I took the job at Yale in July 1965, and never have I regretted it. Early on, in my first year, I was invited down to Tulane to be a visiting professor. As it turned out, I was offered a job. I was in a hurry to leave for New Orleans. While packing, my son Tommy called out from the yard in pain. He was swinging on a rope and fell. I went out to see what the problem was and, with my usual sharp clinical diagnosis, I told him he was OK.
After a few minutes, I learned I was slightly incorrect. I took him to the hospital and got his leg X-rayed and found out it was broken. We fixed him up and I left him with Sally. I was not on everybody’s good list, and my diagnostic orthopedic ability has suffered since.
Another of my visiting professorships was to go to Haiti. One of the Mellon brothers was a doctor and had a hospital there. Yale would send our senior residents down there for a couple of months to get more surgical cases. And Yale would send one of us down for a week to see that everything was working out and to leave the tough cases until one of us came down to help.
I went down and arrived at the Port-au-Prince airport. At the end of the runway was the famous pink building that was the headquarters for the Tan Tu Moot. This was like the Haitian Gestapo. People went in and very few came out.
I got a Jeep ride out to the country where the hospital was. No sooner did I arrive there, I got a phone call. It was from the minister of health. He told me Haiti's president for life, Francois Duvalier, aka Papa Doc, wanted me to see a patient. My brain was telling me that he must have heard of me.
I went back to town the next day to go to an eye doctor’s office. The doctor was obviously missing. In the examining chair was an old lady with two large cataracts you could see from across the room. She also had two friends with poorly fitted suits standing next to her. They did not introduce themselves.
I went through the motions, examining her for about 30 minutes and then told the minister of health my diagnosis -- that she needed two cataract operations. The minister thanked me, and I went back to the hospital. I felt that I got out of a hot spot. Shortly after I arrived back at the hospital, I got a call from my friend the minister, asking me to do the operation. It looked like a simple case, but if something went wrong, I could get a trip to Papa Doc's pink house.
For about two weeks straight, the minister called me every day and I would think up a new excuse. I used such great ones like I did not have a license or my chairman needed me. I was really worried.
So, I called the U.S. embassy and talked to the military attaché. I did not know him but I took a chance he was an Academy man. He was. He assured me that I was overly concerned. But I finally talked him into getting me an embassy car with lots of American flags, with two of the biggest Marines in the front seat, to pick me up at the edge of town. He agreed and I was chauffeured to the airport. When I put my passport down for a stamp, my friend the minister was there with one more pitch.
Nothing happened to me. I calmly got on the plane and I drank my way to New York. I found out later the old lady was the mother of Duvalier’s secretary.
Sterling's Money
Some of the great stories at Yale involve how endowment money is used. Many things at Yale have the name Sterling on them, and a Sterling professorship is the highest chair you can have.
It took me many years to find out who he was. John W. Sterling was the lawyer who put the Standard Oil Company together for the Rockefeller family. Considering how much money he gave away, I would have looked at him closer if he were my lawyer.
In 1928, he gave $3 million to build a medical library. By the time the Yale committee got going, it was 1929 and the Great Depression was under way. The building only cost $2 million and Yale did not know what to do with the extra million. Sterling said build another building, but Yale spent the million on special bronze doors, a peg wooden floor in the historical library and blew the rest of the money.
When Sterling heard how Yale had wasted the money and never called him, he never gave them another dime.
It wasn’t the last time. During the term of this current president, he got $25 million from Sid Richardson Bass, one of the Bass brothers. The Bass brothers, who own Texas, wanted to start a department on American Studies. The committee dragged on for a couple years and did nothing. Then the Bass brothers said that they would like a say in who is appointed to the teaching staff. But Yale said no.
That in general principle was correct. The president did nothing and finally the Bass brothers said they wanted their money back. The story got in the Wall Street Journal, and the school president was asked about it. He said, "I tried to call them twice.” For $25 million, he should have gone down there, and I’m sure something could be worked out.
When I came to Yale, the school president, Kingman Brewster, was a pain and was always meddling into New Haven affairs. His escapades were so bad that the endowment fund was suffering. Some of the alumni got together and bought the Court of St. James ambassadorship for him and underwrote it to just to get rid of him.
Sometimes it works out well. Andrew Mellon donated many millions of dollars' worth of art to Yale. A year later, he was up for a board meeting and went to the Yale museum. He asked where his exhibit was. The clerk said it was due to be put on display in about five years. Mellon went over to the school president. He told him to build another museum and send him the bill -- like he was ordering a ham-and-cheese sandwich.
The new one was built across the street from the first.
Bravo, Benno
We had other presidents at Yale who were great. One of them was Benno C. Schmidt. His is the classical story about why you should go to a Yale or Harvard. I could not sell that to some of my family.
His father went to Yale and his roommate was William L. Harkness, who was Rockefeller’s partner. Very soon after they both graduated, Benno’s father was running the Harkness fortune. He decided to send Sonny to his prep school and then to Yale.
Benno should have gone since he was quite bright. His roommate was one of the Bass brothers. Benno graduated, went to Columbia Law School, did very well and stayed on the staff. He did a great job of raising money.
Daddy liked to keep everything together, and Benno married Mary Harkness. He then got the presidency at Yale in 1986. His wife said she was not going up to "that New England fishing village'' and she stayed in their big apartment in New York City. She never came once to New Haven.
Benno did a great job at Yale before leaving in 1992 to do other things. My daughter Sara ran into him and his wife at an affair in 2016.
12 Bugattis
For all its education, the Yale student doesn’t always get it. During the Vietnam War, they were very anti-military. In New Haven, there was a very famous cooking school called the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). They had those letters written on their beat-up, old panel truck. Some of the students never caught on and continuously tipped it over.
Usually in the summer, we used to invite the eye residents and some of the Neurology residents over for a cookout. About my second year when we were having the party, I could hear a loud car coming up the road. I thought it was a resident in an old, beat-up car. I was only partly correct. It was a Neurology resident named Peter Williamson.
His car was a vintage Bugatti. It was probably worth close to $500,000. I knew he lived in Greenwich, but I thought it was in someone's gate house. But then he once had a Christmas party and invited us to his mansion. Everybody at the party wanted to go to his garage to see his car collection. He had 12 Bugattis that he bought and had them restored to their original condition. He also had a Lotus and a Maserati, but he drove a Chevy.
Peter stayed on the Yale staff and started the new Epilepsy Surgery program, and I got involved. He later moved on to his alma mater, Dartmouth, because of internal politics. Peter was able to do this because he married a Kettering, the family whose patriarch, Charles F. Kettering, invented the self-starter on cars and was a founder of General Motors. He and his wife Susan were both great people. We became good friends and would play bridge together.
Many years later when I was thinking about retiring, I talked to Peter to see if they wanted a Neuro-Op guy up at Dartmouth. They said yes and I was made an adjunct professor. But I then canceled it because Grandmother Maust’s health was failing.
A Trip to Texas
Another of my friends was a Neuro-surgeon named John Van Guilder. He was a simple guy from West Virginia, but he was very bright. His wife also made great cookies, and we were both cookie freaks. He then went to a hospital in Iowa as chairman. That happened to all our young guys here at Yale.
However, John and I did have one great case together. There was a Texan in Dallas who was horsing around with his teen-age son and tossed him over his shoulder. The son became quadriplegic. Nobody felt there was anything they could do.
One of the Neuro-surgeons suggested Yale because we were doing research on spinal-cord injuries and they knew John. So, the father called up John one day and explained the problem. He wanted John to come down and see his kid.
John thanked him, but he told him he never goes away from Yale. The father continued to try and convince him and asked him how much he would charge to come to Texas. John decided to make it ridiculous. He asked for $5,000. The man said that be no problem.
The father also said the kid had a sixth nerve palsy and he would like an eye guy from Yale to come down, too. Before we knew it, John and I were on our way to Texas. He picked me up in his old car and we went to La Guardia.
We arrived in Dallas and the plane disembarked on the runway since they had not finished the terminal. We got off the stairs and this mile-long white limousine was there. A tall man came out dressed in white wearing a white Stetson. He introduced himself properly, but he told us to call him Tex. Tex had his own oil company called “The Good News Oil Company.” Our friend John Dea said there were lots of these kinds of companies in Texas.
Tex took us to the Hotel Fremont, where we had a suite. Then he handed John a bunch of cards to places that we might want to visit that night as his guest. We said no thanks. The next morning, the car picked us up and we went to the house where the kid was on a Stryker frame. We looked at the kid and the X-rays. He had a hangman’s fracture, which is C1 on C2. John said he did not think that fixing the fracture would do any good.
Before you knew it, we were taking the kid to Yale. Tex handed us each a check, and John thanked him and was impressed. Tex thought we were not pleased and said that he could get the cash in an hour. We said that was not necessary and thanked him profusely.
The next morning, the car took us to the airport and we went over to a Lear jet. The kid and the Stryker and a nurse were already inside the plane. Then another white long Cadillac drove up and another old man came out in a white outfit. He came over, shook our hands and wished us luck. He was the kid's grandfather.
We took off and flew to Tweed Airport in New Haven. As we landed, John blurted out that we forgot his car was at La Guardia. But Tex said that would not be a problem. We got an ambulance and took the kid in the Neuro ICU. We then went back to Tweed, got back in the jet and Tex had us flown to the Marine Terminal at La Guardia to get John’s car.
John eventually operated on the kid, and so did I. We got rid of most of his diplopia, but nothing helped his spine.
No 'Altar' for Me
Another one of my very good friends was Bill Collins, who was Chairman of Neuro Surgery. One Friday, I was really having a serious problem and was tripping over my foot. I ran into Bill in the hall and mentioned it to him. He said for me to come to his office and he would check me out.
He said I had a disc out of joint and that I could do two things. I could lose my gut and exercise or he had time on the "altar'' that afternoon. I told him what we could do with the ''altar'' idea.
Later, when my son Tommy was finishing his training, Bill and I had a conversation in his office. They needed someone to put a spark in the transplant program and the job was Tommy’s, considering his training. Tommy met with Bill over Christmas vacation but decided against it. It was an excellent opportunity, but Tommy rarely followed my advice.
We Bought an Elephant
In the 1970s, Marvin Sears was on sabbatical. The man in charge of our lab came to me with a problem. We had some money left over from a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant and no way to spend it.
We couldn’t just waste it. We did not want to send it back since that was a bad thing to do. That would impact your next grant proposal. Al Mead had talked to some other labs and they came up with a novel idea. We would pool our money and buy an elephant.
We would get the elephant's eyes, Orthopedics would get the bones and someone else would get their part. It seemed reasonable to me and they wanted me to sign off on it. The only problem was it was a baby elephant.
I asked them, where do we get an elephant? Were they going out to Africa?
No. There was a place in Long Island City that collected all the large dead animals and freeze-dried them. They had a baby elephant that we could afford. I agreed, but it turned out there was a problem on delivery. They dropped it off one Saturday, but it was bigger than we figured on.
Our surgical knives were not enough to cut it up. We had to get some from the carpenter’s shop. At that time the courtyard from the labs and the university clinical floors faced this area.
We were never asked what we were doing, but I bet a lot of patients had a great story for the nurses. This is true. Sara heard it from Al Mead one evening at the club.
Arguing with My Prof
I did not learn my lesson, but the next time it did not hurt me. In 1998, I was working on my MBA at Yale. One of the courses was management. The prof gave us 50 case studies to comment upon as to the proper management style. One of them was about the firing of a department head in charge of leadership at West Point.
He tried to disguise it, but it was obvious. I knew the case and it was stupidly handled by the superintendent, who was the man who had hired him. As a result, the man did not get his star and was forced into retirement. The prof and I went at it and I told him I could quote verse and comma, including an article in the Wall Street Journal that said the superintendent was an idiot. I passed the course, but Sally told me I forgot why I was in the swamp. She was right.
A Woman in the House
About the same time as I was doing the dog experiments in 1979, I was doing my books. In order to make a summer deadline in order to be on the shelves before the next American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting, I asked my editor to come by for a few days and do the last several chapters. She was from New Orleans, but she was in Philadelphia for meetings at her publishing house. I suggested she stay at our house, and we could really get it done.
Instead, she wanted to come up to Darien from New York every day. I had the book spread out all over the living room since we were trying to get the pictures squared away. I asked Sally to keep the kids out of the house -- they had yet to leave for summer camp. She sent them to ride horses that morning and swim at the club in the afternoon.
This was not something we ever did. People at the club knew Sally and I never used the club as a baby-sitting service. One day, Meg and Kelly ran into one of our friends who asked them why they were alone. The kids said they could not go home since "Dad had a woman in the house.'' They did not elaborate. One of my friends said it was good. It made me seem, for what it's worth, more human. It was a real practice builder.
Delft Houses
Another story I will tell partially for now. This was also while my chairman was away. A Mr. Jan Van Delft, who was the right-hand man of the industrialist J. Peter Grace, came to see us at Yale. He was up looking into a factory nearby in Naugatuck that made Mounds chocolate bars. He had many medical problems and surgeries but had survived them all.
Everywhere Peter went, he would check in as the local big shot and see how he was doing. Sears was away, so they asked me to see him. It turned out well for him since his complaints were a TIA and not glaucoma. He had a carotid bruit you could almost hear across the room.
I explained the problem to him and told him I did not think going to South America for six weeks was a good idea. I got him to see Bill Collins and they planned to operate on him in a few days. His wife came over and even though they lived in Malaga, Spain, they flew KLM and not just because he came from Holland. She flew first class and when you do, you get a souvenir miniature china Delft house with some liqueur in it.
After a successful op, I visited him and commented on the miniature Delft houses. I told him Sally collected them, knowing we could not get one unless we flew first class on KLM. I said a neighbor of mine who was head of the Spanish airline in this country could not get them for me. Jan said no problem. It seemed that he got KLM its landing rights in most of South America.
Almost a year went by and I never got them or heard from him. One day, Jan called me and wanted to go to dinner. We did and he asked me if I liked the village of Delft houses he had sent. I told him I did not get them, and that it would have been impolite of me to ask why not. Jan said he would take care of it. The next day, I got a call from the KLM chairman’s secretary and apologized saying they did not want to upset Mr. Van Delft. I was to call her when I got them so she would be sure. I received them in good order, and for years the Delft houses were in our kitchen window.
Another time early in my career, it was my last day at Yale before the Christmas holiday. I did not have as many Hispanic people at that time. I was looking at my patient list for the day and the last patient was Jesus something. I thought someone was funning me for the holiday. I asked my secretary if he were coming with his mother and the heavenly hosts. I found out he was just a Hispanic guy and not just a religious visit.
Colleen McCullough
I was also friendly with the Chairman of Neurology. He was of the old school and took off every summer to refresh himself. He had a house in Oxford, England. His wife was English. While he would be in Oxford, he would do some work at the Radcliffe clinic at Oxford.
The lady who did the EEGs was always trying to get him to bring her to Yale. He finally did and that is where I met her. As a side job, she wrote novels and her first one was entitled “Tim.” It was published and she received some money and was planning to go back to England with it and enter nursing school. Then she'd go back to her native Australia.
Her next book, published in 1977, was called "The Thorn Birds.” She made a fortune. Her name was Colleen McCullough. Instead of going to Australia, she went to Norfolk Island, which is nowhere. The entire island is about 275 usable acres and no harbor. It is one of the few areas in the Pacific where palm trees go to seed.
She bought about 50 acres and went into the palm tree business. She couldn’t buy any more land because she was not part of the group. They are all Pitcairnians. That is the name of the island that the survivors of the "Mutiny of the Bounty'' came from. Colleen married a local and got more land. She also put in a landing strip. She died in 2015.
Hangman's Fractures
Academia takes strange turns, and my paper on Hangman's fractures was one of them. After I left my fellowship, I brought with me two cases of Hangman's fractures due to auto accidents. I wanted to review the subject, so I went to our medical library, which is probably one of the finest in the world.
We even have an historical library so I could do research on the origin and technique of hanging. I asked questions of the staff and received a lot of unusual looks as if I was going to hang myself right there and then. I did the same thing when I went to Walter Reed and checked it out at the National Medical Library.
One evening at the Cosmos Club, we dined with Doc Schardt and his wife. I told them my story and about the strange looks I received and that the paper was dead. Doc said that may not be. When he served in the Orient after graduating West Point in 1944, a friend of his was the hangman for the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg. He contacted him and found out the Army has a field manual for that also. They did not distribute it widely. His friend loaned it to me and was told it was only for research for a paper. I learned there are several ways to hang a man depending on if you hate him personally.
The Royal Treatment
Here are two more of so many stories: A Middle Eastern royal family had a home in the area, and one day they sent a 13-year-old grandson to see me. The family is not tall and this kid was 13 years old and over 6 feet tall. The royal family wanted to know if he had Marfan syndrome.
This kid came with his nanny, who was about 35 and well-endowed. I was told that his grandfather "gave'' her to him for his birthday a few years ago. My grandfather never got me anything when I was 13. As it turned out, the kid did not have Marfan syndrome.
The last story for now is about a man who was sent in with severe vision loss from alcohol. He had won the lottery and drank away his winnings. He came to my office with a big brown paper bag over his head with a few openings for his eyes. He said the lights bothered him.
The interesting thing was that his son agreed with him and had extra brown paper bags to use when he needed one. I considered suggesting that he get a job in a grocery store so he could have an endless supply of bags.
One of the most interesting characters was a little Jewish man who had terrible diabetes and some neurological problems. He used to come and see me twice a year. As soon as he would come into my room, he would ask me how was he doing even before I examined him.
He was a nice gentleman but not a football-player type. One day, I was trying to be very cheerful to him and said he looked good enough to take me on. He told me he used to be able to fight the likes of me. I just smiled. The next time, he said, he would show me.
The next time came and he brought his scrapbook. He used to be a masked professional wrestler. I could not believe it. It was like seeing Batman in his costume when he was 65.
Skull and Bones
Yale men seem to be a little prouder than most. That is more so if they belong to Skull and Bones.
During the Second World War and in the 1950s, the OSS, which later became the CIA, recruited from the Ivy League schools, particularly Yale.
In the movie "The Good Shepherd,'' the last scene showed two top members of the CIA who were fellow Bones men from Yale. One is annoyed that he had to go and testify before Congress. He asked, ”Why do they refer to THE CIA and they don’t say THE God?''
Dog Days in the Lab
At the end of the 1970s, I was elected to the Senior Society in Ophthalmology. It required doing a thesis. I had an idea to measure carotid pressure by checking the eye. I needed to use dogs, so I had to borrow a lab since our labs were too small.
The head of our lab had friends. I was granted free use of the cardiovascular lab late on Fridays in the summer. I found out during this and the elephant story that there is an entire subculture in academia below the professors. The head of the cardio lab said he would not charge me if we did not do it sterile.
Since the school was charging me $300 a dog, I wanted to do one carotid one week and the other one the following week. The head of the lab said I didn’t have to do it sterile. When we did the first side just take the dog down to the kennel.
The only fly in the system was that the head technician would come in each week and see us doing it non-sterile. She was sleeping with the head of the veterinary department and would tell him and we would have to destroy the dog. Her sex life was costing me a lot of money.
Every Friday, we moved all the monitors and other equipment from our labs to the cardio lab. I got a job for my son Tommy and he helped us.
The down side of the experiment was that I forgot why I was in the swamp. I thought the idea was great and we proved it. However, I decided to put in an addendum and did a lot of calculus.
It was so complicated that the committee farmed it out to a PHD in mathematics. He found a small flaw. It did not change the results particularly but on that basis the thesis was turned down. I forgot why I was in the swamp. That was during the time I was running two practices, doing the first edition of my text book and the first edition of the Academy field book.
I had no desire at that time to do another thesis. However, I was the guest speaker at the Oxford Society that summer and gave the paper and was one of the few Americans admitted to membership to the Society.