Now back to Winston-Salem. One of the bad parts of my first year was that I had to do general emergency-room duty. It was fun when I was an intern, but not so when I was an ophthalmology resident.
It was always busy with auto accidents. That was because of racing around the North Carolina mountains, dodging the revenuers. That was how stock-car racing began. They had a deal with the revenuers to let them try and catch them as long as neither one would shoot at each other. On Sundays, they would race for fun up in North Wilkesboro.
We all knew Junior Johnson, whose family allegedly was the largest bootlegger. I remember one night there was a huge multi-car accident and the ER looked like a war zone. I had one man who obviously had a subdural hematoma and was going fast. I had a Neuro-surgical resident with me. We had no time to take the man to the OR.
The resident said he would do one burr hole on one side of his skull to relieve pressure from the hemorrhage, and I would do the other side. We did not know what side the hematoma was situated. I told him I was clueless about what to do. He said just follow his instructions. We did it and we saved the man. He finished up later in the OR. I never did another one so my success rate is 100 percent. We all knew the bootleggers and the revenuers.
When I was senior resident, we ran a clinic up in North Wilkesboro and carried our equipment with us. I also did it in Mount Airy. One time, I examined the family of the famous Siamese twins who had retired up there. Considering the natives up there, they were not so strange.
Goodbye, Boots
Our Boots was another great dog, but he developed epilepsy. We tried drugs but they didn’t work, so we put him to sleep just before I left residency in June 1964.
During my residency, Sally and I made friends with Jane and Bob Bowden. He was doing an Ob/Gyn residency. I was always borrowing beds from him in order to get in more surgery. In fact, I jokingly was accused of running a hot sheet operation.
Bob was about 6-feet-4 inches and loved to jog. He would jog around in his green scrubs. His running mate was a bald surgical resident. We called them the Jolly Green Giant and Mr. Clean. Later in life, Bob had both hips replaced. So much for exercise.
One of my patients was a Captain Barr, who lived in North Wilkesboro. The Cherry Chair factory was a family operation, but he was forced out. They make all the college chairs that are sold to alumni of various colleges. He went into business for himself and did some custom work for some of the doctors.
I designed two pieces that I still have today. He was not wild about me, so Sally and Mrs. Weaver made trips up there to seal the deal. He never quoted a price but told me not to worry. It arrived two days before we were to leave, and the price was more than fair. The dining-room table was huge and you could get a hernia moving it.
The Other Dr. Walsh
I had gotten a fellowship with a very up-and-coming Neuro-Op doctor who was at Duke, and he was just going to Miami. He trained at Johns Hopkins with the great Dr. F.B. Walsh. I’m sure my name did not help. You know that a full-time Neuro-Op does not make money for the department. That is so true today. So much for good care for everyone.
I just heard from the British that they would no longer do dialysis for people over 55. I am glad my granddaughter Molly is going into veterinary medicine and not people med.
A bit of history about Dr. F.B. Walsh. He was a Canadian. The B stood for Burton. He was a relative of the man who was the explorer who found the source of the Nile River in Africa.
At the Greenbrier
While we were in Winston-Salem, my father-in-law invited us up to the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia several times with Tommy. Since we always had to dine with Ray, we had to feed Tommy earlier. I can remember a waiter bringing a cart with a big dome and then setting up a table with linen and silver and then taking off the dome with a lot of formality. He then served Tommy a glass of milk and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
Since Ray was the largest shipper on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, he and his guests were put up in the Presidential wing. We had fruit in our room and I was given a railroad tie with two cats imprinted on it. That was the logo for the C&O, which owned the resort.
By this time, the Greenbrier was looking to just make money and would take conventions. One day, a conventioneer asked me in the elevator what my C&O tie meant. I told him it was the logo of the C&O Railroad. He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I ran the engine and rang the bell and went toot-toot. That was me being me, but Sally was not wild about my answer.
Sally's Pregnant
During this time, Sally became pregnant and we sent her home to have Sara. Sally spent the summer in Pelham while I took the Lancaster course up at Colby College in Maine.
It was now on to Miami and the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute. It was a great place to train and I was taught by young doctors eager to teach. All of them were to be extremely famous.
Sally rented a house in Miami Shores. We had a community club that allowed the kids to swim nearby and Sally could play a little golf. The house was great. We had several large fruit trees in the backyard and our own private monkey, who lived there. That September, however, a hurricane came through and took out most of the trees and put one through the kitchen window just as I was getting a glass of water. After that, we never saw the monkey again.
There was a family across the street with nine kids. They would come over to our yard to play since we had swings and a sandbox. Our new dog Boots loved to see the kids. However, he would nip at their feet as they started to go home, since he knew our kids were not supposed to leave the yard.
What a Turkey!
Dr. J.L. Smith, the man I worked for, and I would go to see patients every Wednesday morning at the VA hospital and then he would take me to lunch at the Lions Club meeting. The day before Thanksgiving, they had a turkey raffle and I bought a ticket and I won. The problem was the turkey was still alive.
I took the turkey home, and what a hassle that was. The kids would cry if I had it killed. But Sally took it to the butcher, and we lied. We told the kids that the turkey we were eating was not ours.
Christmas was grand. Ray and the McCartneys and Grandmother Maust and her nurse all came to the Breakers in Palm Beach. Ray must have taken over an entire floor. We even had a room for a Christmas tree and presents. There is a picture around somewhere. If I can find it, it will be included in the picture portion of this book.
January was very busy. JLS was running his first-week long Neuro-Op conference, and I had lots to do, including taking care of the guests who were the cream of our specialty -- like Dr. Walsh from Johns Hopkins, Bob Hollenhorst and Tom Kearns from the Mayo Clinic and David Cogan from Mass General. Having them as my charges for that week was wonderful and productive for my future career.
I had known Dr. Walsh from many phone calls I took for JLS. There was a very special relationship between them. It was like father and son. Dr. Walsh had lost his son in the war. Hollenhorst and Kearns took a liking to me, and we became life-long friends. One of the other participants was Bill Hoyt. JLS said they were friends, but I knew differently.
Mornings at the conference were lectures by the panel and the afternoons were case presentations by JLS, who was superb on his feet and taught me a lot. This amounted to about 50 cases that I had to pull the charts and X-rays together for him. Friday came and JLS was so sick, he could not come. I was elected to discuss the afternoon cases before the cream of my specialty.
I didn’t do badly, but Dr. Hoyt took me to task. Dr. Walsh and the others were a big help and very generous. About two weeks later, I received a letter offering me a job and a visit to the Mayo Clinic. Sally and I left Miami and the temperature was in the 80s. We arrived in Rochester, Minnesota, that evening. We did not deplane in the terminal proper. We deplaned outdoors on metal stairs. It was so cold, our hands almost stuck to the railing.
They were so gracious that the chairman, Dr. John Henderson, came out to greet us. We were wined and dined and interviewed. I met a famous previous chairman by the name of Wilbur Rucker. I will tell you more about him later.
I also gave a lecture about some of the research I was doing that year. One of the people who interviewed me was a name I would come across later in my career. He was Dr. Thoralf Sundt, who was a Neuro-surgeon. Instead of interviewing me, he told me about some sheep he was raising.
Everybody was so nice. They were the nicest people that I have met in medicine. It turns out later I heard about Dr. Sundt being a famous Neuro-surgeon and world figure. He used to operate with braces on because he had Paget’s disease. If he moved too much, he could break a bone in his hands or arms.
I found out more about Dr. Sundt years later when I was up at West Point. I used to like to visit the cemetery since it was a great history lesson. One day, I saw an odd gravestone and noticed Dr. Sundt's name on it. He was a graduate, Class of 1952. It has his biography and he was quite a famous man.
Job Offers
I also had several other jobs offered in New York. I went to Mount Sinai. I had the job, but they wanted me to talk to the Chief of Neurology, Dr. Maurice Bender. He was very friendly and he invited me to go to the weekly Grand Rounds conference. It was wild with doctors taking off their coats and ties in rage and calling each other all sorts of names in discussing the diagnoses. They were all certainly certifiable, but I decided not to take the job.
I then went to Cornell’s teaching hospital in New York, which had a great chairman and a great chief of Neuro-surgery. Since a lot of doctors lived in Pelham and we hoped to acquire 49 Hill Crest Drive, my father-in-law’s house, someday, I thought it would be a good job. However, the Chief of Neurology was a tyrant. His name was Fred Plum, and I did not want to work with him.
I then settled on Yale, even though the doctors at Bascom Palmer said I might not be happy since the chairman, Marvin Sears, was no fun. I took my chances and went to practice in Stamford.
Monkey Business
Everyone has heard the old joke about getting syphilis, or lues, from the toilet seat. JLS was into researching the subject. We had a series of owl monkeys that were infected. On Wednesday afternoon, we would dilate the pupils of the monkeys and use the indirect ophthalmoscope to look at the retina.
Our lab man would put on gloves and hold them down. Once, he got careless and the monkey bit him and his serology turned positive. We treated him, but he was about to get married and that was how he and his fiancé found out he was infected. We did a lot of talking, but it finally worked out.
Sally's Pregnant Again
Sally was pregnant again and was due in September 1965. We sent her home to get us settled in Connecticut and to have Kelly, my second daughter. She left me to close up the house and bring the dog.
We used to sew my socks in those days. One day, my shoe felt uncomfortable, but I assumed it was a new shoe. It turned out to be a sewing needle Sally had left. We never sewed another pair of socks. As a matter of fact, I do the sewing of clothes to this day, including fixing up the stuffed toys like the large stuffed turtle that we still have today.
We loved our new house on Salt Box Lane In Darien, and I had my own den on the top floor to do my academic projects without picking them up each day.
The trip home was wild. The car was new and loaded and I had the dog. The old car that I had brought from Germany was sold for $200 to Norman Shatz, the fellow who came after me. That car lasted only two trips to the hospital before it died. He never lets me forget it every time we meet.
While going through Virginia, Boots fell out the window even though he was on a chain. I found a local vet and we ended putting in an IV. But we eventually made it home OK. Even to this day, the family dog is more important than I am, and my daughters always blame me for not training him properly. It’s a family joke.
Lucky Lindy
Before I went back to Connecticut to final practice, I was offered a job by Dr. Walsh at Johns Hopkins. He was the man who started Neuro-Op. I came to know him over the phone almost weekly when I was fellow.
He offered me a job and we agreed that I would come up from Miami to work for him for a few months to see if we got along. Sally would go back to Pelham with her parents.
I liked working with him, but my ego would not let me spend my life being asked by patients to see if "Dad'' would take a look at them. However, it did allow me to meet and work with Dr. Richard Lindenberg. We always called him Lindy. He was a character, and we became lifelong friends.
His story is a great one. He was head of Neuro-Pathology in the German Air Force. He was a Lieutenant General. After the war, the Allies were picking up all the German scientists they could find. That is how we started our space program with Werner von Braun.
Our Air Force wanted Lindy. He wrote a study on our P-40 fighter. It seems that nobody seemed to survive a crash landing. He figured out why. It seems the sights for the guns were mounted on the panel in front of the pilot. When they crash-landed, their heads would hit the site and cause a fractured skull.
They gave him a job in the big air base in San Antonio, Texas. He lasted less than two years and took the job as coroner in Baltimore for less money. When we asked him why, he said the American Air Force was too safety-conscious and he did not get many bodies to autopsy.
We would visit Lindy's lab every Monday night with Dr. Walsh and go over autopsy cases and figure out the pathology with the injuries we could see. Lindy was probably the best Neuro-pathologist in the world. He was even asked to go over the results on the Kennedy assassination. He refused because of he didn’t want involved in politics and his not being a born U.S. citizen.
Lindy was all scientist. He taught us all a lot.
A Look Ahead
It is now July 1965. I think at this point I’ll tell you about Yale stories and the practice years and end up with Study Club, my IOC, the Eye Study Club and different academic trips. I'll end with stories about my children.