The transcript has been edited for read ability. Some of what I said was redundant or of no consequence and has not been included. See Part 1 for the first half.

John W. Ratcliffe:
... library and we always, we started the habit of reading before we went to sleep way back in early childhood, because a

David T Ratcliffe:
Not being read to, but reading yourself.

JWR:
Well, we read to earlier on, and I think that was the way we got to the point of loving books. We’s go down to the library in summer, especially when we weren’t in school, and got four or five books. And just devour them and hot summer afternoons. Back there, no air conditioning or anything like that. And it got very, very hot in the summer.

DTR:
Was it dry or humid?

JWR:
Well, it was basically dry. In fact, we had some droughts in 1936. There was a terrible, there was several years in there when dust storms and terrible drought. That’s when Steinbeck wrote Grapes of Wrath as people were literally blown away from their farms. It was a terrible time. I remember a paul of dust would hang over the city. It wasn’t from [the] locality where we were, it would be coming from West Texas and West Oklahoma and so forth. The topsoil was just blowing away. I don’t think there’s been anything like that since, but it was a very bad couple of years there.

DTR:
So you’d read to pass your time or to fill your mind with things that were

JWR:
I always had a penchant for history books. I always read—my chief reading was in children’s history books and then on up into more substantial history books, even in my mid-teens. I really loved history and I still do. That’s my chief pleasure in reading today is history. Either past history or contemporary, mainly. I spend an hour or so on the New York Times every day because it’s—there’s so much going on and it’s so thrilling to have these things so available now and especially, and of course, CSPAN on TV and everything give you kind of a information overload now. But history has always been

DTR:
What did Allen find compelling? What were the subjects he would read about most?

JWR:
Well, we loved the books like Tom Swift and all of those children’s boys books, you know, like Nancy Drew for the girls and a whole bunch of the Golden Boys and so forth. Adventure books for boys going out, flying, learning how to fly and doing all kinds of daring-do things so that children—we all loved those books. I don’t know whether children today have books exactly like that. But they probably do. I think Nancy Drew or something like that are probably still going. But they were good. And the good thing that that did for us was it got us to reading a lot. It wasn’t important reading, but we got the love of reading.

DTR:
Talk more about your experiences with Nancy and what she was like as she was in her early years.

JWR:
Yes. Right. Well, Nancy was always an utterly delightful little girl. She was born with an agenesis of the pituitary gland so that she didn’t grow normally in height and she also didn’t mature as a woman. I remember well, we were very close. Everybody was very close. And we had every, all the family things were together. She was a very bright student. She did extremely well in school and went on later in spite of her physical handicap. She was strong and everything very active, but she didn’t have, she just wasn’t big. But she went on to get a degree as a registered nurse. She went to college and then nursing. And she was apparently in her hospital—I didn’t see her in action because I was off in the east by that time—but she apparently was famous for her ability to handle patients even though she was very small.

I remember one of my most poignant memories of her and my parents together, was in 1937 or eight, Mother and Dad, an advice of the physician, took her back to Johns Hopkins Medical School to consult about her condition to see if there was anything that could be done. She was seen by Dr. Walter Dandy and Dr. John Eager Howard. Dandy, was the famous neurosurgeon of that time and John Eager Howard was a famous endocrinologist at that time. And there wasn’t anything they could do for her.

JWR:
That was when she was 14, in ’37?

JWR:
Yeah. Right, yes. So they came back vastly disappointed. But I think they were prepared for not—because it was, obviously, she needed to have substitution therapies, which simply didn’t exist. Today, she could have had the substitution therapy that would’ve had her develop in a perfectly normal way. I remember Mother and Dad bought her a little white fur coat, which she was very proud of. That was something that they did for her at that time when they came back from the trip to Johns Hopkins. I think that’s probably one of the reasons I wanted to go to Johns Hopkins. I thought when I went to college back there, I’d probably go to medical school there too. And I certainly, of course, that’s another story—we’re talking about Nancy.

She married later on. Actually it was the 10th of January, 1945 that she married Floyd Everett. I was back at medical school at that time and couldn’t attend. But Floyd was just perfect for her. They were just a wonderful couple. He was a Lockheed engineer. He was a very bright engineer, and she was working as a nurse. He couldn’t have children, of course. And then they moved to Pomona. He was with Lockheed, as I said—later, they were at Santa Clara with Lockheed—but down in, in Pomona. They had a nice home, had a cute little dog. I think it was when Steve was 12, he and I went down to visit them, and we went to Disneyland.

In 1952, I think it was, yes, about ’53 maybe, Nancy developed a malignant melanoma on her leg. It was excised done by Dr. Vadheim down in Pomona, a guy I got to know later. Very nice, good surgeon. So she came up—I knew Dr. Robert Pollack at Stanford, who specialized in tumor surgery. He did a radical excision of the site of this melanoma, which is a terrible malignancy and did a lymph node dissection in the groin. And there were no lymph nodes involved and we were very hopeful that that she would be cured. And Mother came up. This was a very tough time. Mother and Dad were still in Tulsa at that time. They came out here in ’56. But Mother was with Nancy. They came together and we had the operation at Stanford. And she did well after the operation. But then she started to have little recurrences in the space between the groin dissection and the primary site, and went on for eight years with multiple local surgeries and so forth without success. She finally died in 1960 with this. They were in Santa Clara at that time and the last month of her life, I went down to Santa Clara every day to give her pain medications. And it was a very tough time.

DTR:
I remember Nancy quite clearly, her energy and her bright, very exuberant quality.

JWR:
She had an upbeat spirit, I’ll tell you, yeah . And even all the way to the end, she did. In fact I couldn’t, we couldn’t, we never really discussed her disease. We just visited and

DTR:
She was very brave on the level of knowing, I guess, from the time she was born, that she had strikes against her.

JWR:
Yeah. But she overcame that. Her life was a very successful life. It was too brief. But it was certainly a, I think she’s a model for everyone.

DTR:
As a child, clearly you and Allen had a lot of sports activities and events that you would go to. Would she be with you in those situations?

JWR:
Yeah. She was a baseball fan. She didn’t go to the football games, as I recall. I don’t think that she was into that. But she did, the whole family was into the baseball. And of course, we followed Allen’s career too. He did so well in baseball. She did ice skate and she had lots and lots of girlfriends and schoolmates and so forth. She was always very popular and everybody loved her.

DTR:
Well, she’s a precious person.

JWR:
Yeah.

DTR:
I guess in your writings, you’re doing more of a chronology of recounting and remembering starting from the time you were born. Or do you also in that include the genealogy of your Father and your Mother’s line back, say through their Grandparents?

JWR:
Well, let’s go into that. On my Father’s side his Mother, my Grandmother, was the daughter of Judge William Allen. And actually, that was my Uncle Allen’s name too, William Allen, his son, and my Grandmother’s brother. My Grandmother’s Father was a member of Congress from Illinois. And actually much earlier had been a close friend of Abraham Lincoln’s. I believe if my memory serves, she said that Lincoln and Grant and William Allen were in the Black Hawk War in northern Illinois back in, I don’t know, 1830 or something like that. It was an uprising of the Black Hawk Indians or something like that.

DTR:
William Allen Thompson.

JWR:
No, this is William Allen. Allen’s the last name. That’s my Grandmother Ratcliffe’s Father. And he was a member of Congress from Illinois for a long time. And my Grandmother told some stories that may or may not be true. As I recall the story, she said that since Lincoln and William Allen were close friends, and they were in Congress together, she remembered when Lincoln was in their living room at her home. She remembers as a little girl seeing Abraham Lincoln in her living room.

DTR:
At the time that he was a legis[lator]— as a state assembly person, or

JWR:
No, this would be probably when he was in his law practice before and then in Congress. My Grandmother also said that when, remember, Lincoln had so much trouble with his generals. They wouldn’t chase the enemy. McClellan at Gettysburg won that battle, but he wouldn’t chase Lee. He let Lee get away. Well, anyway, Lincoln had a lot of trouble with his generals. And according to my Grandmother, and she’s very proud daughter of her Father, obviously, she said that Abraham Lincoln asked William Allen, who must have had some military experience, of course they didn’t have West Point and all that sort of thing, he’d been in the Indian Wars or something like that, asked William Allen to take command.

Now it’s hard to believe. But that’s the impression that we as little children sitting around her knee would hear this story. But he said, no, that’s not for me, but get Grant. So according to my Grandmother, Lincoln actually selected Grant on the advise of my Great Grandfather.

DTR:
What position did he hold during that time when Lincoln was president? Was he still in the Congress?

JWR:
Well, he was in Congress and actually I think he was Speaker pro tem of the House.

DTR:
So he was a Democrat. From the state of Illinois. During a timeframe of

JWR:
1850s and probably mid sixties or something like that.

DTR:
Now, what was May’s maiden name?

JWR:
Ellen.

DTR:
And what was her Mother’s name?

JWR:
I don’t, that’s where our history gets dim you see. I don’t know. My Grandmother’s sister was Aunt Dora, a wonderful little lady. I always associate her being dressed in purple and very fine features with nice silver rim glasses and so forth. She was kind of the genealogist back there. I believe she actually did some work on family history going further back.

DTR:
So somewhere there must be still, ideally records that she must have

JWR:
Trouble with American families, we have people don’t stay in the same place. I, God only knows where any record would be. I think my cousin Suzanne, has some documents down in Arizona now that bear on this to some extent. She has some documents that Abraham signatures of Lincoln, the things that he wrote and so forth. I think she probably—her Father was my Father’s brother.

DTR:
Allen. Right.

JWR:
Yeah. Since she was always in Illinois until she married and went off, I think that she might have more of those documents and records. Uncle Allen, my uncle Allen, my Father’s brother, was older than my Father. So that it might be that that they had some more of the family records. But unfortunately, one reason I’m writing this thing of mine is not so much about me is, is about probably trying to start a genealogy of some sort with maybe you. I think you’re a natural for it. You’re kind of the archivist of the family. Might just carry that on. It might be of interest in the future too. Have more of a line on our family than we have now.

DTR:
Well, it seems there must be, because I know I’ve heard of people who have engaged in this and learned as they went from techniques that they were taught of ways to find out who William Allen’s wife was, what her tree connections were. And to determine some way, there has to be records somewhere, in some county or city.

JWR:
Yeah. Well I think establishment Richland County in Illinois would have.

DTR:
So at some point, possibly maybe you or someone might end up trying to pay a visit there and do some research.

JWR:
We were also talking to somebody the other day who was speaking about how the Mormon Church has a fantastic repository of that kind of information about families everywhere. Whether they were Mormons or not didn’t seem to make any difference. They seem to have a lot of information. You might be able to get some information about that because we know some dates and places and things like that. And of course way back, our family on both sides came from England. The Ratcliffes were in Virginia and went to Kentucky and out that way. And the Thompsons and the Baileys and the Duttons, on my Mother’s side, started out in New England, I believe. And some of them were actually in the Revolutionary War fighting with Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain boys.

And my dear, late, lamented second cousin Orpha, you knew Orpha Thompson down at La Jolla, she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She died last September. But two members of the family—and she has a badge with a ribbon and the medallion and so forth that was just sent to us yesterday, that has the names of Lieutenant so-and-so and somebody else. I couldn’t, I’d have to get my glasses to read the inscription. But there were two members of the Revolutionary Army that fought. And so that’s why descendants of our family, any one who wanted to be, could be

DTR:
Let’s really briefly, then, I’d like to flesh out a minimal tree here. We’ve got Frank and Nanette, your parents. Now, Frank’s siblings were Allen

JWR:
Allen only.

DTR:
Which is his older brother.

JWR:
Older brother. Right.

DTR:
Allen’s older. And Frank and Allen’s parents were John Ratcliffe.

JWR:
Yeah.

DTR:
And his wife May, May Allen Ratcliffe.

JWR:
Yeah. And her Father was Judge William Allen.

JWR:
He was a judge first and then a congressman.

JWR:
That’s right. And I don’t know anymore about—I don’t know who his wife was. I probably have heard names and so forth, but it’s all very confusing.

DTR:
How many siblings did John Ratcliffe have?

JWR:
I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about his antecedents.

DTR:
How about May?

JWR:
Well, just her Father.

JWR:
No siblings that you knew of.

JWR:
Well, yeah. She had Dora and Aunt Marg, Margaret and William Allen, Uncle Bill.

DTR:
Okay. So there was four of them.

JWR:
Yeah.

DTR:
You were going to say something else about John, I interrupted you.

JWR:
Oh well, I don’t oh, yes. I remember he had tuberculosis. And when we were in Olney around 1926, he died. I can only remember him as a pale, slender man in their house. They lived at the other end of Elliot Street from the nipe house. Nice, big, tall, Victorian, sort of red brick house. I can remember him sitting in a chair with a blanket around him, you know, kind of like a lap robe or something like that. That’s all I remember about him. I was six years old then. And when he died, I remember the day that Mother and Dad told us that he had died. We had button mushrooms for breakfast. Just those little button mushrooms. We didn’t go to the funeral. And that’s really, of course, that was the end of the story for him. But he was a very nebulous figure in my experience and memory.

DTR:
And so for him, records possibly leading further would be, at least the starting point would be Olney.

JWR:
Yes.

DTR:
For his family’s side.

JWR:
I’m sure that’s true. People usually grew up in a town and stayed there.

DTR:
And so at least with that, possibly maybe knowing more about where they might have come from, if that was possibly in the records, and at least then going to that place.

JWR:
Yeah. I should think that Richland County would have back through, I should think you could trace an awful lot back there.

DTR:
Okay. For Nanette’s side, then her parents were

JWR:
Her name was Bailey. And I’m not sure. I don’t know anything about her parents.

DTR:
I see. Okay. How many siblings did she have? Orpha.

JWR:
I think, no, Orpha was another branch of the family, of the Thompson family. I think they were, Orpha and my Mother were cousins, first cousins. So Orpha is my second cousin.

DTR:
Okay. But for Nanette’s siblings,

JWR:
She had Winslow Thompson, her oldest brother.

DTR:
Now, wait a minute, he’s Thompson. But she’s Bailey?

JWR:
No, that’s his middle name—oh, you’re talking about my Mother’s siblings.

DTR:
Right.

JWR:
Yeah. Winslow, Waldo, and Elizabeth.

DTR:
Where was Nanette in the hierarchy there? Was she the oldest?

JWR:
She was the second. Elizabeth was the oldest sibling, and then Charles Winslow Thompson came along, and then Louis Waldo Jr.

DTR:
Okay. He’s the fourth. And Bailey was her middle name?

JWR:
That was her given, that was her family name. And there were also some Duttons in there someplace. And I’m really, it’s pathetic how little we know about these, these are names to me. I don’t know.

DTR:
Where would be a starting place to explore for her? Also in Olney or

JWR:
Beloit. And my Grandfather Thompson had a sister who was Aunt Fanny,

DTR:
But you don’t remember his first name. That was

JWR:
My Grandfather Thompson was Lewis Waldo Thompson. And his sister was my Aunt Fanny, who married Oscar Foster. And they were great friends of the kids. They loved the kids. They had no children of their own. So they always had a Christmas party, and Allen and I and Nancy would sing Christmas Carols in harmony at Christmas parties and so forth for the family, Christmas parties. And Aunt Fanny was, and they were both just treasures. They were so loving of the grandchildren.

DTR:
They loved having you around.

JWR:
Yeah. Right.

DTR:
Gave their life some real spark.

JWR:
Oh, yeah. And Aunt Fanny was very musical. She sang and she played—she was the head of the choir at the church and things like that.

JWR:
Would she and Frank ever have any duets or anything like that?

JWR:
They might’ve had, yeah. Dad might’ve played the flute and she the piano or something like that. I wouldn’t have been, I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t remember it specifically.

DTR:
But they were both inclined that way. Well, you’re getting my curiosity up,

JWR:
Well, you might do a,

DTR:
I don’t know anything about genealogy, but I’m, I know from hearing people minimally describe their own searches That there is a very definite approach that I guess given the time that you go to the locale and do digging in records you can discover much more.

JWR:
Yeah. And you might even end up in Yorkshire, in England or something like that, because a lot of the—that’s where we, they all seem to come from the north, north England.

JWR:
But you don’t know what period,

JWR:
No. Well, I don’t, except that some of them were in pre-revolutionary times. I think they were over in the 18th century. On both sides.

DTR:
Well, I have to do more work there. Let’s see. When Frank went into the Navy, he had already, your best remembrance is that he went to work at Fairbanks Morse soon after graduating from the University of Illinois.

JWR:
Yeah.

DTR:
So he was working there for almost two years before he went off in 1917.

JWR:
That’s right.

DTR:
And I suppose they were giving him on-the-job training as well to supplement his theoretical studies at school.

JWR:
Practical experience. Right.

DTR:
What was his expertise? What were the things he really developed? His own special knowledge.

JWR:
Diesel Engines.

DTR:
The mechanics of them, the development of newer designs.

JWR:
Everything. Everything to do with them. Yeah. The applications too. They used these, these were tremendous machines. They would, some of them were as big as almost this room, as I remember. Just, I mean, they were for municipal power plants, and rotary oil drilling rigs and that sort of thing. Big, big diesel engines.

DTR:
And you actually went on site at times in Colorado where he was working.

JWR:
In Oklahoma too. We would take trips to Blackwell and Wetumka and Okmulgee in Oklahoma. Indian areas where they count towns named after Indian names. We got to know quite a lot about oil. I remember as a mid-teenager, I built an oil drilling rig out of balsa wood that Dad liked very much. It was a nice replica of an oil derrick. It was the old type that had the big flywheel and what they call cable tool when a beam drops a weighted bit down the hole and breaks it up and then they wash it out. It’s the old way of doing it. Now it’s all rotary. And was even then, but this was a throwback to the earliest sort of Drake Well, and that sort of thing.

DTR:
And so in his capacity though, he would be more of somebody that would be working with his hands on the site, or he would be somebody who would be more at a desk?

JWR:
It was more of a desk, more of administration of the thing and troubleshooting out in the field.

DTR:
So he had to have all the technical understanding.

JWR:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. He knew it inside out. He was total expert on diesel engines.

DTR:
And then as they applied to something like oil drilling, that would spill over into elements of the drilling process itself, how this thing would

JWR:
Yeah. He knew the whole thing. Write the book as far as that went. He certainly was deeply versed in the whole oil field process. Even refining process too. He, I mean, he just knew the oil business.

DTR:
And what else besides—so oil was the most direct application of the diesel engine that he was working with.

JWR:
That’s right. And he also worked in municipal power generation before he went to Tulsa. In Springfield, he oversaw the installation of power plants in Marshfield and Neosho and other Missouri towns and cities.

DTR:
In overseeing them, then he would be, as you say, troubleshooting and always attempting to improve whatever the performance ratio, I guess of.

JWR:
Yeah. And he probably sold, it was sale in sales too. They did everything in those days in general practice. But they, I’m sure he had a lot to do with selling Fairbanks Morse drilling equipment to oil companies.

DTR:
So he’d be the initial representative that, he would contact them, or they’d contact him, I guess.

JWR:
I don’t really know how that went. I know that he worked very hard. Even on Sunday when we would—we always went to church. He would take us down to Sunday school at 9:30, and then he’d go to the office and work for an hour, and then he’d come back to the church and sing in the choir. We always went to church, and so there was Dad up there singing in the choir. Usually the Sunday School class, our friends, we’d go and sit in the balcony of this quite large church. It’s a beautiful church.

The minister there was a very heroic guy. He was one of the Oklahoma pioneers. He founded Tulsa University and he came into Oklahoma at the time of the Cherokee Strip opening in 1907 when they opened the Cherokee Strip and everybody rushed across the Kansas border to stake a claim in the land. He was in that. By the time I was a child and going to the church, he was a wonderfully impressive, dignified figure, Dr. William Kerr. He was kind of like a god almost. He was a tremendously eminent person, but he was the head of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, served a term in that.

But he also brought in some wonderful speakers. One of them was Dr. Clothier, who was an MD who was a medical missionary in Cameroon in Africa. And he came back for sabbaticals and gave talks. It was very inspiring to me. It probably had something to do with my going into medicine, although Mother already had let it be known to everybody that I was going to be a doctor. But this reinforced it.

Then there was another medical missionary from Point Barrow, Alaska who came and on these sabbaticals and would give talks and everything. That was inspirational. Many other famous theologians of the day came through so it was really a great experience. The church foundation of my life has meant a lot to me. I really feel that this is something that I wouldn’t want to have missed because it just gave me values and ideals and hopes and things of that sort that I think a lot of people miss if they don’t have, if they have a purely secular mass media sort of exposure that they get today.

There was one other famous man, Billy Sunday. You probably never heard of him, but he was a famous evangelist, like Billy Graham, of that time, and had been a Major League baseball player before he ran into the ministry. He was a very wonderful guy. He spoke once at our church. He was famous at that time. I don’t know if anybody knows about him today. But he’s a lot, you could compare him with Billy Graham. Who was also quite a fellow, I guess.

DTR:
It sounds as if in some ways, the church experience there was combining some of the best qualities of society at large, because there would be these other people who would come in and speak during the service on Sunday?

JWR:
Yeah. They’d have the sermon that day or something like that. And if Dr. Clothier would be there for a few weeks, he would hold evening meetings and talks and so forth. So when somebody like that came, we always took advantage of it and went to many of the meetings,

DTR:
Not just on Sunday.

JWR:
That’s right.

DTR:
It provided functions through the week at times, depending on who was around.

JWR:
Yeah.

JWR:
And this Kerr, the Reverend Kerr?

JWR:
Yeah.

DTR:
He must be related to Dr. Kerr. But there’s also either Senator or Congressman Kerr from Oklahoma.

JWR:
I don’t think they were related. It’s possible, I don’t know. Senator Kerr came along quite a bit later, although I’m not sure when Dr. Kerr died. He was pretty well along, but very vital. Matter of fact, he reminded me a lot of my Grandfather Thompson, who was also a very impressive man. You get some of your height from him, because he was much bigger than—he was a tall, very striking man and a great guy. We loved him a lot. He was a great Chicago Cubs fan. We would listen to the Cubs baseball broadcast in the afternoon, on summer afternoons when we were up in Beliot. He taught us how to score baseball games and things like that. So he was good. And he had a vegetable farming plot out by the factory Gardner Machine Company and he would bring back for lunch on these summer days a whole bunch of golden bantam corn back fresh picked, and Allen, he and I would sit there and eat a heap of golden bantam corn. That was very good, because it was so fresh and everything,

DTR:
It was available. It was grown right there.

JWR:
Yeah.

DTR:
I’ve always been curious about this, and I’ve heard it in different accounts, and you just alluded to it briefly, of Nanette’s influence on you, as, jokingly that she had already decided you were going to be a doctor. Where do you think she was coming from?

JWR:
Well, she had a favorite uncle, Uncle Ira.

DTR:
Who’s uncle Ira?

JWR:
Uncle Ira Thompson was was the head of the Health Department in Racine, Wisconsin. And I guess she had a—I don’t remember Uncle Ira myself. But I think that my Mother had a great deal of admiration for him. And she just really, I guess from the very beginning, wanted me to be a doctor.

DTR:
So he was her

JWR:
Uncle.

DTR:
He was her Uncle. Okay.

JWR:
He might have been my Grandfather Thompson’s brother. I’m not sure. He could be. Yeah. He was Uncle Ira. So he must have been my Grandfather Thompson’s brother.

DTR:
And somehow she was very much influenced by him, thought a great deal of him, apparently.

JWR:
Yeah. Yeah.

DTR:
And what were your earliest memories then of her, of the kinds of things either that she would say, or not necessarily directly directing at you, but the things that you would pick up of her?

JWR:
Well, this may be apocryphal, but I have the impression that we would be in a family gathering or meeting friends with the family in Beloit and they’d say, What’s little Johnny going to be when he grows up? You know, people. And this may be apocryphal, but I think that in my memory at least, she would say, He’s going to be a doctor. My Mother had a strong will. She was a woman of many parts. But I think that she, I guess maybe she wanted to have somebody like her Uncle Ira.

DTR:
That she thought a great deal of him. Of course. I guess in that timeframe, depression-wise, well, this would’ve, well, some of it would’ve been during the depression in the thirties, doctor must have been a pretty prestigious calling.

JWR:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s right. And I think that also they had a very dear friend our family doctor was Dr. Raube. And Mother and Dad were close family friends of theirs, and they all loved Herb Raube very much. And he was a great guy. I got to know him myself when I was going to college and going toward medicine. He was very nice to me. He took me to the hospital and showed me around and did all kinds of nice things so that he was also,

DTR:
He was a great role model as far as somebody who was a humanitarian.

JWR:
Yeah.

DTR:
He would inspire you.

JWR:
Yeah. And in those days, a doctor almost had to go to Europe for six months or something like that, Vienna, but you know, the gold Capitals, to get the gloss on the Apple. And Herb Robby had done that. He’d gone to Vienna.

DTR:
After he’d done his medical school here. Yeah. And even at that time, you had your intern and your residency that you would prefer—

JWR:
Yeah but it was much less formal. Right now, I’m reading a wonderful book. If you’re interested in this, you probably wouldn’t have the time or interest, but it’s a book that won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1984 by a man by the name of Paul Starr, who’s professor of sociology at Princeton. I’m reading it right now and it’s a wonderful recapitulation of the history of development. It’s called The Social Transformation of American Medicine. It’s a fantastic treasure trove of anecdotes and information about how it was back in the 18th century, 19th century, and how it’s evolved into today. I’m really just around 1910 now in this evolution. But it’s a great story and so much rich information that I didn’t know about. It’s a book that I’m really enjoying.

DTR:
So that gives you more background in some ways about, as you say, Dr. Raube, who was one of the last types perhaps, who would be going to Europe

JWR:
Yeah, that’s about right.

DTR:
to expand and extend their

JWR:
That’s what they did. And here now with the medical training that we have in our country, it’s the best in the world, so that you don’t have to go overseas. Although some people still go to Oxford or to St. Thomas in London or someplace to do special work. And they, they have very good programs. But you can get all you really need in our own programs in this country. So people generally don’t go overseas anymore. But some do, and it’s still profitable for anyone to do it. Especially if you want to be in academic medicine.

DTR:
Research based.

JWR:
Yeah. So that’s more or less the way Mother came about to feel it. And I looked around and I, why not? So I started, a lot of my reading in childhood had to do with Heroes of Medicine.

DTR:
Which were books you picked out. Yeah. She didn’t say, Hey, how about reading this one?

JWR:
No, she never did. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember really having any overt direction from Mother or Dad about doing homework or studying or read this, read that. They probably said, here’s a good book or something. But in general, we were motivated inwardly. It seems as if they somehow generated this internal motivation.

DTR:
But in a light lighter vein, you say, well, she said, oh, he’s going to grow up to a doctor. She wasn’t saying that though, about Allen.

JWR:
No.

DTR:
So you were the vanguard, you were the

JWR:
No, I think Mother thought that Allen would go into my Grandfather Thompson’s company, and he did. He was directed toward business administration. So he went to the University of Cincinnati and did that.

DTR:
But your sense is that somehow it wasn’t so much from urging overtly, continuously, or even mildly from the parents, but that somehow each one of you were drawn into the areas that you felt drawn into.

JWR:
Yeah. I think so. It’s, it’s kind of hard to define that. But I think that—and I’m not sure that Allen had the same fixed star, load star that I had. When I got to college I liked every, I wanted to be everything that I learned about there. It was great in English literature and history and, and physics and chemistry and so forth. Actually, I graduated from Johns Hopkins with a BA in chemistry. But I had switched from pre-med to chemistry during that course, but I still wanted to go to medicine. I wanted to take care of people. So that I came back to, I came back to medicine finally. But I did flirt with a lot of journalism. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent or a lot of things. I think every kid goes that. But I was really very keen to do something important or what I thought would be important.

DTR:
So there was just four years there that you were experimenting, exploring these different classes that you’d take. And really conceptualizing different potential futures.

JWR:
That’s right. Yeah.

DTR:
But you felt, it’s interesting, you graduated with a BA in chemistry, but I guess right after that you went and realized, no, what I really would like to pursue,

JWR:
Well, before I graduated, I was already accepted at Harvard Medical School. So that was, I never seriously left medicine. But I did take some good looks at some other fields which were attractive also. Even English literature. I was much drawn to the Romantic Poets and that sort of thing. I could have been, I could have gone that road too. But I always had an idea of foreign service officer or journalist or something like that, too. I always had this idea of a passing scene in world history and history thing. So it’s quite a, it’s been an adventure. And it unfolded, well, we’re just talking about early life right now, but I think that it’s actually fun to do this writing that I’m doing now, because it evokes a lot of memories and things kind of fall in place and bring back a lot of things that

DTR:
Are you approaching it more in a linear progression?

JWR:
Pretty much chronological by place, more by place and kind. But I reflect and flashbacks and flash forward and so forth so that it all just flows. Actually, I’m not having to ponder it very much. I’m just taking it as it comes up. I already have written quite a bit. I guess I’m up to going away to college now. But as I go ahead, I’ll think of things and go back. And the great thing about the word processor is I can just go back and splice it in.

DTR:
It’s like your video camera.

JWR:
Yeah. And I’ve made a file on a floppy disc for this whole project. So that’s all. I can show it to you if you want. You can read some of it

DTR:
I’d love to.

JWR:
But it’s kind of fun to do. I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time, but one of the things that held me up was the fact, I really didn’t know how to use a floppy disc and a backup and all that sort of thing. But Bruce helped me with that. He’s got me on that track now. So I’m building a file of writing on this very topic and also saving it back to the hard disk. The file name always has a period JWR. So that’s my story. So I can call that all up from the hard disk as well as by star period JWR, Will bring it out of the hard disk as well. And then I guess if I print it, I’ll have to figure out how to compose it in terms of editing or whatnot. I mean, in terms of formatting. I feel now that I’m, I’ve been using the computer for a lot of things, and I’ve felt that I’m glad for a long time that I’ve had it, and Joanne uses it too. But now I think that this is something that I’ve meant to do for a long time.