned from a tough old army type that nothing short of perfection in the drawings would do. No erasures. Perfection. A good lesson. The final exercise in that course was to design a house; fun, made one think of being an architect. There was M.E. Hurst in Physics, Edith Force in Biology. One study I was deficient in when it came to going to Johns Hopkins on a National Merit Scholarship; language. I should have done that in high school. The summer after my graduation from Tulsa Central, I studied so hard under dear Frau Berger (University of Berlin) that I was able to absolve the first college year of examination in German in ten weeks. (The following summer I did the same thing in French.)

Being a boy with a lot more ambition than ability in sports, I went out for the track team. There was a certain amount of prestige in being on a varsity squad, sixth hour. I ran the mile but never well enough to make a meet. The competition from the likes of Mode Perry and Bill Bowles was more than I could handle. Nonetheless, I loved to run and carried that love to this day six decades later.

I discovered the love of running in a curious way. Back in 1932, when I was twelve, the Olympic Games took place in Los Angeles. All of the kids in our neighborhood were crazy about sports from baseball to football, hockey, biking, and basketball. We decided one hot July evening during the Olympics to have our own footrace around the block. After supper (sic) we started running. Before very long I was the only one still going. I ran two and a half hours and might have been running still if Mother hadn’t come out and put a stop to it. I had that sense of the runner’s high or second wind and I felt I could have run all night.

For extracurricular diversion we children were busy. We read a lot. I had a predilection for history books early on and have it to this day. We ice-skated at the Coliseum on Saturday mornings where we had many friends. The biggest challenge at that venue was to get up enough courage to ask a pretty girl to hold hands skating together. We all went to the baseball games of the Tulsa Oilers with Mother and Dad and were members of the “Knot Hole Gang” which admitted kids to the football games of the Tulsa University “Golden Hurricanes”. A lot of hero worship went on there focussed on men like Ishmael Pilkington, the fullback, Big Bill Volok who could kick the football a country mile and Billy Boehm who could run like the wind. On hot summer afternoons I mowed lawns for 25 cents. I loved the fragrance of new-mown grass. We boys loved to ride our bikes the 16 miles out to the Tulsa Airport where we watched the planes come and go. We visited with pilots, especially the ones who flew the airmail in enormous biplanes. We saw the advent of the low-wing, metal-skinned commercial airliners. We saw air races with people like Jimmy Doolittle flying stubby little powerhouses around pylons, the same Jimmy Doolittle who led the air raid on Tokyo four months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We saw Will Rogers and Wiley Post with Post’s famous plane, Winnie Mae, in which he and Harold Gatty set a round-the-world speed record of some eight days in the mid-thirties. Shortly after that, Will Rogers and Post were killed in a crash in Alaska. Speaking of aviation, we were privileged to see the evolution of flight from flimsy little biplanes up to Boeing 747s and, indeed, moon landings.

During the Great Depression our travels were limited to driving to Olney and Beloit on summer vacations. We children were so excited at the prospect of such trips that we couldn’t sleep the night before leaving. We were so proud that Dad could drive the 600 miles or so in one day. He loved to drive. Old Route 66 was the way we went. I remember when that road was under construction and we had to take a ferry boat across a river. Summers in Wisconsin were a treat because we went up to the Thompson place on Lake Waubesa near Madison. There we fished and rowed the boats and loved the rustic life. We always listened to the Chicago Cubs games with Grandfather Thompson, a great fan. He taught us how to score the games. Once Grandfather sent the family the Pullman rail fare to go to Beloit for Christmas. It was such fun to waken in the berth and hear the ding-ding-ding of the signals at the rail crossings. The Thompsons had a big house. The Christmas tree was in the third floor ballroom. There were two shiny new bikes, Allen’s red and mine blue. Times in Beloit, winter or summer, were special. Grandfather had a Packard convertible with a rumble seat. Grandmother had an electric car that looked the same coming and going and was steered by a lever like a boat tiller. Our second cousin, Orpha Thompson, mother’s age and single, took us to summer stock theater in the northern Illinois area. There were many loving relatives: Aunt Fannie and Uncle Oscar Foster, Win and Lucille Thompson and Win, Jr. and Mary Lou, Aunt Betty Barnes and Professor Kenneth (Chemistry at Heidelberg College).

There was no air conditioning in homes. On sweltering summer nights Allen and I would sleep out in the back yard. The stars of an Oklahoma summer night are something to behold. In winter there were occasional snowstorms of some depth which brought great pleasure to all.

↑ THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 1938-1942    

In the summer before going off to university I worked six to eight hours a day making up my language deficiency by doing two high school years of German. I took an examination at the end of the summer successfully. I remember that the only thing I messed up on was in the conjugation of the German for “to bring.” I gave the principal parts as “bringen, brang, gebrangen.” The correct answer was, of course, “bringen, brachte, gebracht”, an irregular verb. In late September I boarded a train along with John Wilkins for Baltimore and the beginning of a new era in our lives. We both had won National Merit Scholarships which we could retain year after year if we maintained academic excellence. We arrived in Baltimore on the tail end of the great hurricane of 1938 which swept with devastating force through Long Island and New England; it largely spared Maryland but it was a wet and gray day that greeted us. It was our first acquaintance with an old eastern city with much of its aspect rooted in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Our arrival on the campus at Homewood was encouraging. Here the architectural style was Georgian throughout, taking as its motif the historic Carroll House, the dwelling place of John Carroll, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The house had become the home and office of University President Isaiah Bowman, a noted geographer who had actually played a leading role in the apportionment of borders in Europe at the ill-fated treaty conference in 1919 at Versailles. The campus was beautiful with its Georgian style architecture in keeping with the Carroll House. The trees and gardens were lovely and the fall colors were just coming on.

We established ourselves in our assigned rooms in Alumni Memorial Hall which was to be our home for four years. It was quite an elegant building of two storeys. There was a sumptuous commons room and dining room in the first floor center. The rooms were plain but entirely adequate. The washrooms were down the hall. I have a lot of memories of life there; good friendships developed and a lot of arduous study took place. It was the center of our lives at “The Hopkins” as we called it.

The very first weekend there and just before the school term began we all went to a rustic camp down on the Severn River near Annapolis. It was a Freshman Get Acquainted camp with a program of introduction to life in college and many particulars about procedures and features of the campus. One of the first things I heard was that, if I didn’t want to fail German, I’d better avoid having Dr. Robert Bruce Roulston as the professor. He had the reputation of passing only about 5 out of a class of 25 or so. With my brief, intensive two months of study of German just past, I had every reason to get Professor Albright if I could. When the day came to enter one of two classrooms for German there was no way of knowing which professor would enter which room. Wilkins and I went into the room on the right. The outcome of this arbitrary decision was predictable; in walked a most impressive Dr. Roulston, a man I’ll never forget. I doubt if I ever studied any course any more strenuously. All during the year I would get up at four AM many days, take a nippy shower, and study German. I couldn’t fail a course without losing the scholarship. At the end of the year I was one of five survivors. Johnny Wilkins didn’t make it. To this day 54 years later my grasp of German is far better than that of French which I took the next year with a much easier teacher. Dr. Roulston became a very good friend to a number of us who had worked so hard for him. One weekend in our Junior year he and his wife, Helena, took us up to Gettysburg to see the battle field. He was a keen student of the Civil War and knew every detail of the battles which took place there July 4-6, 1863. I also became acquainted for the first time with Rhine wine at the table of the professor and his wife. She was German but Dr. Roulston was a life long resident of Baltimore except for his student days in Germany before World War I, the heyday of the romantic student life at Heidelberg where students had a royal time of drinking and duelling.

A happy surprise greeted me one of the first days when I found in my letter box an invitation from the Cross Country coach to come out for the team. One of the great things about Johns Hopkins was that there were no athletic scholarships and every interested student could join one of the 14 different intercollegiate sports. We contended in football, swimming, la crosse, track, cross country, baseball, basketball, fencing, wrestling and so on with such fine schools as Swarthmore, Lehigh and Haverford. I made the team as a freshman and had the unaccustomed pleasure of being able to run in every meet and to travel with the team by train to the various schools. Not having ever been able to achieve that during my highschool years, I was delighted. In the spring of my Junior year I went out for baseball but never broke into the lineup. One of the baseball teammates was Tom Yagi from San Diego. He was a good player and a mainstay of the team. After Pearl Harbor, Tom went home for Christmas vacation and never came back for our final semester. I never could fine out what happened to him but it is most likely that he and his family were interned along with many thousands of loyal Japanese-Americans on the West Coast.

Academically, it was a spartan time for me and the others. The professors were outstanding and demanding, for which fact I’m thankful. It was a time of great development and maturation for me and a superb preparation for what was to come at Harvard Medical School. I followed a core curriculum which was standard procedure in all of the colleges and universities in those days. It was truly a liberal education in the sciences and humanities, rich in literature, history, philosophy, economics, languages, calculus, inorganic, organic and physical chemistry, biology, comparative anatomy, standard physics and atomic physics. The later course was taken before anyone of the public knew anything about nuclear power or weapons. I do remember reading on the first page of the New York Times (to which I subscribed even then) in 1939 that an unstable isotope of uranium had been isolated, a gram of which could provide the energy to propel the Queen Mary across the Atlantic! But there was no mention of possible military use.

One of the severest hurdles we encountered as freshmen was in organic chemistry. The professor was David Harker (whose obituary I read in the Times a couple of years ago) was daunting. Every Monday morning first thing we had a quiz. When most of us started getting startlingly low scores (27%, 41%, that sort of thing) we were petrified. So study of chemistry became a field of arduous study. There were a few bright guys who did well; it took me quite a few months to get the hang of it so that my grades rose to decent levels. Not only were there great lectures but the laboratories were demanding. We spent three hours, two afternoons a week in all of the science labs. Quantitative analysis had to be perfect down to the milligram. The highest degree of precision and technique were demanded. Those precepts have served me well in my professional career.

We had a number of distinguished lecturers over the course of four years. Dr. Charles Beard, the eminent American historian, gave a year’s course which I enjoyed. Kerensky, the first president of Russia after the March, 1917 Revolution, a moderate democrat who was displaced by Lenin, gave a lecture. Dr. Kelly, the illustrious pioneer in gynecology and the only survivor of the Big Four founders of the Johns Hopkins Medical School and Hospital in 1893, gave a fine lecture as a very old man.

There was almost no end to the stimulating events of those four years.

It wasn’t quite all work. The social life was very pallid because I had no money or car and there were no girls on the campus. There was Goucher College down Charles Street but I never caught on there. We did sing in the Glee Club and gave many concerts in colleges around Maryland. After the concerts there would be dances at the women’s colleges. We were in tuxedos and it was quite a tony time for us. There never seemed to be time and wherewithal to date and that was a keen disappointment. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo came to Baltimore and agents recruited several of us to go down on the night of the performance to be extras in the cast. We participated in Sheherezade of Rimsky-Korsakov and in Gaity Parisienne of Offenbach. In the former piece we were to be the Sultan’s servants, all dressed up in voluminous pantaloons and jackets. At a signal when the Sultan was provoked by Sheherezade we were to rush out onto the stage to seize her. At a second signal we were to rush back off the stage when the Sultan changed his mind. Joe Kristan and I led the group onto the stage quickly and just as quickly we got the signal to go back out again. The guys behind Joe and me didn’t see that signal so Joe and I turned back and crashed into the oncoming slaves. The next day to our surprise, some of our classmates in the audience said they saw nothing amiss so I guess we got away with the gaffe. Dramatic!

In those days there wasn’t the profusion of classical music on the radio. Columbia Masterworks had a program just before midnight that I listened to religiously as I studied and my appreciation of great music, so well started by my father, began to flourish. My radio was a tiny “bakelite” RCA; these days, of course, every student would have his hi-fi set.

World War II for the United States began on December 7, 1941. I was studying at 2:30 PM on that Sunday afternoon when word came of the Japanese attack. I recall that circumstance vividly today. Of course life in the country changed drastically for all of us. I had already applied for Medical School at Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Cornell. Upon being accepted at Hopkins, I wired Harvard to request their acceptance and was delighted to hear back next day from the Harvard Dean, Worth Hale, that I was accepted. Having spent four years in Baltimore and being eager to see another part of the country, I accepted Harvard with alacrity. I fully expected the war to go on and on and envisioned being a doctor to help in the war effort in due time.

Late in my senior year, while working in the biological chemistry lab, some of my classmates congratulated me for being elected to Phi Beta Kappa. It was in the morning Baltimore Sun newspaper. I was taken by surprise, not thinking once that I had done that well. It was with the greatest pleasure that I could send a telegram to Mother and Dad announcing that award; they were predictably thrilled.

I owe a great deal to Johns Hopkins. The work there was arduous and demanding to a high degree. It was a test of academic fire for me and gave me a great confidence in my ability to learn. As a result of that training, the medical school work seemed easier. If I had gone to a coeducational institution, college might have been more fun but it may not have been as tough an academic proving ground as Hopkins was. I’m satisfied.

↑ HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL 1942-45    

Things were really up in the air for everyone in the early months of the war. Many of us didn’t even hang around for the graduation ceremonies at Hopkins but hastened home for a brief respite before taking on the next job. In my case, I had a month before reporting to the medical school. During that month our Navy scored the first great victory at sea in the Battle of Midway. That gave a great lift to the morale of the country. Just before that, Jimmy Doolittle and his band of 16 bombers took off from the carrier HORNET in heavy seas about 800 miles from Tokyo and laid eggs on key targets around Tokyo. This was more symbolic than anything else but it did show the Japanese that they weren’t immune to attack as they had been promised by the leadership. The story of that raid has become legendary and is best described by Doolittle in his autobiography, I Could Never Be So Lucky Again.

Getting started in med school was pretty stiff stuff. All business. Our very first class was in Anatomy, taught by Professor Robert Green. He was a man of mid-fifties, always turned out in dapper clothes with a flower in his lapel. He was spare, athletic and possessed of a stylish silver moustache of generous proportions. Moreover, he was a famous classicist and made frequent allusions to Greek mythologic figures to illustrate his lectures. An example would be the heel tendon named after Achilles. He would quote passages from Homer and others to embellish his presentations. The lectures were magnificent.

We were all a bit doubtful about facing our cadaver in the dissection laboratory. One doesn’t forget times like that. There were teams of four students for each cadaver. Each dissection room had a faculty member, frequently a PhD in Anatomy, to assist us in the dissections and to point out key features. To our surprise, after the first day, our reservations about the process melted away and we became fascinated with the miracles of anatomic development and adaptation. Along with gross anatomy in the first year we studied neuroanatomy, histology, bacteriology and physiology. In the first two years we were engaged with basic sciences of Medicine including also pathology, biochemistry and pharmacology.

Many medical schools, it was reported, greeted entering students threateningly with the claim that half of the class would fail. Harvard, Johns Hopkins and other schools rejected that approach. They asserted that they made every effort to select medical candidates who would succeed. They emphasized that we were a company of scholars and not pawns to be cast off in some intimidating atmosphere. We were treated with respect and responded with a confident quest for knowledge. Harvard Medical School also imparted to us a spirit of caring for patients, a spirit which we absorbed after the example of great teachers. The loftiest, most famous teachers seemed to have unlimited time to answer the questions of the student. The climate for learning could not have been improved upon.

Midway in our second year most of us entered the army or navy. The ones who entered the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) wore private first class uniforms. I joined the Navy V-12 program and we had cadet uniforms. That was a break for us because Uncle Sam paid our tuition and we got a few dollars a month salary. Of course we were obligated to pay back the government by active duty upon graduation and interneship. Before I went into the V-12 program I washed dishes with other classmates in the dining room at Childrens Hospital across the street from our dormitory, Vanderbilt Hall. I remember going over in the bitter predawn cold during the winter. We earned our meals in this way.

Boston was a great place for schooling. As students we had a chance for very cheap season tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts. We could walk over to Symphony Hall from Vanderbilt. We often dated Wellesley girls with suppers at dear old Cafe Amalfi before the concerts. These were very collegial and fraternal times for us. There were many close friends, too numerous to name. These were good times but the shadow of the war hung over everyone and certainly tempered our attitudes. We felt that we were doing our bit in preparing for military service. There was no idea how long the war would last but we all assumed we would be in the thick of it before the end.

Under the enterprise of my room mate, Ed Friedman, an Octet was formed and we sang at various schools and at USO establishments. Ed had sung with the Whiffenpoofs at Yale. His father, in fact, wrote one of Yale’s most famous pep songs, “Down the Field”.

We had a group of runners such as Steve Royce and John Erskine. It was a good break from the strictures of the classroom and laboratory to jog in the Fenway nearby, a park that meanders through the city.

Ed Friedman had a car, named Robbespierre. We were able to enjoy some wonderful times out at Wellesley on Sunday afternoons. Walking around the Tupelo Lake on an autumn afternoon with the trees in riotous color and with a group of delightful girls and colleagues hit the spot. We might eat at Seiler’s restaurant in the town of Wellesley. These were times of a social nature much superior to my time in Baltimore. Bostonians and New Englanders are reputed to be cold, remote. I disagree heartily. Many classmates and friends were native Bostonians and they couldn’t have been more forthcoming and friendly. One in particular, Harrie Chamberlain, was very well connected among the Brahmans of Boston. Thanks to him, a number of us were invited to quite a few coming-out parties for Boston debutantes. Of course the doting mothers of these lovely girls wanted to have a goodly stag line so their daughters would have every dance. I remember one such evening at Governor Bradford’s home, he a descendent of Governor Bradford of Plymouth Plantation days. I had the pleasure of dancing with Tina Marquand, the daughter of the notable author, John Marquand who wrote, among other things, The Late George Apley. There would be a midnight supper of scrambled eggs and so on. A favorite at those affairs seemed to be eggs mixed with calves brains. Quite good. It was at several such affairs where I first made the acquaintance of Scotch whiskey and soda. I think of those days when I have a Scotch these days.

With Navy pay we had a little money for dates. I was extremely susceptible to the charms of several women at Wellesley. Nothing “serious” happened but I wonder how I might have conducted those friendships if I were in the same life situation these days of sexual liberation. How times have changed. Women I remember with special affection were Cornelia Anne (Bunty) Phelps-Stokes of New York City and Virginia Koch of Winnetka, Illinois. The most significant woman by far I met only near the end of our time in school. On November l, 1944 Ed Friedman gave a birthday party for his future wife, Winifred (Winnie) Herman. That happened to be the birthday also of Winnie’s very good friend, Elizabeth Adda Robinson. That is the night I met my future wife, Lepai. Lepai and I had a few dates but I was still pretty much involved with Virginia. Then everything broke up as we “docs” went into our interneships and the women went into their postgraduate lives. Lepai started training in nursing in New York City. There will be much more to the Lepai/John story a little later.

In those days there were no women in the school. The year after we graduated the first women were admitted. One of those women, Sue Haegler, decided not to go but to marry my classmate, Charlie Clarke instead. We were all close friends. Sue played a fine viola. We were stationed close together in Virginia when we went on active duty as physicians. Lepai and I visited Charlie and Sue in Richmond and went to a Virginia-Harvard football game at Charlottesville. Sue was pregnant. In the summer of 1947, I went to Washington to take the final part of the National Board Examinations. I stopped in Richmond for a brief visit with Sue. Shortly after Sue delivered a healthy boy. She died a week later of pulmonary embolism. We were all shaken to our roots and it was a blue summer. If Sue had gone to medical school she might be alive today. Life has its ways.

There was only one black student, Cyril Jones of the class just ahead of us. He lived next door to me in Vanderbilt and we were good friends. Now, of course, every school has a very size-able proportion of women and ethnic minorities. We have come some distance in approaching a fairer society but there is ever so much further to progress.

In the third and fourth years we went into the hospitals and began to take care of patients. We rotated through medicine and surgery and the subspecialties like orthopedics, pediatrics, urology and so forth. I was attracted especially to internal medicine, pediatrics and, of course, general surgery. I nearly became an interne in pediatrics at the famous Boston Childrens Hospital but applied a day too late. That turned out to be lucky for me because I really did find my niche in general surgery where, in fact, I did quite a lot of pediatric surgery. One of the factors that placed me solidly in surgery was the fact of the war. The reasoning was that being qualified in surgery would stand me in better stead when I joined the Naval Medical Service upon graduation. In October 1944 we all took examinations for interneships in our fields of choice. I was fortunate to be accepted by the Massachussets General Hospital, my first choice.

We graduated from HMS in May 1945 and had a month’s leave at home before starting our interneships 1 July 1945. During the war the interneships were cut to increments of nine months instead of the normal twelve. Interneships traditionally were of two types, rotating and specific to various fields such as internal medicine or surgery. The Harvard hospitals were of the latter type; mine was in general surgery. We rotated among surgical subspecialties (orthopedics, urology, anesthesiology and gynecology) and general surgery. I gravitated toward general surgery which is the field of largest scope, embracing as it does care of patients requiring trauma, cancer, endocrine, vascular, gastrointestinal treatment.

We had had an introduction to actual operating while in medical school in the dog surgical laboratory. That sort of activity in the medical field, use of animals, raises the hackles of antivivisectionists, not without reason. Doubtless, animal rights are violated in some instances but, in my experience the greatest care was exercised to prevent pain and needless death both at Harvard Medical School and, later, at Stanford where I worked on cardiovascular surgical research with Dr. Frank Gerbode and others. Animals were always anesthetized by injection before surgical procedures. Laboratory “dieners” (German for servants) took great care with the animals which were well-fed and kept in clean facilities. As a lover of dogs, I saw to it in my work that the animals were not only well cared for but were cherished.

At the MGH I did my first surgery on people. Not very much, to be sure, but we started with repair of hernias and with appendectomies. I gave spinal and general anesthesias. We always worked under the supervision of senior residents or professors. We “worked up” the patients before surgery with elaborate histories and physical examinations. We did urinalyses at the crack of dawn. We also assisted in major operations of all kinds, working with some of the most famous surgeons in their fields. We studied at a furious pace in preparation for the operations as well as for the pre- and post-operative care of the patients. Surgery isn’t simply cutting and sewing by any means. Surgery is the total management of the whole patient from diagnosis to preparation for the operation and the finest details of post-operative management. We saw in our teachers the critical importance of attention to the psychology, the emotions and the physiology of the patients.

We learned the ABCs of relating to patients and of establishing rapport with and confidence of the patient. In emergency and in elective situations the bond between patient and surgeon must be formed solidly to afford the patient the confidence so important to his safe conduct through the surgical episode. This doesn’t just happen. If the surgeon shows by his manner a caring attitude and evidence of his competence the patient gains confidence and comfort. This is nowhere more important than when, in a matter of moments in the emergency situation, the doctor and the patient must form a working bond of confidence and concern.

I was deeply impressed by an event I participated in with Dr. Lester Yee, a senior resident one day after he had done a thyroid operation. Shortly after the operation I was called by the nurse to find the patient struggling for breath and deeply cyanotic. Dr. Yee came at the same time and immediately opened the surgical wound to evacuate a massive blood clot which was pressing on the patient’s trachea. As soon as the clot was removed, breathing was restored to normal. If he hadn’t done that promptly the patient would have died. I was a rookie at the time. Later in my training I would have known what to do; in fact, every surgeon occasionally faces emergencies requiring instant action. Confidence to do the right thing in timely fashion comes with deep experience.

On the afternoon of the 6th of August, 1945, I was sitting in the barbershop at the hospital when someone brought in a newspaper with the screaming headline that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. A new age had dawned in tragedy and triumph. I remember that my first thought was that this event could herald the end of war. Of course there have been hundreds of wars since then, large and small, but there have been no more World Wars such as this Century has witnessed twice. And the atomic bomb, in spite of enormous proliferation in numbers and power, hasn’t been used again. If the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn’t been used would the world realize today the horror of the weapon? Would there have been a subsequent atomic war? Dare we hope for a world in which atomic bombs will never be used again?

In April of 1946 I came to the end of the nine-month interneship and reported for active duty with the Navy as a Lieutenant Junior Grade to the Naval Air Station at Norman, Oklahoma.

↑ ACTIVE DUTY IN THE NAVY    

In mid-April 1946 I reported for duty to the Naval Air Station at Norman, Oklahoma. The assignment there had nothing to do with aviation and everything to do with the Separation Center for mustering out sailors. At the end of World War II, our military establishment collapsed from some 19 million people to less than a million in a very short time. Everyone wanted to go home and get on with their lives. Young men poured through the facility and we did separation physical exams on them. They were of course quite healthy so that we found very few maladies that might be the basis for medical claims on the Government. Needless to say the summer of 1946 was devoid of any medical or surgical interest but there are pleasant memories of those few months.

It was a time for relaxation and sport in welcome contrast to the pressure-cooker years of university, medical school and interneship. It was nice to be back under Oklahoma skies and on the plains of my home state. I always have loved the great openness of the middle west, the variety of weather and the fine qualities of the people. There seemed to me to be an honesty and a heartwarming simplicity in those folk which may have been a figment of my imagination to some extent. I’ve long thought that the midlands of our country are the wellspring of great human strength and promise for the country at large. Even in Boston I noted that many of the luminaries in Letters, Science and particularly for me in Medicine came from cities and small towns in the great center of the country, north and south. One hesitates to assign particular value systems to the peoples of the various parts of the country but there are certain parochial attitudes found in the coastal cities east and west that seem condescending toward the midland people. Later, when we lived in California, I sometimes wondered if we had done our children a favor by settling in the somewhat pseudo-sophisticated atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay region.

Also adding pleasure to life that summer in Norman was the opportunity to go home to Tulsa some weekends and to see much more of my parents than had been possible for the previous eight years. These proved to be some of the last years of my mother’s good health. Allen was away at the University of Cincinnati with wife Phyllis and Nancy was in Texas with husband Floyd Everitt.

Leigh McCaslin and Jody were in Norman that summer and we saw a lot of each other. Leigh had been a very close friend from junior highschool days. He was working as an engineer in the oil business when we got together in Norman. Incidentally, I spent a weekend with Leigh and Jody at Cape Cod in the early forties when Leigh was an officer in the Army engineers at Camp Edwards. I had some wonderful friends in my Tulsa school days, all young people to whom I owed a lot in terms of setting personal standards of learning and goals. Howard Shank, Bob Staley, Gilbert Gordon, Leigh and a few others formed the core of a very stimulating group for me. There were great girls too like Kathryn Needham, Marjorie Robertson and numerous others. I don’t think I had as much social fun in Tulsa owing to a rather deplorable degree of diffidence. As far as close friendship with the girls went, amatory fires were burning in my breast but I seemed to contain those urges. Perhaps it was because I was fearful of the consequences of loosing the genie of love when my ambitions for achievement and career would be compromised. Anyway, I had no money or car.

My time at Norman was a watershed in the evolution of my political orientation and learning. Before Norman I had been so occupied with studies and becoming a physician that I hadn’t really taken a deep look at my social and political philosophy. I had always been a student of history, even as a small child going to the public library, but there was this gap in my close examination of where I stood in these vital areas. I had grown up in a family strongly orientated toward good old conservative Republican Party values. Taking their cue from the Thompson side of the family, the good name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was taken in vain on a daily basis. Grandfather Thompson, bless him, was a self-educated, self-made industrialist at the head of a smallish company making grinding machinery and abrasives. The Democratic Party and the FDR Administration were anathema. “That man!” my Grandmother Jenny would exclaim. Little or no credit went out to Roosevelt & Company for the emergence of our economy from the disastrous Great Depression which started in 1929; Grandfather’s company, nonetheless, prospered and had an extremely distinguished record in production during the World War II national effort.

In any case, at Norman I became a friend and student of Bill Tyree who was the Chaplain of the Naval Base and himself a student and protege of the eminent Reinhold Niebuhr of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Niebuhr has been described as one of the greatest thinkers and philosophers of the 20th Century and he had a profound influence on Bill Tyree, PhD. Bill opened my eyes to an entirely different philosophic vista than the one I brought in my baggage to Norman. In brief, I became a Roosevelt-Truman Democrat and for the first time perceived the greatness of that worthy duo. From that time on I have been a Democrat in spirit and thought though not uncritically so. For example, Joanne and I worked a precinct door-to-door in 1967 for Republican Pete McCloskey running for a seat in Congress from San Mateo. He was an eloquent and effective force against the Viet Nam War. After Norman, Bill left the Navy and became Professor of Philosophy at Ripon College in Wisconsin. Incidentally, the town of Ripon was the site of the establishment of the Republican Party in 1854, the party of Abraham Lincoln.

One day Bill Tyree and I took a couple of retired race horses for an innocent ride. My horse was named Red Ant. After a while the two horses decided they’d make for the barn and took off lickety-split. We, not being equestrians at all, were completely out of control of the animals. We started to laugh and couldn’t stop despite what appeared to be mortal terror. There was a big pipeline suspended over the trail with almost no clearance for a person on horseback. Somehow we ducked as we raced along and realized afterward that that could have been the end of two budding careers.

My love affair, if it can be called that, with Virginia Koch went on the rocks during the summer at Norman. She was at home in Winnetka, Illinois after her graduation from Wellesley in 1945. Her father who owned the Comptometer Company and her mother were staunch Catholics and there was no way that a Protestant man of whatever other sterling qualities would have her hand in marriage. Virginia was a very sweet and pretty girl and I was greatly disappointed but not surprised at the outcome.

Being in the Navy with a purpose, I wanted to go to sea and not be marooned on the plains of Oklahoma. I applied for sea duty and was rewarded with assignment to the Amphibious Forces based at the Naval Operating Base, Norfolk, Virginia. My only other experience at sea with the Navy was in April 1945 when, as a V-12 medical student working at the Charlestown Naval Yard clinic in Boston, I had a chance to go out into Massachusetts Bay on a shakedown cruise on a new destroyer, DD 743 Southerland, a ship which fought in the closing days of the war in the Pacific only four months later. I remember that rough, snowy April day for both its excitement and my sea sickness. We were having a wonderful noon meal in the Officers’ Wardroom when a sudden urge to get out of the close atmosphere of that room and to escape to the cold, wet wind on deck in anticipation of losing my lunch overboard. Happily, the fresh air saved the day and my nascent reputation as a sailor. Sleek, narrow-beamed destroyers never passed through a wave in which they couldn’t roll and pitch violently.

In those postwar days, it seemed, everyone we knew was getting married. In a questing spirit, I wrote to Ed and Winnie Herman (now) Friedman asking the whereabouts of Lepai Robinson. Winnie wrote back with Lepai’s address and with a warning that I should not trifle with Lepai’s feelings which, unbeknownst to me, had been injured by my failure to follow through in our, I thought, friendly but not serious acquaintanceship during her senior year at Wellesley and my last year at medical school. She and Virginia Koch were in the same graduating class in 1945. The more I remembered and thought about Lepai, the more I wanted to see her again and see what would happen. I dwelt on memories of her sweet nature and beauty but knew little about her beyond the fact that she had grown up in China of missionary parents. I do recall going with Lepai and her mother to a performance of Handel’s MESSIAH in December, 1944, by the Handel and Haydn Society at Symphony Hall in Boston.

I wrote to Lepai forthwith and it was arranged that I should go to Boston on my way to Norfolk to meet her again. She was working at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard for Mr. Forbes, the proper Bostonian museum curator and scion of an ancient and honorable Boston family. I remember so well that sunny day when I met Lepai at North Station, she returning from a weekend with the Forbes family at their Naushon Island estate. She wore a summery cotton flower print dress and I was utterly smashed by seeing her again. It seemed to me instantly and, I think, to her, that marriage was our destiny. It all happened so quickly, in a matter of a few days. We would be married the very next month if I could get leave from the Navy. It is almost embarrassing in the modern era to say that, despite the gush of love we both shared, we didn’t sleep together until our wedding night. God knows the fiery impulse was there. Idealists that we were, I think we wanted to save the magic of the occasion until we were soon united. To the surprise of neither of us, Lepai’s parents gave their blessing. And then, in the briefest of visits, I was off to Norfolk.

When I reported to the command ship of the Amphibious Forces enroute to my assignment I learned that the squadron had been decommissioned. A few days later I was sent out to the base at Little Creek to become the doctor for a squadron of six strange ships called LSMR, Landing Ship Medium, Rocket. These were small, flat-bottomed ships originally designed to land troops on beaches. These particular ships were rigged with ten double-barreled rocket-launching mounts. They fired so-called five-inch 38 rockets to saturate beaches before landings. In addition there was a 5” 38 cannon in a turret on the foredeck as well as several 20 mm and 40 mm antiaircraft guns. These little ships, not more than 200 feet in length, had the fire power of a cruiser. They made a terrifying racket when firing. The flagship of our squadron was an even smaller ship called an LCI, Landing Craft, Infantry. This was fitted out with communications capability and designated a flotilla flagship.

Captain Nixon was the squadron commander. He graciously gave me leave to go to Boston to be married. Lepai and I were married by her father, Harold Robinson, only lately returned from China, at the Congregational Church in Cambridge. My mother came from Tulsa. I never knew why my father didn’t come but he apparently couldn’t get away on short notice. Grandmother Jenny Thompson and Uncle Winslow and Lucy Thompson came from Beloit. There are some wonderful Bachrach photos of the occasion. A number of my Hopkins and Harvard classmates were my ushers and Charlie Weiland, my Hopkins roommate and then at Harvard Law School, was Best Man.

Our wedding night was spent at the historic old Wayside Inn made famous, I believe, by Longfellow. A few years later the Inn was destroyed by fire. Our Honeymoon was in Maine at Shag Pond at the summer home of China associates of the Robinsons. Maine in mid-October was in glorious color but the swimming in that deserted little lake (called “pond” by down-Mainers) was frigid. It was an idyllic time, well worth waiting for.

We then embarked for Little Creek to find a place to live. We found a room out on Willoughby Spit on Chesapeake Bay but only stayed there one night because the lady landlord looked like someone out of a Charles Addams cartoon and she paced the floor in the room adjacent to ours all night, smoking up a storm, never turning out her lights.

Next day we found a nice little apartment on the Spit and enjoyed the beach life. By happy circumstance, we found that Wylie and Nancy Barker were living only a stone’s throw down the Spit from us. We had many a good time, even learning Mahjong. My duties were pretty light and boring at the base. The only surgery I did was an operation much in demand with the young sailors; circumcision. We went out on maneuvers up and down the Bay. One day a dive-bomber crashed just ahead of our ship, fatal to the pilot. On another occasion, the Pharmacist Mate on one of our LSMRs radioed that he had a seaman with possible appendicitis. This was the only time, fortunately, when I had to jump from one ship to another at sea. The two skippers brought the bows of the ships together so, with exquisite timing, I could jump over. Sure enough, the kid had acute appendicitis. We had no operating rooms on our little ships. We rendezvoused with the nearby cruiser, Spokane. The doctor on the Spokane was a young fellow who had never done surgery at all. So the patient and I went over to the big ship and prepared the seaman for surgery. I was pretty anxious because my experience was very scant too. There was, of course, no anesthetist. Fortunately, I had had a good chance to learn spinal anesthesia technique during interneship. So I put the kid on his side and gave a wonderful spinal. The dentist stood at the head of the table and the other rookie doctor assisted me. The patient was pretty chubby but everything went well, anesthesia and all. The captain of the ship phoned down to the operating room during the procedure asking if it would be alright to carry out night illumination gunnery. That was the only time, needless to say, when I was able to tell a naval captain to FIRE.

The most sea duty part of my sea duty was when we sailed for big maneuvers to be conducted off the island of Culebra to the east of Puerto Rico. It was a beautiful experience in those warm seas. We fired our rockets at the beach and the battleship MISSOURI fired over our heads. It was on the foredeck of that great ship only two years earlier that the Japanese surrendered to General Mac Arthur in Tokyo Bay. Her shells roared over our heads like a freight train; we could actually see those 16” shells in flight. Sailing back to Norfolk after four weeks in the south we encountered a tremendous storm off Cape Hatteras. The seas were wild and steep. Three of the eight diesel engines on our ship conked out and we staggered forward, making only 25 miles all night. Then it was smooth sailing and it was a wonderful feeling to rejoin Lepai. After my year at sea we were transferred to the Newport Naval Hospital where I got more into the surgical life. We laid the keel for Stephen Robinson Ratcliffe to-be that October, 1947. Lepai was working at a naval facility; she had a fair amount of morning sickness but took it in good spirits.

As the two-year tour of duty approached its end I was scheduled to go to Framingham for continuing surgical training at the Harvard VA Cushing General Hospital. Some guys were mustered out early but we weren’t and I was afraid I might miss my appointment at Cushing. I had the temerity to write to Senator Saltonstall of Massachusetts seeking relief and that was forthcoming. We left the Navy in February, 1948 to begin my surgical residency.

↑ RESIDENCY YEARS, FRAMINGHAM 1948-1952    

We returned to the Boston area in a frigid February to begin my residency at the Cushing Veterans Administration Hospital in Framingham, about 20 miles west of Boston. At first we found a temporary room in Wellesley Hills but soon went out to 64 Maple Street in Framingham, only a walk from the hospital. A wonderful elderly couple, the Emersons, rented us an apartment on the back of their house. Two bedrooms upstairs and a living room and kitchen and bath downstairs. Very much the New England farm house. We were to spend four fine years there. They had a large garden area out back together with fruit trees. I grew many kinds of vegetables there in the coming years. Stephen, Bruce and Patricia were to join us while we lived there during 1948-52.

Our life was simple and pleasant, devoted to the surgical training so we could launch ourselves into the future. I started as a junior resident and over time went on to be senior resident. To tell the truth, I was disappointed not to have been taken back at the Massachusetts General Hospital after the Navy. At that time, so many veterans were returning from war service that there was simply no way all of us could return to the MGH. As it turned out, I was very lucky to go to the VA because we had a marvelous program of teaching at the hands of what was called the Harvard-Tufts-Boston University Dean’s Committee program. Because of this, we had all of the great teachers from the three medical schools. Moreover, we got to do a lot more surgery than the people at the Brigham, MGH and the other city hospitals.

When I started at Cushing I had done very little surgery, nothing beyond very minor things leading up to appendectomies and hernias. As time unfolded at Cushing I graduated to larger and larger operations. I remember the day I first got to do a lumbar sympathectomy to help a patient with arteriosclerotic circulatory insufficiency in the leg. One of the professors assisted me. I was pretty much on edge beforehand but quickly got in the swing of the procedure which I had assisted in and witnessed many times before. The lumbar sympathetic chain and ganglia lie deep in the space between the aorta (left side) and the vena cava (right side), the two greatest blood vessels in the abdomen. The operation went very well and I felt wonderful. Confidence increased with each such step and new technologic conquest. As time went on, and because so many veterans had terrible peptic ulcer disease, I got to do over 100 gastrectomies, an almost unheard-of number in any residency program. All of the operations, cancer removals, thyroidectomies, vascular surgery and so on and on that general surgeons do, came my way. I think the training I had under Drs. Henry Faxon, Richard Dwight, Lou Hermanson, Roy Mabry, Claude Welch and numerous others prepared me very well for my later career.

While those four years were full of accomplishment and growth for me in my profession, the greatest personal events lay in the birth of three of our children. Stephen Robinson Ratcliffe was born at the Richardson House of the Boston Lying-In Hospital in 1948. In those days no one ever heard of fathers being in the delivery room. Lepai began to have strong contractions about midnight and we drove the 20 miles to Boston. The obstetrician, a prominent professor on the Harvard faculty, sent me home. All went well and I had the thrill of seeing the baby the next morning. I am an enthusiastic proponent today, 1992, for the current practice of having the fathers in the delivery suite and, more than that, participating thoroughly in the prenatal preparation for the new arrival. I’m convinced that the father gains much more appreciation of the miracle of birth and of his wife in her ordeal. It must strengthen the bond among the parents and offspring.

Naturally, with the first-born, we were extremely anxious about every little detail of the care of the baby. Every parent goes through that with the first baby and gains much more confidence as brothers and sisters arrive later. So it was with us. Bruce Allen came along at the Framingham town hospital in 1950. Patty was born in 1952 just before we finished the Cushing years and moved to California. So we brought a brood of three wonderful kids to San Mateo.

I drove our Dodge sedan to California late in June and into July. I visited Niagara Falls on the way and had a nice visit with brother Allen and Phyllis who lived in Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Allen was working for our Grandfather Thompson’s Gardner Machine Company there. Then I pressed on to California and stayed with Harold and Julie Robinson in Walnut Creek who had been such a great help the year before when I flew out to San Francisco to prospect for the site of my future practice and our future home. I looked all around the Bay Area during that 1951 trip and was most favorably impressed with San Mateo, a clean, bright and sunny city on the San Francisco Peninsula. I had had an introduction to Dr. Kirk Prindle who had trained in Boston years before with my Chief at Cushing, Henry Faxon. Kirk and others in San Mateo couldn’t have been more helpful and, with that encouragement, we decided a year later to live there.

After the New England “feeling” we had become accustomed to, the colorful life in the San Francisco area was most attractive. There was a liveliness and pace together with the dramatic hills, Bay, bridges, towns and cities. Hal and Julie took me everywhere around the Bay. The first crossings of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge were unforgettable for excitement. I think I had always had romantic thoughts about SAN FRANCISCO since boyhood, so I was prepared to fall for the region.

Nonetheless, during the last year of my residency, we looked at situations all over the country. We got brochures and reports from Chambers of Commerce in many areas as to their economies and cultural and recreational attributes. I took a trip to Wisconsin to inspect a possible future home and went on to Kansas City where I subsequently was offered a faculty position in surgery at the University of Kansas Medical School. We were extremely analytical about our future home prospects. We still hadn’t decided where to go in April 1952. One afternoon, while I was looking at some microscope slides in the laboratory I was suddenly seized with an impulse to go west. I reasoned that I had always been very careful about my life and deserved to take a big chance, to risk a grand and colossal failure. We would go to San Francisco. I phoned Kirk Prindle that evening and he said come ahead. We had actually taken quite an interest in a nice little house in the woods in the pleasant suburb of Weston, Massachusetts. I had been offered a place in association with two MGH older surgeons in Waltham. That would have been a good choice but it seemed too safe.

There was another fateful event which might have eventuated in our living in Fitchburg near Boston. Two leading surgeons of that city had gone to San Francisco to the annual congress of the American College of Surgeons in 1951. They took the train, apparently thinking that would be safer than flying. (In those days flying wasn’t taken for granted as it is today.) On their return trip they were sitting in the rear parlor car. The train was rear-ended near Salt Lake City and they were both killed. Fitchburg had lost its two leading surgeons. A committee of the medical society was formed to select replacements. Many people applied for the positions which were considered highly desirable. I applied. Two men were selected who were already well-known and older, more experienced. That was a logical selection and no one was surprised or disappointed.

I remember a thrilling political season in 1948. Harry Truman succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt in April, 1945. He had a very tough time taking over the Presidency from the great Roosevelt. Everyone thought the little man from Missouri would be completely overwhelmed by the job. Roosevelt must have known better when he selected Truman to be his Vice President in 1944. Truman inherited a Republican Congress, the 86th. He faced railroad and coal miner strikes, in the former case employing the Army to run the lines. The Congress thwarted him at every turn. Truman ran for reelection in 1948 against Thomas Dewey of New York. Dewey was a brilliant man whom Roosevelt had defeated in the war year 1944. Everyone thought Truman would be swamped by the popular Dewey. Truman was a scrappy guy and took his campaign by railroad whistle-stop tours to the country. He assailed the “do nothing” 86th Congress. The polls gave him no hope. I was on duty at the hospital the night of election day. We had primitive TV at the hospital. During the early evening the pundit H.V. Kaltenborn reported that early returns showed a narrow Truman lead. Everyone expected his lead to melt away as the upstate or rural votes were counted. I went to bed expecting the inevitable. About 3 am I woke up and heard a radio down the hall in residents’ quarters. “Truman was still ahead and gaining!” I was too excited to sleep. There was the famous headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day saying “DEWEY WINS”. The country got a big kick out of that error.

The problem of moving to California was complicated because we had a little new-born, Patty. How to bring her and the older children west? We planned for Lepai and the little ones to take the (safer) train. They all went down to visit Jim Robinson and Hope in Summit New Jersey on the way west. I was delighted when they arrived by air “safely.” So we were in California, ready to start a surgical practice and to establish our home in San Mateo.

↑ EARLY SAN MATEO YEARS 1952-1955    

Having decided to move to San Mateo to start my practice, I started to drive west in late June, 1952. On the way I visited Niagara Falls and then stopped in Birmingham, Michigan to visit Allen, Phyllis and family. The long, lonely drive to California is something of a blur in my mind. Lonely but enjoyable as I’ve never driven coast to coast before (or since). There was a tremendous thunderstorm and downpour outside of Omaha. I drove over the high mountains of Wyoming and followed US 40 on into California. I went first to Harold and Julie’s house in Walnut Creek for a few days until I could make some arrangements in San Mateo.

Lepai and the three youngsters joined me in San Mateo in August, 1952. Steve was four, Bruce two and Patty was just three-months old. Our first few nights were spent in a motel on San Mateo Drive. In the preceding month, I had laid the ground work for starting my practice. We found a pleasant “garden apartment” out in Hillsdale at 144 West 36th street. Everything about this new life seemed fresh and new and a bit daunting.

It was wonderful to be received by my future colleagues in the profession. Dr. Kirk Prindle and Dr. Clinton Ervin were general surgeons at the San Mateo Clinic. I worked with them and assisted them in surgery for the first months and they helped me get started in my own practice. The general practitioners and internists kindly began to refer patients to me and I began to feel right at home. The start was, of course, very slow. I was able to make a little money, enough for us to set up housekeeping and buy food. As all of the new doctors did, I got on the Emergency Room panel at Mills Memorial Hospital. We took care of various surgical cases, mostly lacerations, dog bites and the occasional case of appendicitis. In this way we got to meet some patients and to become part of the medical community. More and more of the surgeons would sign out to me and would also invite me to assist them in the operating room. The staff privileges of the hospital were extended provisionally to me. That meant that I had to have one of the senior surgeons assist me in the operations I did and to see to it that I knew what I was doing. It was all very collegial and helpful. With my superb medical school (Harvard!) and surgical training, I soon developed a very good reputation and, after a period of time, was accorded full privileges in surgery so that I didn’t require supervision. It was great fun being my own man and one of the recognized surgeons. If we had stayed back in Boston, my surgical experience for the first years would have been very anemic because there were so many surgeons there standing around hoping for another case while working for insurance companies. This way I really got into the act in relatively short time.

The contrast between the interpersonal climate of the profession in the Boston area and in San Mateo soon became apparent to me. In the East I saw the hostility and professional jealousy quite prevalent among the practitioners. In some towns, I understood, certain factions refused even to speak to one another. Toward the end of my residency, Ray Marsh and Jane Denton, internists, and I went down to New Milford, Connecticut, said to be a beautiful area with a fine little hospital, to investigate the possibility of setting up in practice together. I met the chief of surgery at the hospital. He seemed cordial enough but said that I would have to live in the community five years before I could practice in the hospital! It was their nice way of keeping competition out of town. They had other restrictive tricks too, but that was enough to send us away empty-handed. Fortunately for neophytes today, doctors cannot act with such heavy handedness. On the other hand, in San Mateo there was nothing but friendliness and a welcoming attitude from everyone. Doctors and the hospital staff were helpful in every way. Although there were already many fine doctors in the community, they seemed to be glad to have new members join the staff.

I made a number of friends who became very close to me. The first one was Dr. Martin Karr, a family practitioner, in whose office I began my practice. He and his lovely wife, Suzanne, couldn’t have been more cordial to the Ratcliffes. Fact is, I started in the right lower desk drawer in Martin’s office. I naturally didn’t need much office time at the beginning because my patients were few and far between. I only needed facilities for seeing emergency and post-operative patients for suture removal and follow-up. Another early, close friend was Bill Rosow, an internist who started just before I did. He and his wife, Emma, became longtime friends who, at this writing (July 1992), remain cherished friends.

My new surgical colleagues, in addition to Kirk Prindle and Clint Ervin, were Dick Gonzalez, Ed Drucker, Ken Allen, Jim Edwards, George Laird and others. The professional atmosphere at Mills Memorial Hospital fostered excellent educational conferences and extensive cooperation along the line. In problem cases consultations were freely offered. The medical climate owed much to the quality of training of the staff and to the two stellar medical schools nearby, Stanford and the University of California at San Francisco. Initially, we had residents from UCSF at Mills and Stanford residents at the San Mateo County Hospital. Kirk Prindle led the surgical rounds at the latter hospital every Wednesday morning to which we all went religiously. Those rounds were attended by surgeons from all points on the Peninsula.

Meanwhile, the family was settling in nicely. Steve and Lepai started in a cooperative nursery school through which we met our longtime friends, George and Thelma Kromhout. We were feeling our way in the community. Most of our early acquaintances were naturally in the medical community. We joined the Congregational Church to which Grandfather Harold Robinson and Mary later came in the role of assistant pastor. Earlier they were in a church in Guerneville on the Russian River where we visited. Lepai and the children found Martin’s Beach south of Half Moon Bay on the ocean side of the Peninsula and, for years, enjoyed a little house and the friendship of the proprietors, the Wattses. (In 1983, Patty and Kirk were married there on a bluff by the seaside). I visited them briefly but the demands every doctor faces in private practice, namely, the fear of losing the referral of a case, unfortunately kept me from being a full participant in family life. I felt financially insecure enough that I was in fact a sort of slave to the practice. It is the nature of solo private practice, an aspect I deplore from the standpoint of family life, that if one isn’t always at the ready to respond to a referral, the referring doctor may not call again. This situation was ameliorated somewhat later on when Bill Larsen and I became associated, but even then one had to be ready to come on call. I think this pressure on me had something to do with my not having been all the father and husband I might have been, had I had more free time. I envied people in other walks of life who worked nine to five and had every weekend free. Nowadays most young doctors work in clinics and groups and share out the work to one another, to everyone’s benefit. The family and I paid a price. It wasn’t only the pecuniary aspect of practice that concerned me. The quality of my clinical results had always to be of the highest order for humanitarian reasons and for my professional reputation and, to tell the truth, my pride. The great Professor William Osler, one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, wrote that a doctor really had no business marrying before forty because Medicine was such a demanding discipline. That was never a popular precept with young doctors in the latter part of this century. It must be said that the marital partners of doctors face a difficult role.

One day I took little Bruce down to the playground. He fell out of the swing and lacerated his scalp with the inevitable brisk bleeding. I had a rare adrenalin flush, fearing the worst that he had cracked his little skull. I grabbed him and ran full tilt the two blocks back to our apartment, put him in the car and raced down to Mills Hospital. He was perfectly alright, if covered in blood. I sewed up the laceration which wasn’t very big. That’s the end of the story but it shows how doctors react when one of their own is injured. That’s why surgeons don’t operate on family members. On the other hand, when the Robinsons moved down to San Mateo from Guerneville, it became apparent that Mary had a long history of duodenal ulcer with, by this time, a major degree of obstruction to gastric emptying. This was in the mid-fifties. She needed surgery. Although we urged her to have another of our best surgeons do the work, she insisted that I do it. With some trepidation but, captured by her insistence, I did the appropriate partial gastrectomy. Happily, she had a very smooth recovery and enjoyed eating the rest of her life.

In the Spring of 1953 I went to the meeting of the Society of University Surgeons in Los Angeles as a matter of continuing education. I had lunch with Dr. Francis D. Moore, my young chief in General Surgery during my interneship at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He was then chief at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital at Harvard. I was missing the academic stimulus I had known in Boston and he offered me a Fellowship at the Brigham with him which might have led on to an academic career at the University of Vermont or some such. I was thrilled about that and sorely tempted. On the flight back to San Francisco I sat with one of the surgical greats of Stanford, Dr. Emile Holman. He had been one of the residents of the most illustrious Johns Hopkins surgeon, William Halstead. That was like being a disciple of Jesus to surgeons. He thought I should seize the opportunity to go with Moore. Shortly after I returned to my practice, my colleague Dr. George Laird told me that the big three surgeons at Stanford wanted to talk to me about working with them. I guess Dr. Holman told them about me and my thoughts about joining Dr. Moore. Drs. Frank Gerbode (cardiac surgical pioneer), Roy Cohn and Victor Richards all offered me a chance to work in the surgical research laboratory. It was an embarrassment of riches. Having no basis for choice, I decided to work with Dr. Gerbode in cardiovascular studies. I did this several days a week for six years. I did my own research on such subjects as the physiology of cardiac function after ablation of the pulmonary valve of the heart in dogs. Also, I did some early work in attempted coronary bypass surgery using a plastic material and entirely without success. A decade later this work succeeded by using vein grafts in humans and became a very big field. To do that successfully one needed cardiopulmonary bypass during the operation so that the heart would stand still for the intricate bypass procedure. At the time I was working at Stanford, heart bypass technology was in its early development phase in animals. I should say that the dogs in our laboratory were cared for in the most salutary fashion and were anesthetized before any procedures. I never witnessed cruelty to the animals. One would be amazed to know how many advances in the treatment of human disease were made possible by experimentation involving animals.

Dr. Gerbode insisted that I be paid a small stipend, $150 per month, for my efforts. I would gladly have done it for nothing but it came in handy for a young surgeon in his second year of practice. I put that money to a special use. Dear old Reuben Silver had a piano shop in Burlingame. He had a lovely 19 year-old Steinway medium grand piano for $1800. He gave it to me for $1500! I paid him off over ten months time with my Stanford earnings. That piano is still with us. I studied for ten years with Bill Keller but then faded out. The children all took piano except Bruce who had a brief flirtation with a violin. David became the most accomplished pianist and is still at it. His special interest lies in ragtime, jazz and Bach!

In 1953, I passed the final third part of the examinations for the American Board of Surgery and became a Diplomate. That’s one of the milestones in a surgical career. Before 1938 surgeons learned their art and science in a variety of ways. When the American Board was established, the quality and scope of surgical training was formalized to make for higher standards. Specialty Boards were established in Internal Medicine and other disciplines. This has led to an elevation in the level of proficiency in American physicians. One of the problems in the medical world today is that too many doctors have specialized and there is a dearth of generalists or family practitioners. There is a reverse trend under way at this time which will be to the benefit of patients who hitherto had to see a number of doctors willy-nilly to get at the root of health problems. A generalist who can quarterback and coordinate the diagnosis and care of patients is a more rational way to go. When I qualified in surgery, we diplomates were relatively rare birds. Americans rarely do things by halves. In late years, thanks partly to prevalence of specialization, the costs of medical care have shot up into the stratosphere.

In the Spring of 1954 we must have been doing reasonably well because we bought a nice house in San Mateo Park, an older but desirable section of the town: 428 Edgewood Road. Lovely trees and winding streets. With our hearts in our throats we paid the frightful sum of $32,500 and felt some guilt as high fliers. The schools were excellent and Stephen was ready for that, Bruce soon to be. We have some quaint old 8 mm family movies of life there with typical birthday parties, skiing and other activities. David recently had all of those old movies transferred to VHS video for all of us, a wonderful gift to the family.

In 1954 Richard Gonzalez and I were joined in the office by Bill Larsen who had been in the class ahead of me at Harvard. We formed a very happy trio and shared the upkeep of our office until I left for Saudi Arabia in 1975. Dick was a plastic surgeon and Bill and I were the general surgeons.

1955 was a banner year. David Thompson Ratcliffe joined our family on then. Lepai and I had originally thought six children might be a good idea but with the arrival of Dave, we were content. That was the time of the baby boomers after the war and everyone seemed to be producing a bumper crop of kids.

1955 was also the year that the tenth commemorative ceremony of the foundation of the United Nations took place. Leaders of most of the UN membership attended and it was a very big splash. I was a member of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco at that time and attended a luncheon of hundreds of people at the Palace Hotel. To my amazement, I found myself standing by people like Prime Minister Harold MacMillan of Great Britain and Dag Hammersjöld of Sweden, the General Secretary of the UN. I can see them in my mind’s eye vividly today. But the biggest event of those days was 25 June. When I saw that the guest of honor, President Harry Truman, who had given the key address the night before was to fly back to his home in Independence, Missouri early the next morning I resolved to go to the San Francisco airport to see him. I took Grandfather Robinson along. We walked in and saw the ramp to Truman’s plane. President Truman was a special hero of mine. On impulse, I walked down the ramp and went up to the plane. Mr. Truman was taking his customary morning walk on the tarmac. I boldly walked up to him and congratulated him on his great part in the formation of the UN. He was extremely congenial and thanked me for my expression of appreciation. He signed his autograph for me. Then he entered his plane and took off. As I walked back up to ramp to rejoin Grandfather Robinson, I was accosted by some newspaper reporters. They asked me who I was to be talking to the President. I told them I was just a doctor who admired Mr. Truman. Apparently one of the photographers for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin had shot a picture of the President talking to me. That photo appeared in the evening edition and I have a couple of copies of it in my Truman books. That was a tremendous thrill to shake the hand and speak with that wonderful man whose reputation as a great President has since grown to olympian heights and deservedly so.

↑ SAN MATEO 1956-1960    

The last half of the 1950s was a time of general tranquillity and surface peace in the United States and in the world at large. Of course the Cold War was in full thrust with it’s attendant anxieties. The horror of McCarthyism had subsided but Communism persisted as the great fear of the populace. The Soviets had launched the Sputnik satellite and our side was extremely upset to think that we were behind in the space race and in nuclear weapon delivery devices. The beeping Sputnik was at once a thrilling achievement on the scientific side but the United States were in something of a panic about being behind in the Cold War and in space science. Earlier in the decade we were amazed that the Soviets could produce nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) so quickly when we had hitherto thought we were well ahead in the race. Consequently our country reacted strongly in a number of ways. Our schools suddenly were consumed with a passion for advancement in the education of our children in math and science. Many of us got up in the wee hours to try to see Sputnik fly overhead. The satellite was minute, not larger than a basketball, apparently. It could be seen by a few but I don’t remember that we were successful. In any case, our space program was greatly accelerated leading to our own Pioneer satellites and the whole series of evolving space probes.

About that time, Steve was having some trouble with his arithmetic at Park School. Feeling that I could help him, we purchased a regular green-surface school chalk board. Steve and I went over and over his problems and he emerged as one of the strongest students in his class. I might have been over-imbued with the anxiety widely felt that our kids weren’t achieving what they should in school. In any case, the chalk board on the dining room wall was a symptom of the concerns of the day.

I became a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons in 1956. One qualifies for that after becoming a Diplomate of the American Board of Surgery and after serving in a surgical community under the surveillance of staff surgeons for three years. I continued my Stanford cardiac surgical research part time until 1959. Then I had to make a choice between supporting the family by private practice or going on in the forward rushing world of open heart surgery. Obviously my choice of necessity was the former.

Lepai and I had the temerity to take a “grand tour” of Europe in May 1957. We sailed on “Liberte”, former German “Europa”, from New York to Southhampton and stayed at historic Brown’s Hotel for a few days. Then we visited the sights and sounds of Paris, staying in the Hotel Continental which had been the headquarters of the Wehrmacht during the Nazi occupation. On the Rue de Rivoli by the Tuileries and near the Place de la Concorde, we splurged and ate supper at Maxim’s for $20.00! We took in the Louvre and Jeu de Paume, the Notre Dame Cathedral, Sacre Coeur and many of the usual attractions. We even had a night tour of some of the night clubs culminating at the Lido. I don’t know quite how we arrived at the conclusion that we had the money to take a trip like this only five years after we started the practice. My income must have been paltry. Youth, I guess. Endless possibilities. We went on to Cologne. I remember so well the massive Dom which had survived the bombing which left the entire neighborhood absolutely level still 12 years after the war. We bought a Leica F3 camera and a red and black Karman Ghia car. We left it with our new friend Dieter Ebeler who had stayed with us in San Mateo when he and his cousin Dagmar von Bernsdorff stopped over during their ’round the world motorcycle trip during which they recorded ethnic music from many places for Deutchewelle radio. Dieter drove the car for three months so we could import it duty-free. He also put a dent in the fender which was repaired and painted. It seemed quite thrilling to have an imported car; the prices at that time must have been very cheap dollarwise. Then we sailed up the Rhine on a steamer to Main/Heidelberg. I remember hiking on a famous trail above the city called Die Philosophenweg, the philosophers’ way. Then we took in Munich with its great art galleries (Der Alte Pinokathek) and their science museum with great clocks and musical instruments of all ages. Thence to Vienna where, on the night of arrival, we went down to the gorgeous, rebuilt Statsoper and bought standing tickets for 16 groschen to hear Licia Albanese and company sing “Don Giovanni”. That house, all cream, gold and crimson was a jewel. A couple of nights later we went to “Die Meistersinger” in more style, taking a break for supper, between acts. We took a train to Venice and arrived at night by gondola at our hotel on the Grand Canal near Piazza San Marco. I believe the hotel was Danieli. We walked all over town and went out to Murano where they make wonderful glassware. Next we took a bus across the Apennines for Florence where we stayed at Villa Luchese on the Arno River. We visited, of course, the Pitti Palace, the Uffizi, David at the Academia. We bought a marble carving of the David and some copies of florentine art in antiqued frames. Then we went to Rome and visited the Vatican Museum, saw more than we can ever recount. It happened that Italy was celebrating the anniversary of the Republic and they had a great parade on the road leading to the Coliseum. The thing I remember about that was the fierce elbows of the people racing to get in and the Bersaglieri, mountain troops in green uniforms, running and blowing desperately on their horns before the reviewing stand. We flew home by stages in a DC-6. I think we were away six weeks and it is hard to believe we could have undertaken such a trip at that time. The kids were all safely at home with our dear friends, the Coxes. Harry Cox, a black cabinetmaker, had known a friend of my father’s, Bill Steele, many years before back in Missouri. Harry made the examining tables for our offices.

In the summer of 1958 we shipped our Ford stationwagon and all six of us on a Dutch freighter, the Dongedyk, to Vancouver, B.C. via Portland, Oregon. She carried 50 passengers and had a delightful doctor aboard. We went up the Columbia River to Portland and watched the process of shipping cargo by sea. When we debarked in Vancouver we enjoyed that lovely city for a few days and then took a ferry across to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. We stayed in Victoria. It so happened that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were making a state visit to Canada. We went over to the parade ground to watch the rehearsal for the big occasion of the traditionally dressed soldiers in red coats and great bearskin hats. The precision of their drill was amazing. When those hundreds stamped their feet it was as one. The next day we were on the parade route and were thrilled as the royal couple drove by us only a few feet away in the motorcade. We loved the Burchard Gardens. Then we took a ferry over to the Washington state shore and thence to Seattle, Tacoma and Portland. We visited the Whites there. Janny was a classmate and dear friend of Lepai’s from Wellesley days. I remember having terrible hay fever from the profusion of roses at that season. Nonetheless, Portland is truly the city of roses.

In 1959 I was elected to the San Francisco Surgical Society where I was to spend many splendid evenings of scientific papers and fellowship at the bar and dinner table. Years later, in 1975, I was to become Vice President of the Society but left for Saudi Arabia; Bill Larsen took my place.

↑ SAN MATEO 1960-1965    

1 January 1960 saw the beginning of my 40th year. Lepai and I had a growing family and we were entering a fateful decade. It was the year of the Presidential campaign which finally pitted John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon against one another. It was the year in which we moved from 426 Edgewood Road to the Parkside house in Hillsborough. The “new” house was an older two story home in one of the older parts of town with big trees and an overgrown hodgepodge of bushy growth. We were to do a lot of work improving that house and grounds. We cleared much of the old growth and re-landscaped most of the land. It was a period of landscaping creativity that we enjoyed greatly. We built a swimming pool, blacktopped the driveway and added a shop and three-space carport. We remodeled the old kitchen. We created a basketball and tennis backboard. The place was fitted out nicely for a pleasant family life. The stage seemed to be set for a lovely life. The children were in excellent public schools. I was happy in my practice though I felt then and continued to feel that my capacity far exceeded the demand for professional recognition and utilization. There was an “itch” in my spirit to do something more significant than my private practice afforded. An event later in the year brought a welcome degree of self-realization which was a temporary palliative.

Meanwhile Bill Larsen, Dick Gonzalez and I helped design a new office at 104 St. Matthews Avenue which we rented from the Benninghovens. That was an outstanding success, an attractive and functional facility. We stayed in that office until 1966 when we moved our offices to the Mills Square Building across the street from Mills Hospital. During these few years I served as Chief of Surgery at Mills Memorial Hospital and later at the Peninsula Hospital in Burlingame.

In September 1960 the doctors in the San Mateo County Medical Society received invitations to visit the Hospital Ship HOPE which lay in San Francisco Harbor in preparation for sailing to Indonesia to initiate the first overseas services of “Project Hope”. This project was to become famous as a people-to-people medical outreach which was the brainchild Dr. William Walsh of Washington, DC who, in the beginning, was inspired by President Eisenhower’s vision of a people-to-people peace initiative. The hospital ship taken over by Project Hope served in the Pacific during World War II as the CONSOLATION. had always liked to take the family to visit interesting ships that visited San Francisco. Previously, for example, we had visited a reproduction of Captain Bligh’s BOUNTY and on another occasion the first nuclear powered merchant vessel, SAVANNAH. So it seemed the exciting thing to do to visit HOPE. It was a gleaming, white ship sitting so proudly in her berth as we boarded her. By sheerest coincidence, when we immediately encountered the Chief Nurse, Lepai and Dorothy Aeschliman recognized one another. They had both grown up together in China as children of missionaries! Emboldened by this pleasant circumstance and being bedeviled probably by inchoate temptation, I asked Dottie if the Chief Medical Officer were aboard. He was. To make a long story short, I went up to Dr. Paul Spangler’s office and we hit it off immediately. He had been at the Massachusetts General Hospital some years before me. I said that in all likelihood they had a full roster of surgeons for the initial voyage. He said there was a stack of applications on the desk in Washington but complained that the ship was ready to sail and that there was no one available on short notice. I instantly hatched the idea that, subject to the approval of my family, I would be the man they needed.

The family seemed to be excited and enthusiastic about the prospect. None of us knew what we were getting into. The Project wanted us for four months as volunteers. To leave Bill Larsen and our practice for that much time seemed quite idiotic but the impulse to do it was irresistible. Dr. Walsh came out to the ship in the next few days and the deal was sealed. A few days later the ship sailed out under the Golden Gate with great fanfare and geysers from fireboats. I couldn’t possibly be prepared to sail so soon and spent the coming several weeks making local arrangements. I’m afraid Bill Larsen was quite disappointed and felt that I had taken leave of my senses. I was able to recruit our anesthesiologist friend Dick Thompson and Phil Myers, one of our OB-GYN colleagues to go out with me. It was a rather pathetic launching of this grand project. They only had 17 doctors to begin with and they were expected in Djakarta by the University and the Indonesian medical profession as a gleaming super-hospital, American style. Instead, we were to be a skeleton force to begin the project which had been thoroughly organized together with the Indonesian government and medical profession well before the arrival of the ship.

Dick, Phil and I flew by jet to Djakarta a few weeks later and arrived in Djakarta, Java the very day the ship arrived at Tandjung Priok, the harbor. We had flown 30 hours via Honolulu, Manila, Saigon and Singapore. As a portent of dire events to come, we saw numerous machine gun emplacements around the Saigon Airport. The first impressions of Djakarta and the ship are unforgettable. Djakarta, the capitol (formerly named Batavia by the Dutch who had governed the Dutch East Indies for 350 years prior to the World War II), had grown from 500,000 to 3 million souls in the 15 years since the Japanese were defeated and the Dutch were driven out by the insurgent Soekarno, who became President of the new republic. We arrived at sunset and drove through the densely populated city which was covered in now pungent, now aromatic smoke of the evening cooking fires. The city is six degrees south of the equator and, in late October, it was suffocatingly hot. Please refer to “Appendix A” for my account of the Indonesian experience.

1960 was an exciting year because of the presidential campaigns of Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President, Richard M. Nixon, and the young Senator Jack Kennedy. This history of that campaign is well known for having pitted a sitting Vice President against a very young and charismatic Senator who had defeated the brilliant Senator Hubert Humphrey in the primaries but who had the daunting task of being a Roman Catholic. Al Smith, former Governor of the State of New York, had run unsuccessfully against Republican Herbert Hoover in 1928. It was commonly perceived that a Catholic President would be in thrall to the Vatican. Kennedy overcame this obstacle by convincing southern church-people that he was wholly free of any such entanglement. The campaign hinged on television debates at which Kennedy excelled. Since my medical colleagues and I had taken off for Indonesia on 19 October we were in the dark about the closing days of the campaign. We knew it would be close. On election day we hung on rather shaky short wave radio reception and were up in the air for many hours before it became apparent that Kennedy had won a hairbreadth victory. Feelings on the ship were mixed, but I was delighted.

Late in December Phil Myers and I finished our term with HOPE and departed from Bali for Djakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Hongkong, Tokyo, Honolulu and home. The return trip was memorable. By this time, we were thoroughly enchanted by the Asian people. Our Djakarta leg was delayed because of a faulty cargo hatch on the BOAC aircraft that was to take us to Singapore. When we finally arrived in Singapore in the wee hours of the next day the airport was empty except for a pretty young woman representing Cathay Pacific Airlines with whom we were to fly to Bangkok. She took us to the fabled Raffles Hotel where we were installed in what might well have been the Presidential Suite. Next morning, we had a wonderful British breakfast with kippered herring and the works. It felt so good to be back in a western setting. The airline people further treated us to a city tour of Singapore. Then we flew to Bangkok where we spent a strange sort of Christmas Day. We did the usual rubberneck tour of that city including a boat ride among the klongs, canals much like those of Venice, passing through the watery living districts and by the wonderful temple towers along the Chaya Phrya river. We stayed in the Oriental Hotel on the big river. I bought some Thai silk for Lepai and a “pigeon blood” sapphire ring for Patty.

On to Hongkong with its myriad dramatic spectacles and impressions. We stayed in Somerset Maugham’s Peninsula Hotel on Kowloon and did all of the things tourists do there. If I were writing a travelogue I could spend pages describing Hongkong.

Phil and I had some delicious experiences in Tokyo. We were there on New Year’s Eve and for a few days afterward. We stayed in the unique Frank Lloyd Wright Imperial Hotel, a somber building of dark hue, dim lighting, an air of oriental mystery and great charm. On New Year’s Day we walked around the streets and enjoyed seeing the formal manners, the bowing to friends, the lovely kimonos of the ladies. The day was bright and cold. It turned out that the Imperial Palace grounds are opened to the public only two days in the year, Emperor Hirohito’s birthday (April) and on New Year’s. We stood in a long line, crossed the bridge over the moat, were impressed by the beautiful garden. The Japanese certainly have the knack of tender care of their trees. Each and every tree was wrapped in straw at the trunk and given support for the branches to protect them from the weight of snow.

They had a fabulous restaurant at the hotel; Prunier, a British concern, I believe.

We took a superspeed train up into the mountains to Niko where we saw frozen waterfalls, the frozen city with lively hucksters and, on the way, a fine view of Mount Fuji. One of the great highlights of that week came about when I phoned a wonderful man, a former student of the Robinsons in Hawaii many, many years before, by the name of Dr. Ayazawa. He had worked for many years in Geneva, Switzerland for the International Labor Organization of the League of Nations. This courtly, slender gentleman invited us to their house for lunch. He lived two hours away from Tokyo by train. He came into Tokyo to meet us at the hotel nattily dressed with a jaunty black beret, very European. He took us back out to his house where his delightful wife had prepared a wonderful Japanese meal which I cannot describe. Several impressions. Japanese houses then had almost paper-thin walls and the interior was about as cold as the outside weather. I remember that he took some orange crate wood and made a spare fire for our marginal comfort. What a pleasant surprise experience at lunch. The low table had some kind of charcoal heater underneath. We sat with our feet down in the depressed underfloor and the thick table cover served as a blanket so that we were entirely comfortable. Our host and hostess, having become thoroughly European, spoke excellent English and the entire visit was unforgettable. After the visit, late in the afternoon, Dr. Ayazawa took us to a typical village coffee house. There were many young people there. The music was Mozart, Schubert on the HiFi. The students loved that western classical music. They were reading garish comic books while sipping coffee and listening to the sublime music. It seemed a striking contrast in taste. As an extraordinary example of his hospitality, our host then took us back to our hotel on the train; he had spent eight hours of that day travelling to and fro in our behalf!

Among the things we learned that day was something about the Samurai tradition. Dr. Ayazawa came from a noble family of the Samurai class. He described the ritual of hardship and endurance prescribed in that warrior class. Such practices as sleeping uncovered in the cold, spare eating, martial arts, exacting education programs. This kind of upbringing probably accounted for his small, wiry stature. The younger Japanese today are much taller and heavier than their spartan predecessors. For a fuller and rewarding understanding of the exotic codes of development and personal standards in the traditional Japanese culture, one could do no better than to read Ruth Benedict’s classic, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. She was a cultural anthropologist who was recruited by President Roosevelt during World War II to write about the character and culture of the Japanese people for the better understanding of our redoubtable adversaries in the Pacific. Her book was quite consistent with Dr. Ayazawa’s account of his own early life.

After these adventures we were anxious to return home. I had a certain feeling of triumph at the achievements of the trip but I wondered then as I still do whether I was justified in going off like that, perhaps to satisfy an urge or a whim of mine at the expense of my family. We had just moved to the Parkside house in Hillsborough a few months before all of this came up and I think I could be criticized for thus indulging myself. Perhaps it was, on balance, a good thing to have done; I recruited eight other doctors from San Mateo County for the Hope in that first year. We constituted 12.5% of all the volunteer doctors from the entire nation in that initial year of struggling Project Hope. We all felt pretty good about that. There was intense community interest in that cause in the community. I gave some 120 slide talks to churches, school, and service organizations in the following several years. Several of us appeared on Channel 2 TV in a discussion of the program. Since then the Project has flourished in countless places in the world. I worked again for Hope in Grenada as a volunteer on three occasions in 1986-7. For more of that see “APPENDIX B”.

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After Indonesia I settled back into pleasant home life and practice. The Parkside house was so agreeable, situated as it was among fine old trees and winding lanes. The first exciting event of 1961 was, of course, the Inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on 20 January. His eloquent address imbued the country with a spirit of optimism and idealism which was not to be seen again for decades. The Peace Corps typified the liberal impulses of that time. One of JFK’s remarks during the inaugural address carried the idea that we would go any place and fight any battles in the cause of freedom. We were to have second thoughts about that idea later in the 60s when we became involved more and more deeply in the quagmire of Viet Nam.

1961 brought deep sadness to our family. Sister Nancy Jane had had a malignant melanoma excised from her right calf in 1953 in Pomona by Dr. Louis Vadheim, an excellent surgeon. It was apparent to me that she should see our Stanford oncologic surgeon and friend, Dr. Bob Pollack in consultation. He felt that a radical inguinal node dissection and wide local re-excision should be done to see if there were metastatic deposits. There was no evidence of the spread of tumor at that time. This was carried out at Stanford and Nancy recovered nicely from the operation. My mother was here with us for that ordeal. Nancy then returned to home and Floyd. In the succeeding years she had a number of skin recurrences between the site of the original excision and the groin. These recurrences were excised by Dr. Vadheim but they kept coming. Later Nancy and Floyd moved to Santa Clara where Floyd continued to be employed by Lockheed research as an engineer. By 1961 in the Spring it was apparent that her disease was out of control. She was very brave and acted as though nothing very serious was going on although, as a Registered Nurse, she must have known. By September 1961 she was in pain and mostly confined to bed at home. Her leg was massively swollen. I went down to Santa Clara daily to give her Demerol for the pain. Her spirits were undaunted. We talked of old times, of our childhood. Nancy was three years my junior. We were extremely close. We never were able to face together the fate she faced and it was probably better that way. The memories of those daily visits are precious to me. Finally, by late October, she was in agony and I brought her up to our Peninsula Hospital. I prescribed medication for pain adequate to keep her in complete comfort and somnolence for most of the time. She died on the night of 30 October 1961. Floyd and the family were devastated, of course. She was only 38 years old and had had such a marvelous spirit through so much travail, eight years of sickness. She was truly the darling of the family, our tender love enhanced by the fact of her congenital pituitary insufficiency that prevented her from having children. No woman could have been a better mother than she might have been. She lavished her maternal instincts on her patients and was loved by all who knew her. I am so proud of her and still think of her daily. My children remember her with great love. In the eyes of my memory her smile shall live as long as I do.

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In October 1962 arose the Cuban missile crisis. Our U2 high altitude surveillance planes detected the development of intercontinental ballistic missile sites in Cuba, placed there, of course by the Russians. Tremendous anxiety pervaded our national psyche and it seemed that we could be on the verge of a nuclear war. Many people built and stocked bomb shelters. We were not among those. Khrushchev and JFK were at daggers drawn for some weeks. We mobilized troops in the Southeast while diplomacy finally triumphed. We set a naval blockade around Cuba and were about to board Russian ships carrying missiles on deck to Cuba. At the last moment, Khrushchev and Kennedy, in a confusing exchange of messages saying one thing and meaning its opposite, finally brought about a peaceful solution. The Russian ship turned around. We took some old ICBMs out of Turkey and a red phone “hotline” was established so, in the future, our President and the Russian chief could resolve confrontations before they reached the point of ignition. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief. As this is written from the historical vantage point of the 90s with the collapse of the USSR, a virtual economic implosion, it is challenging to think how the USSR was regarded and feared in the 50s and 60s. From the military standpoint, the USSR was a colossus. Economically we thought that the USSR and the Communist Internationale (COMINTERN) might well dominate the world. There was much talk of the domino effect of growing communist power in the world and the pervading influence of China and the USSR in Southeast Asia led to the Viet Nam conflagration which inflamed our fears and resulted in our deep involvement, the Viet Nam War (1965-73). Little did we know then that the economy and the society of the USSR and international communism including Eastern Europe was destined to fall of its own clumsy weight.

My father retired from his career as a mechanical engineer in 1956 and Mother and Father moved to Carmel, California where they built a nice so-called California ranch house at Yankee Point. It was one of the first houses built in the area. Mother loved the Coast and Dad, a Navy man of World War I vintage, loved the sea. Their affections were quickly transferred from Tulsa, Oklahoma to the very shore of the Pacific Ocean. Sadly, Mother’s health entered a slow process of deterioration of a very mysterious sort. She lost progressively her powers of locomotion, mentation and self-care over the next eight years. She slowly withered in every capacity so that she couldn’t speak or even seem responsive in any way. To his eternal credit, my father heroically tended her every need for all of those years up to the time of her death, 5 December 1965. He would not put her away in a nursing home as the majority of people would do in this day and age when such facilities serve the function of terminal care. Mother died at home. Dad phoned me and I came down immediately. Her passing was a blessing because her life had been drained of all value for her. Dad and I took her body back to Beloit for burial in the Thompson plot. We took the train together to Chicago and had a warm companionship and many recollective conversations. After the funeral on a cold, snowy afternoon in Beloit, attended by all the family living there still, we returned to California.

My Mother played an especially critical role in my path in life. There is no doubt in my mind that she pointed me in the direction of Medicine from the earliest days of my memory. She had a favorite uncle, Dr. Ira Thompson, who was the head of the Public Health Department in Racine, Wisconsin. I don’t believe I ever knew Dr. Thompson at least to remember him. Whenever family and friends ask what little Johnny would be when he grew up, Mother would say he would be a doctor. I more or less grew up with that idea although, as a boy, I had other ideas in mind as well. I wanted to be a baseball and football player, a flyer, a scientist, a diplomat and what not. In college I was attracted to history, literature, economics, chemistry and physics but I always came back to Medicine. As a child and youth, I read history and biography, especially about some of the heroes of medical history. I switched my major at Hopkins from Pre-Med to Chemistry. I don’t think I had quite the talent to go very far in the physical sciences but I finally couldn’t resist the lure of Medicine. Of course, Mother was pleased when I embarked on that course.

It is strange how the memory of even so signal a person in one’s life tends to blur around the edges with the passing of time. My impression remains that Mother was a rather high-strung, nervous woman not light-hearted and particularly happy. She had bouts of extreme agitation and occasionally bit her arm in anger, leaving ecchymotic, bruise-like marks. She wasn’t without her disappointments and I have a hard time focussing on what her feelings about my father were. I don’t recall any mutual display of affection between them although there were no overt signs of turbulence. On the other hand, even as a small boy, I was enlisted by Mother to plead with my father not to drink. Dad wasn’t a steady drinker but there were lost weekends and there were always whiskey bottles to be found under the house. When asked, he would tell me that it was “medicine”. When we lived in Springfield, Missouri in 1926, Dad had a “friend” by the name of Ray Killingsworth who may have had other business, but he was a bootlegger during that Prohibition time. Mother, of course, despised Ray. We children would occasionally go out to Ray’s house with Dad and I remember that he had a small son who was hunchbacked, apparently as I later understood, because of tuberculosis of the spine. I’m sure Dad had some acquaintances in the oil field business who were hard drinkers and more and this doubtful company probably led him astray at times. That sort of thing seems to be an occupational hazard. At any rate, I remember going to Dad many times while he was “sleeping it off” after a bad bout. He always promised to give up drinking but my childish efforts were largely unavailing. I was caught between my love and loyalty for both of my parents. Normally, Dad was a wonderful father and gave to brother Allen and me a great love of sports and some proficiency. I have more to say about that in the “Appendix B” letter I wrote to my children on the occasion of Dad’s 100th Birthday, 19 February 1892. Notable in that account is how Dad overcame the drinking problem single-handedly in the 40s without any such aid as Alcoholics Anonymous.

With the Great Depression in full swing and with Mother’s collegiate training in Home Economics, she helped enormously with family finances by becoming the manager of the cafeteria at the Henry Barnard school in Tulsa. She served in that capacity for five or six years. Thanks to these quiet efforts on her part and my father’s excellence as an engineer, we children never felt “poor” during the depression and our childhood could be called idyllic compared to so many others.

Mother apparently rested considerable hope for future careers in the three of us. Allen would go into college in business studies with a view to becoming ultimately an officer at Grandfather Thompson’s Gardner Machine Company in Beloit. I remember countless evenings when I would dry the dishes and we would talk about many things. I’m sure these talks were pretty serious and they had a profound influence on my thinking. Our parents never had to urge any of us to study. Siblings can be very different. I was the incipient scholar and Allen, while adequate at his studies, shone much more brightly than I in the social scheme of things and in athletics. Sister Nancy was good at studies and beloved of all who knew her. Allen, who was taller than I and much more talented in athletics, became All State Oklahoma catcher on the Tulsa Central High School team. I mention this in connection with Mother because, when Allen went to the University of Cincinnati in Business Administration, his baseball prowess attracted the attention of the management of the Cincinnati Reds National League. They offered him a contract to play for their Pueblo, Colorado farm team with the possibility that he would be able in due time to make it to the parent team. Allen would have loved that but Mother thought ill of it and persuaded him to continue his studies. Of course, we entered World War II in 1941 and Allen became a Navy pilot and had the good fortune to play with major leaguers like Ted Williams on the Chapel Hill Naval Preflight school. True to Mother’s wishes, Allen returned to Cincinnati and completed his studies. He met the lovely Phyllis Woellner there and they married and went to Beloit with the Gardner Machine Company. There is much more to this story to be told later.

Mother had trouble with arthritis and went to the Massachusetts General Hospital several times to see the famous Walter Bauer. On one of these occasions, in 1946 during my interneship at the MGH, she stayed at the Statler Hotel. I was visiting her prior to our going out to lunch one afternoon. When we left her room for the elevator there was a flurry of excitement in the hallway with a number of people approaching. To our delight and amazement, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and entourage were passing. He was in uniform. We stood aside for them to pass. As he came near us, I said something like, “Nice going, Ike!” He turned to me with that famous Eisenhower smile. End of story but a thrill. No one at that time dreamed he would be President six years later.

Mother loved to visit the West Coast and, of course, Nancy and Floyd in Pomona. She also made a number of cruises to the Hawaiian Islands. Her affinity for this part of the world doubtless led in 1956 to their retirement at Yankee Point. Her health had declined perceptibly by the time they moved to California and the following nine years saw a steady deterioration in her condition leading up to her death nine years later. Her disease was utterly mysterious as to cause. I have wondered if she might have contracted a delayed affliction of the “slow virus” type when she volunteered as a nurse at Army Camp Grant during the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918. After her death the eminent neuropathologist, Malamoud, of the University of California, San Francisco, studied her brain but couldn’t make a definitive diagnosis. It might have been something like the poorly understood disease complex called “Jakob-Kreuzfeld” disease, a degenerative process in nerve tissue, but that is pure speculation. Her ordeal reminds us, despite the astonishing progress in Medicine, how little we know about health and disease.

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The 1960s turned out to be a series of tragic events. Late in November 1963 President Kennedy and Jacqueline made a political trip to Dallas. As the world cannot forget, he was fatally shot from a building while his party was driving on a major avenue. The terrible shock felt by everyone in the country and world needs no retelling. Everyone remembers exactly where he or she was when the word came. President Johnson was sworn in as President that afternoon and the world entered upon a period of intense mourning. The country was drenched in tears.

The Kennedy programs for social benefit such as Medicare were expedited by the succeeding President and JFKs legacy for the country was largely realized in Johnson’s Administration.

Unfortunately for President Johnson’s aspirations to emulate his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he became enthralled in the escalation of our role in Viet Nam. He sought to show the world that, despite the failure of the French to prevail over the Communists during the 50s, we could save Asia from the spreading Red Plague and prevent the domino effect. We ended up sending over a million men over the late 60s and early 70s until our defeat and withdrawal in 1973. Not only were we defeated in the field by the cunning Viet Cong directed from Hanoi by Ho Chi Min, but the violent reaction against the war in our country rent great gaps in the social tissue. Young men burnt draft cards, others fled to Canada to escape the draft. On the evening television news we saw the carnage and the body bags as the casualties mounted to some fifty thousand dead and countless wounded. So great was the anger in the country that President Johnson saw the futility of running for a second term and gave way to Richard Nixon. A whole generation of young people became disaffected and cynical about our country and its seeming betrayal of its ideals.

One of the first events of the post Kennedy era that heralded the disaffection of the young was the Free Speech Movement begun by Mario Savio on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1964. The phenomenon of the Beatniks led to that of the Hippies led on into events of the following decade that transformed radically the mood of the country. The vastly unpopular Viet Nam war catalyzed this.

While this era upon which the country embarked only began in the 60s its effects have left a long shadow even on the 90s. The sexual revolution promoted by several factors led to a more casual attitude about what used to be called “free love”. Antibiotics removed the fear of venereal disease in the popular mind. Also “the pill” abolished fear of unwanted pregnancy. The “Baby Boomer” generation was coming of age. Promiscuity in sexual encounters became commonplace and a large number of couples took up living together without the social stigma formerly attached to that in earlier generations. Some people theorized that couples being intimately acquainted prior to marriage might make wiser choices of marriage partners in contrast to the former conservative practice which resulted in a large divorce rate. It appears that there was no such benefit in premarital cohabitation; in fact, the marital bond seemed looser than ever. There was virtually no stigma attached to divorce even though there was no mitigating escape from the pain of it.

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The years 1960-65 brought the deaths of sister Nancy and our Mother and the assassination of President Kennedy. The pain of this quintile was not at an end. The cohesion of our little nuclear family was disrupted by divorce. How this came about is a story full of sadness and regret. Although our mutual friends from the very beginnings in Cambridge in 1946 until nearly twenty years later thought that Lepai and I were perfectly suited to one another, we never escaped the usual stresses and strains of the marital relationship. I am certain that, even had we had the “advantage” of premarital living together as so many of our children’s generation have today, we would have in all likelihood not felt that we could eventually overcome certain difficulties that intruded in our relationship from early days. I don’t think I was all I might have been in our marriage. I’m sure Lepai would say that she also had a part to play in our growing apart. We had had dreams of a large family of, perhaps, six children. We were blessed with four and we both shared deep and abiding love for these children. I think we were good parents and the outstanding quality of these children as adults must attest to the fact that we did a good job of parenting. I’m sure that I wasn’t very successful at blending my professional life with family life. I didn’t share the picnics and seaside sojourns with the family as I would have if I had an easier conscience about leaving my patients. The demands placed on doctors by their professional duties probably makes them less than wholly available to normal family life. For one thing, the economic pressures of “private practice” had the effect on me and most other surgeons, I believe, of fearing the loss of a referral. Virtually all of my patients came to me by referral. If I weren’t available when called by a physician, I thought I might not get another referral from him or her. I guess I always worried about making an adequate living. We lived well but modestly and yet there was always that financial anxiety hanging over me. I often wished I had a 9 to 5 job with free weekends but that was impossible in my kind of practice. The profession of Medicine is a severe taskmaster and I used to envy men in other lines of work who could leave their cares at the office. Bill Larsen and I worked together smoothly but there was always the feeling that if I operated on a patient, that patient expected me to be in attendance. Bill felt that way also about his patients. It’s a special bond, that between the surgeon and his patient. Maybe that is partially imaginary but that is the way it felt. If I were a young surgeon today working in a Health Maintenance Organization, a clinic, I probably would not feel about the role as I did in my private practice years. Today young doctors in such groups take their time off and their vacations without the constricting feelings we had earlier. I could go on in this vein but these lines express the frustration that doubtless contributed to the rupture of Lepai’s and my marriage.

The professional story was not the only element in our marital problem. Over the years Lepai and I seemed to grow apart. We were never as successful as we had wished in our intimacy. We had good times and bad. Communication was frequently difficult. We had substantial areas of disagreement on raising the children. I was anxious that they prepare themselves for professional careers. Lepai thought I put too much pressure on them and that in the fullness of time they would find their way. Naturally the children gravitated toward her more laissez-faire approach to their studies and away from my less palatable guidance. I felt like an ogre in their eyes although there was plenty of parent-child love. Although I should have liked to have had one of the children follow me in the medical field, I must not have presented an attractive side of being a physician to them. They thought I worked too hard and that way of life didn’t obviously hold much appeal for the children. Having said all of that, the children all turned out very well and certainly vindicated Lepai’s philosophy of child-rearing. If I had it to do all over again I might be able to do a more balanced job of fatherhood. It is some consolation to me that, in later years, I sense that the children appreciate more than formerly my role in their upbringing. I suppose we all might do a better job as parents if we were to have a second chance.

At the risk of boring the reader to death, I must recount that I fell victim to the so-called mid-life crisis in 1963. I became enthralled in an affair with one of Lepai’s friends. All doubts of my sexual capacity were buried in an avalanche of passion that I was unable to stifle and manage. I was completely overwhelmed by these feelings of self-realization. Of course, Lepai soon found out. I finally moved out to an apartment for a few months and then returned home for another try at the straight and narrow. Finally, in October 1965 I left home for good and our divorce was finalized during the same week that saw the death of my mother. This period had to be the dreariest of my life. The impossible affair had long since fallen of its own weight and with great personal relief. Lepai’s feelings of outrage were so powerful that there could be no returning to the old times. The trauma to the children, to all of us, was staggering. I’m sure that both Lepai and I have deep regrets about the emotional scars the divorce left on the children. David was only ten and it appears he suffered the most, even to this day.

The divorce was a quiet affair, uncontested. To the credit of all concerned, we have maintained through the years close family bonds. Lepai and I hold one another in deep respect and fraternal affection and all of the children are loyal and loving to both of us. Lepai never married again. She pluckily undertook studies leading to her practice in counseling service in Berkeley.

↑ 1965-1970    

New Year’s Day 1966 found me a lonely, sadder, perhaps wiser man living in a studio apartment at Woodlake in San Mateo. I kept close ties with the children but it wasn’t like living at home with them. Lepai and I did our best to ease the pain of the divorce but it is doubtful if that were remotely possible. We cannot measure the effect on each child in the long term but we were keenly aware of the misery all felt.

I worked hard and the practice seemed to grow so that, at least, financial worries were mitigated and I was able to pay the alimony and child support. My memories of 1966 are mercifully blurred. I had a modest social life but little stomach for seeing other women. My colleagues were loyal and good friends always help. The children were especially supportive of Lepai and me.

As the year wore on I became more adjusted to my altered lifestyle and the bachelor life became a bit more comfortable. Life takes strange turns. On October 9, 1966 Dick Gonzalez operated upon my right wrist which had a painful ganglion. Our old friends, Michal (Mike) and Dick Feder had invited me to supper the next night and I went with cast on arm. Like Lepai, Michal had also gone to Wellesley. It turned out that one of their longtime friends, Joanne Martin Whitehead, was also present. The Feders had known Joanne and her erstwhile husband, Bill Whitehead, when Dick and Joanne worked at the Emporium department store. I think it was Michal’s plan to introduce two divorced friends. The party was very pleasant and I was quite impressed with Joanne. In fact, she was a striking beauty with a scintillating and slightly acerbic wit. She piqued my curiosity and I came away thinking I must see more of her.

Three weeks went by during which I was very busy. On a Sunday afternoon I called Mike to ask about Joanne and to get her phone number. With no clue that my call would be welcomed by Joanne, I screwed up my courage and phoned her. When she answered it seemed that she didn’t remember me. I’m not sure that was the case but she acted it out very well. I told her I’d like to visit her that afternoon. She lived in Saratoga, about 25 miles south of San Mateo and I had a hard time finding her place. When I rang the doorbell a little tow-headed boy, David, answered. It was a beautiful Fall day. I met son Tom and daughter Becky. Joanne and I went nearby to play some tennis and I was happy to see how lively she was, quite athletic, most attractive. Later in the afternoon we went swimming in her pool and she made further happy impressions on me in her bathing suit. I was having a very good time. Somehow I wangled an invitation to stay for supper. I was in a very light-hearted mood when I returned to Woodlake. We told something of our respective stories. We had both undergone divorces a year or so earlier and neither of us was searching for any entangling alliances. Joanne was taking art courses at San Jose State University. She had been married to Bill about 14 years and I had been married 19 years. Our Sunday afternoon and evening were given the light touch and that was that .... for the present.

The balance of 1966 was devoted to keeping in touch with the children, managing my practice and, additionally, making more and more frequent trips in the evening and weekends to Saratoga. Joanne and I, to the surprise of both of us I think, became more and more interested in one another. We went to dinners and especially memorable was attendance at Janocek’s opera, “The Makropolis Case”, in San Francisco. I went to her house for Thanksgiving and met Morris and Sophie Martin, Joanne’s parents. I think Morris was disappointed in my arriving in the Mustang convertible instead of, “successful doctor-like", in a Cadillac. The Martins lived at Lake Tahoe and we visited them several times. After an early December skiing weekend up there with all of the children, we drove back in our separate cars. In a moment of madness I proposed marriage later that evening (after only knowing one another two months!). Joanne thinks I was awearying from driving to Saratoga but I had a feeling that in Joanne I had found my future wife. It’s difficult to weigh the feelings and impulses of that time except to say that I feared that if we didn’t strike when the impulse was front-burner the whole thing, to our great loss, would fold with a long engagement. Joanne agreed. We knew it was risky business. The times were dizzying. There were so many implicit problems, chief of which were involved with reconciling our children to the sudden change of circumstances. I’ve often thought of the lines from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”:

There is a tide in the fortunes of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea we are now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Neither Joanne nor I had had such mad expectations before we met. We had both tasted defeat in marriage and evidently felt together that we had good prospects of success this time. Writing 26 years later, I can say that our taking the current served our ventures well.

We were married in the Unitarian Church in Palo Alto, January 21, 1967, in a quiet ceremony attended by friends and by all of our children. Photographs of that day showed a sad-looking but brave group of children. It wasn’t easy, that day. The skies opened up and drenched the affair coming and going. An amusing note was when Joanne’s parents’ car broke down or flooded on the way to the church. By the rarest of coincidences, my dear friends from earliest San Mateo days, the Kromhouts, were coming along and asked if they could help. Could they help! They delivered the bride and themselves to the wedding with moments to spare.

After the reception, Bill and Jody Larsen drove us to the Airport for a flight to Honolulu. We spent the first night at the Waikiki Beach Royal Hawaiian Hotel. By mistake the management had given us a twin-bedded room but that was soon rectified. The next day we flew over to Kauai to the Waiohai Beach Hotel, a very romantic place with south sea thatched-roof cottages and beautiful gardens. The honeymoon was a lovely success with ocean swimming, body surfing and relaxation.

Prior to the wedding we had arranged to rent a house on Robinwood Lane from Colin Rawnsley. We returned from Hawaii and moved in together with Tom, Becky and David Whitehead. Steve, Bruce, Patty and David lived with Lepai.

There is a maze of problems in parent-child relationships in such occasions as the second marriage for people each with his and her own children by the previous marriage. Books have been written on this subject. Each of the newly-reweds carries a heavy burden of grief and guilt involving their children’ pain in divorce. We didn’t escape a great many of the pitfalls common to such events.

Tom, Becky and David lived with us while the Ratcliffe kids remained with Lepai at the Parkside house. There was the inevitable conflict of loyalties for Joanne and me as we tried, driven by guilty feelings, to keep good relations with our own children while embracing the children of one another fairly. It didn’t always work smoothly. The children naturally had conflict problems in relation to the non-parent in the newly-wed duo. Everyone was very polite but there were occasional flashes of resentment and anger all around vis-a-vis child-adult contact.

For example, in June, 1967, I took Patty, Dave and Bruce down to La Jolla to visit my aged second cousin Orpha Thompson and to have a little seaside vacation at Mission Bay in San Diego. It turned out that Joanne felt hurt that I had done that with three of my kids. We were learning to communicate.

The San Diego trip did have several benefits, one immediate and the other quite long-range. The immediate benefit was the pleasure of being with the children again on neutral ground; it was sheer fun for all. The long-range benefit came as we rented a sailboat, a Coronado 25, and sailed in Mission Bay. The seed was sown for an important new activity in our lives which abundantly included Joanne. We were literally launched on our sailing career. For the details, see “APPENDIX ___”.

Also during that very week the “SIX DAY WAR” between Israel and the Arab neighbors occurred. That war was to have some impact on the later involvement of Joanne and me in the Middle East.

At our home on Robinwood Lane our new family lineup worked pretty well. There were all kinds of undercurrents of feeling vis-a-vis children and the four concerned parents. Joanne found some difficult elements in adjusting to the Ratcliffe kids literally down the hill at the Parkside house. I encountered some negative feelings from the Whitehead kids as I became the local pater familias with their own father close by to the south. I had the conviction that I should and could not act in the role of a father to them, to be an usurper of their own father’s role. Joanne was disappointed in me at times because of this. All such things in newly-rewed households are natural hurdles to overcome and, in time, the sharp edges were smoothed. I suppose my true role in that house at that time and since could be directed in an avuncular vein, for better or worse.

The chronology of those times has blurred in my memory. Tom graduated from highschool handily and made a good name for himself academically and in track. He and I ran several years in the famous San Francisco Bay to Breakers race and once in the Dipsea race from Mill Valley to Stinson’s Beach over rugged terrain. Tom went to Wabash College in Indiana. Later he took an interest in cultural anthropology at San Francisco State University. Meanwhile, Becky went to Beloit College for a year but not happily. David, the youngest finished highschool with several years at Bellarmine, a Jesuit school near San Jose.

Steve Ratcliffe went for a year to Reed College but didn’t like it enough to stay on. He transferred to the University of California at Berkeley where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and went on to get a PhD in English Literature. Bruce went to Oberlin College for two years but also came back to Berkeley to finish college. Patty in due time went back to Colorado College. Dave Ratcliffe went to the University of Oregon for a year and a half but lacked direction and dropped out to do various jobs such as building the school at Bolinas and piano tuning.

There were two painful political tragedies in 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and that of Robert Kennedy the very night that he won the California presidential primary. Those were grim days. In fact, the entire decade of the sixties had few redeeming features after a brilliant start. Assassinations, war, divorce, political and social turmoil, drugs and so forth. There were blessings, though. All of our large family came through the decade in good health. The children bore up surprisingly well from the damage of divorces and avoided the terrible pitfalls that swallowed so many in their and succeeding vintages. I like to think that good family values inculcated in all of them early on helped carry them through the trials of their young years.

In December 1969 Joanne and I found a nice house to buy at 25 Trophy Court in Hillsborough. We moved in in January, 1970. With a lovely garden and swimming pool we developed, we were to live there for the next five years until August, 1975.

↑ THE SAUDI ARABIAN YEARS    
1975-1986

One never knows in life what lies behind closed doors. Opportunity presents itself in many guises. Regret or rejoicing may be in the offing. There may be promise or peril in opening or not opening those doors. Everyone can remember times in his or her life when choices were or were not made which cast a long shadow on their futures. Often, until after a choice is taken, its impact on the individual or collective lives isn’t immediately apparent. The picture may not be clear for days, months, years or ever.

As one reflects later upon the results of choices made, affirmative or negative, it may be startling to imagine or realize the trivial or serious effects on the present and future in single or many spheres of individual or collective experience. Richness of the realized life consequent to choices large and small may add elements of excitement, of pleasure, of romance, of joy and satisfaction, and of a sense of victory. On the other hand, alas, the path taken may lead to large or small disappointments. Everyone experiences over the years from childhood onward both outcomes in given instances. That is life.

Such a choice of divergent paths was unexpectedly initiated for Joanne and me on a late May evening in 1975. We went with Richard and Michal Feder to a performance, the title of which is long-forgotten, of the Spring Opera, at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Now, the Feders had already played a crucial part in the lives of Joanne and myself. They introduced us to one another on the 10th of October, 1966, an introduction which led to our marriage a little over three months later, on January 21, 1967. (At this writing we are in the 31st year of our marriage, a most happy choice of door and pathway!)

After the opera, Dick and Mike asked us if we’d seen an ad from the Life Sciences Division of the Whittaker Corporation in the Business Section of the San Francisco Chronicle of the day before. We hadn’t seen the ad but were told that the corporation was recruiting Board Certified specialists to help start hospitals in Saudi Arabia for their Ministry of Defense and Aviation.

The Feders knew that Joanne and I were looking for a medical adventure in some challenging, less-developed country. Living and practicing surgery in the San Francisco Bay area with its attending indulgences had for some time grown boring for us. So much was this true that Joanne, as the children graduated from the nest, had undertaken the tough job of achieving a Registered Nurse degree at the College of San Mateo. It took five years of arduous labor in her busy life to gain the degree. We anticipated, at one point, taking our 40’ sloop down the coast to Baja California to provide isolated Mexican communities with a sea-going clinic. This was one wild prospect which was fleshed out sometimes with the assistance of a good Martini at the Crown Room at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill.

A mission something like that was inspired in part by my having served in Indonesia in 1960 on the good hospital ship HOPE at the very inception of Project Hope, begun by Dr. William Walsh of Washington, D.C. The HOPE was originally the US Navy hospital ship CONSOLATION in World War II. I was in the first rotation of volunteer doctors in October, 1960 and, in fact, did the first operation of that now-historic and on-going institution.

On that opera evening with the Feders, Joanne and I sniffed a hot prospect for our adventure. We went home and looked up the Chronicle article. Sure enough! On the first business day following, we phoned Whittaker, expressed our interest, and were invited to their facility in Los Angeles to learn more. On our visit shortly, we were further infused with guarded excitement and seemed to be what the Whittaker people were looking for in surgeon and nurse. Then a dose of common sense had its effect. After all, we knew nothing of Saudi Arabia except in romantic desert myths along the lines of Arabian Nights. We searched our souls, our motives. Would we really leave our secure, comfortable, family-orientated life in virtual paradise to venture into the raw desert for we knew not what? It wasn’t to be a picnic. Our hospital-to-be was in a remote area of desert mountains just north of the border with Yemen. The only contact with the “outside world” was by radio-telephone, a virtually impassable mountain road and the Saudia airline. The army and air force base was near the small village of Khamis Mushayt. We would be about 600 miles as the crow flies from the nearest city, Jeddah, on the Red Sea. In fact, the reality turned out to be even more “out of this world” than we could possibly feature at first.

In the ensuing couple of months we learned a bit more but had the uncomfortable suspicion that the Los Angeles people really didn’t know much more about Saudi Arabia and the particular situation than we did. In fairness, it would take a deep appreciation of the history of the Arabian peninsula together with its natural features, its ruggedness and remoteness from Western commerce and cultures, for anyone to predict what the prospects for us and others would be. The prospect really did now assume the attributes of a sterling adventure. We kept our mental guard up but there was something insistent and compelling about opening this “door” as the next chapter in our lives.

Needless to say, we opened the door. In fact, Joanne hadn’t quite graduated from her training. I had to close my practice, ably assumed by my dear colleague and friend, Dr. William G. Larsen, with whom I had shared practice of General Surgery most enjoyably for 21 years. Colleagues and friends thought we had taken leave of our senses to follow our intentions. It was the professional atmosphere in our community that a doctor was pretty radical to take more than a week-end off duty. Here we were proposing to go away for two years! We planned to return after that but there was no assurance that I could crank up my practice again after so long an absence. Anyway, we were determined to go ahead with the project. Full steam ahead. Excitement mixed with trepidation.

↑ SAUDI ARABIA, A SURGEON’S TALE, circa 1993    

When Joanne, my wonderful wife, and I decided in 1975 to spend two years in Saudi Arabia we embarked with almost no knowledge of the country and certainly no idea that we’d be there almost 11 years. Whittaker Corporation of Los Angeles was setting up three military hospitals and was recruiting western board-certified physicians. Ever since 1960 when I served as a volunteer in Indonesia at the beginning of Project Hope, I had hoped to do another assignment overseas. To that end and after the children left the nest, Joanne took an RN degree at the College of San Mateo. The stage was set for our adventure.

Today I’d like to do four things as time permits. First, to make a few remarks about the society, the culture and the politics of the country as we perceived them. Second, to mention some of the interesting clinical problems we encountered and managed with special emphasis on ecchinococcal disease, a disease which could make its more frequent appearance in our country pursuant to the Gulf War. I noticed last week that Dr. Shideler was kneeling with his arm about a Seluki dog. The handout and some later remarks today will suggest that the American GIs love of dogs and the communicability of hydatid cyst disease could present some problems in the more remote future. Immigration and world travel also make many diseases available to all. Third, to show and tell something of our life there. Finally, if time permits, I’ll be glad to answer questions. (Slide; map).

Our first two years were spent in the southern mountains near Yemen and about 2000 m altitude above the Red Sea. The Ministry of Defence and Aviation hospital was brand new and at first only 30 of the ultimate 110 beds were in service.

The life of the people in the Asir Province was agrarian and pastoral, complete with shepherds and shepherdesses, sheep, goats and camels. It is reminiscent of biblical scenes at Sunday School. The country was similar to the high deserts of Arizona and New Mexico (slides). Dwellings consisted of goat-hair bedouin tents (slides), and gingerbread-like adobe houses in small clusters (slide). Contact with the outside world consisted of shortwave radio, crude mountain roads subject to flash floods and a daily Saudia Airlines flight. Many of the people still employed ageless modes of transport such as this nomadic family on the move (slide) and this everyday fresh air convertible (slide).

It is impossible to comprehend Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries without some knowledge of Islamic history, practice, and philosophy. Even those with doctorates in comparative religion may have difficulty comprehending Islam in all its complexity and appeal. All we expatriots could hope to achieve even after years of exposure is a rudimentary appreciation of the powerful influence the Koran and Islam has on every aspect of daily life. Saudi Arabia, furthermore, is the sanctum sanctorum of all Islam since the holiest shrines of Mecca and Medina are there. The Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem, the legendary site of the ascent of Mohammed into Heaven, is one of the elements which has turned Israel and the occupied territories into such a cauldron of dispute.

The oil wealth that began to flow into Saudi Arabia in 1973 with the surge in OPEC petroleum prices brought an amazing transformation to the country. We saw this phenomenon almost from the beginning. It was an industrial and commercial revolution compressed into a decade (slide of Jeddah harbor). Humble adobe towns and cities were transformed into modern cities with freeways, cloverleafs, glassy modern highrises, new schools, hospitals, housing projects and commercial enterprises. Universities blossomed forth in architectural splendor rivaling visions of the Arabian Nights. Likewise airports, palaces and sports facilities. With all of this, in contrast, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution finds little or no credence among the Muslims. Saudi Arabia operates on the lunar Islamic calendar, called the Hegira, as it dates from the time in the 7th Century when Mohammed escaped his enemies in Mecca and fled to Medina. Accordingly, this is the year 1412 for them. The contrasts and contradictions in that society reflect aspects of our modern world and the world of our Middle Ages. They are simply leaping into the 21st Century while trying to adhere to traditional values.

Five medical schools came on line, the Riyadh campus graduating its first class of 25 men in 1975. Now men and women become physicians but classes are strictly segregated by sex. Male lecturers to female medical students must use only remote, closed-circuit TV for their lectures. The students don’t dissect cadavers. In contrast, however, once the women graduate they practice alongside their male counterparts garbed in headscarves and lab coats instead of the traditional veil and the head to foot black shroud called the abayeh. These ladies, many from wealthy families, are true pioneers in a society that has always cloistered members of their sex. There are no Saudi female nurses on the horizon, however. This is consistent with the idea that Saudis, male and female, don’t do what they consider menial work. For the men, professionals and executives, yes; mechanics and street workers, no. Women are beginning to emerge from the cloister but ever so slowly. They teach, become physicians, and there is even a women’s bank. Many people think the Saudi society will change radically after the ordeal of the Gulf War but I am certain that, like the sands of the desert, our western footprints both literal and cultural will disappear quickly in the wind.

Popular misconceptions about the role of women in Saudi society are worth correcting. To westerners, it appears that women in Muslim societies are mere chattels and of low estate instead of free and self-actuated as in the west. The fact that they can’t drive a car looms in our minds as a gross miscarriage of justice and equality. It is true that the Muslim women are cloistered but it is important to examine their own attitudes about their place. People are always astonished when they hear that Saudi women feel protected and cherished by their menfolk. In contrast, they think we western men have less regard for our women because we let them run around freely and wear next to nothing. There is a lot of Adam and Eve in their thinking, that men are frail vessels who cannot resist the seduction of women. From their “cloisters”, women actually wield the power. Their attitudes will never take root in our society, nor will ours in theirs any time soon.

The health care delivery system has made gigantic strides since 1975. Every city and district has Ministry of Health hospitals. Many of them are gleaming new buildings but often the facilities and staff are uneven in quality. The university hospitals are growing in sophistication and are quite impressive. Their faculties are dominated by United Kingdom physicians and teaching. Other hospital systems are operated by the Royal Council (KFSH & RC), the National Guard, the Ministry of Defense and Aviation and the Ministry of Public Security. The majority of physicians and staff have been expatriots from North America, Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon and Europe. Now Saudis are filling the ranks but I think there will always be some expatriots in the picture.

In 1977 we were invited to join the staff of the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Riyadh. This hospital had an outstanding international staff and was managed by the Hospital Corporation of America. There are over 40 nationalities employed in the hospital. It has complete staff and facilities for water, power and security. Its degree of technical sophistication is amazing. State of the art libraries, laboratories, patient care facilities and accommodations evolved from its beginnings in 1975. The hospital has a cyclotron for manufacture of radioisotopes. The entire concept of the hospital is American from Blood Bank and Medical Records to Peer Review and Post Graduate Education. Every year we were given first class air to any certified meeting in our specialties in the world. In all we made some 25 trips to the States for holidays and professional meetings in addition to other travel. We were out of the Kingdom about two months a year. (Slides of the hospital.)

Resident training involved some 80 or more young physicians. At first most of them were from other Middle Eastern countries but, as more graduates emerged from the Saudi schools, they supplanted the expatriots. This tertiary care hospital now provides a wide variety of services in all specialties. These include kidney and bone marrow transplants as well as open heart surgery (originally and for 7 years by the Houston group of Dr. Michael DeBakey). There is a strong Oncology service. There is an ICU, a CCU and a Neonatal ICU. The hospital grew from 250 beds to around 500 at this time. (Slides of the hospital).

As for the Ratcliffes personally, it was a magnificent cross-cultural and professional experience. Joanne worked four years in various roles in surgery, pediatrics, general medical-surgical and in the cardiac catheterization lab. Our patients represented the simplest desert bedouin up to the highest members of the royal family. Expatriots were ineligible for admission except for jeopardy to life, limb or sight. In the first two years, in the desert mountain hospital in the Asir, I finally found out what it means to be a GENERAL surgeon. I spent a lot of time in the library learning about procedures unfamiliar to my experience. One unfortunate young woman required an ileal bladder because her entire genitourinary tract was destroyed by pressure necrosis due to an arrested delivery. One can only imagine how she suffered out in the northern desert without help. By some logistical miracle, our little desert hospital had Freeamin which enabled us to save a young woman with a nearly fatal high-output small bowel fistula. Her fistula closed spontaneously on TPN. I did caesarean sections, extraction of retained placenta, nephrolithotomies, craniotomies for massive subdural hematomas, biliary atresias (Kasai), and other congenital GI abnormalities from mal-rotations to atresias, imperforate ani and Hirschsprung’s Disease. One Hirschsprung’s patient in Riyadh had disease involving the entire colon and lower ileum. We did Soave pull-through operations for those patients. One of our T-E fistula patients weighed only 900 grams; thanks to the one stage extrapleural repair and stellar neonatology service the baby survived and left the hospital in three months (slides). I had three cases of hemobilia. One was in a young soldier three months after laparatomy elsewhere for liver rupture and in whom I ligated the right hepatic artery. Not having angiography available in the desert, I had done an operative cholangiogram without a clue as to source of the bleeding. I was in the process of closing with T-tube in place when fortuitously, blood gushed from the T-tube. Having previously isolated the right and left hepatic arteries I was able to determine that the bleeding stopped when I compressed the right branch. The hemmorhage recurred when I released the right occlusion. After five minutes of occlusion of the right branch without color changes in the right liver lobe I concluded that right branch ligation was imperative. Post operatively the patient did well with no changes in liver chemistries. Another was in a three year old girl some months after motor vehicle trauma in whom hepatic angiography demonstrated an intermittent intrahepatic arterio-choledochal fistula; the artery was embolized at the moment of hemmorhage by chance at the time of fluoroscopy and with the catheter in the strategic place. The third case, amazingly, required total arterial devascularization of the liver after several subtotal ligations failed to stop the intermittent hemorrhages due to at least one A-V malformation. His third operation was done in London by Dr. Blumgart of hepatic surgery fame.

A three-month old girl from Dhahran, Tahani (slides), had recurrent massive upper GI bleeds finally requiring CPR. She had congenital telangiectasis of the entire stomach but nowhere else. Under intraoperative microscopic control I did a total gastrectomy as a life-saving measure. We naturally had fears for her nutrition and development but up to two years later reports from her physicians in Dhahran were encouraging with respect to those parameters. Schistosomiasis is endemic in the Middle East due to exposure of the skin to water containing the minute black snail vector. Our patients all suffered from massive hemorrhages from esophageal and gastric varices. The cirrhosis of schistosomiasis is of the pre-sinusoidal type in contrast to that of Laennec’s cirrhosis. Four porto-caval shunts were accompanied by excessive ammonia intoxication and are apparently unsatisfactory in these patients. An Egyptian surgeon, Hassab, found that a radical devascularization of the upper stomach and lower esophagus together with splenectomy was the best treatment. I did some 30 such arduous, sanguinous procedures. The spleens were enormous, over 25 cm in size, and the splenic veins were tense, thin-walled and dilated to over four cm; removal of the spleen was like defusing a bomb but was done safely after prior ligation of the splenic artery. I was delighted when our expert British gastroenterologist, Bill Larkworthy, undertook to treat these patients with sclerotherapy with encouraging results.

There was every kind of sepsis. A young muslim theology student required total colectomy for toxic megacolon from ulcerative colitis. A number of infants required pleural decortication for trapped lung and bronchpleural fistula following staphylococcal pneumonia.

There was inoperable carcinomatosis of the colon in an 18 year-old male. There were many cases of carcinoma of the stomach, many of whom underwent palliative resections of bleeding tumors. It must be said to their great credit that the Saudi patients, especially the desert arabs, were tough, brave and grateful; they regularly survived extensive surgical incursions. Carcinoma of the esophagus was also prevalent; right thoracoabdominal approach was used to good post operative palliative effect. Curiously, there were no varicose veins.

Endocrine surgery ran the gamut of maladies of the thyroid, parathyroid and adrenal glands. These included some exciting pheochromocytomas and adrenal tumors, one of which weighed five kilograms and displaced the spleen to the right upper quadrant.

We had some interesting contrasts between the lean, wiry desert arabs and the more corpulent city patients demonstrating the effects of life style and diet on health. The desert people had virtually no carcinoma of the breast or bowel whereas the city people were suffering an increase in vascular and malignant disease. Appendicitis, diverticulitis and polyposis were almost unheard of in the desert. (Slide of old desert man). Atherosclerosis, even in elderly men, was unknown in the desert. Their common femoral arteries were as soft as those of a baby. In Riyadh the heart team did an increasing number of coronary bypasses.

In the medical realm there was a high incidence of diabetes. It is the custom in Saudi Arabia as well as in many other areas for first cousin marriage. It seems to be a tribal matter, a concern for keeping possessions inside the close family. There was abundant rheumatic valvular disease involving valve surgery by the heart team. The renal dialysis unit was fully employed. Blood Bank HBsAg antigen was approximately 7% positive. Many of us in surgery as well as those in the renal dialysis unit took Heptavax. Up to the time we left (March 1986) there was no acknowledged case of AIDS although there were rumors to the contrary. Our American Chief Pathologist was sent home summarily possibly because he had claimed there was a case of AIDS. The circumstances are murky. Dr. Shideler remarked that the blood banks are testing for AIDS now so I am sure the dread disease has emerged into the open since our departure in 1986.

Poliomyelitis was a scourge in infants. We only saw the children admitted for tendon transfer procedures by our orthopedists but they were in the hundreds. Currently there is an active childrens immunization program in the Kingdom.

One factor that hampers medical advances in Saudi Arabia is the total absence of autopsies except for forensic reasons. Many mysteries accordingly went unsolved. We tried every conceivable way to get permission for autopsies but were never successful. The bodies, even that of the King, are buried in a shallow, unmarked grave before sunset on the day of death (slide of cemetery).

↑ CURRICULUM VITAE    
JOHN W. RATCLIFFE, MD, FACS, 1993

1987 to present: Retired in Carmel, California.
I have maintained my California State license
and continue to attend medical and surgical meetings.

1986-87:
Volunteer General Surgeon Project Hope Grenada, West Indies.

1977-86:
Consultant Surgeon King Faisal Specialist Hospital
and Research Center, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

1975-77:
Consultant Surgeon King Faisal Military Hospital,
Ministry of Defense and Aviation, Khamis Mushayt,
Assir Province, Saudi Arabia.

1952-75:
Private practice General Surgery San Mateo, CA.
Instructor in Surgery, Stanford University (1953-75).

1948-52:
Resident General Surgery Cushing VA Hospital, Framingham, MA.

1946-48:
Lt. (jg) MC, USNR

1945-46:
Surgical Interne Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.

RELATED TO CAREER

Surgical volunteer three months Project Hope, Indonesia

1959: Member San Francisco Surgical Society
1956: Fellow American College of Surgeons
1953: Diplomate American Board of Surgery.

EDUCATION

1942-45:
M.D. Harvard Medical School

1938-42:
B.A. The Johns Hopkins University, Chemistry.
(Phi Beta Kappa).

Born 31 December 1919, Beloit, Wisconsin

↑ THE SAILING CAREER    

Growing up in the middle west and having a father who served in the US Navy during World War I, apparently gave me a yen for the bounding main. It wouldn’t surprise me if the statistics on naval personnel showed that a preponderance of sailors came from inland parts.

My first experience of sail came during medical school. The family of my classmate, Glenn Behringer, had a summer place down at the Black Point Yacht Club on Long Island Sound in Connecticut. We went sailing in a Star there. Later, Glenn and I were invited in July, 1944 to go up to Upper St. Regis Lake as guests of Cornelia Anne (Bunty) Stokes and family. I was dating Bunty at the time and her classmate, Mardette Edwards, a friend of Glenn’s, was also there. My second sailing experience was in an “O Boat” of theirs on the lake. Parenthetically, on one of the evenings we sailed over to the mansion of Ambassador Davies of “Mission to Moscow” fame to see a movie. I remember it well: “The Uninvited", a real spooker. That was very tame sailing, a lumbering old tub.

In 1943 I entered the navy as an Apprentice Seaman in the V-12 program at medical school. In April, 1945, I worked in the Medical dispensary at the Charlestown Navy Yard. One day we were taken out into Massachusetts Bay on a shake-down cruise in the destroyer, DD Southerland, 743. It was a blustery day with spitting snow, just the day to cause seasickness in a landlubber. While having lunch in the wardroom I had a sudden urge to get out to the fresh air and stinging cold wind on deck; thus did I forgo the humility of vomiting. That didn’t quench my appetite for further life on the water.

In April, 1946, after my interneship at the Massachusetts General Hospital, I reported for duty, Medical Corp, United States Naval Reserve, at the Naval Air Station at Norman, Oklahoma. The war was over and I was attached to the Separation Center. Our military machine which had about 19 million souls at its height, was dissolving rapidly. My boring duty was to do separation physical examinations on the sailors being mustered out. Most of them were 18 or slightly older, all in good health. I applied for sea duty and was rewarded by assignment to Little Creek, Virginia, where I joined as squadron doctor for seven amphibious rocket ships called LSMR, Landing Ship Medium-Rocket. My duties there were to look after the crews of the flat-bottomed landing ships which were converted to shoot rapidly very large rockets for close-in fire support for beach landings. These little 200’ ships had firepower equal to that of large cruisers and they made quite a racket. I travelled on an even smaller ship, 170’, which was the Flotilla Flagship, LC(FF) 786. Those little ships were too small to have proper names. Commander Louis Volk became a good friend. He had had a very dangerous role at the beginning of the war. As the Japanese Navy attacked the southeast toward Australia in the first months of 1942, Captain Volk commanded one of four old “four-stacker” destroyers that stood between the entire Japanese fleet and the slot to Australia. Somehow he and his ship survived until help came.

I was along on maneuvers in Chesapeake Bay, up and down innumerable times. The amphibious navy wasn’t considered exactly choice duty. Still, I had a chance to see and participate in the working navy along with Marines. There were some special memories. One day on maneuvers a fighter plane plunged into the water close to our ship with loss of the pilot. I had never seen anything like that and was deeply moved. Dangerous business.

One time the squadron went up the Potomac to Washington, D.C. for an interesting visit. Another time, the Chief Pharmacist Mate on one of my squadron LSMRs radioed that a young seaman may have appendicitis. I had the privilege of jumping from one dipping and rising ship’s bow to the other while at sea. The boy did have appendicitis. We rendezvoused with the cruiser SPOKANE nearby. They of course had surgical facilities. When we went alongside I saw that their medical officer was a very young Lieutenant Junior Grade like myself. It turned out quickly that he wanted me to come over to do the surgery. So over I went (having done two appendectomies during my interneship). It ended up that I had to give the spinal anesthesia and then the surgery while the ship’s medical officer assisted me and the ship’s dentist stood at the head of the table watching vital signs. The operation went very well, fortunately. The only time I gave an “order” for naval gunfire was that night when the captain on the bridge called down to inquire if their gunnery would disturb us in the operating room. I assured him that he could fire at will.

My first real deep sea experience came when our squadron went down to Puerto Rico for grand naval maneuvers off Culebra Island just to the east. I think I was a bit seasick for a week but felt fine the minute we landed in San Juan. During those exercises we were close in to the beach firing our rockets and the famous battleship MISSOURI was off shore firing 16” shells over our heads. We could literally see the projectiles and their passage sounded like a speeding train, deafening. The passage back to Little Creek was memorable as we hit a virtual hurricane off Cape Hatteras and barely made 25 miles in the entire night; three of our eight diesel engines conked out and we barely made seaway. Those flat-bottomed craft certainly could bounce and plunge but they were very seaworthy.

During my residency at the Cushing VA Hospital after I emerged from the Navy, I sailed with our chief resident, George Clowes and his family, from Woods Hole, MA, through the Cape Cod Canal up to Booth Bay Harbor, Maine. While becalmed at noon next day in Massachusetts Bay an enormous whale came up and basked in the sun a few feet from our boat. Friendly.

I didn’t sail again until 1967 in Mission Bay, San Diego. Joanne and I went to a boatshow at the Cow Palace in January, 1968. We fell for a demonstrator Coronado 25 like the one in Mission Bay, the summer before. We sailed “Nereid” from Redwood City to Coyote Point in San Mateo in February. We had some rollicking adventures in “Nereid” and had our first exposure to the wild sailing conditions for which San Francisco Bay is famous. One weekend, Joanne, Steve, Becky and I went to San Francisco on a club cruise. When we hit the high winds and steep chop in the upper bay, we had a fairly good example of a “Chinese fire drill” when the jib sheets got tangled on the foredeck. I was on the tiller; Joanne and Becky, anxious and pale down below, looking up hopefully to the helmsman; Steve working on the snafu on the foredeck, ultimately successful and drenched.

That summer I sailed up to Angel Island in the mid-bay to anchor overnight with Patty, David and Bruce. Steve was sailing on the President Lines as a kitchen helper to the Far East and back. We were over at the San Francisco Yacht Club for supper when we saw a perfect vision of a sailboat called BRITANNIA, a 40’ sloop, built in Hong Kong two years earlier. She had a teak deck and was a real classic. We were later to hear that she was for sale. I can’t believe at this writing that Joanne and I had the temerity even to consider buying her but we finally did at a good price and encouraged by a recent real estate windfall. We had BRITANNIA from 1968 to 1973. We raced her and cruised her with great pleasure. She wasn’t a modern sailboat from the standpoint of racing-boat architecture but we did win a few races in the Bay by dint of luck and some tactical skill. Joanne was an outstanding tactician and sailor and Steve became a top-notcher too. Patty liked sailing but Bruce and Dave were lukewarm.

In fact, Steve did so well that he sailed in the 1969 Transpacific race from Los Angeles to Honolulu. His boat, a Columbia 40, proved to be rinky-dink with an owner/captain who had the misfortune to suffer a kidney stone attack on the way. Steve was a tower of strength on the crew. I went out to visit him in the Islands upon his arrival and we had a fine few days on Maui at Lahaina. While driving over the island we happened upon a strange scene. There was a full-rigged schooner tied up in a little cove. There was a throng of people on the pier and, upon closer inspection, there were movie cameras and people in period costumes of the mid-Eighteenth Century. Of course, we stopped. Imagine our surprise when we saw actor Charleton Heston, and they were filming a sequence in the movie, “Hawaii” from Michener’s book. Steve and a short-handed crew sailed their boat back to San Francisco in three arduous weeks. The skipper for the return voyage was a stocky, heavily-bearded young man of fine skill. Coincidentally, Joanne and I were to meet the same bearded fellow in the harbor of Hydra in the Greek Islands while we were sailing a bare boat in 1976. Small world.

It is remarkable how doors of opportunity and adventure open at the most unexpected times. Dick Morrison, an obstetrics/gynecology colleague and his wife, Betty Bradley Morrison (pediatrician for the Ratcliffe kids) had a wonderful old-style classic of a sailboat named MOONGLOW. Sadly, Betty had advanced cancer of the breast. They decided courageously to take a cruise to La Paz, Baja California, Mexico as presumably the last cruise of Betty’s life. While at La Paz in February, Betty took a bad turn and they had to fly home. Our friends Alex and Erika Weisskopf together with Bo Searls and I went down to bring the boat home. MOONGLOW wasn’t in very good shape. The mainsail had blown out and needed a deep reef which robbed her of good sailing power. Moreover, the heat-exchanger on the diesel engine leaked so there was the constant need to add fresh water after the questionable soldering job failed on our way north. We started back by sailing to Cabo San Lucas for a pleasant anchorage overnight. Thereafter we sailed every day, putting in to anchorages only every other night. When we anchored, the local fishermen came out and we bought langouste, a treat. One evening while I was at the helm, I saw and heard a remarkable meteorite explosion directly overhead bearing directly toward us. Fortunately, the atmosphere consumed the visitor and there was no real danger as it turned out. I remember the glorious colors enhanced by the light of the just-set sun.

We put in to Turtle Bay (Bahia Tortugas) for refueling and proceeded around Point Eugene (Punta Eugenia) northward heading for San Diego some four days of sailing ahead. With the failing engine due to the heat-exchanger leak and with a powerful Santa Ana wind heading us we decided to put in at Cedros Island village in hopes of repairing the defect. There we found no welder and a soldering job was bound to fail. A wild and threatening night ensued while we were at anchor. The wind was on-shore so that we would have drifted onto the rocks if our anchor and rode didn’t hold. About 0200 next morning, with the wind rising and the boat pitching wildly we turned on the engine in order to relieve strain on the ground tackle (anchor). About 0500 we realized, aided by the example of the neighboring fishing trawlers, that we had to up-anchor and go to sea to save the boat and perhaps our lives. Imagine going into that raging sea with an ailing engine and a scant mainsail at first light with the sun just peeping over the horizon. Getting the anchor up was a tough chore to begin our doubtful voyage. Once we were clear of the island we set the mainsail, such as it was, and sailed downwind back to Point Eugene heading to Turtle Bay. Some hours later with the coast all but obliterated by a thick dust storm off the land, we spied Turtle Bay entryway. With virtually the last gasp of the engine we crept slowly against the wind and dust into the anchorage. When we finally were able to secure the anchor in a safe place we felt enormous exhilaration at our now-certain survival. If our engine had failed and with the total inability to enter Turtle Bay under sail dead against the gale, we would have been blown south for several days into the wide Pacific. In any case, we were lucky and it isn’t hard to imagine how good that cold beer tasted. Due to the blowing dust the entire rigging and mast of the boat was covered literally with mud.

It was obvious that MOONGLOW couldn’t go home without help from our San Francisco friend and sailing master (through whom we had bought BRITANNIA). We radioed Tom and he flew down with a new heat exchanger a few days later. We flew back home the next day. Tom brought the boat back to San Diego with assistance.

Now, further to advance the point made previously about the door of opportunity, it turned out that there was a problem in the steering gear (quadrant) in BRITANNIA. Joanne and I went up to Sausalito where the boat was berthed and opened up the lazaret where the mechanism of the steering was sequestered. While doing that, an older man with one of his grown sons came along. As people in boat-yards do, he came up and asked to take a peek. It turned out that he also had an Off-Shore 40 like ours, only a yawl (main and mizzen mast) instead of a sloop. Furthermore, he said he had his boat out of the water at Anderson’s yard being measured for participation in the 1971 Transpacific yacht race to Honolulu. I suggested that I might be interested in crewing in the race if he needed another person.

The long and short of it was that they did want me. We became fast friends, together with our wives. We sailed on 4 July 1971 and reached Honolulu after 17 days, a very slow passage. The winds were quite light much of the time and the cruise was quite beautiful with trade-winds on our quarter. One day a thousand miles from any land, the seas and wind were so still that we went swimming. I must say that it was a bit spooky to realize that the nearest solid earth was three or four miles away, straight down! I think we were number 69 out of 72 boats. The name of his boat was BOLD HOST. Joanne and the crew wives flew out to Honolulu and met us about 0100 hours. The boats in the race all were assigned an Honolulu host who provided us with some tasty food. It was great to have finished at last and to be back with Joanne. We all stayed at the Ala Wai Hotel by the yacht harbor and spent some time later on Maui in the Pioneer Inn which was an authentic throw-back to the old whaling days at Lahaina. Interestingly, one of the boats in the race, a grand example of the comfortable cruising/racing art, was hijacked out of the harbor in broad daylight a few days later. Two thieves held-up the two crew members who were staying aboard and compelled them to go to sea at gunpoint. It turned out later that those criminals, several hundred miles out in the trackless waste of the Pacific, put the unlucky crewmen in a life-raft facing certain death. Fortunately an air/sea search was going on and the men in the raft were miraculously found and saved. I don’t know whether the stolen boat was recovered or not.

In the coming several years, I raced with them from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, from Los Angeles to Puerta Vallarta, Mexico and finally from Los Angeles to Tahiti. These three races were in Dick Williams’ new boat, a fast, competitive sloop 52’ long.

The Santa Barbara race was sailed in a lot of fog. The second night out we were off near-by Point Sur in thick fog and running with a strobe light on the mast head and a radar reflector on the mast. I was at the helm about 0230 in total darkness when, suddenly, I saw a light dead ahead and well above our boat. It wasn’t a star! It was the bow light of an on-coming freighter! Coming directly at us. I had no idea which way to turn because we were so close under her bow that we couldn’t see the red or green navigation lights. Then we heard the throb of big engines! I threw the helm over to the left (port side) on instinct or for no good reason. Immediately a giant ship passed by not 15’ away from us. Someone on the flying bridge of the ship must have known we were there because they shone a spotlight down upon us to see if we had survived. This all happened so suddenly that there was no time for an adrenalin rush or panic. When the ship was safely past we thanked each his particular Supreme Being for our good luck.

The race to Puerta Vallarta started off Point Fermin near Los Angeles on a stormy February day in 1973. A wild night ensued in the Catalina Channel. Some of the favored boats were so damaged by high winds and head-seas that they had to retire from the race and went to San Diego. We survived the night although the teak stem piece was fractured. I’ve never seen heavier rain at sea. The waves were nearly flattened by the weight of rainwater. Off Baja California the weather turned fair and the rest of the race was entirely pleasant.

My biggest race was to Tahiti from Los Angeles starting 15 June, 1974. 4000 miles in three weeks and two hours. Every kind of weather including storm and fog as well as calm weather as we inched our way through the doldrums at about 5 degrees North Latitude and 140 degrees West Longitude. One morning we were joined by about 30 pilot whales which cruised alongside for about an half hour. Later, when we reached Tahiti, we learned that a pilot whale had knocked the keel off a sailboat in the Marquesa Island with loss of all hands. We were lucky our pilot whales were friendly. One of the key challenges of that course is threading the needle between two very low-lying atolls in the Marquesas. As luck would have it we came into the danger zone in the middle of the night. The moon was full and we were able to make celestial navigation sights to keep a safe course. We never saw any of the treacherous atolls. The French aptly named the Marquesas “Les Isles de Disappointment” out of respect for the numerous vessels lost on the reefs.

The morning we approached Tahiti was a glorious one with golden sunlight playing on delicious, rosy, faint clouds. The boat that won the race, SORCERY, had landed a day or so earlier. We had radio calls from her and were delighted to hear the voices of our wives who had landed in Air New Zealand only hours before. As we approached Point Venus I recalled that that was the very landfall that Captain James Cook made when he discovered Tahiti about 200 years earlier. A romantic occasion! Needless to say, our reunion with our wives and the picnic that greeted us won’t soon be forgotten. Couples went their separate ways and we had a delightful Society Islands holiday. After a few days of rest in Papeete, we flew out to Huahini and, later, Bora Bora. Books can be written about the beauty of the islands and atolls. By sheer coincidence, at our beach hotel on Huahini, our friends and associates, Carl and Hazel Benninghoven, he a radiologist, and their large family were having a marvelous holiday. Joanne and I hiked a lot. One day we encountered a solitary gravestone, that of an American whaling captain, dated 1848. On Bora Bora we snorkeled and continued our lazy ways. On 14 July we attended a colorful Bastille Day celebration in this far-flung outpost of France.

The highpoint of SMALL WONDER’s racing career came in a race from Coyote Point to Tiburon in September of 1974. We won the race against some 60 boats, first to finish and first in class. We also won the Winter Series at Coyote Point Yacht Club.

Our next sailing adventure occurred in September 1976 when, on vacation from Khamis Mushayt in Saudi Arabia, we chartered a “bare boat", a 30’ French Arpege in the Greek Islands with another couple, Harvey and Pat Weldon. We took the boat at Poros and sailed across the Saronic Gulf to Point Sounion on a cloudy day with threatening deluge from the heavens. There is a lovely Temple of Neptune on the heights at the Point and a little harbor just below. We no sooner had our anchor down when the rains came in full measure. We shall not forget the spectacle of a ghost of a fiery setting sun emerged for a few moments through the clouds and gave an eerie light to the silhouette of the temple columns which were later illuminated dramatically by lightening. We felt very snug in our anchorage and enjoyed happy hour and supper.

The next day we sailed in glorious sunlight and fresh breezes to the island of Kea. In succeeding days we sailed on to Siros (bypassing the prison island of Yaros where the Colonels of the sixties kept their favorite political prisoners) and thence to Mykonos. There we were pinned down for three days by a strong Meltemi windstorm. It was a pleasant place for an enforced layover, what with its classical Greek whitewashed houses and a handsome harbor. One day, we heard about a pleasant beach some little distance by foot from the harbor. It was called “Paradise Beach” for the reason that it was “topless”. So it was. But then we heard that a little further along there was “Superparadise Beach", even more interesting. We walked on and came upon a fine expanse of sand and water with, among other people, handsome young men and women, in their altogether, playing volley ball. Being dressed, we felt like voyeurs so we doffed our clothes (Joanne a bit more modest) and had a nice hour or so sunning and swimming. It was the first time either of us had been on a nude beach and we were pleasantly surprised at our reaction to being there. There, of course, was nothing erotic about it and the sense of freedom being nude was delicious. In those days, and still largely today, Americans don’t take easily to public nudity (Berkeleyites excepted), but we feel that our puritanical mores don’t exhaust the possibilities of self-realization.

While at Mykonos we visited the adjacent island of Delos of great historic significance (the Delian League) and then we sailed to fabled Naxos to the south. Here it was that lovelorn Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus. Catullus wrote in a long poem:

(Luckily for Ariadne, Dionysus arrived and it was love at first sight. He blessed Naxos with fertility and good wine. Much later, Lord Byron wanted to buy the island.)

Cruising in the Aegean Sea has many delights. The “wine dark sea” of legend. An overnight in the various harbors affords the sailors a chance for a fine Greek dinner and often music in the numerous tavernas. We would eat ashore and then sleep aboard the boat. Next day off to the next island. After Naxos we sailed past Paros (from where the famous parian marble of Greek statuary originated) and anchored at Serifos. Next came the only leg of the voyage on which we couldn’t see our destination at the outset; namely, Hydra. It was some 40 miles from Serifos to Hydra. Hydra is a place to visit and explore for its physical beauty, typical town architecture, and a cozy harbor (where we met Steve’s Transpac skipper mentioned above, he of the enormous beard). In the harbor at Hydra one must tie-up his boat stern or bow to the dock. The trick in slipping into a narrow gap among the boats is to sail by the proposed berth and drop anchor in timely fashion so that one can immediately reverse the engine and swing on the fixed anchor so that the stern can slip into the dock. It was a Saturday afternoon and the colorful harbor was filled with spectators. I was lucky to accomplish the above maneuver flawlessly though I had never done it before. It could have been embarrassing with all of those on-lookers.

We were near the end of our two weeks. We sailed on to the island of Aegina where Harvey and Pat left us to return to their Tobruk, Saudi Arabia hospital. Joanne and I sailed back to Poros and headed back to Araby ourselves.

It was a fine voyage although Joanne didn’t care much for Harvey who had quite an imperious attitude toward patient Pat. Harvey was a bit temperamental when we decided not to try to go well south to Crete. We knew that the further south we went the lighter the winds and there just wasn’t enough time to make that possible. Harvey could be petulant. He was a good sailor and very proud of the fact that he was a member of the prestigious Larchmont Yacht Club in New York. Contrast that with our yacht club, Coyote Point, of which no self-respecting eastern yachtsman had ever even heard.

Our next and last notable sailing experience occurred in September and October, 1982. At that time we were at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (1977-86). We had marvelous friends there. We decided to make another Greek voyage, eight of us altogether: Ann and David Barkham, Philip and daughter Randy Weaver, Mary and Glanville Davies, Joanne and myself. We flew to Athens and took a Primrose 40 sloop at Piraeus. Again we sailed to Cape Sounion for an overnight and thence to Kea. Here the plot thickened. Next day we had pretty strong winds but the reports for the area seemed to promise moderating trends. We soon found out that going north of the island on a hoped-for passage to Mykonos put us into very severe weather. The ladies were in the after cabin, quite green with nausea. It was to be a long day at best and I decided to return to Kea. We made the boat ready to come about. Joanne slipped on an ill-placed carpet on the cabin sole and fell chest against the table. She had severe chest pain but she was the only one in that company I could trust with the helm as Glan and I went forward to free a jib sheet fouled on a cleat. She did an heroic job of handling the helm as we came about. I didn’t realize her plight regarding the chest injury. We made it back to Kea without further trouble but came to find out that David Barkham had twisted his leg in the rough time and had a great deal of pain. Both of the injured despite their pain carried on through the voyage that took us south to Naxos and thence to Serifos, Hydra, Spetsai and back to Piraeus. When we returned to Riyadh, Joanne had a chest film that showed she had fractured a rib and had punctured her right lung with a slight hemo-pneumothorax. She required no treatment but if I had known what she had I would have aborted the sailing and returned to Athens and probably Riyadh forthwith. Also, David’s leg x-rays showed a fracture of his fibula. Fortunately, the remainder of the voyage was easy from the standpoint of weather and sea conditions. The Aegean and the Mediterranean Seas are usually pretty benign but there are times when all hell breaks loose with enormous storms and heavy seas. At the time of year of our voyage the weather is very light but in both of our Greek Island voyages there were short attacks of the waning Meltemi season. Sailor beware. That wine-dark sea can give you fits.