Document 06rddXBG0dw881Gmzqo3BgqZJ

MEMOIRS Randolph K. Byers June, 1986 Copyright Randolph K Byers, M.D. PU06637 N39095 INDEX Introduction ............................................................................... Origins .............................................................................................. Family Tree.................................................................................... Life at Home ................. School .................... The Renault .................. Death of William Byers ............ Trip to Europe, 1912 ........................................ .... The Distillery ................ College and Army ...................................................... First Meeting with MOB ............ Night Orderly at Newton Hospital............................. Medical School ................ Engagement to MGB ............... With the Grenfell Mission to Labrador ..... Wedding and Honeymoons ....................................................... Residency? MGH, Childrens, Boston City .... Start of Private Practice ....................................... Family .................... Trip to California with Doug, 1934 Death of SKB ................. Porcupine Point and Harley Fitch ....... Trip with Lloyd and Randy, Jr. ........ Medical Research: The Lead Poisoning Papers . Louis Diamond's Research ........... World War II: Sulfanilamides, Penicillin, and Streptomycin ................ Miss Smitty and the IRS, or the virtue of being Welsh ......... Electroencephalography: Frannie and Sue join the staff .......... .................... Appointment as Head of Neurological Service . . Work of Students and Colleagues: . .......................... Founding of the Walker School ......... Retirement (?)............................................................................... Trip to Europe with MCB, 1962 ......... Family and House in Milton, 1931-1962 .................... New House on Morton Road ........... Illness and Real Retirement, 1979 ....... Changes in Medicine Since 1921 ........ More Morton Road ............... Little. Compton ................ Grandma Cooke ................. The Hurricanes of 1938, 1944 The Hands ................... Helping Hands in Milton, 1981-1984 ...... The Itellow Lady Slippers ........... The Move to North Hill ............ Life at North Hill .............. Parting Words ................. Page 1 2 2 12 17 23 24 24 25 28 29 32 34 37 38 50 54 61 61 63 69 72 78 82 34 86 87 87 89 89 90 93 93 100 102 107 108 110 Ill 112 113 116 118 120 123 125 129 pL06638 INTRODUCTION In trying to writs my memoirs, I am giving in to pres sure applied by children and grandchildren, who seem most inter ested in family facts; but also to pressure by sons-in-law who seek to be informed about any contribution I may have made to medicine and even the public weal. I am not too impressed myself for it all seemed to come naturally out of whatever I was doing. My memories of the long-distant past are so much clearer than those of the immediate past that I suspect them, but I enjoy them Setting them down in written form disturbs me a little, and re minds me of my wisdom teeth. Ten years ago had I been hailed into court and been required to testify as to the then state of my wisdom teeth, I would certainly have testified that all four of ray wisdom teeth had been extracted. I remember my face feeling swollen like a pumpkin but looking disappointingly normal in the mirror. After my long-time dentist died of tetanus, I went to a new dentist who took x-rays of my teeth, which showed one unerupted wisdom tooth still present. Should any one quibble about any of the "facts" that I have recorded, I will simply refer to wisdom teeth. 3ut i the main, my story reflects life as I saw it, and in sum, it has been full of fun and comfortable satisfaction. ORIGIN'S My parents ware a vary diverse couple. My father was of Scots - Irish, Calvir.iso background. His father came from Moira in Ulster, and he ran stage coaches from Belfast to Dublin. With the advent zz the railroads and unsuccessful counter investments in new and better coaches to compete, he was forced to move to the New World and set up a coal dealership in Brooklyn where my father was born. I never knew in detail about his family, but certain members visited in my childhood; I don't know their relative ages. The most imposing was Uncle John Byers, a tall straight man with a white handle-bar mustache. He was at one time Associate Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. Whether he was ever married I do not know, but with him lived his sister, Aunt Min, who came up from Brooklyn to read aloud to us children whenever illness struck. I don't remember either of them after I was eight or ten years of age. There were several mythical figures in his family -- Uncle Tom whom father had seen drunk once, and who was therefore never allowed near my father's family. His son became a federal judge in Brooklyn and made headlines in the papers by refusing an in crease in salary, voted by Congress, I think, during the Hoover Administration. Another was Aunt Anna Maston, who lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and who in later years was prbtty much dependent on my mother for support but was never satisfied with what she got. She had two sons to whom my and my brother Lloyd's bicycles were shipped as Christmas presents suddenly without a by-your-leave, much to our sorrow and their displeasure, for the PL066M0 bikes were " second hand" in the recipier.es1 eyes. These boys .never did anything useful to support their .tether as far as I know. Aunt Sara Hanna I never saw. She lived in Newark with her only daughter and lived on a veteran's pension (her husband having been killed in the Civil War) and supported herself in addition by painting greeting cards. My mother was very fond of her. Father's youngest sister, Helen 3arrows, was not allowed in our house by father, because her first baby had been born eight months after her marriage, which proved to him she had been "immoral." I met her after father's death; she was a charming, lively, imagina tive woman. I felt I had been deprived by her banishment, but she bore no ill will toward father. Father and mother were married on October 19, 1389 (I know because the combination of the household safe was 10/19/89). Father came to Boston as a salesman for Mill & Gibb, a New York wholesale dry goods firm. He drove about the suburbs selling to small dry goods stores from about Brookline to Natick, I'm told. In winter he had a pung with a pair of heavy horses and a racoon fur coat that reached to his shoe tops and warmed his feet when he sat. Somehow he and mother felt that being a salesman was an inferior job and he set out later in life to be a manufacturer. At this he was a colossal failure, operating on the theory that if a competitor could make it at a given price, he could also. I suspect Mother set him up in business a couple of times and then gave up. This greatly colored his outlook on life, especially in view of the financial success of two of Mother's brothers, who were close family members. pL066Mi Mother had a, vary close and jovial family. Her father, Henry Rudolph Kunhardt, was tore or less forcibly evicted from Hamburg where his family had beer, prominent for generations. My impression is that, he could not compete 'with 5ismart as a pirate. He left Germany in 1349 in a schooner well stocked with hardware. On the ocean crossing a boat going eastward told of the California gold strike, and he changed course for California around Cape Horn. A fortunate thunder shower at St. Paul's Rocks in the Atlantic Ocean is said to have provided him with the additional fresh water required by the change in plans. Provisions were available at 3uenes Aires and around the Horn they went, but instead of San Francisco, they stopped in Valpariso where business was apparently good. From there a side trip, to the Sanawich Islands let him have an audience with Queen Liliuokalani. Thence to San Francisco where he set up a successful merchandizing busi ness , but was burned out after a year or so. As I understand it, this gave him a chance to sail back around the Horn and to New York to claim his bride, Catherine Trainor Bradis'n, born in Norwich, England. All this occurred in the days before steamers, much less air travel. Grandpa came from a long line of doers and shakers for which see the Byers' family tree written by me in about 1970. He had left behind in Hamburg his brother, George Edward Kunhardt, of whom he was very fond. I never saw my grandfather but he is reputed to have been a very male-rights oriented man. My mother reported that when Garfield was shot she made some remark to the effect that she would have thought they could take better care of PL066M2 -r.s President than that. He said to her, "Susie, women neither chink about nor have opinions on such subjects." Catharine Trainer Bradish was born and brought up in England. How she and rr.y grandfather got to know each other is unknown to ns. I used to be required to go to her '.Tew York apartment, ail dressed up in a sailor suit and patent leather button boots to recite poetry to her. She tolerated this. She died in 1905 leaving a very considerable estate, amassed by her husband. She and my grandfather had six children. First Lilia, a very sanctimonious churchly lady who married two Episcopal clergy men, the first of whom died of tuberculosis soon after marriage. Her second husband was Edward Warren, minister of St. Jcunes Church on Madison Avenue, New York. They had one son, Edward Kunhardt Warren who, Aunt Lilia informed me, when he was about ten, could not abide brass bands. He looked to me like an undertaker from early childhood. I was never very welcome to his mother after I cut a bunch of fire crackers in his hip pocket and lit them one fourth of July. The next child of the Kunhardt's was Wheaton Bradish Kunhardt. He remained a bachelor all his life. He was a graduate of Stevens Institute in New Jersey and quits early in life was appointed receiver of the Carpenter Steel Company, of which he made a great financial success, I have been told, by inventing ways of cost accounting that left his competitors in the lurch. Next, was Uncle George Edward Kunhardt who married twice: his first wife, Harriot, died of meningitis soon after marriage; PU06643 his second wife, Martha Knapp from Norwalk, Conn, (a friend of the deceased Harriot) was the arbiter of Victorian tanners in our clan. You could not put honey fret the pot or. your toast in her house, you oust put it on a butter plate first, followed by discreet applications to toast, each to be eater, in one bite. They had four children, tore or lass rny age. The oldest of these cousins was Harriot, who married Felix Knauth -- after her parents refused to let her marry her first cousin, Farwell Knapp of Norwalk. Next came George Edward, Junior, known as Jack. He was a hard living, hard drinking tan who married twice. His first wife, whom I.still see and admire, divorced him. He took his second wife when he was probably in his sixties. They achieved a son. When I asked Jack how he felt about living with a new baby at sixty or so, he said, "There is nothing like a do-it-yourself grandchild to make an old man feel young." Philip, Jack's younger brother, lived an effective conservative sort of life. He was president of the Harvard Club of New York for a while and carried on a woolen business in New York. His wife was Dorothy Kunhardt who wrote imaginative child ren's books during the 30's and 40's such as Junket Is Nice and Pat the Bunny. Their son, Philip, was publisher of Life Magazine for a period in the 1960s. Hildegarde, the youngest, was very beautiful and resembled a daguerreotype of her Grandmother Kundardt made when the latter was a late teenager. She married a school teacher and eventually moved to Arizona where she and her husband set up an artistic photographic business, dealing largely in landscapes. I grew up next door to this family, knew them quite well, and was 3 Laced 'ey my mother and uncle ;o enter his mill business as I grew older. Why, I can't imagine as I had had the temerity in 1914, -luring the great I.W.W. 3tribes of mill workers in Lawrence, to suggest perhaps someone in authority in the mill ought to visit the workers to see how they lived. I was virtually excommunicated from the family circles for such audacity and lack of loyalty. After Uncle George came Uncle Henry Kunnardt, a jovial sociable man, married to Mabel Farnham. The latter was tolerated, just barely, by my father because she used "face powder," part of the devil's armament. I was very fond of both and as a child, visited their house in Bernardsville, New Jersey, several times. They had three sons, the youngest of whom I fought with frequently and freely. They are all dead. Next in line of Kunhardts came my mother, Susie Alvena Kunnardt, born in 1861, died in 1934. Why she and my father ware attracted to each other I cannot guess. Mother was quite European in outlook and, I suspect, rather expected men to have mistresses. She also liked a glass of wine or beer with her meals, a frivolity frowned upon by Father. Mother never was comfortable in company but was very attached to her family and most upset when any of her children failed to turn up for a meal because of activities in college or business. The last Kunhardt child was Katharine, who was born about 1865 and died in the late 1930's. She married George Mosle, and they had five children, one of whom died in childhood of diph theria. She was one of the most: domineering women I ever encountered. I can still see her shaking her head violently while her pince-nez flopped to and fro telling everyone how life should he lived. I once overheard her telling her gardener not to water some wild flowers that her husband had put into her garden. "They will just die and he'll never know the difference." He died in a mental hospital after many years of custodial care. Father and mother had six children, five boys in a row followed by one girl. My father adored his only daughter but very sadly for him, she would have little to do with him as a little child. He died when she was five and never succeeded in winning her affection. Edward, my oldest brother was born in 1392 and died in 1976. After finishing St. George's School and Harvard, he married Mary Dimick in 1917 and went to live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he represented the American Woolen Company. Service in the First World War interrupted their stay in South America. They had three sons and a daughter, the latter dying in infancy. The boys are all married and have grown children. Eddie and Mary moved to a beautiful farm in Canaan, Connecticut, in 1939, preferring farm ing to business. There they very generously entertained friends and relatives, letting them help work the farm, make maple syrup, or run tractors. These expeditions were anticipated eagerly by me and my children and always lived up to expectations. Generosity was the watchword. Eddie, having grown up in his Mother's European-oriented household, likeed his coffee with hot milk in it. Each morning a pitcher of hot milk and a pot of coffee were sat before his place at -he breakfast: table. Ha also acquired a super-size coffee cup that oust have half the better part of a pint. Each morning he filled this cup with half coffee and half hot milk and then sat back to eat fruit, eggs, and pancakes and verbally dilated on the latest crimes of F.D. R. or whatever Democrat was in the '.'hita House. Whenever he had finished this exercise he turned his attention to the by then quite cold cup of coffee with a skim on it. The Eisenhower Administration afforded him eight years of unappreciated warm breakfast coffee. Wheaton, the second son, was a good student and was a metalurgist. He developed one of the early formulae for the manufacture of stainless steel at Carpenter Steel Company in Reading, Pennsylvania. He married Corinne Weston, but they had no children. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1925, aged thirty-one years. I was the next child, born in 1896 and still plodding. After me came William Lloyd, born in 1397, died ir. 1949. He was unfortunate in that he was not a student and was by dispo sition a charming bon vivant. He was the favorite of all the neighboring ladies since he was so friendly as a child. I once had a letter from Father to Lloyd upbraiding him for wasting Father's money (which was really Mother's) by not applying himself to his studies in boarding school. In spite of this, he was still required to go to Harvard where his self-esteem suffered. Given a chance Lloyd could have sold Santa Claus ice blocks at the North Pole, but this asset: of his went undeveloped, and he ended leading Pt-06647 "he unhappy life of an alcoholic and eying of cirrhosis of the liver at about fifty-two. To me he was charming and generous, and I could go on trips into the woods with him for two or three weeks curing which he always gave up drinking spontaneously. He was married to Adelaide Clifford and they had one son, William Lloyd, Jr. Douglas Swain was my parents fifth child. He married Dorothy Hayes of Andover and after a brief attempt at banking as a profession, went into archeology. He was for many' years director of the Peabody Museum in Andover, which is loosely associated with Fnillips Andover Academy. He did quite well in the archeologic world, editing a series of volumes on the American Indian and redesigning and enlarging the Museum. He and I drove from Andover, Massachusetts, to Santa Barbara, California, (by compass through much of Arizona) to visit Mother, who then lived there, in 1934. A trip on which I learned more about archeology, geology, and local history than I ever will again -- all told with humor and a wink at philosophy. He was, outside my own family, the dearest thing to me I had on earth. He and Dot had three children, two girls and a boy, whom I knew quite well. The elder girl married a soldier. Colonel Ralph Dethrow, who had a disasterous stroke years before his death, which left him physically helpless, but mentally competent. Corinne cared for him, their three children, and just to keep busy, a couple of horses as well, over a period of seven or eight years and was genuinely cheerful throughout. Upper left: Susie Kimhardt Byers with Wheaton and Edward, 189? tipper right: Mary Bartley with Randolph and Lloyd, 1898 Bel^ws SIB with Hannah. outside ''Cozylodge" in Newton'Centre, 1897 PL0&&49 PL.0&63O Tbp: Harvesting ice on Crystal Lake, 1897 Bottom left: Lloyd, SKB, RIB, August, 1898 Bottom right: Wheaton, Randolph, Edward, Lloyd, 1900 PL.Q&6S % PL06652 Tops The Barker loose, 1902 Above:. Susie Kunhardt Byers, Lilia Kunhardt Warren, Katherine Kunhardt Mosle, 1905 Sight: WllMaa Byers PL06653 Top lefts Douglas Swain Byers, 1906 Top right: William Byers and Barbara, 1907 Bottom left: House in North Andover, 1KB Bottom right: Barbara, 1908 -11- Their second child, a son William, was educated first as a pollen paleontologist, a calling of concern to oil companies in search of new oil. This seemed to him too greasy a business and he took four years of training to become an Episcopal minister. He appeared to be too liberal to please his presiding bishop and congregation and was discharged from his post but not unfrocked. He has been a moving spirit in synthesizing the Byers clan. Marjorie, their youngest, had four children, one of whom was very extensively burned when her nightgown caught fire in the oven. This latter child, in spite of severely burned hand and amputated fingertips and facial scars, is an excellent pianist and the life of the party. She was married just recently. Barbara was my parents' last child. She married George Bancroft, son of a Professor of Chemistry at Cornell. Though he had an extensive technical education in chemistry, soon after they were married they settled down to farming near Pittsburg. They raised chickens for the market and horses for hunting and showing. They had six children, and Barbara achieved the distinction of nursing her youngest while buttoning her second into her bridal gown. (Sadly I had no camera on hand to record the event.) Barbara fell off her horse hunting and broke her neck at the age of seventy-two and lived as a helpless paraplegic for about two years, able to talk and move her right thumb and index finger slightly. Her husband died of cancer at about the same time she did in 1975. PUQ66SS -12- To return to the more mundane path of tracing my past, I was brought up in a pretty well starched household at 130 Lake Avenue, Newton Center, Massachusetts, on the west shore of Crystal Lake. I recently drove by my old home, which looks much the same from the street. However the granite block from which ladies decorously mounted their side-saddle equipped horses is gone, as is the hitching post beside it. The stable has also been demol ished. Life there no longer revolves about horsesl The household consisted of my parents and siblings and a very rotund kind Irish nurse/maid, Mary Bartley, who cared for Lloyd and me very lovingly. We all three lived in the "nursery" together, and Mary took her daily bath behind a screen that surrounded the wash basin. On moonlit evenings Mary used to delay lighting the gas so Lloyd and I could pat the patch of moonlight on the nursery floor. She also read us Robert Lewis Stevenson about the lamplighter as the local lamplighter came by on fall evenings. There also was an Irish cook and an Irish chambermaid, as well as a waitress. They were all, as I remember it, kinder and more interested in us than our parents were, in spite of very low rates of pay. The quality of their speech influenced ours as I' 11 describe later. There also was a coachman to look after horses and drive family members on shopping trips, to school on rainy days, and even to church occasionally. He lived in his own house not far away, but when a horse got "cast" (i.e., lying down in his stall) at night it was up to Father and one of his boys to right the animal -- to me, at least, a dangerous task. FL066S6 -13- About the time Lloyd and I outgrew the care of a nursetalc, and Louglas came along to claim her services, Mother decided it vas important to preserve some of cur -German heritage. She engaged a German governess to watch over us. Her .tame was Anna Hichter, and she was obviously the product of a very practical German middle-class family. To increase my confusion about the acquisition of reading and writing, her first duty was to instruct us in writing German script (a skill which has long since vanished from my repertoire) and to read German print (a skill which remained useful in medical school and medical research). Praulein Richter also knew a lot about nature. Her family had obviously supplemented their diet at home with a variety of mushrooms. She used to go into the woods about North Andover gathering not only the unusual champignon, or to her "Franzosen Piltz," but also "birchen piltz" or birch mushrooms whose stems resembled in color the stems cf grey birch trees -- these were her favorite -- and various others, especially morels now a faded memory to me. These various edible mushrooms [Anna Richter was always che "guinea pig" in testing for edibility) were sliced, then put into muslin bags each kind to its own bag, and dried in the attic. They appeared in sauces and soups throughout the winter and were mostly very good. "Fligen Piltz" was another of Fraulein Richter* s spe cialties. This was one of the deadly amonita "toad stools," the one that appears with brown spots on its umbrella. These wars never dried, but put moist: and fresh in a concoction of sugar and water, and might be boiled a bit, then put in open pans in little Pl_D6657 wooden la.ct.ice boxes to keep them oat of reach of dogs, children, and others. There was no doubt that soon the pans of liquid were well populated with dead insects. 1 was never able to convince myself that mosauitces fall for the bait. Although, it seamed less buggy sitting outdoors in the evening near a pan of "fligen piltz" bait, the danger was so great that its use was soon abandoned inspite of Fraulein Richter's disapproval. With the approach of World War I, Fraulein Richter returned to her native land, and none of us much mourned her absence. Our backyard gave directly onto Crystal Lake, a small pond, perhaps one-half by one-third mile. We had a small ~^ck which was taken in curing the winter and a little row boat called the "Wood Duck," which we all learned to manage at an early age. Skaters fell through the ice in the winter, and I vaguely remember Father swimming under the ice to pull one of them out, to me a . very frightening experience. Coasting down our bank unto the ice was a big thrill. Another paternal crisis occurred on a Fourth of July when Father went offshore on the raft that formed the end of our dock to set off fireworks over the pond. Somehow the pile of fireworks became ignited. Father jumped into the water and swam ashore with rockets, bombs, and Roman candles blazing about him. Abutting our home on the north was Farnham1 s lot, about one or two acres of undeveloped land fenced in by barbed wire. It was said the Farnhams, who Lived across the street from it, called the police if anyone intruded on their land. Two old broken down PLQ66SS aopie trass and grass and wild bushes occupied it, but like ail little boys,. 11 ova and 1 wondered what .tight be there. In the fail we could creep in by twilight to steal a sour apple or two, but in the spring, when "we had to go to bed by day" we never had the courage to go through the fence to pick violets which grew in long-stemmed profusion. Up at the end of Mooreland Terrace, a short street with five or six houses on each side, lay "The Woods." To us this was a deep forest where we picnicked with bonfires over which we cooked bacon and roasted corn and potatoes. We never saw an Indian, though we were apprehensive about them. Later we discov ered that Walnut Street with trolleys lay one-quarter mile beyond. The Farnhams were an elderly childless couple who lived alone in their clapboard house on Lake Avenue nearly across the street from us. No one ever saw their mattresses sticking out their bedroom windows as did those of the whole neighborhood on Tuesday mornings for airing. Fresh air was as much a fetish at that time as is jogging today. In their seventies both Farnham's died within a few days of each other. It was then discovered that the Farnham's windows were nailed shuti I remember the protest meeting, addressed I imagine to God, complaining that such impious people had been allowed to live so long. We lived a life regulated by many prohibitions. Under no circumstances could anyone work (except for saddling or harnes sing horses) on Sunday. We could not see the Sunday papers, for these contained awful things like the comics which were pure trash FLQ66S9 and car" of Satan's works. (Fortunately the coachman saved his for us in the barn where we could pursue the Kaczenjammer Kids in peace. We could not ro and play ball with rough boys for fear we .tight learn bad words. We could not play marbles for keeps for this was "gambling." We always wore starched Eton collars, even at play, to Look like little gentlemen. There were good times, too. Especially I remember Christmas when we had a great feast and a Christmas Tree lighted with real candles. As a fire precaution a wet sponge tied to the end of a cane stood in. a pail of water beside it. Never a firel And what shiny great giftsi Among regularly recurrent less glamorous Christmas gifts for each of us there were always a one-pound box of chocolatevanilla kisses and a one-pound box of S.S. Pierce's (pronounced Purse's) sugared figs. For most of us, the chocolate kisses van ished rapidly, the sugared figs more gradually. Lloyd, however, always took his chocolate kisses and laid them away in his lower bureau drawer among garter snakes, rocks, and other treasures. About the fourth of July he would bring them forth and begin to taunt the rest of us with his frugal foresight. After a while he would relent and share, but the chocolates were so hard we had trouble chewing them. In the summers of perhaps 1899 to 1901 we went by Pull man Car on the train to Plymouth, New Hampshire, and drove in a coach to the Sugar Hill House where we stayed a couple of weeks or so. I remember feeling discriminated against, being the youngest, by never being allowed to go on family picnics climbing "Garnet pt-o&aao Mountain." I was sure if allowed to, I would find a garnet there, out never made it. One day I wandered out on the golf course to look around. ' Text thing 1 knew I was in the " Arabian Grotto" a part of the hotel off limits to me because of the Arabian girls in low cut gowns in attendance. I was bewitched by the semi-light and the glittering necklaces and costume jewelry on display, but mystified about why I was there. It seems an errant me had interrupted the flight of an on-course golf ball with my head and been knocked out for long enough to be carried indoors, the center of much concern. That was the nearest I came to semiprecious stones in Sugar Hill. The summer of 1901 we gave up the White Mountains and started summering in a small farm house known as the Barker House, which had been acquired by my Uncle George Kunhardt, and remodeled with plumbing and new wallpaper. It was an unfortunate move for Mother, who at best was terrified of lightening and'thunder, for while we were at home one evening lightening struck the house throwing a ball of plaster across the living room into the opposite wall, melting the pull chainon the upstairs toilet and melting a picture wire, the picture crashing to the ground. Mother was emotionally undone for days. That fall, finally, years of learning turned up on the calendar. The night before I was to start school a torchlight parade passed the house in NewtonCenter. I reluctantly was finally persuaded that the parade had more to do with the campaign of McKinley (whoever he was) for President., than with my departure to school next morning. Pi-0666 1 "ext. .tomint I went off to the brand new Mason School, set in the center of ihat had been "avion Center Common. I remember no events in school. What I do remember is that 1 came home with a lovely brand new word and used it the first opportunity at lunch. "Look at that tarn fly in the sugar bowl." Instantly the whole house came to a silent halt; I think even the kettle; on the stove probably stopped boiling. Wot a word of reproof was said in my presence, but next day I was driven four miles to the Chestnut Hill School, a private school for nice little boys and girls. I attended that school with my brother, Lloyd, for the next eight years, riding the suburban train from Newton Center Station to Cnestnut Hill Station and walking a short way at each end. We had lots of fun putting pennies on the rails and watching the next passing train flatten them. Think of the Indian Head pennies that went down the drain by this route. Why we were not killed escapes mel One very vivid memory of about third grade remains in my mind. All the years I was in Cnestnut Hill School I felt bewildered by the teachers' efforts: perhaps I had one of the many disorders grouped under the name dyslexia in the present parlance. At any rate, I turned in a composition with the word "across" spelled "acrosst" as it was pronounced by my intimates, the maids, at home. The teacher, ordinarily a kind considerate person, arose at school the next day and read aloud my production looking right at me and emphasizing "acrosst." The class burst into laughter and I can still feel the blush that overspread my face. I was known for some months as "acrosst" in school. 19- I conr.ir.ued to be sent to Chestnut Hill School, which in its uooer trades became almost entirely female in its enrollment, until I was twelve. I still had no idea what education was all about, and I was a complete failure in athletics even in competition with girls. (Don't take offense, feminists.) At twelve I was to begin the six most unhappy years of my life. I was sent to St. George's School, Middletown, Rhode Island. I was tonally unprepared to hold my place in a society of fairly independent boys. I was a dismal failure at school work and was both clumsy and afraid on the athletic field. Mr. Allen Wheeler, the director of athletics, and I soon came to a misunderstanding which lasted throughout my s+-y there. Strangely to me ne was obviously the most popular master among the boys. One day he hailed me and gave me a dressing down about always wearing a starched Eton collar in school. I explained that the costume was what my mother gave me, but he simply growled, "Stop being a mommy's boy" and left. A few days later I found somewhere about the dormitory a heavenly, soft-collared shirt, and dirty as it was, proudly wore it. The shirt happened to be Mr. Wheeler1s son1s shirt, and did I ever get a dressing down as a "sneak" and "a thief." The head of the mathematics department was a little Episcopal priest named Peasley. He was as precise as his disci pline and sharp tongued. Should a submitted geometry or algebra paper not please him, he simply folded ic and creased it with his thumb nail, requiring that the whole paper be done ever. One day he returned a creased geometry paper to Harold Sterner, who later became a well-known ITe you should be ashamed York architect, with the comment, "Harold, this paper. Why, at your age, George Washington was an accc: lished' surveyor." Whereupon Harold rose ao his feet and replis M Sir, at your age George Washington was already President of f United States. " Harold was looked upon with favor by Mr. Peas ley from then on. The Reverend Mr. Diman, head of the school, was so possessed by his own ecclesiastical problems that he paid little attention to the boys. He finally, converted from being an Episcopal priest to Roman Catholicism and left the school. His sister, Emily, who lived at the school kept open house with tea certain afternoons and read stories in the evenings to any boys who cared to visit her. She was an oasis of kindness. In general in the first decades of the century I think it is fair to say that the faculty felt it taught all there was to know in the world, and the body .of knowledge imparted was certainly considered to be final. However, it was often easy to put them into an uncomfortable corner. For example, I became unpopular in the science department with Mr. Sturtevant, a very kind, boy-scout sort of man, when he taught us about acids. In brief he said that acids tasted sour, that they reacted with many metals to release hydrogen and dissolve the metals, and turned blue litmus dye red. When I asked what acids were he repeated their characteristics, but would go no further when I claimed he was enumerating what acids could do, but not telling us what they were. I don't think he ever got the point. PLD6664 At the end of each academic semester the school standing by academic grades -as read aloud to the entire school, gathered for the purpose or. the main school room. At first this -as a very humi-latino occasion for me as 1 generally stood near the bottom, it first I understood as little as 1 had in Chestnut Hill School about what went on in the classroom. Rather suddenly in my third year at school I found Z was doing very well, and the last three years at school I ranked at the top along with the bright boys like Harold Sterner. During my first years in school everyone exhorted me to try harder and I was trying as hard as I could. Mow all of a sudden everyone said "see you're trying harder, the results are wonderful. " By my own standards my efforts ware no more intense than before, but suddenly school work became easy. I felt guilty because I was being applauded by my family and teachers for success that came almost of itself, probably because of my maturing and the curriculum changing its emphasis from English grammar and spelling to subjects like chemistry and history about which one could reason. However, even Latin and Greek seemed easy. I was no better on the atheltic field and found it difficult to be enthusiastic about watching the school team play each Saturday in football, basketball, or baseball. Fortunately there were a few Saturdays free of sports when I could go for walks along the beaches and marshes and watch the abundant migra tions of water birds. Audubon bird books were unknown to me (I am not sure any existed at that time), but my mother had taught me about some of the birds that came near our home in Newton Center and '.North Andover. The School completely neglected a teaching resource at its doorstep daily; perhaps no faculty member vas qualified. The person who came nearest to addressing my loneliness at school was Mr. Herbert French Preston, a middle-aged mildmannered man who taught English and Latin, as I remember it. From time to time he would ask me to go a walk with him. He took me along the too of the ridge that upholds Aquidneck Island to an ancient windmill, where corn was reduced to Rhode Island Corn Meal, the ingredient of Rhode Island Johnny Cakes. According to him, "Johnny Cake" was a contraction for Journey Cake. Since the cakes were unleavened and fried to a firm crust outside, they could be tucked in about a traveler's clothes and eaten cold as required. He also showed the great stone wheels which were activated by fabric sails set on yardarms that could be turned to face the wind by winching the top of the circular mill into the necessary position. I remember other walks, but this was the high point of my adventures with Mr. Preston, Sundays at school were a special day; every boy, no matter what his religious background, was required to walk four miles to St. Columbia's Chapel to morning prayer -- on Easter we had to do the walk twice. It is astonishing to me how my feet hurt on that walk, compared to the buoyancy of my pace in going to look at terns play in the ocean off Sachuest Point at least as far away. Thanksgiving we were allowed to go home for the day provided our homes were near enough. `We chugged into town in gorge Edward Kunhardt,, Mila Kunhardt Warren, two unidentified wanea, Wheaton Bradish Kunhardt, 'Mabel Kuaahsrdt, liartha Kunhardt, and Henry Kunhardt Wheaton, Edward, Kingsley Kunhardt, ED, and .Kunhardt Warren Edward at the wheel of the family's new Renault, 1908, with Kingsley Kunhardt and Kunhardt Warren riding behind PLD6647 -23- -wo-cyUnder -utccar taxis, took the train to 3ostcr. and then to :;swton Center, What excitement! However, I remember one trip that ended an frustration and anger. On the way heme I bought for a dime a copy of Life Magazine a la 1910 or so. This was a vary gentle, humorous conservative publication, but I had never seen it ;? until then. When we arrived home my father was indignant -"What, you're spending my money cn Satan's work!" was his cry. I didn't hear the last complaints about my moral turpitude for months. However, a good Thanksgiving dinner silenced Satan for a short time. The summer of 1908 was a banner season. My family, at the urging of Cousin Rudolph Kunhardt, purchased a 1905 `wocylinder Renault touring car. It had a magneto but no batteries in the ignition system and therefore required "spinning the crank" to start it. This I was just able to do, but my two older brothers could often start it handily. It was temperamental and not infrequently refused to start for anyone, in which case the magneto had to be shipped to New York for tinkering. One day in mid-summer Edward, Wheaton, and I and a hired chauffeur started out from North Andover to visit Aunt Lilia in Prouts Neck, Maine, just South of Portland, a ninety-mile journey. A flat tire was in those days a disaster requiring removing the tire, identifying the leak in the inner tube, and vulcanizing a patch on it with a gadget made for the purpose in which burning alcohol supplied the heat for the job, then reapplying the tire, being careful not to pinch the inner tube, pumping it up with a hand pump, and hopefully cranking up for a new start. An hour and a half usually did it. pi_Q466B The first, fay, narked by countless tire changes, we got as far as the beach at York, Maine, where we fed the mosquitoes all night, lying on a blanket on the ground. We had brought some food with us. Next fay we went through deep woods on very poorly defined tracks, but progressed so that we made Aunt Lilia's in the mid-afternoon -- 36 hours for 90 miles. Her butler, Peterson, as was his want, served us shad with not a bone in it. We thought he might leave the skeletons of the shad on our road to puncture our tires. In the fall of 1911 I had a contretemps with my father. He asked me to get a pan of water for Buster, the English Bull Terrier. In doing so some of the water slopped onto the floor of his study. He at once flew into a rage at my carelessness and cuffed my ears. Next day I went off to boarding school. Father's birthday was about October 5th and I purposely did not write him a birthday letter, a usual chore. On October 11th, Mr. Diman sum moned me to his office, told me my father was very ill, and to take Lloyd with me and go home. When I got there I found that Father had dropped dead on the golf course the day before. My sorrow was doubled by guilt over my withheld birthday letter. The guilt is still with me occasionally. During the summer of 1912, six months after my father's death, Mother decided to send my two older brothers and me to Europe to see the sights under the guidance of Harold Arrowsmith, a very agreeable and respected young teacher at St. George's. We planned much of the trip to be on foot. We set sail from Boston on the Laconia in June, 1912, and landed in Liverpool. From there p u o *66? Upper left: Lloyd and SIB near the Worcester train line in Newton Centre (Bate is probably 1912 or later, as- SIB is in mourning ) Upper rights Mr. Arrowsmith,, unidentified friend, RIB, and Wheaton about to start over the Stelvio Pass, 1912 Bottom left: Lilia Warren at Keansbago, 1915 Bottom right: Barbara PL06670 -25- we made quick visits Chester to visit the Prince of Wales's castle and to 3angor or. the island of Anglesey which forms the northwest, hook of Wales . We tried swimming in the sea there -- cold, cold, cold, jelly fish, jelly fish, felly fish. Most repulsive swimming I ever encountered. Somehow we got from Bangor to Belfast, I suppose by a ferry of some sort. There we visited relatives of my father's in Glascow, a very grim city, but I remember little about them save that they strongly recommended a visit to that "spalpeen of the family who had married into Dublin, one of those Bushmills." The name meant nothing to me, but we soon took the train to Dublin, where we were mat and taken in lovingly. We were taken to the races, which I thought very boring: you stand around til your feet are excruciatingly flat, then someone shoots off a gun and by the time you get oriented and look toward the race, it's all over. We were also taken to the theater a couple of times and shopping in Dublin, a lovely city. Finally, at breakfast the last morning of our visit, our host remarked in his beautiful brogue, "Tis your last day, we must see the distillery." Off we went. It was all very grey and dull and early morning, but presently St. Patrick's Cathedral chimed out nine ringing strokes. Our host's face became illuminated by a smile and he said, "A terrible disservice was served on me as a child; I was made to take the oath, and I canna drink before nine in the morning, but now we can go see the office." We went. If was beautiful -- black walnut panels of cathedral height, hung with gold-framed portraits of Bushmills, PL06671 back, I suspect, to the time of Oliver Cromwell. He didn't waste time with introductions to forebears, but retting to the point at once, he rang a bell summoning a porter, who shuffled in bent over and said, " Nu phwat?" "Have we a1 ting fitt'n to serve these gentlemen?" "Well," said the porter, "the 179B was a'drunk up yistiddy, but we've a bit o'1303. Could ye do wi it?" "Lets try," said our host. Presently the porter shuffled back with a dusty, fiber-bound glass gallon jug, handed each of us a cut glass tumbler (which in my memory stands out as big as a pail), and proceeded to pour dark liquid into my glass. I didn't >-ow enough to say "when," but he stopped after a while and poured for the others. "These gentlemen are American, should we let them have some ice?" "Noo," said the porter and shuffled out. I did the best I could to emulate our host who swallowed most of his whiskey in one gulp, but all I could manage was a few sips and many chokes and splutters. Finally I looked so pale and wan, my brothers took pity on me and pulled and hauled me onto theirshoulders to a nice cool dark cellar. I heard afterward it was the crypt of St. Patrick's Cathedral where I was violently ill. They next dragged me to the train for Belfast where I was sick out the window much of the way. I was able to get to our cousins in Belfast and, by next morning, I was able to resume our walking crip having crossed to Strannear in Scotland on the ferry. Pl_Q6672 -27- Vie walked to and climbed Ben Lomond, a beautiful smooth Low mountain. On the climb we drank cut of pools cf beautiful tasting cold clear waters celling up from the mountainside. At the top we encountered a German tourist who told us such a practice was most dangerous and gave us a small bottle of acetic acid which he said added to the water would make it safe to drink. Maybe it did, but we didn't find out since it tade the water taste so bad we abandoned the treatment. At any rate, we survived. At Stirling we encountered a heat wave, so hot the waitresses in the local restaurant were fainting of the heat. As far as we could find out it was seventy-six degrees Faranheit in the shade. We walked to York, visited the Cathedral, and then went by train to London. I have little memory of this part of our trip, but I remember London as a pleasant blur of activity. We did see the Guard change at St. James Palace, a memory brought back by reading "When We were Very Young" to my children years later. The British Museum held us in thrall. We crossed from England to Holland by ferry from Folkstone to Scheveninaen. Arriving for breakfast Wheaton ordered a glass of curacao, which he imagined was a type of orange juice. A long draft made him turn red in the face, gag, and vomit. I never knew him to drink before breakfast again. We went from Holland to Hamburg where we visited some Kunhardt relatives who were quite vocal about the injustice cf allowing England to own their offshore island of Heligoland. Certainly the seeds of World War I were being exposed but went unrecognized by us. The City Hall of Hamburg, a beautiful white PL06673 stone building, had "any Kundardt names inscribed on i; as people in authority, such as mayors and the like. This building was totally destroyed in World War II.' After Hamburg we went by train to Turenberg and Innsbruck from where we walked into Switzerland past a lovely little Alpine Village called Trafoi and then, over the Steivio Pass which was on the then borders of Austria, Switzerland, and Italy overlooking the Bernina Valley in Italy. Somehow we retreated from there into Switzerland and walked down the Rhone Glacier and over a pass into the Visp Valley and to Zermatt. My feet got as sore as they did in walking to church in ray St. George' s days, but the scenery was so startling it took a much bigger dose of walking to produce comparable discomfort. It finally turned out I had a plantar wart which a local doctor removed. After a visit to the top of an Alp and then to Gsns v3. and Paris we sailed home. I am sure we visited many sights like cathedrals and museums of which I have no recollection. I was delighted to get home. In the spring of 1914 I graduated from school, getting a prize for excellence in French, which still surprises me, as I have only the feeblest facility in French at present. I made Harvard easily, especially as I had taken Greek for an entrance credit. At that time the classics, Greek and Latin, were worth more for college admission than any other subject. I arrived in college about as uninformed in the ways of the world as could be. My class was the first to be assigned to wham were then the freshmen dormitories, fronting on the Charles PU0667M -29- P.iver along Memorial Drive, nearly across the river from the Stad ium. These were the nuclei of the "House System" later estab lished for upperclassmen. Me were allowed to suggest one room mate, but were assigned to rooms in groups of four. I got Parker Hills who had been a friend at St. George's School, and in addi tion we had John Howe of Belmont and George Whittemcre of Brookline. 'Tone of us was very sophisticated and none made Clubs in the first two years at college, after which the class disinte grated under the influence of World War I. John joined the French Army in the Artillery and spent more than a year at the front, coming home unscathed. Before he left he had introduced me to Margaret Cooke whom I subsequently saw a year or so later at dances. I regarded her as his girl and therefore one with whom I could be on formal social terms only. College work in the 1914 era was to me very simple and easy, save for English A, the only course required of all students and to be taken in the freshman year. At the end of the course Dean Briggs, who was the professor in charge of the course, called me to his office for a conference. After a few pleasant generalities he got down to the point. "Byers," he said, "you are one of the most resourceful spellers I have uncountered in a long career at the English Department. To illustrate what I mean, I have saved for your inspection a theme written by you about colonial trade with the West Indies in which the word "tobacco" is spelled four different ways on one page. Also, there are a number of other spelling mistakes." PL.Q&675 I looked 2.0 the exhibit, and, io, it was as he said. "I was inclined," he said, 'to fail you on the course, but. that, would mean would have to take English C next year, and that seems to ta an unproductive burden, both on the English Dapart-tant and you. If you'll promise never to take any courses in English during your career here, I'll give you a C- which will dispense with any obligations on your part with regard to English for your degree." The interview was conducted with such humor and suavity that I was not the least hurt by it. In the next two years I went back and got Dean Eriggs1 permission to take courses in English Literature with Professor Parrett Wendell and Professor Percy Houghton, which both sides seemed to enjoy. In the summer of 1916 at the end of my sophomore year in college I enlisted in the Reserve Officers1 Training Corps at Plattsburg, N. Y. My career there was not brilliant from the military point, of view. I could not distinguish between my target and those of my right and left hand neighbors on the rifle range, earning from rifle practice one of the lowest scores on record. I did fairly well on the drill field, but when it came to marching distances with a pack on my back, I was suddenly afflicted with fainting spells, where I suddenly fell to the ground unaccount ably. The Army doctors thought after a little investigation that I had heart trouble and should be discharged. Their opinion was that my life expectancy was short and that the Army should dis charge me with a diagnosis of neurocirculatory asthenia, a really meaningless phrase zhen in common military use. Captain Ware, who PL0&676 RH IN ROIC, Plattsburg, 1916 (back row, second from right) PL06677 commanded my company, called me :: his tent and very kindly told me that I was not cut cut to be a soldier and that since I was academical ly nearly rsctcLv fr32r medical school, I should pursue that course as being the 'case wav io ssrvs my country .us rums ned orf by saying "You look cratty healthy to me. I'll cat you'11 outlive those doctors". (I'm eighty-nine now, so he was probably right.) Much to my regret I never heard again from or about him. He was a kind and thoughtful man, unusual in the military. The boasts of my Plattsburg tent-mates of their conquests of girls during their occasional visits to town went completely over my head; I had never heard of human sexuality, though we had raised rabbits at school. The following academic year was spent at Harvard where I finished off the courses needed to enter medical school. Particu larly necessary was biological chemistry which had interested me deeply since my introduction to it under Mr. James 3ryant Conant; then an instructor. He promoted the idea that here was a field in which knowledge was just denting che surface of the body of under lying fact. Energetic and wise, he was the most forceful charac ter of my college experience. The year was a depressing one, in the knowledge that my friends were all in the Army facing danger. I did also encouncer evidences that- my intellectual capacity had its limits. I had taken solid geometry and trigonometry with no trouble, but calculus was too much. I walked out of the final exam without touching pen to paper . It consisted of one question which to my best recollection ran as follows: A man is standing twenty feet PLQ&678 from the edge of a hemispherical dome fifty feet in diameter. The sor. is on the horizon directly behind him. He throws a tennis bail straight up to a height of thirty feet. When the tennis baLl has reached a height of twenty feet, how fast in feet, sec is the shadow of the ball travelling ever the dome? My daily and weekly marks allowed me to pass the course. I never graduated from Harvard College for I still owe them a course in. philosophy, which I have missed my entire life, and a course in history which I have tried to fill in on an amateur basis. During all the preceding turmoil I had been buffeted this way and that about a career. My family wanted very much for me to go into business with Mother's brother, Uncle George. I was somewhat afraid of his domineering and inflexible attitudes and wanted to avoid that fate. College had opened my eyes to a lot of the misery and sickness in the world, and also the vast lacunae in knowledge of chemistry, physics, and other sources. To me medi cine was an attractive choice. My Mother felt very strongly that joining the medical profession was a step down the social scale from that of manufac turer and was against my doing so. She had been accustomed to ordering doctors around in the treatment of her neuroses and re garded them as high class servants. She was willing, however, to see me through medical school if I could put up with spending two college summer vacations as night orderly in the Newton Hospital, where her favorite doctor, George E. May, was enough of a power to get me a job and had offered to do so. PLQ6679 Accordingly,, in June of 1917 I went. :: the then "ewton Hospital, where the lady superiorsr.dent signed res on as night orderly for two months. At that time the Newton Hospital con sisted of two or three cottage-like buildings and a brick office building which held the emergency ward, also. I was to be or. duty from 6: CO g.rtt. to 6:00 a .m. , seven days a week with one day off a nonth. My pay, besides room and board, was 530 a month. There were probably a dozen or so night nurses on the same shift with me, all girls in training, save for one or two supervisors? there were also one or two ward maids, who did household chores. I was to support and help the nurses in doing their work, to do a little simple laboratory testin- such as urine for albumen and sugar, to prepare a midnight meal for the night crew, to light the coal fire in the kitchen stove in preparation for breakfast., and to wait on a few of the male patients' bedpan needs. The only oven available at night was one of the old fashioned ones in which a fire is built and then raked out when the oven is deemed hot enough. I had never seen one before, and my skill with this one was circum scribed. The girls used to tease me to make cake for them, but my recollection is that my few efforts produced better ammunition for throwing at each other than food for eating. Lighting the anthracite stove for breakfast was made easy for me since the day orderly was supposed to leave a bundle of kindling wood and a scuttle full of coal to put on after the kindling was well started. Most mornings this system worked to perfection. PLD66BO One fay a rather pretty ward maid asked me to co for a walk with her in the afternoon. She led r.e down various sylvan paths on an altogether uneventful expedition. Next morning the scuttle was full of a mixture of coal and water. The hospital patients and saaff got little breakfast, and I got a dressing down and a wising up. One night toward the end of the summer there was an insistent blowing of an automobile horn in front of the emergency ward. I hastened there to find a very excited taxi driver deliv ering a baby on the semicircle of lawn in front of the building. The mother instructed us in care of the umbilical cord, since it was her third or fourth baby. That is how I found out where babies come from! At the end of the summer I took the train to the South Station in Boston, transferred to the North Station, and boarded a train for North Andover and points North. I woke up somewhere about Rochester, New Hampshire, much to the disgust of the conduc tor , but he was nice about it and gave me a pass back to North Andover. I was late for dinner but welcome home. Medical school presented new problems, but interesting ones. The overpowering personality there in my experience was Dean Edsall, who was changing the school from a trade school to a fundamental educational institution by devoting much of the time and energy of the school to attempting to understand the basis for disease and the frequently successful defenses of the body against disease. The definition of self-limited disease, such as pneumonia or the common cold, was just gathering moment.um, but how PL.Q6&8 1 lid the hcdy accomplish this miracle? Dr. Edsail was recruitir.g faculty who he fait could ask questions that might enlighten man on the working of the human body and in doing so, massing over many skilled practitioners who had expected to fill the teaching positions at his disposal. A totally different personality at the school, who stuck out in my mind, was Dr. Robert M. Green, the professor of anatomy. He could stand in front of a blackboard talking coherently and gracefully and at the same time with a piece of chalk in each hand draw the anatomic details of bones, joints, muscles, or internal organs. These were exquisite lectures and drawings which were obliterated by the stroke of the classroom janitor. I wonder if even modern recording methods could have preserved them. He made anatomy palatable in spite of dissection in the morgue and in spite of the countless irrelevant details we had to memorize to pass the state board examinations for registration in medicine. Professor John Bremer taught embryology, a subject now omitted for most students. He described the development of different, organs as a war between the various bodily primordial, embryonic layers for the right to build here and there. He was an old school Victorian gentleman who, though a medical school graduate, would have been embarrassed to death to examine a female patient. One day he asked me what was the proper wine to serve with roast beef. I replied Beaujolais since that was the only wine name I xnew. He reported two days later it was an excellent choice. PLO&682 Professor Frank Mallory of pathology was a warn:, com fortable parson who lived down the street from the medioa1 school ana whose son was a classmate. He had the ability to communicate with students that made his subject interesting and comprehen sible. In addition, he had a tennis court and, at sixty-five or so, could beat any of us youngsters at the game. His son, my classmate Tracy, followed in his footsteps as Professor of Pathology and did much original work during the Second World War and after. During the first year in medical school I lived with my mother at the Tudor Apartment House on Beacon Hill. Most mornings I walked out Commonwealth Avenue and the Fenway to the school with Gus Thorndike, a classmate, who lived with his parents-in-law on Commonwealth Avenue. A friendship that lasted to his death in 1985 began, and when vacations came I often visited him and his wife, Olivia; after my marriage they were among our intimate friends and traveling companions. My mother had moved from her big house in North Andover when the U. S. joined World War I because it took a freight car load of anthracite coal to heat it, and such quantities were no longer available to one customer. She had a poor winter with one respiratory infection after another in the Tudor Apartments and moved to Santa Barbara and then Ojai, California, the next fall, spending summers in North Andover. Meanwhile, I moved into the Phi Rho Sigma Fraternity House in Brookline for a winter or two. One of my closest friends then was Sam Weber, a class mate from Calais, Maine, where he returned to practice surgery PL.06&B3 -37- after comp Latin? training at the Coster. City Hospital. He became permanent president :: cur class and continued in this post until his sudden death by falling cut of a canoe in shallow water. Every night or. going to bed he laid out a cigarette and .natch against the corning. 1 assume that emphysema and dunking in cold water caused his demise. He was a warm, loveable person. The first two years of medical school were devoted to fundamental subjects such as human anatomy, embryology, physiology, and chemistry in the first year. These were a pretty steady grind, but I did find time to get off to a dance or theater weekends for a much needed change. During these expeditions I became quits attached to Miss Jessie Cordingly of Cnestnut Hill, and we frequently went to dances together. The third year in medical school introduced clinical ex perience, i.e., patients, how to interview them to elicit medi cally important material, how to examine them and draw diagnostic conclusions. I found this very intriguing intellectually and satisfying emotionally and absorbed it with very little study at home. By this time John Howe had returned from the War and he and his girl, Margaret Cooke, and Jessie and I went to several events together. Finally, we went to the circus as a foursome, and came home as two twosomes, but with reversed partners. Johnny with Jessie, and I with Margaret. The underlying cause of this most definite and satisfying shift must have been in our personalities, since I can recall no specific incident precipitating it. May 13, 1920, stands out as a very lucky day in my life for on that day Margaret accepted me as her fiance. Hurriedly I raked out what PL.Q668U little capital I had, bought her a ring and hissed her goodbye on her way to Europe with her tother while I prepared to take off for Labrador with the Grenfell Mission, a contract I'd mads the winter before. The trip to Labrador began with my making some sort of traffic violation crossing City Square in Charlestown, a fact borne in on me by a court summons for June 15 hanging on my apartment door when I returned in September. I wish I could remember the names of all the party, but a few stand out. First, Josephine Peabody of Cambridge whose younger brother shouted to her through the windows of the "Gull" (train) as we pulled out of the North Station "Don't come back without a husband." She lived up to his every expectation by annexing Le Grande Cannon, Jr. author in later years of Look to the Mountain, a novel about colonial New England, still circu lating 1 think. Another member was Bill Clarke of Dover, a typical college sportsman, excellent company and capable. There was another young woman who is per force anonymous, a pleasant capable girl who went with Josephine as a social worker and housekeeper for the hospital. They bartered and traded with the local women, for their handiwork, which they sent to a shop in Montreal for the benefit of the mission. Lovely, practically waterproof wool socks, knitted out of nearly unwashed wool, were among the prime products. They also bought harbour-seal skins when they could get then, but they had to compete with the Hudson Bay Company for these. PL06685 39- The train cook us North Sidney in a very gradual tanner. We crossed the heac f tide water in Moncton, but missed seeina the tidal bore which said to be quite abrupt there. We 3tavea Cored Sidney about twelve hours on the docks waitinc for the boat to take us across the Cabct Straight to Newfoundland. While we were there the local mayor stripped us of our loose change in a poker game and would have gladly made further cash inroads, but'we all declined the invitation. That night we set sail on a small steamer for Port aux Basques at the southwest corner of Newfoundland, and what a trip that wasi A storm raged.all night and the ship pitched and rolled unmercifully. We had a deck load of horses who fell tnd broke their legs and had to be shot and shoved over the side. Though I narrowly escaped sea sickness, the job was too dangerous and tough for any of the passengers to join and we stayed below decks. I have never seen so many white-faced exhausted people as turned up on the dock next morning. Among these was a former teacher from St. George's School, who guessed he'd give up salmon fishing in Newfoundland if he had to go through that again. However, im provement soon set in, and we took off in the narrow guage Read Newfoundland Railway. Our plan was to go to Curling on the west coast of Newfoundland about one-half way up, and there to embark on the 3.S. Seal (procounced "Swoil") which would take us across the Strait of Sells Isle to Battle Harbor where the mail steamer would pick us up. When we got to Curling all that was to be seen of the "Swoil" was the crosstrees on the mast sticking up out of the PL066B6 beautiful water of the Bay of Isles with the captain sitting in them. The story was that he and the mate had had an argument the night before, and after the captain had gone to bed the mate had gone below, opened the saa cocks and rowed ashore. The local constable was about, and I asked him what to do. "You telegraphs the Premier" was his reply. The premier replied almost by return tick and instructed us to get on the St. John's Express the next evening for Lewi sports where he would have the mail steamer for St. Anthony held to meet us. When the express came the next afternoon it was full, but, with the premier's command at our backs, we were permitted to sit on the back platform of the last car for the night. At that time the Read Newfoundland Railway had a not too enviable record of about fourteen derailments on one trip of the "express" between Port aux Basques and St. John's, a distance of around five hundred miles. We were told the back platform was very safe since that car almost never tipped over when the train derailed. Soon after we left Corner Brook the dining car steward came to inquire what we would have for dinner. "We111 get some nice fresh salmon out of the River when we get to Humbermouth, and I've still got a mite of frozen moose meat in my barn in the woods just beyond. Say an hour to dinner?" We choose salmon and at the appointed time he escorted us to a fully set dinner table for five and served us a beautifully cooked dinner. It still makes my mouth water after sixty years. The night was pretty grimey, but the train on upgrades went hardly faster than a walk and we threw each others' hats off PU06687 -41- c'r.e rear, jumped cf f and got ahem, and caught, up to the train. ?crtu.tately no cr.e tried this just as we got ever a crest, for then the train whizzed along at twenty miles an hour., .is we clicked along ever the bogs of central Newfoundland the track behind us would rise up out of the black .turky water. From time to time we passed black abrupt rocks that towered over the landscape and must have been volcanic cores. The night never became totally dark. We arrived at the junction for Lewisporte, the train, which ran a few times a week, had been there for some days with people living in it. There were no unoccupied seats, but they put our baggage inside a car and said we might sit on the roof for the ten or fifteen mile ride down to the town. This we did, and were we dirty and cindery when we got there 1 We were met by a fisherman in an open boat who said he had been instructed to take us out to the mail steamer "Prospero" in the harbor.' He thought we all needed to wash and suggested a short tow in the water behind his boat. Dne or two took him up, but with ice floating about the harbor, most declined. The mail steamer was a smallish steam boat with state rooms for a dozen or two passengers and a passenger list of about seventy. We camped under a life boat and cooked over a sterno can on the deck. We got mostly crackers, eggs, milk, and bread from the local people, as the boat cruised along the north-pointing finger of Newfoundland in what I think was called White Bay. The cliffs were very abrupt, and my recollection is of the steamer being made fast to the almost bare cliff as we stopped from town to town. No one but me seemed much excited about it. PL.06&B8 Wa reached St. Anthony in about a day and a night and vers royally welcomed, washed, scrubbed, and fed. I don't remember much about the stop otherwise. We were quickly hustled onto a two-masted fishing schooner that was setting sail before dawn next morning for the region of battle Harbor. The crew consisted of several competent looking but very rough sea men and a woman cook, who had her own "sand box" in the afterhold. Their competence was abundantly attested by the next twenty-four hours. We set off in a beautiful red sunrise of the sailor's warning type and headed northeast across -the strait of Belle Isle with a comfortable breeze. Presently we encountered dense flocks of shearwaters which settled on the sea all about us. The captain wanted "lots for food." Doreys and gunners were set out and soon they had a hundred or so birds. While the doreys were out, it began to get foggy, but we retrieved all three and were off again. Soon it came on to blow from the northeast, fog rolled in and a lookout was posted on the bowsprit, a wet cold assign ment. After a while he began bellowing and flapping his arms, and there, perhaps fifty yards ahead, was a rocky reef. About we came and cleared it easily. An hour or so later a similar outcry an nounced the the neighborliness of an iceberg. We came about at once and it seemed to me its icy pinnacles were practically drip ping down ray back. I never knew my knees to bend sideways before. In twilight we passed from the rather choppy ocean swells into calm flat water and dropped anchor. We all made up for the night in blanket rolls and gratefully went off to sleep. PL06689 .Ob -the Grenfell Mission, 1920 Top lefts Hie hospital at Indian Harbour Top right: RIB and LeGrand Cannon Bottom left: Domesticated fishhawks, a source of poultry! Bottom right: "Diana" beached at Humbermouth with fishflakes in the foreground--Phew! PL06690 Ir. r.he morning we were in the middle of a beautiful rocky little rove in the coast, the entrance of which was only a few hundred yards wide and which we had navigated unseen in the fog. The next day after a brief featureless sail we reached the Hudson Bay Company Post at Battle Harbor. I have little memory of that save that the local factor made me promise not to sell or give the sixteen guage shotgun I had with me to any native. "How are we going to make a living if you do?" The Labrador Mail Steamer came by the next day on its way from Montreal to the coast. We were easily accomodated and reached Indian Harbor on a group of small rocky islands at the mouth of "Hamilton Inlet" in a few days. Meanwhile we had stopped at various harbors on the bleak, rocky, black coast, one of which still stank to high heaven of the processing of whales, an industry that had died out twenty or thirty years before our visit. These are all blurred together in my mind save for the tiny settlement of Cartwright where a most friendly and intelligent Roman Catholic priest came on board for a visit, as he said, with "civilization." He stayed long enough to share a little sherry with us and was a charming person and looked after a scattered flock, both physically and theologically. The captain was a square jawed British masochistic type. Each morning "to wake up," he dove off the starboard end of the bridge of the steamer, swam under it and climbed out up a ladder on the port side. In this ice--infeseed water it surely waked him. At Indian Harbor he stopped his poker game long enough to bid us Godspeed and farewell. The poker game revolved about the reliaf- PLQ6691 officer for the labrador and his cash, This hoard had been entrusted to him by -he dominion government at St. John's for the relief of poverty-stricken people along the coast. It was gener ally alleged that vary little of the money reached its targets. Another common reaction was that since there was nothing to buy on the Labrador, it made little difference. The two or three days on the Mail Steamer cost $39 apiece, meals included. Most of the summer the weather was clear and sunny with a steady procession of icebergs moving south some miles off shore. However, on Bastille Day we had a brisk snow storm, leaving everything white until the sun hit it next day. Not good for gardening, even though the long days made things grow very fast. The summer was a busy one. I was much more delegated to mechanical tasks than medical ones. When I arrived I found that the "hot head" gasoline motor of the "Yale," a forty foot ketch, had been removed since no one could make it run. A brand new one-cylinder "Myanus" motor had been bought, with the notion that I'd install it. As a helper I had a very ingenious epileptic who was paid fifty cents a day to help me. He was much better at lining up shafts than I was, but between us we got the motor in and shaft connected, and the exhaust manifold attached to the underwater exhaust pipes of the old motor. The new motor would not stay running because the old exhaust pipes and muffler were so clogged with rust that exhaust could not squeeze through, a dis ability to the new motor, also. We decided the only thing we could do was to make a hole ir. the deck and pipe the exhaust into the free air a few inches above deck level. Since the single PL06492 -45- ry Under had a four or five inch bore and abouz six inch stroke, and since there was no muffler, "he resulting rackec could be heard for .-..lies before and behind us when under way. My main anxiety was for my assistant, who was reported to have grand mal fits. Should he have one and fail into that ice water, it would be only a short time before he froze and help to get him out was not readily available. Bromide was about the only drug for the control of grand mal in 1920, and I gave him that. At any rate, after a nervous few days, the job was done and he could stay ashore safe and sound. Another mechanical victory was starting up a gasolinepowered circular saw which had lain idle for a year or so since it had landed at Indian Harbor. The gasoline inlet to the carburetor was partially stopped up, allowing the motor to start and then die with a couple of coughs. A bit of fine wire and carburetor ad justment repaired that, much to the enhancement of my reputation as a fixer. I didn't tell anyone that I had nearly cut off a finger or two on the saw in my enthusiasm to show one of the hospital people about how well it ran. I pulled my finger out of the draft created by the whirling saw in time; stupid to put them there! Once I got the "Yale" in cruising order, I started to use it on various medically oriented ventures. If we were to cruise in the open sea it was necessary to get a local fisherman to come along. The charts ware quite inaccurate and drifting icebergs were capable of moving boulders as big as small houses from one place to another. PLD6693 About, the middle of Julv Bill Clarke and I took the "Yale" to the head of the Harailton Inlet. It cook us two days to reach l*orth West River and the ad jaceat mouth of the Cnurchill River. On the way we made a step at Ricolet where the Hudson Bay Company had a trading post and where indeed all sorts of supplies could he bought. We filled up on gasoline, hut by and larga we depended on sails for locomotion. On the way west we were suddenly becalmed and saw black thunder heads approaching. We got into the dorey and manned the oars, towing our ketch to a little harbor on a nearby island. The storm wasn't too severe and our anchor held through a short gale. Soon we were off again under sail. That night while I was standing watch alone and steering from the very stern of the ketch, a blackfish breeched right under me, showering me with cold sea water in its spout. The sound was ghostly, and I was frightened and chilled. At North West River we found an encampment of Indians who wera much amused at our fishing for salmon with rod and reel. Salmon were plentiful, but not many felt like going after a fly. We landed two or three in an hour or more. The Indians thought it simpler to dip them out of the river with a net, which they did, drying and salting them for winter use. At North West River Hospital, which was closed for the summer, we picked up four very pregnant young ladies. Next morning we set sail under a clear blue sky before a stiff breeze from the west and went wing and wing all the way to Indian Harbor. The following sea made the four girls sea sick, but Bill and I were kept so busy with the boat and chart that */e paid little P*-0669M -47- aomer.tion. Nobody wen" ime labor .and we arrived am Indian Harbor in rood shape about: 3:00 p. m. , still broad daylight. 'Text day the first of the babies was bomr we considered our favorable passage a Godsend. For one of the girls this was her first baby, and she was not married. Tne nurses explained that this was usual in labrador, since making a living was so hard that people of forty or so could not survive without the help of grown children and that marriage was usual only after a girl had demonstrated her ability to have children. After her baby was born. La Grand and I went out to look for the father, again up the Hamilton Inlet, feeling like a couple of policemen. As the wind was deficient that day we had to proceed under power and the father heard us coming. Thinking he might get news of his intended bride, he came to meet us and was overjoyed at our news. We-three sailed back to Indian Harbor where we had a wedding celebrated with cake and chocolate fudge, made by one of the nurses. It was a very warm, happy occasion. About early August the cod came in. This was quite a sight, looking down into the water off the steep rocks, the backs of the cod schools looked like paving stones in the water. Nets were set wherever a bit of mud bottom could be found and cod were hauled out by the barrowful. The cod were cleaned, split and laid out on "fish flakes," i.e. frames to dry. My epileptic friend did this for a whole week without stopping save for a bit to eat now and then. As he said, "this is our year's food and we have to harvest it in PLQ4695 the few fays the cod are here." Fortunately, the sun shone almost iav and .tight for the process. We had little diversion. In the first few days we vers there there was little to eat save salmon. After boiled salmon for breakfast with coffee, salmon steaks broiled for lunch, and salmon poached for dinner, you get sick of it. We did make a few batches of fudge for we had sugar and cocoa and canned milk, but that didn't go far. The next mail steamer brought potatoes and canned vegetables. We had a small "vegetable garden" in a small patch of soil among the rocks. It produced a large crop of turnip greens which we boiled and ate hungrily in August, but that was it. When the cod came in they were welcomed as if they were venison. We did walk a little here and there around the island seeing birds -- particularly pipets and puffins -- but there were not a great many. In bogs about the island there were a few black berries, much prized by the natives, which I thought tasted rather of turpentine -- I've never encountered their like anywhere else. The genius of Indian Harbor was Dr. Henry Padden, a very competent Scottish surgeon, universally admired by the natives and staff. He was most patient with me at all times, but expected more of me than I was prepared to give. I remember excavating the mastoid of a fisherman's child and wondering whether her brains would spill on the floor at my next chisel stroke. She recovered from both the infection and ray efforts. Tuberculosis, in all its forms, was epidemic. I never saw tuberculous middle ear infections elsewhere. Fortunately no tuberculous meningitis turned up in our two months stay. PLQ6696 -49- I tried ia various ways to find a gift to bring home to T.y betrothed but had to settle far some harbor seal skins which my kind mother-in-law-to-be had made up into a winter jacket for Margaret. Though each of us wrote lone letters to the other of our doings, much of the mail was delivered after we got home. The trip home was uneventful; Cook's Tours could not have made it more routine cr duller. The highlight was a day-long stop at Twiliingate on Newfoundland, where a very friendly fisher man's wife took us all on for tea and fed us tea, scones, and Devonshire clotted cream, a treat I'11 never forget. When I arrived home I had to plunge back into my fourth year of medical school. Margaret came home a few days later and seemed disappointed I was not at the Back Bay Station to meet her. However I was at her apartment for that purpose, and we were soon reconciled. That winter of being engaged and fourth year medical school kept me hopping, but I enjoyed it. I finally graduated "cum laude," though on our honeymoon at the time, and secured a much coveted job as "house pupil" at the Massachusetts General Hospital, beginning the following September. PL04697 V.Te decided co marry on June 1921. Margaret would be dependant cn her mother for support, but, both ladies seemed happy with this prospect. 1 must say here and now that Margaret's mother was unfailingly generous ir. her support of us and never inferred in any way that we should consider curselvas beholden to her. She was obviously delighted with the grandchildren we presented to her and as far as I was concerned, she gave me more tender maternal care than my own mother ever did. Our marriage was solemnized by a Reverend Edwards, father of the Episcopal priest who was in charge of St. Michael's Church in Milton, Massachusetts. I have always thought the younger Reverend Edwards wanted to marry Margaret himself and therefore was "too ill" to perform the ceremony for us. His father told me some of the funniest risque stories I have heard while entertaining .me prior to the wedding. We had lots of friends in the wedding party, including Johnny and Jessie Howe who were married the following fall. Helen and Carleton Richmond (Margaret's older sister and husband) gave us a lovely reception at their house on Adams Street. Jean Richmond, their three-year-old daughter, quite charmed my uncle, Wheaton Kunhardt, at the reception and was the "belle of the ball." From there we set out on a succession of honeymoons. The first was a quite conventional one by ourselves in my mother's 1918 Buick Roadster to Worcester, Manchester (Vermont) and Chocorua (New Hampshire). This was interrupted by PLQ6698 my hiving to return to medical school for my final oral exam for '-.oners. This was r.ot particularly arduous as it was an exam covering all four years o work and could r.ot be crammed for. I received my Cum Lauds okay. Next we set off in my 1920 Model 'T" Ford runabout for Gus Thorndike's camp on Long Pond on Mt. Desert. Island ir. Maine. In those days a stop over night on the way was usual? ve made one in Portland. The only snap shot of our honeymoon I still have is the one of us crossing the Penobscot River at Bucksport, in a scow pushed by an open launch. The bridge at the same site robs one of the thrill of slipping and sliding down the bank of the gorge to the water and chugging up the other side. The road from Bucksport to Or land was dirt, and grass grew between the wheel tracks. While in camp we tried to demonstrate our talents to each other. Margaret wanted to make popovers and I cooperated by getting popover cups "good and hot" in the oven of a woodburning stove well supplied with nice dry wood. She poured the batter in my heated cups and . . . pfsssti . . . there were six. little black crumbs in the bottom of each. (Laughter) I also showed her my woods skills by taking her to the top of Western Mountain on the island. Though we went half way up in the Ford, the going on foot, especially down, was too much.for her. We never did another mountain together, though she tolerated Blue Hill in Milton for years. We thought we had a lovely secluded hideout, but when we tried skinny dipping in daylight we aroused so much enthusiastic whistling from neighbors about the pond that modesty deterred us. PL06699 On the way east we had stopped at a nice hotel in Camden, Maine, and registered as Mr.- and .Mrs. R. K. Byers? on the way west we registered as Dr. and Mrs. because my medical school graduation had taken place in our absence. The proprietors were a bit mystified. After this trip we spent a while visiting "Grandma Cooke" in her home "Onacune" in Little Compton, Rhode Island. Hers we got accustomed to being treated like royalty. it was very comfortable and affectionate. I never guessed what a help a mother-in-law would be on a vacation. She had her rules. For example she loved bridge and got up a game Saturday evenings pretty regularly. When ` he clock chimed midnight, she gathered up the cards, rose, and went upstairs saying, "See you at breakfast at eight, church at ten." Inspite of them, to us at least, she was warm, welcoming, and loving. About the end of August we joined Gus and Owie Thorndike for our last trip of the summer to Quebec and the Saguenay River in his Model "T" touring car. We had so much luggage on the running boards that the only entrance to the car was a running jump over the side. The girls managed without too much immodesty with a hand from the boys. On the way we stopped at the Moose River House in Jackman, Maine. There I signed the register "Dr. and Mrs. R. K. Byers," and Gus, who had been parking the car, hurried in and signed "Dr. A. Thorndike, Jr." When the clerk said "And who's the dame?" Owie, a veritable Lowell, was r.ot amused. Pt-O67O0 I la Quebec we stayed, of course, in the Chateau Frcntenac, where everyone was astonished at rr.y breakfast of fruit, kippered herring, buckwheat pancakes, and coffee. 1 thought it delicious and regret that kippered herring is off limits to tie now and that making real buckwheat pancakes is so cumbersome a process that I've had to give them up too. While we were packing in our rooms, the Saguenay boat began to blow its whistle, and we threw everything in our bags and skittered down the steep hill to the river. I was left to come after and run down with a bag, a nearly fatal exertion. We got on board and sat on deck looking at the dock for an hour or two before setting sail. The scenery of greenfarms stretching north in unbroker rows from the river was beautifully bucolic and the countryside appeared reasonably prosperous. We envied the Thorndikes their deck stateroom from which they could look out and get plenty of air. Ours was a deck or two below with a closed porthole. At Murry Bay, where the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, a fair was oeing held and while in dock we were treated to a hot air balloon ascension and parachute jump by the balloonist. There was also a deep sea diver in his suit operating on a vessel tied up to the wharf. Soon after we entered the Saguenay the weather changed from beautiful sunshine to clouds and rain. By the time we reached Capes Trinitfee and Gris Wez it was raining so hard that we could barely discern them through it. At'Chicoutimi we docked and spent a very muddy few hours. There I saw ray first Model "T" Ford with a sloping Pl_D6701 v" inusni 'wind shields having usly been -/article) my main memory of the gray wet town and lake We returned to the steamer :or the nig' ^Text morr.ina when he woke it was drenched with cold rainwater. His breakfast outfit, though modest, would not have passed muster in the Ritz dining room. His suit got dried out in the engine room before we returned to Quebec. The return trip to Boston through beautiful New England became increasingly exciting as the bands on the Model "T" transmission wore out. First no foot brake, then no reverse, and finally traces of low gear and stalwart high gear got us home. We also had distributor trouble; the spring that held the roller to the terminals broke. I was able to repair that with a hairpin plucked from my bride's head. That jury-rig held until we reached a gas station that sold parts. While motoring in 1921 may have been simple, you had to know how. When I reported to the Massachusetts General Hospital September 1st to take up my duties as "house pupil" consternation ensued. There had never been a married house pupil before! The East Service to which I was assigned was headed by an obstinate Chinese resident who accepted me and our marriage, the west service by an obstinate Philadelphian who felt I should be fired for such insubordination. I had no written contract and nothing had been said one way or the other about marriage. The contro versy continued throughout my service and I graduated in July, 1925, with the question still in dispute. PU0&702 The East. Service had as visiting men such well known medical practitioners as Dr. Roger I. Lee, Dr. William D. Smith (Little Bill), Dr, Howard Means 'representing advanced medicine and physiology), and Dr. William Robbins (the patients' favorite) Dr. Lee sat 5own and philosophized with us rather often; at one session I particularly remember he pointed out that when one came right down to bedrock there were only two genuine do-good medi cines available; morphine for pain and digitalis for heart fail ure due to auricular fibrilation. Other medicines might make self-limited diseases more bearable or itches lass severe, but these ailments would go away by themselves. STo one ever died, he thought, of simple constipation. He stressed the self-limited nature of most diseases such as typhoid and pneumonia. If they didn't prove fatal, recovery would ensue. Diphtheria antiserum was just emerging as possibly curative. Dr. Means among many other things, differed from standard medical practice at the time in realizing that fever was a part of the body's defense against infection. He pioneered in abandoning the heroic methods, such as slush baths for typhoid if the fever went over 103 degrees. Fortunately the press was uninterested in medicine then, and the death rate from typhoid in our hospital was lower the second summer under this philosophy than the on of actively combatting fever. Immunization for typhoid had been demonstrated during the Spanish American War of 1898 but was not generally utilized unless people contemplated travel to the tropics. Many common scourges of mankind, such as diabetes, pneumonia, pernicious anemia, tuberculosis, leukemia. PL0670S cancer of too stomach, or heart attack ware totally beyond control and often unrecognized, though venerated treatments wars of farad. Paul White identified cardiac infarct during my service. Another important character on the staff of the Mass General was Jr. Joseph Aub, a very intelligent sr.d interesting observor of humanity. With Drs. A. S. Minot, 1. J. Fairhall, and Hesnickoff, he conducted a thorough study of the toxicity of lead, its absorption, and disposal in the animal body. Among other things he showed that much lead was deposited in relatively inert form in bone, from which it could, under certain stresses, be released again into the circulation and again become toxic. His studies aroused ray interest and led to my follow-up studies of lead poisoning in children. Dr. Fredrich 'Washburn was superintendent of the hospital during my stay there. He had many rules, among them that the house pupil's uniform pants must have their side pockets sewn up so that we could not walk around with our hands in our pockets. He also inspected the house officers' quarters for contraband, but as he said, "I'm not tall enough to look on your closet shelves, and I don't carry a step ladder." All of which brings me to our bootlegger. Prohibition was in force throughout my terra as house pupil in various hospitals. The "official'' bootlegger, whose name was unknown, drove into the parking yard at the hospital entrance in a grey hearse, from which he would unload gallon jugs of 90% alcohol labeled "For Purely Experimental Purposes." We made extensive experiments in flavoring and diluting it to quite respectable gin. PL.0670M As a result many who had nevar imbibed alcohoi before took it up enthusiastically. If you stuck :o the official bootlegger's alcohol, you did not develop blindness or wood alcohol poisoning. The bootlegger himself wore immaculate grey three-piece suits, with white edging on the vest, and looked as much like an undertaker as my beloved cousin, mentioned above. Skill in diagnosis through careful history taking and physical examination were taught very thoroughly under the aegis of Dr. Frederick Lord, a meticulous observer, while x-rays and other auxiliary procedures were looked upon as confirmatory or useful for fractures in suggesting possible means of reduction and positioning to get the best functional results. At the present time, exclusive reliance on x-ray and failure to perform careful physical examinations have left some fracture victims undiagnosed and subject to more or less severe incapacity or death. I am aware of several. Thus, while changes in medicine have been on the whole for the better since 1920, deterioration has also shown up here and there. As I was leaving the Massachusetts General Hospital at the end of my "house pupil" job, Banking and Best's discovery of insulin was announced in the medical press. Freddie Lord brought a clipping of the article to rounds saying "Well they sure have got somethingi" However medical training in the early 1920s was mostly concerned with diagnosis and prognosis. Effec tive treatment was just developing for non-surgical conditions. My next hospital appointment was as "house officer" to the medical service of the Children's and Infanm's Hospital in Boston. As I walked into the front door a head leaned out of the PL0670S telephone office, inquiring ''Lawrence 9, how are you, and what's one news of Kay." The head belonged to Ruth O'Brien, who had been the local telephone operator in Lawrence ar.d who had monitored conversations between me and my then girl friend, Kay Allen. She continued for years as the "Ann Landers" of the Children's Hospital with great success and applause from both medical and nursing staff, which were each virtually nonosexual at that time. My first assignment in the simmer of 1925 was to the Infant's Hospital Medical Ward and it was as grim an experience as I have ever had. Mothers brought their sick babies in with vomiting and diarrhea at the rate of six or ten a day, and the undertakers took their remains away in compartmented suitcases within a day or two. Few survived. The ill babies were seldom breast fed. Many had had inadequate diets; by the time they got sick they had little reserve to fight for life. That winter Massachusetts passed a much needed law providing that milk could only be sold if pasteurized or certified by a milk certification board. This was bitterly opposed by the intellectual suburbanites of the Civil Liberties type and got through the legislature with difficulty. The next summer, no such procession of dying babies came to the hospital. In fact, it got to the point that an infant's admission needed to be carefully considered by the admitting doctor, since the Infant's Hospital charge of $12 or $14 a week was the cheapest way to have a baby boarded out while the parents took a vacation. Such boarding of babies was not a good idea for we had plenty of disease in the wards. Tuberculosis in all its forms was frequent and during the year and a half of my service we had a PL.O&7Q4 -59- ward of ten or twelve reds constantly full of children dying of tuberculosis meningitis', No recovery from the -1 is ease was known prior to the 1940s. Rheumatic fever with its crippling heart disease was constantly with us and a complete mystery medically until shown by AIvan Coburn in the 1930s to be the result of streptococcal infection. Pneumonia in children was not -as severe as in adults, and, if healthy, they generally recovered. The medical staff of the Children's Hospital was in turmoil during the first year of my internship. Dr. Oscar Schloss had been appointed by Harvard Medical School as Toomas Morgan Raich Professor of Pediatrics and head of the medical service. He, however, much preferred his private practice in New York and seldom visited Boston. He resigned at some point and Dr. Kenneth Blackfan was appointed. Since he was not well, he sent a surrogate who was not mature enough for the job. He and I had differences all of which did not endear me to Dr. Blackfan. The latter, when he finally arrived, was one of the most successful heads of any medical service in the U.S. as measured by the output in original medical work of his pupils and by the number who became heads of service elsewhere. An inveterate pipe and cigarette smoker, he died of lung cancer in his early fifties. I have always regretted that I did not get to know him better when Z had the chance. The person whom I most admired as a visiting man during my internship at Children's Hospital was Dr. Brcr.son Crothers, who was the first children's neurologist in this country. He was very gifted especially in the language field. I believe he taught himself to read Greek in his father's library before he went to PL06707 f school. He could read technical medical reports almost as fast as you could turn the pages and give a spontaneous summary right away. He had many original ideas and was instrumental in getting funds and a building from the Rosenwald Family of Sears Roebuck fame to set up a study of the poorly understood subject of infantile cerebral palsy. He capped his abiding interest in the subject by writing a book, The Natural History of Cerebral Palsy, after he retired in 1951. He also wrote a most valuable volume, A Pediatrician, in Search of Mental Hygiene, which is out of print and now unobtainable but is a philosophical gem. He also described obstetrical injury of the infantile spinal cord, a crippling condition now no longer seen as a result of his effort. After my internship at the Children's was over I had a short three months sojourn at the Contagious Department of the Boston City Hospital under Dr. Edwin Place. He was a most astute clinician and tried to teach me how to intubate children with . laryngial diphtheria, still common, but vanishing owing to the introduction of immunization with diphtheria toxin antitoxin mixture. I never became proficient as an intuber, but opportuni ties never came my way since all my patients were immunized in infancy. While at the City Hospital I developed what was then known as catarrhal jaundice, now hepatitis, and shrank from 150 to 135 pounds. My shrinkage was greatly ameliorated by the nearly constant company of our niece, Jean Richmond, and our two older girls as they played house under my bed. '~o secondary cases in our household. It took me some months to recover, ' but in February PL06708 Upper lefts SIB with Frances Cooke Byers, 1922 Upper right; MB's first car, a 1920 Ford, on the Esplanade, 1921 Bette* left and right; Margaret Cooke Byers with Franny pLo&y09 Maaf cousins* about 1928; third from the left is Susaa Byers* then Franny, probably Bsmij and Keith Kunhardt and Rosemary, and Ted Byers (tall). Others likoljr to fee EngatliS' and perhaps Bea aad Wheaton -61- 1325 I burs~ upon the scene of private practice as an associate of Dr. Richard Smith who had a very large private practice in Boston. He did the first twenty house calls that came to the office telephone, and I was expected to do the rest, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen more. In addition I worked three .mornings a week at the medical out-patiant department of the Children's Hospital from 3:30 till lunch at noon time. Otherwise I was free to develop my own private practice as I saw fit. The latter grew rapidly since Dr. Raymond Titus, a busy obstetrician, referred many new boras to me for care and supervision. I had done little to deserve his confidence except once to express my interest in his gentleness in completing a breach delivery, a benefit to humanity first stressed by my friend and mentor, Dr. Crcthers. Dr. Titus also gave my wife obstetrical supervision care during her four pregnancies and deliveries. Our family grew easily and naturally for the most part. My wife and I have always been thoroughly in love and have enjoyed our love mutually. A double bed serves not only to foster that love but to make it impossible for doubts and misunderstandings to persist when they arise. Communication becomes easy and almost automatic and trust grows. Even though sex as such has waned, we both anticipate cuddling up to each other at night even now. Our first child, Frances, was born decently recently after our marriage while I was still interning and earning nothing. Margaret's mother took us in and appeared happy at the chance. We named the baby Frances after her. Our second child, Susan, named for her other grandmother, was born a couple of years p*-0671 i -Ci- At the time of her birth we were ir. ccsss or settling m . end the house C-randrr.other Cooke had radeling. .After the birth of the baby ght .v-as in process iargar et was kept in bed m the hospital for fourteen lays and only allowed to travel to little Compton, a matter of sixty-five miles, by automobile after nineteen days. Quite a contrast from the present custom of discharging babies and their mothers in twenty-four to thirty-six hours after delivery. Our third child, Randolph K. , -Jr., was born at home by very sudden labor. Our house was being painted and the painters nearly supervised the delivery, but Dr. Titus pulled the blinds and gave Margaret a few whiffs of gas. After delivery she came to and asked "What did I get this time?" "A nice fat little boy" I replied. "Darn well better be," and off to sleep she went. She's been an admirer of his ever since. Our fourth child, Margaret P. , was born because my wife insisted "I must have another baby, they give me such a lift." She was four years younger than our son. By this time we were on our own financially and had the nursery done over with new wallpaper with bright colored balloons on it. Some days before the birth of the baby, we found Randy sitting in "his" room looking at it with pleasure and said to him, "What are you doing?" "I'm sitting on my toya box, 'citing 'bout my new o' loons" came the reply. PLQ6712 "63- In a week or two he was displaced to make room, for his new sister in the nursery next to our room. Though he made no protest, it was clearly a disappointment. Naming the last horn became almost a crisis. I assumed she would be Margaret after her mother but failed to say so. When I asked my wife about names she said "Why not Camilla?" "Why" said I, back and forth, until I said "Why not Margaret?" You should have seen the look of joy and relief on her face I At the age of four on the way to New York by train this child spelled out the station sign "B-R-I-D-G-E-P-O-R-T" and asked if that meant "Bridgeport," something her older brother could not do at nine. A jealousy developed between them that has mellqwed into a very loving respectful comradship in adult life. My youngest brother, Douglas, came to me the spring of 1934 and proposed that as a thank you for my having extended pediatric care to his three children, he and I drive his car to the West Coast where Mother had been living for the past two or three years. He made all the arrangements for the trip through A.A.A. with maps and room reservations. We set out from his home in Andover, Massachusetts, at sixish on a beautiful summer morning and drove five hundred odd miles to Buffalo. In those days there were no throughways and a five hundred mile trip in one day was quite a jaunt, but we did enjoy the trip over the Berkshires and through the beautiful finger lake district of New York State. . Buffalo was not a tourist trap, but a griraey city down at the docks where we and the car boarded the night boat for Cleveland. PL.04713 Tr* s v 9 w3 made a slight dcetcur to .'isit t.te ^nagrit Vails-/ " 2. neighbor had just acquired a lovely 'rids who had grown up there -- after which we set out for St. Louis, via Indianapolis and way stations. It a place called Centralis, 'state unknown) va encountered a hail -torn which soon reduced the foliage of the maple trees lining the street to about six inches of slimy spinach (in spite of the present notices on T.V., trees have foliage all summer though they get credit for it only in October) . This slowed our transit a bit, but not disastsrousiy. Save for that the day was a humdrum grinding drive. When we arrived in St. Louis we were greeted with open arms by the night clerk in our hotel. "Welcome with yr-r fresh air from the Cast Coast; at the moment we are having the first temperature below 100 in a week." (It was 93 degrees ?. by his desk thermometer.) We were so tired I think we paid no heed to temperature and went right to sleep, ttext morning we set off on our longest day of the whole drive, from St. Louis to Dodge City, Kansas. The roads were still good black top until one reached the western third of Kansas when patches of gravel and then all gravel appeared. Missouri appeared prosperous and hilly much of the way. The State Capitol, Jefferson, held us up a few minutes, and I don't remember it at all. The two Kansas Cities produced us some Lunch and a short stop. Kansas was pretty well shorn of its wheat as we bypassed the main cities. As we drew into a town called Hutchinson we came upon a disconsolate man sitting by an old auto parked at the roadside in the moonlight nursing his arm. We stopped and asked if we could help. "Yup" he said, "I was out PL06714 -65TM here runing her up and I cranked her and she threw me ever the -'all and broke my arm." He did indeed have a broken wrist which we bandaged a bin for him and took him to his home a few miles away. He seemed very cheerful about it all; his harvest, I guess, was in. We made -edge City about midnight and spent the night in the station hotel but were little disturbed by the passing trains. The interesting thing about this town is that the east end of the station platform is in the U. S. Central Time Zone and the west end of the platform is in the Mountain Time Zone, one hour later. The trip that day was something over seven hundred miles . Wert morning we were off bright and early :--o southern Colorado. At La Junta we branched off to the south of the main trans-U. S. route and went via the Raton Pass to Trinidad and in later afternoon, up the canyon of a small river called the Cimaron, I think. This was beautiful, almost tropical; maybe there were a few palms at the bottom. The road ran ever upward and finally popped out at Eagles Nest Lake near Taos. Had this road been anywhere in the East, it would have been lined with hot dog stands, but its worst disfigurements were occasional small signs advertising camp grounds at fifty cents a night, usually near beautiful little waterfalls. We passed through Taos at suppertime and stopped appropriately. Sante Fe for the night. After eating we went on to Next day we started off by visiting the Bandolier National Monument where there are very ancient cliff dwellings scooped out of the very soft rock lining che sides of a canyon. PL06713 -oe~ 7rom ;';:re :n va flirted .vtth "he fcr.ttr.entai Divide criss-crossing aha hew Maxico-Ceicrace eerier Through beautiful alpine maadows, interrupted by such blemishes on the landscape as che coal mining town of Dirango wioh slag piles smoldering smokily away. We ended cp at Mesa Verde /.'hers we put t o on top of the Mesa with park rangers. We spent a day at Mesa Varde visiting the spectacular cliff dwellings dating back to before Columbus. These are spectacular in their isolation half way down the nearly perpendicular walls of the Mesa and overlooking a small branch of the San Juan River with its primitively irrigated fields. We did not wander far afield, for the Rangers all said that rattlesnakes were abundant in the brush about the Mesa top. We stuck "lose to the horseshoe pitching field when not at the ruins. Doug did quite well with the horseshoes there, but I could not compete with the Rangers. The next day we set off for the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We drove south and west, missing the "Four Corners," where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona meet by a few miles in sight of the Natural Bridges National Monument. Such vacant, desolate Landl We then turned west over blown sandstone with cairns here and there to mark the right of way and in some, compass bearings for the next cairn. This system of travel is a bit slow, but. we did make the bridge over Chinley Creek (which was dry, but otherwise unpassable) successfully and headed for Kayente, Arizona, where there was an isolated oasis and ranches. From there traces of road lead us to Moenkope, where we saw a Hopi PL067IS Indian Village. Front there ve went north on a well recognizable road gassing the "oho Cliffs and leading to a bridge over the Colorado River at Lae's Ferry. Why anyone wanted that road 1 could not guess. Front there ve passed miles of the Vermillion Cliffs, very spectacular and so to a small hamlet called Konab. There ve turned south and traversed the fCaibab Plateau where there was some vegetation and mule deer in the forest. We spent the night at Point Royal in an overnight cabin on the north rim of the canyon, from, which there was a good view of the many terraced canyon. We learned from the newspapers a few days later that one of the most wanted criminal's in the U. S. had spent the night with his girl friend in the cabin next to us. However, the night passed without incident, though water was distinctly in short supply. Next day we headed back into Utah and had a brief visit to Zion Canyon and Bryce Canyon, and after a long dusty journey made Las Vegas -- then mostly a railroad yard -- and so to Boulder City. We visited the foundations of the Hoover Dam which were at the bottom of a very deep hole and nearly out of sight. It was clearly one of man's major projects but somehow unimpressive then. The next day we reached our goal. We left Boulder City early to avoid midday in the Mojave Desert and just as well. The road ran straight and the air was so clear that we could see fifteen miles of road at a time. We passed at times near the great vooden Aquaduct which Douglas told me "stole water from the Owen's River for the land spec tula tors in Los Angeles." We also saw lots of cactusy Joshua Trees scattered through the desert, unique looking trees growing widely separated from one another. Pt_CJA717 -58- About noon we came to what was alleged to be the outpost of Eastern Civilization, the town of Bars tow. It was shut jp tight on account of the heat, covered deeply with Just and sported a small grove of vary dusty tamarisk trees. We did r.ot linger but headed for San Bernadir.o w-hich is really at the edge of the desert. As you come over the crest of a ridge, in a car's length you go from desert to green vibrant life. A great relief I From there we drove through thriving green orange groves, through Pasadena, at that time ten or fifteen miles from Los Angelas, from which it was separated by shiney green orchards, on up the coast to Santa Barbara and the El Encanto Hotel where Mother lived in the summer. Mother and Aunt Winkie (Miss Annie vanWinckle who lived as companion and housekeeper with Mother from about 1917 until her death) greeted us warmly and gave us a good dinner at the hotel. In the next several days we made various expeditions with them to see things that Mother was anxious to show us, such as the beds of flowers for seed at Point Lompoc a few miles north from Santa Barbara. We went over the Santa Ynez Mountains to a lovely valley where we saw the then rare yellow billed magpies endemic to that valley. We also went to Ojai where Mother during the winter months rented a house owned by the Foot Hills Hotel. It was rented to someone else for the summer so we didn't go in, but it was clearly a good warm retreat for the winter visitor, as the sun poured into the little valley in which it was located. At Carpentaria wa swam in the surf and encountered Dr. Franc Ingraham, neurosurgeon at the Boston Children's Hospital, Pi-067 lo ............ -o - -69- surfing on horseback. He had severe asthma which was eventually shown to be due -.2 sensitization, to horse dander. Abstention, from horses, cured him. Up to this point the entire trip had been conducted in a mixture of high good humor and discussions of the geology and archeology of the regions through which Doug and I were passing. I got to love and admire him very sincerely, a feeling which persisted throughout the rest of his life, and he seemed to reciprocate. He was the person outside my own family of whom I was most fond in the whole of my experience, and I feel this trip was the basis of our affection. As we got to oanta Barbara I had a headache and Doug had a cold in the head. After we had been in Santa Barbara for a few days. Mother caught our cold and it rapidly developed into pneumonia of which she died after about forty-eight hours of illness. She passed very quickly and apparently painlessly, clearly having been overjoyed by our visit. After her death Doug and I and Winkie had to deal with the powers-that-be to have her body shipped back to North Andover for burial. Winkie had to have two tickets on the train, and we set off to drive home as quickly as possible. I have very few recollections of the return trip save that we crossed the Colorado at Needles, California -- where they make a heat record every few days it seems to me. We also went through Flagstaff, Arizona, and stopped at Sunsec Peak in Arizona -- a small ash cone of a mountain, stained yellow with sulphur at its summit. This is also remarkable in that it contains caves which have water dripping PL06719 -70- Irom their roofs. The air is so dry that even in hot weather ice forms because of the rapid evaporation. We drove home in six days, which in 1934 -was some going, and I remember nothing about it except fatigue. Mother*s funeral was held at Ciairwood in Worth Andover, with burial in the Byers family plot in Ridgewood Cemetary in Worth Andover. It was clear from her will that Mother had made no adequate financial provision for Winkle, who had no resources of her own. Mother had bought her home in Ojai shortly before her death and bequeathed it to Winkle in her will, but there was no money to pay the inheritance taxes on it, nor the expense of owning it. Edward, Doug, and I banded together and sent her bits of money monthly to help her out, but none of us was financially well established at that point. I suspect that Eddie did more than the rest of us, but if so he never let on. As Mother's estate became settled, each of us received a considerable capital endowment. I bought the Ojai house from Winkie and sold it through a real estate broker for half my purchase price. Eddie continued his support of her with monthly payments as did Doug. Winkie lived for three or four years, with high blood pressure, headaches, and other discomforts, and was cheerfully grateful for whatever help came her way. She had compromised her own indepen dence to live with and emotionally support Mother. She had been brought up in gentile circumstances, and had been left a fair inheritance which was dissipated by her guardian, an uncle I believe. Mother could not have functioned without her in the last ten years or so of her life. FL06720 -71Margaret and I continued to live quite happily in Milton. We bought the house Grandma Cooke had supplied us with as ^oon as money became available from my mother's estate, and a couple of years Later we put an addition onto it, which included a second living room where the girls could entertain callers without dispossessing us in the evenings, a large double bedroom, a study with couch Eor grandchildren, and a bathroom. We lived in this suite until marriage took all our children and adoptees. The V study was not a successful sleeping quarter for our grand daughters, for in it were hung some pictures of my paternal grandparents -- so grim the children were frightened of them. We removed the pictures. FL0&721 -72- Porcupine Point Over several years I had been on the lookout for a hideaway in the deep woods somewhere. I had been a member of the Mounoany Pond Club in Holden, Maine, not far from Bangor, but this was coo concentrated a croup of camps to suit me. There was, though, one pond where black bass fishing was good, and a few trout were to be had in the main lake. I had joined that club with Gas Thorndike, but he acquired a farm in Dummerston, Vermont, sometime in the 1930s, and this took his interest almost entirely. Francis Moulton, of whom we saw a good deal in Milton, and with whom I often went duck hunting in the 1930s suggested we go and visit a guide and friend with whom he had fished ir Princeton, Maine. We eventually got a date to go to Grand Lake Stream, Maine, about forty miles northwest of Calais, where Harley Fitch lived. This was in the early 1930s, during depression years, and Harley welcomed us, smelling of business, with open arms. He was clearly a charming and resourceful person with a great variety of skills, and a wonderful sense of humor. He took us to his camp by canoe about seven miles up Grand Lake at the mouth of Ox Brook. There we fished in Grand Lake and also walked about a couple of miles up a trail to the two Ox Brook Lakes. The lower had landlocked salmon up to about three pounds in size in it, while the upper lake, a fifty yard carry from the lower, had brook trout up to about two or three pounds, and Lots of white perch. The tranquility was' superb and the fishing good and PLG6723 t -73- huncing for deer promising. Half way up the trail from Grand Lake was a wet hillside with about an acre of May flowers, beautiful and fragrant in the fishing season, and at that season the woods were full of Perula Warblers 'woods canaries to many) singing their heads off. 3lack flies came out on June 2 or 3 and made many people unhappy for a month. Harley took us fishing and good fishing it was in the ponds and in quaking bogs, which was like catching trout out of a golf hole, but requiring instant reflexes or the trout would let go of the fly before you hooked him. Harley was maddeningly successful compared to us duffers. We canoed up Amazon Stream several miles and camped in deep woods near a little round mud hole full of trout at that time. We brought along evaporated milk, potatoes, salt port, a live hen, which we killed and plucked and roasted in a bonfire, delicious. Later, chowder and corn bread -- superb. I didn't go for fiddle head ferns very heartily though. Finally, Harley sold us on building a can? on a ten foot: bluff overlooking upper Oxbrook Lake, on the north side with lovely views of the sunrise and sunset at either end of the lake. He got the necessary permits from the lumber company who owned the land, and that fall, while trapping, he erected log walls for the camp and roughly roofed it over. The next summer Francis and I went for a couple of weeks with him to the site in mid-summer to build the roof and chimney and to make some furniture such as tables and chairs and beds. To me fell the job of paddling a canoe down the lake to a small beach where I sifted two canoes PL0&72M full of = and to make cement, for the chimney. The latter was built of small boulders gathered around the lake shores. The fireplace and chimney were.capacious, "If that thing smokes, there'll be Hell to pay," was Moulton's motto as we worked on it. The finishing touch was a mantle over the fire place, which Harley insisted would make the place ''home like." He went out into the woods and found a very straight white cedar tree of about six or seven inches in diameter, sawed it down and limbed .it thoroughly. He carried the desired section of trunk to camp where he pegged it to the camp floor after peeling it. He then got out his adz, from his all-containing tool trunk and sharpened it until it was razor sharp. Next he drew in chalk on the bare trunk the outline of the mantle he proposed to hew from the log. Then, standing on the log and chopping in toward his foot, he chopped away the wood with his adz until he had approximated the outline. Finally he took the shoe off his right foot and started in chopping again. "Aren't you afraid you'll cut your toes?" I asked him. "Well," he said "you can't tell just where to stop with your shoe on, for fine work." When he was through the mantle looked almost as smooth as if finished with a plane, and it fitted in the place where he had left a groove in the stone work to hold it. The camp was a great success in spite of the fact that it took a day and a half from Milton to reach it. You could stay for a month and see perhaps one lumber cruiser as a visiter in that time. The lake fishing was good, and Amazon Stream, about *1-06725 -75- one-half hour walk through lovely beech woods, provided brook trout at any season in quantity. Forest bird life was abundant and varied? eagles, various owls, warblers, and woodpeckers in particular. The Moulton and Byers families in various proportions enjoyed summer vacations there under the direction of Harley and his second wife, Helena, who always found berries for pie in the woods and who made delicious chowders out of the available fish. We always brought in a chunk of beef which kept well enough in a screened box up under the eaves. Flour and vegetables and milk could be flown in once a week in the fifties, but were a problem in the thirties and forties. We got a kerosene refrigerator in our second summer in the camp -- wonderful appliance I Better cocktailsi One day Harley and I took my daughter, Peggy, to fish in the Amazon Mud Hole, a tiny pond about an acre in size off in the woods. We made a small raft of logs and fished from that as the shores were very wet and muddy. The fish weren't very cooperative as I remember it, the mosquitos and black flies more evident. Finally, in desperation, I poled to the edge and said to Peggy "Jump off onto that log, " pointing to a round white birch lying on the shore. Peggy jumped and went right through the "log" which was nothing but a hollow bark skeleton of the log it had once been. She sank waist deep into the mud and Harley and I had a hard time extricating her. She stank all the way home and had to be doused in the lake when we got there but seemed to enjoy the outing. PL0672& Harley, -o my mind, was one of a nearly extinct '-reed of men who grew up on the edge of civilization and knew how to care for self and family by what nature provided. He had.to adjust as a boy to the knowledge that the person he had always called Majorie, his oldest sister, was indeed his mother; his father was never identified. However, he was one of tha kindest most generous-spirited people I ever knew. I overheard him talking over a tragedy of the previous winter with a friend one day. During the winter a young man driving a team of horses and loaded sled over the ice on one of the local ponds, fell through the ice trying to cross a well known spring hole in the ice. Said Harley to friend "Who was it went through the ice with his team of horses over the spring hole in Big Lake?" "Oh that was Joe's boy, poor kid" was the reply. "Him that got Dan's daughter in a family way last summer?" "Yup." "Clumsy warn't he" was Harley's only comment. We used the camp for hunting and fishing for a number of years and had nearly exclusive use of several lakes and streams in that period. Just before World War II the C.C.C. built a dirt road along the lovely little Machias River and that immediately became full of discarded tires and other junk and absolutely barren of wild life and fish. As a last straw the lumber company built a gravel road from near Tops field to Pleasant Lake, a mile or two north of our Upper Lake and within a few hundred yards of PLO&727 -77- Amazon Stream. For a year or two no 'one discovered our trout, but about the third year when we went there to fish, the banks were trodden down like cement sidewalks, the brush was cut away, and the stream dead as far as fishing went. Such is progress. Meitner the English nor Canadian would permit such a fate for their natural resources. Rumor had it that a Massachusetts judge had been apprehended by the Mains Fish and Game Service leaving the Amazon Brook with a "trunkful of dried trout." We used the camp in the spring for fishing and in the fall for deerhunting. For the latter, A1 Hunt joined our group. One fail, I believe it was over the week when Truman scored his surprise victory over Dewey, we drove north in A1's new Buick convertible to hunt -- very jazzy car. A1 who, in his younger days, had been a west coast football personality and was quite handsome, drove us. As we passed through Lynnfield, two girls on the sidewalk turned to look at us in obvious approval. A1 smiled back warmly, whareupon one of the two cried, "Tt`s not you, it's the car." The car got lots of compliments the rest of the outing. With the advent of the C.C.C. road, the fish were gone and the chances of being shot, mistaken for a deer, so great that we sold the camp in the mid 1950s, sadly closing what had been a very happy experience. Harley died of old age, I would say, some time in the middle 1960s. Prior to that I used to send him a box of cigars for Christmas and about mid-March I'd get a letter of thanks from him explaining that he'd smoked them all and none had exploded. Pl-06728 -78- In the spring of 1945, as the European phase of World War II was winding down, and as Randy, Jr., was about to reach draft age, my brother, Lloyd, invited Randy, Jr., and ne to make a salmon fishing trip with him to the Little Worth West Nirinachi ^Ish and Game Club, situated on that river in New Brunswick. I had been there ones with Lloyd just after the war began in Europe and knew what an undertaking such a trip was, but also what a comfortable relief it would be to Lloyd, who by then had a well-established drinking problem. On this account it was thought by some that I ought not expose Randy, Jr. , to him for such an extended tour, but his drinking problem had always vanished while he was with me off fishing on several occasions, and I thought it would again. Lloyd first planned the trip going by air to Fredrickton, since flying was being resumed, but that flight was not resumed in time for us to go in June, 1945. Lloyd instructed us to ship baggage ahead and to meet him at the North Station at ticket counter 4. When we got there Lloyd was seated behind the grille at the booth with a Boston & Maine ticket sellers cap and emblem on his head. He passed out tickets to Fredrickton on the "Gull," and we got on the train. We sat up ail night in day coaches, but the train was not crowded and sleeping was reasonably feasible with interruptions at stations hare and there. There was, of course, no dining car, and by the time we arrived at MacAdam Junction, the Canadian Border Station, we were all very hungry. Customs did not in any way interfere with us, and we made for the restaurant. PL.06729 -79- This had vary little china but plenty of food. We ordered fried eggs and bacon, which were served to us or* paper napkins in our hands. While we wars trying to devour these, the "all aboard" for our train was called, and we dashed out to it with egg yolk running up our arms and dripping off our chins. We did consume most of cur eggs and managed to mount the steps to the cars in spite of dangerously slippery hands. We settled down in our seats for the brief ride to Fredrickton Junction; cleaning up was a problem with dry paper towels. At Fredrickton Junction the crew of the local for Fredrickton all greeted Lloyd on a first-name basis, and Lloyd asked if they would let Randy and me ride in the locomotive cab. They agreed at once, and he and I rode in the cab for the 20-30 mile trip. It was a single track line, and the engineer was busy ranch of the way blowing the wistle to warn deer off the track. They all ran at the first blast and were a graceful sight. The fireman stoked the fire between us, and the ride was grindingly rough. When we reached Fredrickton there were crowds of people lining the west bank of the St. John River, as a moose had just swum over from the east bank. This welcoming committee, however, had convinced him that discretion was the better part of valor, and he was swimming home again. At Fredrickton we transferred to our automobile, which carried us through lovely looking country up to the kiriraaChi River Basin. We passed through towns with names like Boisetown, Doaktown, Upper and Lower Black Blackville. At rhe latter, a metropolis of a dozen or two houses, a newly painted sign PLQ673Q -30- announced, "Sandwiches For Sale." '-<e stopped at once, since by -hen it was well past toon and our hurried fried eggs had Long teased to satisfy hunger. Randy asked what kind of sandwiches. A nice British lady replied, "Chicken, ham, egg, pork sausage, Lamb, and veal." "I'll take one of each," replied Randy. The rest made do with less, but he went through his six sandwiches on lovely homemade bread in a trice, and we were off. Roadside springs with water pouring from pipes in the hillside were common r thirst was not a problem. At Newcastle a disappointment awaited us. The camp clothes we had shipped ahead had not arrived, so we had to find a clothing store and buy chinos, sneakers, and jackets for the long walk into camp. We set off on foot for camp, a matter of eight or ten miles as I remember it, through woods traversed by trails. We had some fishing gear to carry, but not our napsacks with sweaters and toilet articles. As we walked along it became clear that the stitching in our newly bought garments was not of first quality and every seam in every piece of clothing came apart. Our pants were converted into independent flappers suspended from our waists, and our jackets fared nearly as badly. The black flies very early became aware of our seminudist plight and soon re cruited mosquitoes and other bugs to join them. After two or three hours walking we were indeed a gory sight but reached cam? still able to heave a sigh of contentment. R smoky fire soon rid us of our tormentors, and the food produced by the guides slid PLQ6731 down happily. We did have a cocktail first, and for the rest of the crip Lloyd never drank except at cocktails in the evening. Lloyd was assiduous in letting each of his guests have the first go at every pool, except for the pool at the falls, per haps a quarter tile above camp, which was large enough for us all to fish at once.. This pool resembled a man-made dam with a smooth semicircular rim over which the water flowed in a smooth green crest. You cast flies into the smooth crest just before it broke into white water and the salmon grabbed them and swam maybe up current, maybe down through the rapids below the falls, in which case you had to try to follow for fear they would break the line. Grilse (young salmon) up to three or four pounds were common that summer, and each of us caught plenty? in addition each oi us killed two or three good size salmon up to eighteen or twenty pounds. There were several other pools we fished within walking distance of the camp, most requiring wading and a guide to point out the likely location for fish. Very thrilling to ardent fishermen. The fish after landing might, if not too badly hurt, be returned to the stream, the fate of a minority. Others were cleaned and eaten at camp, .and still others were shipped home in boxes lined with ferns and then half filled with snow, then salmon, then more snow. These arrived in Milton by express in good condition. The snow was stored in an "ice house" on the premises of the camp and was the result of last winter's blizzards; there was plenty of iu. The last method of disposing of killed salmon produced, to me, the most delicious result --- smoking. The fish was split PL06732 -82- and salt rubbed into the flesh and allowed to soak for a day or two. It was then hung in a narrow tube of wood with a smoldering fire of green hickory chips and branches, which was left going for wo or three days. This fish didn't keep very well in warm weather, and I can't remember whether we sent any home, but it was wonderful eating. In general we had delicious hearty meals three times a day of fresh country food, though how this was accom plished in June in a far-north latitude I can't say. We came home without any special incidents by train, and still with an untapped load of liquor, having had a wonderful time. I wish I could remember the guides' names that I might greet them personally now. My role at the children's Hospital changed after Dr. Crothers organized and opened the Children's Neurologic Service in the Bader Building. I spent more time on the ward than in the outpatient department and had the great advantage of being associated with Dr. Elizabeth Lord, a psychologist of independent intellect whom Dr. Crothers had persuaded to join his staff. She and I each noted children returning to the Outpatient Department who had been discharged from the wards as cured from a bout of lead encephalopathy, mostly contracted by chewing lead-containing paint off houses and furniture. Her patients were mostly referred back to the hospital by school teachers for learning difficulties. Mine were referred by teachers for violent, aggressive behavioral difficulties, such as attacking teachers with knives or scissors. We kept, a file and collected twenty cases. Dr. Lord showed that though most of these pL06733 "83- children had normal I.Q.s they had subtle learning defects in the way of distorted shape memories and concept formation. She died suddenly of leukemia in the midst of our work, which I was able to carry on with one of her pupils. Dr. Cecelia Roberts, who inter preted Dr. Lord's notes for me. Finally, in 1943 I published a paper on the "Mental Effects of Lead Poisoning in Children" which made the point that the vast majority (nineteen out of the twenty cases we followed) showed more or less permanent mental defects after recovery from acute lead poisoning, even though many of their I.Q.s continued in the normal range. The response was immediate. First there was a spate of studies showing that, just as I had said, children recovered from lead poisoning had normal I.Q.s in most instances, therefore they were not hurt. It took some time for that response to die down. The second result was that I was waited on by several members of the Lead Industries Association and threatened with a suit for a million dollars. At the invitation of the lead people I went to meet them at the Ritz for lunch to discuss the matter. Dr. Crothers who had urged my publication went with me. When we were through, the lead people gave me a grant which they continued for eight or ten years to continue and expand my studies. This for tunate result may have been abetted by the four or five martinis the Lead executives each drank, but more likely it resulted from the quiet skillful backup given my work by Dr. Crothers. After that I met with executives from the lead industries each year and in spite of three to five martinis for each of them and one for me, they gave rae a grant of several thousand dollars annually to PUOA73M -84- eontinue my investigation, resulting in a second paper about 1955. Mr. Manfred Bowditch administered the fund and visited me two or three times a year, h@lp.ful he was. Tnus the -first descriptions of the mental defects caused by lead ingestion were completed and showed that in the absence of acute lead encephalopathy, lead poisoning could cause mental defects in growing children. This conclusion depended for its realization on ray exposure to Dr. Aub's and his group's study of lead metabolism in animals and my association with Dr. Lord who was an independent-minded psychologist and the wealth of relevant clinical material at the Children's Hospital. During the 1950 's, 1960's, and into the 1970's. Dr. Louis Diamond was studying the effects of maternal sensitization to the Kh factor in her unborn baby's blood. The mother had to be Eh negative (Eh being a factor in the red cells of about twothirds of the human population) , the father Eh positive, and the baby Eh positive. Several syndromes appeared in the baby after birth in this situation. Without going into them all, one was severe neonatal jaundice (often fatal), but if survival occurred a severe discoordinate cerebral palsy appeared. The .babies were quite helpless, at first generally limp, but later, at one to two years of age, showing violent involuntary moments called athe tosis . These rendered the individuals entirely helpless in later life if severe. The children were generally regarded as feeble minded, but with the help of psychologists and otologists, we ware able to show that many of them were profoundly deaf instead. We had one girl who could not stand or feed herself, who had to be PLOA735 0035AWP000008508 -SS- st rapped into a chair to sit, who coaid not speak at all, hut who graduated from Radcliff and read Plutarch in the original Greek for pleasure once her deafness was recognized and relevant education cersued. As a result of Dr. Diamond's research, prevention of this once common form of cerebral palsy became possible, and this awful syndrome is no longer seen. At the onset of U.S. involvement in World War II I was just over forty-five years old and in view of my previous Army experience, decided I could better serve my country at home. I continued private practice as well as I could, making many calls on a bicycle {owing to the gasoline shortage) , ran the neurologic outpatient department at the Children's Hospital and was school physician at Milton Academy. This schedule involved me in a work week of sixty-five or so hours and left me little time with my growing family. Since I had a doctor' s' gasoline ration and one of the few cars in our neighborhood on the road, our son Randy rode with me whenever possible since, like all boys , he was very much attracted to automobiles. One thing that irked me in the situa tion was the insistence of the athletic coach at school that I do routine physical examinations on all the boys who went out for sports. He set the time and place of exam, and I was expected to keep these dates no matter who might just then be importantly sick. I was doubly irked because all of the boys were supervised by doctors at home, many were being given shoos of so-called hormone solutions to make sure they achieved full male virility. These solutions were palpable fakes and I usually wrote the home PL06736 -36- doctcrs to say thsit all a inis had been achieved and begged permis sion to stop the shots. The doctors usually agreed readilvi Daring this period various antibiotics made their ap pearance. First the sulfanilamide group which was effective against the streptococcus almost exclusively. Then penicillin which had a much wider range of susceptible organisms and is more completely curative than the sulfa drugs. This revolutionized septic medicine, for example making quite unnecessary the mastoid operation so frequently necessary theretofore after middle ear infections. The nose and throat specialists depended on this job for their livelihood and to some extent voiced objections in the literature. Streptomycin next appeared as a potent anti-tubercular drug. It had several drawbacks: it was very expensive; chough it seemed to cure tubercular meningitis, the disease always recurred after the drug was stopped; and deafness was very common after its prolonged use. Because of these defects I was cool to the use in tubercular meningitis after seeing one or two families completely deprived of their homes, education for their other children, and old age security for themselves, with a fatal outcome for the afflicted child. With the introduction of isoniazid and paraminosalicylic acid a few years later, the cure of all forms of tuberculosis was established and the dilemma was resolved. From then on antibio tics multiplied and improved and to the present day they still are doing so. Soon after the war was over the I.R.S. sharpened its talons and went after taxpayers whom it considered possibly F'L.06737 -87- delinquenc. They seat an agent: to look into my tax returns. He required, on forty-eight hours notice, that I close my office for two days -while he investigated -- really unnecessary. At the time I had a most competent, if diminuti/e secretary, named Helen Smiddy. Her brother had a severe cerebral palsy and was a patient at my cerebral palsy clinic at the hospital. One day I found her peeling uncancelled five-cent stamps off incoming mail and said "See, Smiddy that's pretty Scotchi " Whereupon she turned on me and said "I'm Welsh; we make the Scotch look like spendthrifts." While Smiddy let me stay in the office during the inspection visit, she answered all questions and promptly since she had made out my returns. After two days haggling, she proved to the I. R.S. man that we'd overpaid our tax by some $31. She demanded immediate payment and threatened him with her father who was a police power in the neighboring town of Winthrop. She got her $31 on the spot. The I.R.S. has never returned. That woman could also take a letter from dictation directly on the typewriter, have it reasonably paragraphed and punctuated. I could sign it on the spot. She always got me to the dentist or doctor on time. Unfortunately she developed colorectal cancer and died young in 1951 just after I had taken on the neurologic service at the Children's Hospital full time. About the time the U.S. became involved in World War II electroencephalography became sufficiently well described to require its inclusion in the medical armamentarium of the hospital. Since the machines ware moderately expensive, the Pl-0675a -88- truscees ware unwilling to take the financial risk of installing one. Dr. Franc Ingraham, recently appointee neurosurgeon, felt so 'strongly about it that he purchased an early model machine for"use at the hospital. It proved so important in the localization, of certain brain tumors, the recognition of certain types of . epilepsy, and the understanding of certain types of behavior disorders that it was soon overwhelmed and the hospital acquired a newer and larger model. As a nepotistic venture I brought our eldest daughter, Frannie, into the lab where, with the aid of Mary Van Amee, Franc Ingraham's technician, we together worked out the procedures for operating it and interpreting its graphic messages. Later, when our second daughter, Sue, was through with her war time job in M.I.T.s Radar Laboratory, she joined the staff, and Frannie was able to introduce her to the mysteries of electroen cephalography . Both daughters have plied this trade subsequently, and Sue is still at it, part-time, at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa, California. At about this time Dr. William Lennox, who had been working in epilepsy at the City Hospital joined the Children's Hospital staff. He had had the unfortunate experience of a niece who developed uncontrollable epilepsy and mental deterioration, an experience prompting him to regard "convulsions" as an evil spirit in need of exorcism. He developed a large department with many E.E.G. machines and wrote the most complete book on epilepsy so far published. His work was carried on by Dr. Cesare Lombrcso, who worked up normal/abnormal patterns in health and disease in newborns and premature babies, a previously undescribed field. All of these developments proceeded over a span of thirty or more Pl-0739 -39- years and advanced the care and understanding of epilepsy and other cerebral diseases. In 1951 Dr. Crochers who had headed the Neurologic Service at the Children's Hospital since its foundation in the 1920s reached Harvard retirement age of sixty-five. Since his appointment was funded by Harvard Medical School for the hospital, he retired and I was appointed to his place. An advance in salary from $3,000 annually to $4,000 was granted. For this I was expected to administer a division of the medical department at the hospital, its clinical and teaching aspects, and find money to run it and to attract and appoint trainees. To me this was a very satisfying and worthwhile occupation, but even supplementing my hospital pay with private consultation patients, I never earned more than about $18,000 or $20,000 a year. The hospital objected to my taking weekends off, something to which I felt entitled, considering the rate of pay, and I did. I had many interesting associates in this job. A holdover from Dr. Crothers' staff was Dr. Edith Meyer, who later married Mr. Overton Taylor and finally moved with him to Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She described the changes in psychologic function shown in acute disease of the cortex and wrote an excellent book on the subject, now largely unnoticed. V7e had ample opportunity to study the subject in such diseases at post-vaccinal and post-measles encephalitis, diseases now no longer seen. She had the capacity to transfer the significance of her observations to children with cerebral palsy and other fixed brain lesions, which helped in preserving their "amour propre" during groping attempts at education. PLQ67<4q -90- Aftar Edith Taylor left we had one or two rather routine psychologists who wars more interested in labeling patients psychotic than in probing their intellectual functions. ' An out standing exception among these was Albert Treischnan, who was assigned from the Judge Baker Clinic to my neurologic service part-time. He was a most kind, gentle, widely-horizoned man who understood the importance of self-respect in the development of children's personalities. His studies and reports (when they came) of individuals were most useful and informative. I was much out out when I discovered that he was leaving in 1961 to start a brand new project called the Walker Home and School in Needham. This turned out to be a completely unique institution. It was set up on the premises of the old Walker Gordon :-iilk Farm, where certified milk had been produced for years. This became no longer profitable as it became evident that processed milk'and milk products were really better than raw cow's milk for infant nutrition. On the death of the owners, the farm was left to the Children's Hospital as a Convalescent home. Poliomyelitis, rheumatic fever and various forms of tuberculosis contributed to the clientele, but as these diseases vanished with the use of Sabin Vaccine for the prevention of polio, penicillin for the supression of streptococcal infection, and isoniazid and its congeners for the cure of tuberculosis, the convalescent home stood empty. A court order was obtained, dedicating the abandoned home to the care of delinquent children. There A1 soon found that a large proportion of delinquent boys had severe learning difficulties. Some sitting in PI_067M 1 -91- the third grade had no accurate concept of the meaning of 'such fundamental aspects of arithmetic as the concept four, anything over two being "some'' in the chaos of their lives. In reading many were as primitively deficient. Underlying these deficiencies was often an emotionally and intellectually deficient homelife with brutality often very extreme. In the last few years before his untimely death, in his early sixties, I saw two boys who, on admission, I'd have certified as mentally deficient at eight or nine, get going, in school and cover two or three grades in an academic year. In some cases, at least, the Walker School con vinced me that I.Q.s are often culturally imposed rather than genetically determined. Dr. Betty Banker, who was the neuropathologist at the Children's Hospital, was another powerfully stimulating person in ray life. She and I together, as a result of clinical material I had been gathering for years and her own autopsy studies, wrote an account of "Infantile Muscular Atrophy" that I think is the world definitive paper on that disease. Could someone define the gene by whose double presence, i.e. one from each parent, the disease is caused, perhaps we could be rid of a number of clinical syn dromes which we were able to lump into a single disease. After his resignation as head of the department, Dr. Crothers worked diligently on a grant I obtained for him, describ ing and documenting the evolution of cerebral palsy. Though this study showed treatment of cerebral palsy restored few people to competitive living, it brought to the attention of the profession the fact that many cerebral palsy cases were not the result of p *-04742 "rough obstetrics" 2.3 had been previously believed, and this find ing has resulted ir. a great decrease in the.disease, improved care of under-weight newborns, improved methods of delivery, and the virtual suppression of Hh disease of the newborn (the latter was well underway before Dr. Crothers1 work). Sir Peter Tizard, of Oxford, England, ay first trainee in the children's neurological service was a major contributor to the health of under-weight newborns, pointing out that they could not afford the nutritional interruption tolerated by full-sized newborns before their mothers begin lactating. During my tenure as Chief of the Neurologic Service I had trainees from all over the world: Holland, England, Lebanon, Australia, and the U.S.A. It seemed to me part of my duties were to orient them toward increase of knowledge, so, in conjunction with each one, I wrote a paper on a subject of neurologic interest. Some are quite pedestrian, a few are fairly good. While I can't make claim to be a major contributor to medicine, it seems to me that Harry Beacher's statement, in a history of Harvard Medical School, "that Byers was able to hold the neurologic service together during his tenure" is a bit of an understatement. PL067U3 "93" As m.y sixty-sixth birthday approached in the spring of 1962, a large gift to Harvard Medical School for the establishment of a Bronson Crooners Professorship in' Pediatrics *as given. The head of the Department of Uuerology at the Medical School, Dr. Derek Denny-Brcvn had a very favorite candidate. Dr. lahut Uzman, who with Dr. Denny-Brown had done therapeutically successful research into the genetically determined Wilson's Disease. Dr. Uzman had been known to be suffering from Hodgkin's Disease for many years and there was much opposition to his appointment. Dr. Denny-Brown's Committee finally prevailed and Dr. Uzman was appointed. The next day Dean Berry of the Medical School called me saying "Randy, do you care who pays your salary? Under rules of Harvard University I can't pay you after July 13th. " "Well" I replied, "If it isn't in Confederate money, I guess I don't care." "Under the rules, I can pay Children's Hospital, and they will pay you." Four or five months after his appointment Dr. Uzman was dead and I was again running the service. Meanwhile Margaret and I had had a lovely six weeks in Europe. We went to Lisbon where I gave talks to the International Pediatric Association about various subjects of neurological interest, mostly having to do with cerebral palsies and Rh sensitization as a cause of deafness and athetoid cerebral palsy resulting therefrom, stressing that unsuspected deafness was the usual cause of ohe low I.Q.s being reported in this disease. PL067MU -54- In Lisbon we stayed an a beautiful new hotel overlooking a semi-tropical garden-park. On the walls was a notice in English and Portuguese stating that the individual rooms wars soundproof. In the next day or two the newspapers carried an article about a man who had beaten his female roommate to death in the hotel, and no one was the wiser for several days. The proof of the ouddingi The taxicabs of Lisbon were terrifying. Speeds of 100 kilometers per hour were not rare downtown on the .tain traffic arteries. In the poor crowded sections of town were streets so narrow that the taxis crawling at a snail's pace just barely got through, and pedestrians perforce stepped in doorways and sucked in their guts. From there we went to Madrid where we stayed as pure tourists at the Ritz in super comfort. To me the Prado Museum was and still is the best art collection I ever saw. We made a side trip to Toledo where we visited war monuments from tha revolution and bought scissors and knives just as we should. Dr. and Mrs. Lee Hill of Des Moines, Iowa, went with us and we had a lovely time with them. Lee had transfered as a third-year medical student from Dartmouth Medical School to Harvard into my class. I hardly knew him until he had established himself as a leader of midwest pediatrics in Des Moines and had headed up the American Board of Registration in Pediatrics. For years I was an examiner of candidates for the board, which gava exams in medical Centers all over the country. Marion Hill, his wife, was a very charming typical ITew England woman; she never drank as far as I knew, but f3 LQ671JS -95- she picked out the wines and liquors for the meetings with exquisite taste. She let the men pick out their cigars. The Hills were unfailingly good company, and we were sorry to lose them when they deserted us for a trip up the Mile while we flaw from Madrid to Beirut. In Beirut we visited Dr. Maria Salaam and her husband in a palatial apartment. The bathroom, large enough to hold a ball, had marble walls and ceiling and a shower that came down like rain from the ceiling involving much of the room. Toilets, basins, and such were arranged on the periphery. In the living room was a stuffed tiger and thereby hangs a tale. When Maria was due to turn up for her traineeship with me on a September 1, I received a cable from Assam, "Delayed, tiger hunt, arrive third. Salaam" This was the tiger that had postponed her arrival from the first to the third of the month a few years before. This charming Polish woman had been captured in her adolescence by the Russians during World War II and had mined coal for them in the Vorkuta Region of northern Siberia. She escaped across Russia. Somehow she obtained a consignment of ladies nylon underwear and, trading this judiciously, made her way to the near-east, where she continued her interrupted medical education and also married the manager of Lebanese Air Lines. Multilingual, accomplished pianist, excellent doctor, and charming person she is an example of how civilization persists in the face of brutal disaster. While in training in Boston she brought with her a charming daughter and weekends flew back to Paris to- visit her husband. Finally she was divorced and later married Professor Raymond Adams. PL.Q67U6 -96- In Beirut I talked a few times to the medical students at the American University. The city then was a lovely seaside city with a- vivid night life, quiet streets on which knots of people sat playing chess and backgammon and talking endlessly. I had a haircut there in an undistinguished shop; two years later I walked into a barber shop in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and the barber said "Didn't I cut your hair in my shop ir. Beirut in August of ' 62?", and he named the street. One day Maria arranged for us to travel to Baalbek in the Lebanese hinterland. Margaret was ill, but I went with a Lebanese guide. The trip began by auto up the steep Mediterranean shore mountains, where there were ski lifts with a view of the bathing beaches below. At that season no snow, but the lift machinery was all there perched two to four feet above the ground, and they said snow came in the late fall. The road was at first the main Damascus highway, but soon after entering the green valley of the Litani River we abandoned the auto and took to a camel, which was slow and rough. I tried to get the Moslem guide to take my picture on the camel, but he felt squeemish about touching a camera and would not take a picture. The temple at Baalbek is truly a remarkable structure. Much of it is built from local stone, indeed there is a quarry with an incompletely quarried column matching some on the temple waiting to be freed from its nascent attachment to bedrock. In addition there are tall columns six feet or so in diameter and many feet tall, made of grey marble, the nearest quarry for which is said to be somewhere on the Nile. How were chey transported pL067M7 -97- down that river and up over the Lebanese Mountains to 3aalbek in the days before steam power had been harnessed? Another day we visited Last Jerusalem for five or six hours. In order to Jo this from the Arabic city of Beirut, we flew to Aman, Jordan, and from there to Jerusalem, since access to Bast Jerusalem was blocked to Arabs by the Israelis at the time. I can't remember just what we visited, but among the places was the Garden of Gethsemane, the Dome of the Rock, and Bethlehem. It was all very touristy, and I, at least, felt little reverence save in that it all looked very old. The Arabs who took us on this jaunt were well educated, suave men, but in spite of their good manners and speech, their hatred of the Israelis showed through. I wish I could remember a quote, but none comes to mind. It seemed unlikely that any set tlement of the Arab-Israeli feud would ever be possible short .of annihilation of one side or the other. Perhaps generations will produce modification of attitudes, but it will take many, and violence will but postpone any possible settlement. After a ride on Maria's tiger in her apartment and a visit to a night club where we were entertained by belly-dancers, we took off to Athens where we stayed at a hotel in the Main City Square, not far from the Acropolis and other ancient Greek relics. In Athens we met an erstwhile trainee of mine, Helen Economopulu, and she showed us a lot of the town, including the regal place and its Evzone guards. We toured the Acropolis by ourselves and were duly impressed. I can't compete with archaeologists in my descriptions, but it surely is a magni.ficant monument to the skill and artistic power of the ancient Greeks. PL067t|e The city seemed to be thriving at the time, but neither of us liked the cuisine, especially the wine served by the local restaurants, We took a taxi, an ancient Mercedes, out to the Temple of Poseidon on a promontory overlooking the Aegean Sea. Hare the isolation and natural surroundings enhanced the beauty of ancient man's work; I thought it one of the most beautiful ancient sites I had ever seen. We rejoined the Hills in Athens and were each scheduled to take a boat trip to the Greek Islands. Unfortunately, the travel agent had booked us on different boats since the Byers had decided later than the Hills that they wanted that expedition. On going to Paerius (the Port of Athens) we found our craft had a large hold, divided into a men's half and a women's half and that several of the women had live hens traveling with them. We withdrew to our hotel where we looked for other outlets. The hotel manager said he could get his friend, the manager of the Grand Hotel in Rome, to put us up r accordingly we flew to Rome and the Grand Hotel. I have never been treated any where as I, or I should say we, were treated there. Much of the opulent beauty bestowed on the hotel by Mr. Pierpont Morgan was still evident. Oriental rugs in profusion, two exquisite dining rooms -- one light and airy, the other more formal with crystal chandeliers and dark furniture. Flower arrangements everywhere and very tasteful. A head waiter who selected your table for you with reference to your desires. A profusion of scrubbed and polished waiters. Should you order consommfe a waiter would come with heated soup bowls and put them on the table. A second would PL067M9 -99- prcduca a silver tureen of soup, while a third ladled if. into the plates* They 1st you eat it yourself in your own way. To me the profusion of help was an expression of the depression of the Italian economy, but I could not help enjoying falling into the lap of luxury thus offered. Rome was a beautiful city, but the traffic was about as bad as in Lisbon, where the rule of the road seemed to be that he who blows his horn first has the right of way. At least 100 km/hr. speeds weren't possible in Rome. We saw much of what we were supposed to, the Colosseum, Spanish Steps, and many shops. We ware so intrigued by the Grand Hotel and its fixings that we visited few restaurants. While we were in Rome we were off our prearranged schedule and unfortunately our sister-in-law, Angela Cooke, was killed in an auto accident while we were there. No one at home could find us until we got back on track by flying from Rome over the Alps to Amsterdam where we put up at the AmsteL Hotel very happily. While at dinner there our daughter, Peggy, called to tell us of Angela's death, and between us we decided not to cut our trip short. In Amsterdam we visited the Rembrandt Museum and liked that nearly as well as the Prado in Madrid. tie also had visits from two Dutch girls who had come to the U.S.A. to work as babysitters for Peggy when she had little children to care for, perhaps in 1959 and 1360. We still get a Christmas letter from one Jeanne Nieuwland, warm and friendly. PL0&730 - 100- One day we hired a car and drove front Amsterdam to visit another trainee of nine, Johanna Krigjsnan, in Miimegen. On the way we'passed the Van Gogh Museum, a beautiful gem tucked into a glowing birch woods. The pictures ware so full of Light that T have an impression of sunshine all about; a lovely experience! We finally found Man at her hospital, run in a beautifully religious fashion by a sisterhood of the Dutch Catholic Church. Man took great pride in showing us about and explaining her own contribution to the care of the many children in her charge. We also visited her home on a quiet side street and then she took us to a lovely wayside restaurant for-a delicious and intimate dinner. She insisted it was her party and would not allow us to contribute. I had an invitation to her retirement party in Holland in the summer of 1985! How the young grow up! A very dear day. Prom Amsterdam we flew to London and then home without further incident. That trip was our last to foreign shores. Our family living evolved through the years. Our own four children were all present and accounted for oy 1931, and what fun we had with them. Our house at 277 Adams Street, Milton, was adequate if some children doubled up in bedrooms, but when they started having evening callers there was but one living room for everyone. In, 1936, after ray mother's death, we built an addition to the house on Adams Street with another living room, and a bedroom, study and bath upstairs. This gave us so much flexibil ity that by the late thirties we began to acquire stray students who wanted to attend Milton Academy. Durrr.g the war years we had F*L0A73l -Id as many as three a'osorbees at a tine, one Betsy Brayton stayed with os five years, Madeline Lee cwo years, and others like Jans Williams and Kayo Little for periods of months. I well remember coming home from golf on Sunday morning and finding Betsy and a friend hanging at the end of a fire escape rope attached to a third floor window. The rope was intended for the second floor level and left them with a long drop to the ground. They finally swung to a roof over a bay window and crawled to safety while I was in pursuit of a ladder for rescue -purposes. Our last boarder was Frances Sternhagen, now an established actress in Mew York. All these youngsters orought spontaneity and fun to our house while our older children were exploring the world of jobs in New York and on the West Coast. Some years later we had the fun of having Connie Buffum as a boarder for a year and a half. She left us to be married in December, 1953. While she was with us Margaret's jewelry and Connie's was stolen by a daytime burglar. retain her warm friendship to this day. In spite of this, we For a long time we thought our children immune to cupids darts, but in 1951 Frannie married Dr. Sidney Horowitz of Columbia University. In 1951 Randy married Eleanor {Nunnie) Atwater, and in March, 1953, Sue and Peggy were married in successive weddings on the same day to Graeme Plant and Robert Wood, respectively. The stress incident, to arranging their weddings was the precipita ting factor in our sending Frances Sternhagen away to board with friends of ours. All save the first of these marriages have pL067S2 -102- prover, stable and happy -- all have resulted in fourteen super grand grandchildren. Visits to their parents and then kept us happy while we continued to live at 277 .-.dans Street, Milton, for eight or ten years. Suddenly we found the heating bills and taxes for cur large house excessive? the latter had risen from around SSOG in the early 20's to over S3,000 by the late 50 's, early 60's. We could have slept in a different bedroom every night for four nights (not using the single bedrooms at all) and made beds only twice a week, an option we never exercised. At any rate, Margaret saw an obituary for Catherine Luther in the paper one day in the fall of 1961. We knew her husband had died six or eight months before and that they had no children. Margaret was on the doors ill as soon as the funeral was over, offering to buy the house from Mrs. Luther's brother, who was the executor. We struck a bargain, sold our house for almost as much as we paid for the new house, and in June, 1962, moved into 65 Morton Road, Milton. As we moved in I said to my dear Margaret "This doesn't look like such a small house. I thought we were doing this to shrink." "Well," she replied, "the other house had sixty-eight windows and this has twenty-nine. " The taxes were $800, roughly, but mounted steadily in the next twenty-two years to $3,000. Is this a warning against home ownership, or just an expression of inflation? Our new home was indeed smaller, with two double bedrooms and a single bedroom on the second floor, each with a PLD67S3 -103- bathroom, and two largs plastered rooms with little heat on the third floor. Ifo bathrooms up there. In spite of its modest size, the new place made me feel Like an aristocrat. With it came a very kind, willing caretaker, John Kippenberger by name. He had worked for the Luther's who had lived there since the house was built in 1929. Since he was already collecting Social Security, the amount he could earn annually was sharply limited, but he seemed very content. He came one day each week. He: did anything: lawn mowing, leaf raking, snow shoveling, housepainting, floor waxing and staining, gutter cleaning, wood carrying, and window cleaning. He even put out heavy board walks in winter and stored them in. the cellar for the summer. He was an inveterate gossip and entertained us with comments on some old-line Milton customers. According to John, one of his patrons, a so-called Milton silver-top, paid John's wage3 weekly to the local savings bank, and at the end of the year turned John's wages over to him, but collected the accrued interest for himself. John's comment was that " it was a sort of Christmas Club --- not as good as it might have been, but I was glad of the extra money at Christmas time." He never destroyed a leaf from the plethora of leaves that fell on our lawn, and we had bushels of beautiful leaf mold every year for our gardens ; how it grewi As John and I got older, we began to creek and needed help, he because of a deteriorating hip joint and I because of cardiac limitations. One day I saw an ad from Sear's in the paper for a motor driven lawn cleaner which sucked up leaves, shredded pt.067SM -104- ani bagged them, cr. sale that day in Quincy -- stock limited. "That's for re and John," I said to myself. Margaret and I went post haste to their Quincy store? there on the floor was the very thing, but when we inquired, this was only a display model; the real thing had been all sold off. However, the salesman called up the Hanover store where a buddy of his worked; yes, they still had some and Mr. X would save one for me if I'd come right down. We made the fifteen mile trip in a few minutes and were greeted by Mr. X who said he had the leaf-raker and shredder for me if I'd just pay him for it. I handed over my check in the amount of $200 and my driver's license for identification. After a slight pause he came to me to say the check was accepted and we could have our lawn cleaner if I would drive around to the loading platform. There two strong young men had trouble lifting a large wooden box into the trunk of the car. It was labeled with a picture of the machine I coveted. We drove proudly home and waited John's arrival next morning for the unveiling and demonstration of our new toy. Next morning John and I with great effort got our boxed beauty up and out of the trunk and by means of a plank slid it down onto the floor behind my car. It seemed unduly heavy, but we went enthusiastically to work. On opening the box what should we find but a room air conditioner! I called up Sears in Hanover and asked that rhey come to pick it up. PU0675S -105- "Well, our truck will be in the neighborhood in the next week or two and we'll pick it up then" they replied. "But I'm a doctor with sick people to visit, and I can't get ray car out of the garage -- this monster is on the floor in my way and too heavy for me to move. " "Too bad," they said. "Well, I paid $200 for the lawn sweeper; this air conditioner must be worth about $400; don't you want it back?" "Yes, but we can't come for a week or two." "I'll bet the local hardware store would get it today for $300 or so." "Well, we can't; we have no truck today." John and I considered it would be unmoral to sell the air conditioner, though we were tempted. Finally we decided to try to get it back into the trunk of my car and take it back to Sears in Hanover. We had two 1 "xl" joists left over from something and about the right length to make a workable incline plane to the trunk. We got the ends of them under the edge of the box nearest the car and with crow bars gradually levered the box containing the air conditioner up to the trunk. The joists bent alarmingly but held, and with much puffing and panting we were successful. The car did not bend and we were able to lower the box into the trunk without lacerations or fractures of either it or us. On arrival in Hanover ve were greeted with extreme reluctance and skepticism when we told our story and asked for an exchange. Finally the floor superintendent came and told two pL06756 -106- youths to take the box out of our oar and give us a new lawn sweeper. The youths' faces fell when they cried to Lift the box out. They struggled and grunted and finally got it out of the trunk; then it fell to the ground and broke open. "Jesus 1 it is an air conditioner ! " was their comment. How American merchandizing became great! The lawn cleaner was a great success ; it shredded and bagged leaves at a great rate, doing two or three hours worth of raking in an hour or so, provided the leaves were dry, and the shredded leaves formed a very durable mulch to suppress weeds and when piled in a hole quickly became leaf mould. Our home at 65 Morton Road, Milton, was a great comfort to both of us. When alone we were not lonesome in it, out there was a comfortable guest room, and what had been a maid's room would hold a child or two. The attic provided almost unlimited, but unheated space for grandchildren on a few cots. We had probably eight or ten family Christmases there, with Frannie and her children being the most frequent visitors. We recited the "Llight Before Christmas" with them in front of the fire and then tucked them in bed and got out presents. Great funl In 1965, at the suggestion of Ruth Moulton, Margaret gave me a lovely little green house tacked unto the south end of the house. It was a bit hot and dry for some plants, but yellow and brown lady slippers (Paphilopedeliums) grew well in it, as did Reiga Begonias and geraniums. I tried lots of other things and had much fun and more or less success with many varieties of plants in it. pL067S7 -107- We had a screened-in sunporch which was a very, very comfortable retreat -- also on the south end of the house. This we glazed with sliding Anderson doors, two or three years later. This formed a very warm sunny retreat on bright winter days, and heated by a small portable electric heater, stayed just above freezing on cold winter nights. Here camelias, azaleas, ivies, and other plants thrived. I used it as a convalescent ward after several acute illnesses such as flu. It was enhanced by a couple of bird feeders, one with thistle seed, which drew redpolls, siskins, and gold finches; another with sunflower seeds was tempting to chicadees, cardinals, and purple finches. The porch was surrounded by hemlocks on the north side, which had their visits from crossbills of both kinds, and grosbeaks. Thus our home grew more and more into a retreat to which we became more and more addicted with the passage of time and advancing age. In August of 1979 I had a long-postponed prostatectomy. After the operation I had a septicemia caused by a pseudomonas organism. A few years before this would have been a fatal complication, but with new anti-gram-negative antibiotics, I pulled through with the help of three special nurses round the clock to give the medication intravenously. One of these nurses, Victoria White, was a remarkable person. She was orphaned early in life and apparently brought up by friendly bartenders under the Boston elevated in the south end of Boston. They thought she needed to learn to defend herself in this situation and as she reached adolescence fitted her to a set of brass knuckles. PJ-O&7S0 -108- One day, while I was convalescing, the hospital office called me on the telephone, ashing to transfer this gem of a nurse to another patient. As 1 was very fond of Victoria, I stalled. ""Jest day I told her of the call and she told me her story: They want me for that Kennedy boy who has been breaking up hospitals in the oast year or two. I had him as a patient here two years ago and was the only nurse who could get him to behave. When I got him I went home and got ray brass knuckles and hell them under his chin and said to him, "Sonny, these are for you, if there is one peep out of you while I'm in charge." "He was a lamb from then on, but nobody knows about my secret weapon." After this illness I lost position sense in my legs and feet and for a day or two was unable to walk at all without a nurse on each side to hold me up. Some neurologists thought this probably the result of the antibiotics required by the infection I had had with deadly pseudomonas organism. Some improvement occurred rapidly, but by the next summer I still fell in the dark if lights ware suddenly turned off. This disability together with the shortness of breath resulting from the mild coronary thrombo sis I suffered in August, 1979, prevented my return to work at the Children's Hospital where I had happily continued as an associate professor for fifteen years. In 1964 Professor Charles Barlow had taken over the now independent neurological service at the hospi tal and kept me on as a well paid henchman, but resignation was forced on me by ray disability. This seems a good point at which to note some of the changes in medicine that have accrued during the fifty-eight years PL.D67S9 -109" I was active in medicine. Complaints as to chs vast increases in medical costs are conscantiy at hand, hut there seems to me no practical way to evaluate the vastly improved medical care available for purchase. I can r.ot imagine that I can enumerate them completely, but I can cite examples. As I was emerging from training in hospitals the discovery of insulin for the control of diabetes was announced by Banting & Best, resulting in the control of a large proportion of cases of diabetes, but by no means all. Pernicious anemia, usually fatal within a year of diagnosis, was vanquished in the 1920`s by the liver diet, subsequently refined to a simple vitamin preparation by Minot, Murphy, Castle, and others. A diagnosis of cancer of the stomach was universally fatal in the twenties, but surgical research, anticancer drugs, and new instruments such as the fiber-optic gastroscope have tamed it to a very large degree. Infections of all sorts have been quelled. Pneumonia, which was in Osier's day, the captain of the man of death, is now an excuse for a pleasant few days vacation. When I was at, the South Department of the City Hospital it was r.ot rare to have scarlet fever enter a home and kill half the family in a few days; now it and its dreaded complications have virtually ceased to exist. In spite of extensive and expensive sanatorium systems, tuberculosis took its toll after long years of incapa city ; now drugs control it very handily. Chronic severe pain of sciatica marred the lives of many people, now removal of their ruptured intervertebral discs eliminates it instantly. Prevention of disease has also grown rapidly. Effective vaccines and toxoids have made possible escape from the threat of infantile paralysis. PL.06760 -110- tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, and German measles, the last three of which were part of the growing-up process of most children in this society. Though so considered, they were capable of serious hard, especially brain damage, to a few and if delayed into adult life, might deform unborn babies. Advances in general health care involving reduction of fats in the diet, ab stention from tobacco and excessive alcohol have reduced the death rate from heart disease, strokes, cancer of the lung (achieved already in white males only so far) emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver. Special drugs like beta blockers and diuretics have re duced the toll taken by elevated blood pressure and angina. All together medicine has tide great gains in the control of patholog ical processes of various sorts, even if it has relinquished some of the personal charisma which made the relatively powerless nineteenth-century doctors so beloved in their day. After giving up the pursuit of medicine in 1979, I re tired with my wife to our home at 65 Morton Hoad, Milton. Hare was a very satisfying home for me. We had a nice garden where spring bulbs grew happily and where perennials like iris, peonies, and roses grew well. We had wild flower beds up against the southeast side of the house, shaded by a large ash tree in the middle of the lawn. Here grew native holly in abundance, yellow lady slippers in clumps, Dutchman' s-breeches, and anemonies in ground cover of ivy. On trellises were two beautiful large-flowered white clematis vines which bloomed abundantly in the spring. There was about one-quarter acre of lawn, which sooner or later became infested with chinch bugs and required PI-0676 1 insecticides, but keeping it .towed was a job John did for me until he died in 1982. In the fall we had vast quantities of- leaves. These were always raked up and turned into leaf mould, which made the wild flower garden possible, as well as being an unending joy to neighboring children who jumped from our stone wall to the top of the pile with a great bounce. Sears & Roebuck's leaf shredder produced leaves so chopped up that the kids1 fun was spoiled since the pile of shredded leaves had relatively little bounce, but leaf mulch was produced six months sooner. After I retired we spent long summers at our cottage in Little Compton. Here I had a flower garden which Frannie's second husband, Buzzy Hatch, helped me fence in and cultivate. Here, with the help of leaf mulch imported from Milton, grew a number of kinds of lilies, lovely clove pinks, stoksia, gaillardia, Japanese, iris, and many summer bedding plants such as petunias, stock, snapdragons, astors, and zinnias. I at first started the seeds in the cellar of our house in Milton, under fluorescent lights which worked well for them and for slow growing denizens of the vegetable garden like cantaloup. I got great satisfaction out of this sign of agricultural prowess, but as I grew to be more and more of a cardiac cripple, I had to abandon the cellar lights and try a few seeds in my greenhouse which didn't work too well. My final gardening achievement was weaving a seat into a canoe chair which sat me practically on the ground, but with the help of arms built into the chair, I was still able to get to my feet again. With this device I could still weed and plant annuals PL06762 -112- and cultivate fertilizer into the soil. Pictures of ne doing so appear -.3 show me cut off at the waist, but these are an exaggera tion of my elderly disintegration. The Greatest ioone to Marraret and me that comes from Little Compton is the close neighborliness of our children. The Little Compton layout consists now of three houses developed on a four-acre plot of seashore land which my mother-in-law stated her husband acquired in 1901 far four-hundred dollars. He put up a very comfortable house with spacious porches, five bedrooms, and a bath, again at a bargain price of $11,000. Furnishings were brought from Hyannis by barge for a few more hundred dollars. Since the house was on a sandy bank twenty-five feet or so above sea level, well water was scarce and unreliable and used for drinking only. Three large cisterns in the ground collected water from the roof which was used for bathing and washing. Each day tanks under the eaves were filled by a more or less unreliable pump. 'To one but George Cutler, the coachman-chauffeur, or my mother-in-law, Mrs. John S. Cooke, could activate the engine or knew which combination of valves to turn to direct which water into which tank. I cart see her still, a fastidious lady of sixty or seventy, standing in the pump house with an air of triumph as she conquered that recalcitrant engine when George was ill or away, and no one else could. Hot only was Grandma Cooke able to run the cranky gas-powered pump at Little Compton, she ran the Point socially. She and Mrs. Dean, her neighbor, spent summers across a little dirt road from each other and to their dying days called each other Mrs. Dean and Mrs. Cooke. However, they were , I freely critical of each ether- For example, when Grandma was in her later years and having trouble finding maids to help in her summer home, Mrs- Fean said to me, "If your mother-in-law would nay her help decent wages, she could find plenty of help." Their crowning modern achievement in collaboration was to commission me to purchase an electric hedge clipper for use between their two summer places which were well supplied with California privet, one of the few plants that throve in the windy, salt spray environment of Warren's Point, It cost $23 and was kept in Grandma's garage. They had tea together on their respective porches nearly every afternoon, and the young people of the point were welcome, provided they were properly dressed. Grandma gave up on this requirement the last few years, of her life, allowing sports wear, even shorts on girls, on her porch, or else as she noted, her grandchildren would not come to see her. Another of Grandma's hobbies was bridge, a game at which she played indifferently. Saturday night was her bridge night, and we played until the clock struck midnight, at which point she gathered up the cards and went up to bed saying, "See you in the morning; breakfast is at eight-thirty, church is at ten-thirty." Grandma took us in for a month or so every summer, until well after we had four children and they were growing up. In 1937, in the midst of the depression and great unemployment, Grandma built us a lovely summer house on the point, a hundred or so feet from hers. A high hedge cf privet intervened, and our house was more intimate with the sea then hers, being a bit lower and nearer the cliff. We moved in for the summer of 1933 and had barely moved home to Milton than the hurricane of 1938 struck. FL0676H -114- Margarat and I were terrified when we heard over the radio that "hundreds ware frowned in Rhode Island." We hastened town by automobile a couple of days after the storm, for the roads were blocked by fallen trees and all telephones ware out. Our anxiety was somewhat mollified by having' the knocker on our door bang the night of the hurricane by a neighbor who came, struggling through a mile of fallen twisted trees :: tell ~a that his daughter's vaccination, which I had done ten days before, had taken. I had told him to report in ten days. I wondered if ail doctors1 directions were so meticulously followed. To return to Little Compton and the hurricane of 1938 -- Margaret and I motored to Tiverton, Rhode Island, at the head of the East Arm of Narraganset Bay. There the police had a road block, but immediately gave us a pass to proceed to see Grandma Cooke. Thus far the road had been well cleared of trees and other debris. The first thing we noted as we rounded the hill that overlooked the head of the bay was that a solid line of flotsam and jetsam encircled the hill about seven or eight feet above the roof of our car. Wires were down everywhere, but electricity was turned off. A single-car roadway had been opened up through the fallen trees and branches, but we had no competition so the trip was made easily. We arrived at Warren's Point to find Grandma all safe and sound. The police, at some risk to themselves, had been to call on her an hour :: two before the hurricane to urge her to leave. She had refused, gently but firmly, saying that her house was on a bluff thirty or forty feet above high water and she'd be PLQ6763 -115- saf?. The sea did cone over the cliff, and left telltale debris her lawn, within a few yards of her house but had r.ot entered. "How'did you make out?'' we asked. '"It was nasty," she said, "So much mud and sand flying around you could not see anything, " and the windows gave her remarks substantiation. "I put Cousin Sadie in the Morris chair up against the French doors (on the ocean side of the house) and she held, no windows broke, and even the pump works." The devastation all around was appalling. Sakonnet Point, a much lower point than Warren's, had been rather thickly settled and had a small summer hotel on it. Now nothing but bare rock with here and there a lonesome telegraph pole. Several people were reported to have died in the sudden onrush of a tidal wave thirty or more feet high. Indeed, the Sakonnet Light keeper whose lighthouse rises a good thirty feet above water level reported that the wave completely engulfed the lighthouse for a few moments. Sea water did get into our house, about as deep as the mop board on the ground floor. A sequel to the 1938 hurricane is worth reporting here and has to do with the hurricane of 1944, which was not nearly as severe in Little Compton. Margaret and I were there during it and while it raged I did go over the Grandma's house carrying a bit of two-by-four joist in my hands. On the way this was jerked out of my hands by a gust of wind and disappeared. I got in Grandma1 s rear door without too much trouble, but in the house destruction reigned. "What happened? X asked. PL06764 -116- "I put Aunt Ethel in the Morris chair up against the French doors, but she's too easily air born, and the living room rug just blew out through the leaded fan light over the front doer." We found the crumpled leaded glass window about a hundred yards from the house but never found the rug. "Tables, chairs, desks stayed home, but were overthrown. The modern slim figure for ladies {Aunt Ethel's LOO lbs. -) is not as useful as the Victorian silhouette of Cousin Sadie (2 00 lbs. -) in a hurricanel A few hundred yards up the not-so-main road at that time lived a lovely couple named Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hand. Their house was the first one in which the Cookes lived in the summer of 1901 while their house on the Point was abuilding. It was said to have been built in 1644 and to be the house in which the hymn, "My Faith Looks Up to Thee, " was written. At any rate, there is in the house a drawing of it standing in a dense jack pine woods, which were destroyed in the hurricane of 1841. Grandma always said that when she lived there she could not fit a comb between the top of her head and the ceiling of the bedroom if she stood up to dress. At any rate, it is a venerable house by American standards. Herb and Kate were very popular with our friends, and we saw much of them. Herb was a subtle practical joker. One day while I was transporting a mattress for our double bed from Milton to Little Compton roped onto the top of my car, I came upon Herb, kneeling in his garden pulling weeds. I thought I'd make him jump by driving up behind him quietly and blowing my horn. I did so. PLQ6767 -117- Herb turned around, nook in the car, iriver, and mattress, and admonished: "Handy, ton't drive so fast, you've already lost your patient." Herb was an ardent fisherman, and during the days when striped bass were common in Rhode Island waters fished a good deal. One day during the early years of the Second World War in Europe, Herb caught, "a beauty" and presented it to Grandma Cooke on a Sunday morning. At that time maids were understandably scarce, and we had engaged two college girls to take care of Grandma. The girls said they could cook and serve, which was an exaggeration. They were, however, expert in entertaining life guards on the beach, especially on Sunday afternoons when there were extra lifeguards. That Sunday afternoon Herb was on the beach and over heard the following conversation between a life guard and one of our girls. Life guard - "Well, where have you been all afternoon?" Girl - "You ask? Some darn fool caught the biggest whale in the ocean and gave it to Mrs. Cooke this morning, and I had to cook it and serve it to the whole damn family and boy, did they eat." Grandma never presumed to trespass on the freedom of college girls again! Pt-0676B -118- In the early 1930s our comfortable and happy way of life in Milton began to change. In the fall of 1931 cur faithful John began to fail. In the fall and winter he took a couple of months off because of increasing congestva heart failure and in the spring of 1992 he suffered a fatal heart attack in bed at .light. He had remained emotionally comfortable and optimistic to the end. A few years before, he and his wife had celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, a party to which we were invited. All their children were grown and established on their own. His widow re mained alone in their small house in Dorchester. For the first time I understood the word "relict." We have helped her a bit ever since. As if to shore up the impending "wreck" of our lives, our door bell rang one day in the fall of 1981 and there stood a handsome Irish woman who said, "I understand you need help, Bridy told me, and I want to come to work for you." Bridy was her sister-in-law who worked for friends of ours. We fell for her at once, and with this little introduc tion, Nora McDonough became part of our household. She is a lovely Irish woman, with black hair and snapping blue eyes, and a smile and laugh that would melt the heart, of a Scrooge. Her brogue was delightful; she herself characterized it by saying one day, "What do you think, I was talking to the kids this morning when one of them said to me 'Aw come on, Ma, talk English, and we'11 be with you.' " Another quote is also characteristic to Nora. One day I was contemplating moving a rather large plant in the garden, cer- f*L06769 -119- tair.iy more than I could .tanaga alone. iTora came along, as always interested in ,,hataver might he in store. "Do you think you and I could move that plant, "ora? it will have a heavy ball of earth?" "Sure, Doctor Byers, there is nothing you and me, the two of us together, can't do," was her reply and verdict. She worked for six dollars an hour, the cheapest psychiatric care of which I've ever heard. She came at nine and left at one. She cleared the \ breakfast dishes, cleaned up the kitchen, made our bed, cleaned the bathroom, carried fire wood up from the cellar, did a bit of housecleaning, made our dinner and served it to us in our easy chairs, cleaned up the kitchen, and slammed the kitchen door just as the clock struck one. To keep her time full she* d get some thing ready for supper, or pick flowers in the garden, or pick up the lawn in the spring. She was a good cook, and we got spoiled under her care, especially her apple crisp, and the crisp summary of current events that issued from her lips. She had a gentle, effective husband, and he and her eldest son came on a few occasions to clear snow for us. It was a pleasure to watch him instruct the boy on how to operate the snow blower; it was done so effectively and thoughtfully that the boy enjoyed the task. Unfortunately school attendance made regular employment of the son for this purpose impossible. We got to know all four of her children, and those two have given the U. S. a valuable asset in them. Pl_0A770 -120- Long before Nora same into our lives, we had enjoyed the loving and devoted ministrations of Catherine Xillilea. For twenty-odd years she came once a week to do our laundry and clean house, - and she has continued to do so, making the long trip from Dorchester to Needham once a week for a year or so. She is a person of much courage and has successfully intervened in the crises of her own family, while continuing to enjoy the devotion of her children and grandchildren. Though she is no longer a. spring-chicken, she can hustle cheerfully through a day`s work that would kill many people. She knows how to cope with any household problem, such as spots on garments and resistful gadgets, and does so. She also brought us our lunch in the living room, quite a different menu than Nora's, and equally welcome. At present writing she is ill with shingles. In place of John for the garden, I found a wonderful woman, named Jan Childs, who came as a professional gardener once or twice a week as needed to care for my garden. You could easily see that her heart was in her work and that she felt as positive as I did about the beauties of the garden. I'll always remember her kneeling in front of a clump of yellow lady's slippers in flower in my wild flower bed. It was almost as if she knew their history: In about 1933 of 1934, at the request of the then Secretary of Labor, Mrs. Perkins, I went with Dr. Joseph Johnstone of Detroit, to talk to the doctors of northern Michigan about the feeding of infants. I don't know how the locale of the talks was chosen, but we covered the upper third of the southern peninsula PL0&771 -121- and much of the northern. It was in the early spring, perhaps May, and one of the nost tiring expeditions I ever undertook. We would talk in soma snail village hall from scout 3:00 p.m. to 10s 00 or 11s 00 p.it . ., go to bed somewhere, and invariably soma ardent fisherman would wake us at 4:00 a.m., anxious to introduce us to his favorite stream, pool, or lake. On one of these crepuscular expeditions we trespassed on a Ford fishing preserve, and there greeting the rising sun, above a flowing stream, was a bank of yellow .lady' s slippers in full bloom. Our physician/guide said, "They are easy to transplant; why don't you help yourself. " I did pull up five or six plants, wrapped them in wet leaves and stuffed them in my jacket pocket. The botany was better than the fishing. When I got home to Milton I planted them, first at our home on Adams Street, then transferred them to Morton Road, and now ray children have some at their various hemes, and I have a small bunch at our retirement home. Jan stayed while I told her the story and was happy in it. The last person I engaged to try to patch together our home was one Peter Collis. He came in answer to an ad for someone to do a little painting needed on the house. He was a small mildly asthmatic man who looked much older than the fifty years to which he admitted. Mo sooner had he and Nora seen each other than they almost executed an Irish jig in the yard and flew into an animated conversation in Erse. "He's from Sligo, right by where I grew up," said Nora. For the pleasure of talking Erse, Peter showed up from time to time to mow the lawn chat summer, but it was clearly too much of a physical job for him. In the fall he quit, and Nora's Erse siren song fell on deaf ears. PU0&772 -122- In spits of all the enthusiastic devotion of ail these people, problems existed about our home on Morton Road with which I could no longer cope physically. Mowing the lawn took a couple of hours of keeping up with the motor-driven lawn mower. Raking leaves, even with Mr, Sears leaf shredder, took several sessions of two to three hours each fall, and if the leaves got wet each session would double in length. Clipping hedges took two or three day-long sessions yearly. Snow in unpredictable amounts had to be cLeared from the driveway and paths. In the winter of 1981-82 we ware not able to clear the path to the front door for several months. This left the kitchen door our only escape hatch in case cf fire, an undesirable risk. In addition to these unsolved problems, my dear wife developed a then unexplained tendency to fall down. How many falls she had I don't know, and whether all were due to the same cause, I don't know. In the summer of 1983, while trying on finery for our granddaughter's wedding, she fell, claiming she tripped on a rug, and fractured her pelvis with six-weeks hospitalization. A year or more prior to that while looking at mild flood waters from the cellar stairs, she plunged down the stairs and had to be hospitalized- temporarily for suturing of gashes on her legs. In the spring of 1934 she was standing on the lowest step of the cellar stairs, leaning on the newel post talk ing talking to me, when she suddenly plunged to the cellar floor, landing on her head and shoulder. She fractured her left humerus and was hospitalized and had physiotherapy for six weeks after. She had many other falls, not resulting in injury. PL06773 -123- Slectrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, brain scans, and physical examinations did not explain these falls, nor did careless walking or standing habits. At any rate, wall-to-wall carpeting and avoidance of stairs seemed indicated cor her. In the fall of 1332 we heard from our friend, Ruth Breed, widow of my medical school friend, Bill Breed, of a new retirement home to be built at Needham in the near future. Ruth had already applied and plunked down a considerable sum to reserve herself a place. Accordingly, we journeyed to the office of the Living Care Villages of New England on Highland Avenue, Needham Heights, for a looksee. We were greeted by one Mrs. Betty Jamesion and looked at each other in recognition. She was a co-par-shioner with us at St. Michael's Church in Milton, though much younger. She explained the financial arrangements, which essentially were a ninety-nine year lease of space after a large down payment, which was to be used by the corporation as working capital. We have no equity and must depend on the success and honesty of the corpora tion for return of ninety percent of our big down payment whenever we relinquish the apartment. Many sizes and shapes of apartments were available, but most of the planned larger apartments had already been engaged. We settled on a so-called two-bedroom deluxe but were not altogether satisfied. We had to be back a few days later about various business details, and while we were there a putative tenant telephoned asking to relinquish his reserved three--bedroom apartment. PUO&77M -a*1 2|'t 4A - This was a lovely apartment at the end of one of the wings of the building facing east and south. It had three bed rooms, one of which could be opened up into the ample Livingdining area and used as a T. V. lounge, a good-sized kitchen, a large taster bedroom, a tiny guest bedroom just big enough for twin beds, and two bathrooms, and lots of closet space. We engaged it at once, though we thought the price a bit high. Next we consulted our real estate agent about selling our house. We had bought it for forty-eight thousand dollars in 1962, and I knew it had appreciated in value during the twenty years we lived in it. I was thinking in terms of one hundred and eighty or ninety thousand dollars, but the real estate lady thought we should ask two hundred and twenty-five thousand, which we did. This would leave us with ample money for the down payment when we moved into the apartment in the spring of 1984. We got detailed floor plans of the apartment and made paper cutouts to scale of all our furniture. Randy and Frannie were the prime movers in this project, with their help we managed to furnish the apartment with our own furniture and not a stick has had to be replaced or rearranged. As we watched building progress it was obvious we would not move in until the fall of 1984. In May we put the house on the market and sold it almost at once to a young couple with a two-year-old boy and an unborn child for two hundred and eight thousand in cash. In the sales agreement we promised to be out by October 31. FH-OA773 125- We had a happy summer in Little Compton next to Peggy and Bob on one side of us for a month, ani "rannie on the other side for another month. About mid-summer 'North Hill signified our apartment would be ready for occupancy on September 15th. We went and looked at it a few weeks before that, and the lovely sunny rooms lived up to our expectations. For the grand move our children rallied around. Randy managed the show and directed the movers as to what was to be taken and where it went. Frannie had a schedule of all our pos sessions that we were not taking and who had chosen each piece as part of his or her inheritance, choices made in person by the four children in May. Some were shipped to Sue in California, some to Peggy in Middletown, some to Randy in Wilton, and somn to Frannie in Barrington. As far as I know everything arrived at the proper destination. When all that was accomplished Katherine and Nora each got a keepsake and then the grandchildren had a tag sale. Each remaining item had a price attached and each grandchild got equal sums of play money to spend. This was apparently the highlight of the move and was a very successful social event. As far as we were concerned, we went to bed as usual in our bedroom at Morton Road, had breakfast, and motored to North Hill, Needham, where our furniture and clothes were being installed, and slept comfortably that night in our own bed in our new apartment. North Hill was far from finished, with four wings yet unbuilt. All through the fall and winter we were waked about 5:30 a.m. by truck loads of steel beams, or bricks, or whatnot being -126- i;rr.ped outside our windows. One " improvement" that took us by surprise was the building of a covered swimming pool in the bay between our wing and the next. This replaced a group of wild trees native to the site, which had been shown on the brochures. We don't use the pool, and we would have liked the birds that came with the trees. However, the swimming pool has proven popular with many tenants and should be regarded on the whole as a plus value for the institution. We had been here only a few weeks when Margaret's falls began to reappear. One morning, after breakfast, I was_ sitting in my easy chair and she stood talking to me and exclained, "I'm dizzy." Before I could reach her she had collapsed over the T. V., shoving it onto the floor. She was only half down, and I got a chair under her; in a moment she came to, unhurt. This was clearly more like a syncope than a seizure-and certainly directed attention at heart and circulatory system as causative. A few days later, while fussing over medical arrange ments for studying her, I was in the bedroom and heard her whim pering down the hall. I found her lying on the floor of the kitchen with her feet in the hall and a bruised head. I could not get her upright myself so I pulled the emergency cord to the Health Center to get a nurse. Nothing happened. We did have a telephone, and I summoned help which came immediately in the form of two nurses. They examined her for broken bones and finding none, picked her up and put her to bed. . We went that afternoon to our doctor in Boston who applied a so-called Holter Monitor, a twenty-four hour electro- PL06777 -127- cardiogram. This ahowed what the cardiologists call a "sick sinus." 'The sinus in. this sense is a node of muscle tissue that generates recurrent electrical discharges which cause the heart to heat; her syncopes wars obviously the result of this sinus not doing its job regularly and allowing long pauses between heart beats. The treatment was placing a cardiac pacemaker to supplement the work of the "sick sinus." The diagnosis was evident on a Friday and immediate hospitalization into a room with cardiac monitors was advised f-or her immediate safety. The pacemaker surgeon was away, and it was Tuesday before he came back and said he would implant the pace maker in a day or two. Meanwhile Margaret had several roommates in her double room; one of them had a cold. Friday the pacemaker got put in, delayed because no operating room was available (the state has withheld permission for the Baptist Hospital to build more for several years). The next day Margaret telephoned me to say she felt awful at seven or so in the morning. I dressed and rushed to the hospital as soon as I could and arrived on her floor long before visiting hours, much to the consternation of several lady patients and the nurses. Margaret did look severely sick, and I called the doctor and went home at the very competent pleading of a nice head nurse. Frannie visited her that afternoon and reported her as looking very sick.' Hext morning Randy, Jr., came to support me when we went to visit, and he was visibly shocked by her appearance. I don't think it was all postoperative shock, the prostration came on too gradually. I think she had some infection, possibly from the PL06778 -128- roommate who had a cold. At any rate, from then on she improved rapidly, but. not quits enough to vote, as she would have for Reagan, while I did vote for- Mondale. A tough act to put on to let my vote count! Her syncopes vanished and in a few months she was back to her usual self. A year later, in November, her right shoulder began to twitch, looking like a horse shaking off flies, and a repeat Holter Electrocardiogram showed that the pacemaker was no longer functioning. She was immediately hospitalized for installation of a new one, but encountered the same delays in the hospital that had stalled her the year before. I'd like to be shown the surplus operating rooms that are said to exist by the State Rate-Setting Commission in Massachusetts. Certainly the Baptist Hospital needs more. A job that could have been accomplished for under a thousand dollars in Medicare costs, cost $4, 3 00 as a result of no operating rooms being available, as well as discomforting both my wife and me unnecessarily. Life at North Hill has, on the whole, flowed smoothly. Like all institutions, the food is monotonous, too much served on a plate, and no attention is paid to the fact that most of the people being served are arteriosclerotic and hypertensive -- too much ice cream (fat), and too much ham and bacon, not enough ~ cooked fruit such as baked apples or apple sauce or prunes. The sliced vegetables in vegetable salad are in chunks, something *- ': easily cured by the purchase of a preparing machine such as a Cuisineart or the like. But the kitchen is too small. PL0677? -129- The people here are very nice and willing, and to most special requests very sympathetic. They clean well, they change our bed linen once a week, and do the flat laundry {without ironing) . The grounds are attractive on the whole, and we are very lucky to live in a beautiful, light, sunny apartment of ample size. One last word about our family. We have four children, and we got better at having fun with the children and making them independent spirits, with practice. Had we not had the Esther Richard's philosophy of child rearing, taught to me in Medical School, to contend with in our early marriage, we might have done better earlier. We have fourteen grandchildren, ten of them girls. Five of our grandchildren, three girls and two boys, are married, but no great grandchildren. Most of the girls are pursuing careers, as is the present fashion. Some appear to have no choice, but feminism is depriving many couples of the deep satisfaction of parenthood. I predict that another generation will change its personal targets to be more in line with physiologic needs of adulthood and fun in living. One last admission: When and if you have children, regard their self-respect, or as the French would say, their "amour-propre, " as their most valuable possession. Ho sentence to them must ever begin with, "you should be ashamed of yourself" or convey that idea ? a slap, whether on face or buttock does not build self-respect. Careful direction given as part of a joint venture for you and them does. To me this is the cardinal rule of child rearing. Easy communication is second. Have fun is third -- laugh with, not at them! Have fun! pi_067B0 -130The practice of pediatrics as I knew it is dead. ''Then was first engaged in if, death was the urgent foe and occurred frequently. At present the main fo is social failure, due to drugs, poor educational application, and lowering of ethical standards. AIDS may yet reintroduce the death threat. PL.O&7B1