Bio Bits

 Pre WW II Family Fun

In England the day after Christmas, Boxing Day, is also a holiday. Traditionally it was the day employees received Christmas boxes from their employers. As a kid in England during the 1930’s, Christmas and Boxing day meant fun, presents, sweet stuff to eat and a big family party.

We helped to shuck the peas and to top, tail and cut the beans, French style. We also stoned huge Arabian raisins for the Christmas pudding, a cross between a rich fruit cake and a steamed suet pudding with just enough flour to hold the grated suet, dried and candied fruit, sugar and butter together. Grown-ups ate small servings, but my cousin Jack and I ate as much as we could get.

Thanksgiving is not celebrated in England, so Christmas is the annual feast. A big turkey, a ham, roast beef, potatoes roasted-in-meat-drippings, Brussels sprouts, beans and peas. No corn, yams or cranberry sauce, but we didn’t miss what we’d never had. Christmas was also the time for big Jaffa oranges from Palestine, dates and figs from Egypt in neat diagonal rows in long thin wooden boxes and a big bowl of mixed nuts to shell. Mum’s favorites were walnuts, Dad loved Brazils and I ate them all. 

Like most homes with children, Christmas morning began in chaos, with piles of presents and wrappings everywhere. Aunt Nell’s house, across the road, was the family gathering ground. After breakfast, Dad went over to join the other men at the on-going poker game with penny stakes and sixpenny max. Mum and I went to help with last minute chores. Dinner was at 2 PM and lasted till dark, around 4 PM. when the real party started.

Uncle Horace and Uncle Bill were family comedians who organized kid’s games while the grown-ups moved to the front parlor. Dad played the piano. He could pick up any melody and as there was booze for adults, everybody liked to sing. The room was so packed there was no space for more chairs, so we sat on the floor. A coal fire in the grate kept us warm even if it was freezing outside. 

Tuppenny Rush

I’m minding daughter Emily’s triplets. Oliver is working his Nintendo, Juliana is surfing doll-dressing sites and Michelle is curled on the sofa chatting on her cell about boys at school and I’ve drifted three thousand miles and seventy plus years away.

Mrs. Pavelly was a widow who lived one street away from me in Romford, England, when I was a kid. She needed money, so she opened her own sweet shop, using a rear window of her house to display the candy. You had to walk down the alley between two houses to get to her back garden to study them. Packets of white candy cigarettes with red tips cost a penny, sherbet and lemonade powder with black licorice straws were a halfpenny. Hard gob balls were a farthing; they changed color as you sucked them so you had to take them out frequently to admire them. There were boiled sweets, toffees and foil covered chocolate money. 

Money was key to everything. A penny (1d.) was worth about half a cent. There was also a ha-penny (½d.) a farthing (¼d.), tuppence (2d.) thrupence (3d.), sixpence (6d.) called a tanner and a shilling (12d.) called a Bob. Only grown-ups had larger sums. (The abbreviation d comes from the Roman silver penny, the denarius).

My weekly allowance was sixpence until I was 12 and started a paper route that paid five shillings a week. I usually bought peanuts from Mrs. Pavelly, as a big bag only cost a penny. Saturday afternoon was the week’s high point, the Tuppenny Rush.

Volunteers at Romford Wesleyan Church rented movies for kids. They showed them on Saturday afternoons in the hall next to the Church. Doors opened at 1 PM and at least an hour before, our rowdy bunch crammed into the yard outside. (Kids are much less rowdy en masse now. Maybe it’s because they spend so much time quietly watching TV, gaming etc.) When the doors finally opened, tuppences were collected and we ran in to get chairs near the screen.

The movies were black and white. They were stacked in big reels, each in its own can, next to a 16 mm projector. The screen was a spread-eagled sheet knotted to rope at the corners. After each movie, the film had to be re-spooled. This gave lots of intermission time for throwing peanut shells or careening around the hall. Pea-shooters could get you thrown out, so they were only used discretely.

The movies involved audience participation. Buck Jones, Tom Mix and other cowboys won lots of bar fights and always beat the Indians or bad guys in the end and we cheered on the slaughter. The triplets would have called Harold Lloyd a nerd, but he was always in hot water. “Look out, he’s behind you” we’d yell. He never listened. Felix the Cat was OK. but I liked adventure stories best. Tarzan would grab a hanging vine and swing from tree to tree in the jungle. Romantic scenes brought on a chorus of kissing noises made with the mouth and forearm.

The most exciting stories were serials. At the end of one episode the heroine was tied on a bench and a huge buzz-saw blade slowly came nearer. In another ending the hero was in a tiny cell and one of its walls was slowly moving closer to squash him. We had a whole week to worry how they could be saved or how they’d clean up the mess before next Saturday’s tuppenny rush.

Roaming

Romford is 12 miles due east of Liverpool Street Station in London. Romford was and still is a market town, and there was a lot of the Essex countryside just beyond Town limits. I loved to walk in the country when the weather was warm. After a week at school, Mom packed me sandwiches and an apple or two. I would take a local bus to the end of the line to start my walk.

I often walked toward Havering-atte-Bower, a lovely old village about three miles from the end of a bus route. The village grew up around a cross road and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086).  The village green is bounded on two sides by intersecting roads, on the third side by cute thatched cottages and the fourth side by the Church of Edward the Confessor, King of England from 1042 to 1066. He built an earlier church on that site and worshipped there.

In a small corner of the village green the village stocks were enclosed by a fence of iron railings. They were a historic curiosity, but once the place where villagers guilty of being drunk and disorderly were held fast by their wrists and ankles between huge slabs of wood. Next to the stocks was a small but really ancient tree. It’s gnarled trunk was reinforced by bricks and mortar. Local folklore says King Charles I hid in it from Cromwell's men in 1645. He was captured, tried and executed in 1649.

Across the road from the stocks was the village pond, with bulrushes at one end and a flat grassy area where you could feed the ducks. The side of the pond remote from the road was bounded by a long high brick wall that continued along the road for about a quarter of a mile, then it left the road to enclose the manor house, home of the local squire.

Even 70 years ago, Havering-atte-Bower was like a village in a time warp. Sometimes I would walk to Bedford Park. The mansion house was open to the public as a moth and butterfly museum. Several rooms downstairs were filled with glass cases, full of rows and rows of them, sadly pinned in place. We paid a nostalgic visit there a few years ago and the mansion house had gone. The parkland around is still great for picnics, with lots of tame deer. It is one of the high spots around London. On a clear day you can pick out St. Paul's Cathedral and other landmarks.

On other walks, I found the remains of Pyrgo Palace, built by Henry VIII and supposedly destroyed in the Nineteenth Century. Some bits of the old palace still stood, and a farmhouse had been built using what looked like an original palace wall. In the fields around there were chunks of old statuary and two long tree-shaded driveways led to the palace from the county road. This was a super place to explore, but twice I was shooed away by the farmer or his men.

Dad

When I was a kid, Dad was around at evenings, weekends and our 2-week annual vacation. He was strong, good-looking and an independent hard-working man. We lived in a row house in Romford, Essex, 12 miles east of the City of London and two from the nearest County of London suburb. Each weekday Dad left home for work long before I was awake. The first leg of his commute was a 20 minute walk to Romford train station. A steam train took him to Liverpool Street Station in East London, then Tube subway trains took him to his job as top foreman at the Tube depot at Golders Green, North London. On Saturdays he was home by three pm.

The Tube repair depot provided a lot of the raw materials for Dad's home projects. A truckload of outdated Tube carriage doors with roll down windows delivered to our back garden became the walls for a huge shed. We spent a lot of time there. He taught me to use and respect tools while he resoled our shoes and did other jobs. When Mum wanted a lean-to awning Dad arranged for a load of old plate-glass carriage windows to be delivered. The awning he built with them was still standing when Audrey and I paid a nostalgic visit there 50 years after he died.

Do it yourself was the name of the game. Dad wired our house for electricity as well as any professional and built a brick and concrete bunker that would hold a ton of coal. In 1938, with war looming, Dad erected my favorite structure in our back garden, an Anderson Air Raid Shelter. It was a small room made from heavy corrugated iron, just high enough to stand upright without hitting your head. It was installed in a three foot deep hole and given a concrete shroud and floor. He even added frames for two bunk beds on each side.

I had passed the high school entrance exam that summer and as a reward Dad bought me a big chemistry set. It had a recipe book full of intriguing experiments, including stinks and fireworks. In my view, the air raid shelter was a tailor-made spot for a chemistry laboratory. Dad helped by converting the lower bunks into shelves and the upper ones into bench tops. Mum was relieved that I would be less likely to blow up the house or burn it down from there.

So Dad planted and nourished my early love for chemistry. During the height of the WWII blitz, Mum refused to use our shelter. She and Dad preferred to go across the road to Aunt Nell's crowded shelter than brave my chemicals. The 1944 untimely deaths of Mum and Dad helped me to a higher education. Their estate left enough money for a year of college. With the help of an ex-army grant I parleyed that year into a chemistry honors degree from London University and later a Ph. D from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Thank You, Mum and Dad.

Acrophobia and Near Death

At 13 I spent the school summer holiday walking and youth hostelling in mountainous North Wales with my friend Keith. At Mount Snowden, the highest peak in England and Wales, we decided to climb it by the Goat Trail. I had climbed it before with Mum and Dad from the village of Llanberis, alongside the cog railway, but this route was more of a challenge. When we were near the summit I saw a narrow ridge of rocks with mist on one side and I walked along it to show Keith how well I balanced.

At the summit is a small restaurant, so we bought snacks. While sitting there the mist cleared. It had been a low lying cloud, and I looked, horrified. The narrow ridge I’d walked on was the edge of a sheer drop of several thousand feet. We could see a herd of sheep grazing in a field below as tiny dots. I was so shaken that we came down by the cog railway.

That may have been the trigger of my life-long acrophobia, or fear of heights. It was reinforced near Seattle. CEO Bob McGrath offered me a job as Research Director at Schick Pharmaceuticals, a small company in Seattle Washington. I flew out to look the place over but wasn’t sure about it. They obviously wanted me, and invited me to bring my wife out. We accepted and they put us up at a first class hotel in Seattle for a week.

After several days of wining and dining Bob invited me up for a short trip in his private plane “to look at the Seattle/Tacoma area”. I had a residual fear of heights since the Snowden episode, but I gathered my courage and agreed. It was an old two-seater biplane with side by side open cockpits. I was close to having a bowel problem before it took off. After ten minutes or so flying around I was starting to feel a little less fearful when the cockpit door on my side suddenly flew open. I screamed at Bob and leaned over, but he just smiled and said, “Don’t worry, it happens all the time and you are strapped in”. I asked him to land as soon as possible. I never found out if he triggered the door from his controls as a twisted joke, but I did not accept the job offer.

In 1975, as the Research Director of USV Pharmaceuticals, a small New York drug company, I was invited to give a paper at a scientific meeting in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. It was a three day meeting and luckily, my paper was one of the first on the first morning. After I had given it, I decided to miss the other papers and explore the country, so I rented a car and took off.

Wealthy people in the city had opulent mansions but the countryside was third world. Some families lived under a sheet of corrugated iron and wore rags or less. Many people looked hungry and had no apparent work. I enjoyed watching people working hand and foot operated looms where beautiful colorful clothing was woven and watching half-naked young women beat their laundry out on rocks at the edge of a river.

When I turned back toward San Salvador, I picked up a young man who asked for a ride to the city. He spoke English, which was unusual. After a few miles my hitchhiker pointed to a side road and said it was a short cut to San Salvador. In my naivety I believed him, although after a few miles the road became narrower and steadily climbed uphill. Suddenly it disintegrated into a narrow track with a vertical rock wall on one side and a steep drop on the other. That settled it. I stopped the car after a few yards and asked where the blazes I was being led. My hitchhiker jumped out and said I couldn’t get out and that he’d be back soon with friends.

Too late I realized my stupidity. I had visions of being kidnapped and held for ransom. I examined the road and paced it out. It was one stride or two and a half feet wider than the car was long. Could I turn it around without it falling off of the precipice? Despite my acrophobia I was scared enough to try. The normal way to turn a car is a three point turn. The one I did half way up that mountain was more like a twenty three point turn.

At least a dozen times the back of the car hung over the edge of the hundred foot drop (I got out to look after every tiny move). It took about twenty minutes to complete the turn but it seemed like hours and I was fearful of being attacked all the time. Finally I made it and hurried back to the main road and my hotel in San Salvador. That was a couple of years before civil war began in El Salvador. Apparently Death Squads were active and there was a lot of kidnapping and killing that was not reported in the US press.

In 1980 I had itchy feet and a yen to move to a peaceful part of Central America since my trip to El Salvador. My plan was to buy a farm in Belize, previously British Honduras, where many people spoke English. I flew to Belize City. My seat neighbor on the flight introduced himself as Buzz, an acoustic engineer with a company that had installed microwave antennas through Belize. He was going on an inspection tour of the installations. I told him my plan to travel around looking at farms. He invited me to join him for the ride, so I accepted.

Buzz was greeted like royalty at the airport. I was introduced to local leaders and included in a dinner invite at the home of one of them. It was in a compound with a high wall around it and guards at the entrance. Belize City was like an ancient throwback. Many houses had window openings but no windows, with people lolling in the openings. You could see all the people inside. Some houses had huge water butts alongside them to collect and store rainwater.

Our trip started the next day. We were in a VW minibus that was fairly comfortable. We went through jungle trails and across creaking log bridges over deep chasms. It was wild country with strange animals, sights and food. One day we heard about the perfect farm property for sale. We called the agent in Belize City and he directed us to it. It was a modern 3 bedroom house, which had been stripped of its removable plumbing and other fixtures but was otherwise sound. It was on eleven acres planted with bananas, palms, oranges, lemons, limes and papayas. They were overgrown but there was plenty of ripe fruit. It had a ridiculously low asking price of $10,000.00 US dollars. I was carrying that much cash and felt like signing a contract for it immediately, but I was getting older and wiser, so I asked Buzz if his Belize City friends could find out something about it.

The friends told us that the previous owners were a young ‘hippie’ couple from New York. They had planted the trees and were running the place successfully until a robber band raided them. They cut the phone lines then killed the man, raped the woman and stole anything of value. I decided against buying a farm in Belize. Apparently robber bands were fairly common .

When we arrived back in Belize City the people we had dined with were nervous. The night before, someone had thrown poisoned meat over the wall and killed their guard dogs. They were taking precautions against a possible robber gang attack.

I love garage sales and second hand stores. I once bought a pickup truck at a yard sale, but one day I saw a ‘must have’ open boat fitted with an outboard motor and its own trailer. It was too cheap to miss, so I bought it, hitched it to the car and drove it home. When I checked it the engine coughed and sputtered so I got a friend to examine it. He returned it and said it seemed to work fine after oiling, but the only true test was in the water. The nearest water was the sea at Matheson Hammock. Marty came along with her 6 & 8 year old daughters. We had two lifejackets for the girls and a basket of goodies for a picnic. The sea looked calm as a millpond when we launched it from a ramp and the outboard started easily, so we jumped in and cast off.

When we were about a hundred yards off shore we were hit on one side by a sudden huge wave. I didn’t know it at the time, but a powerboat had sped past us. Its wake swamped our boat, but worse, it drowned the outboard engine, which quit working. We had no way to move the boat, which promptly turned side on to advancing waves and capsized. I lost sight of the others in the water. Suddenly, where the sea had been quiet, huge waves came at us. I’m a weak swimmer so I was soon overwhelmed and sank. As the horror of drowning and death was imminent I felt a wooden pole touch me so I grabbed at it.

The pole was the handle of a game-fish landing net from the powerboat. Soon after that someone pulled me out and I flopped on to the deck next to Marty and the girls. Apparently, someone on the powerboat realized that their wake had swamped us and told the wheelman. He turned so fast in his effort to get to us that he made the huge waves that nearly killed me. They rescued Marty first, then the girls, while I was busy drowning. I swore never to ride in a boat with an outboard motor again.

I’ve missed lots of wonderful views because of acrophobia. During a vacation to Las Vegas, we rented a car to spend a few days visiting nearby National Parks in Utah and Arizona. I didn’t think about my phobia until we started on those mountain roads. I was in such a panic that Audrey had to drive while I cowered down with my eyes shut. At beautiful Bryce Canyon I would not get out of the car and I flat out refused to go to the Grand Canyon.

Last week I tried to watch Ken Burns’ new film about the National Parks and it all came back vividly. I could taste the fear as they showed images of people skylarking on jutting out ledges over the Grand Canyon. I even had a nightmare about it. My favorite National Park is the Everglades, and I regularly give thanks that in flat South Florida the landfill, Mount Trashmore, is our only peak.

Acting on the Side

I sang the Orderly Song on stage when I was six but messed it up when I forgot a line. Seventy five years later I remember the mortification of that moment. There is no terror like the terror of an actor on stage with a large audience when he gets a cue but can’t remember his line.

At 14 I was introduced to stage acting after joining a youth club affiliated with the Romford Episcopal Church. We met Fridays in an ancient meeting room next to the church to play table tennis and board games. Soon I started to organize record hops where Philip Gaze, the Curate, played gramophone records. Then I grew bolder and put together several dance evenings with local bands, these became very popular.

Philip and several adult church members were enthusiastic amateur actors. They recruited us for the casts. It was hardly auditioning, more like ‘volunteering’ in the army. “I want you, you and you”. I was picked for several plays over the next two years and worked up from a few lines to lead roles.

Looking back in later life, I believe that the Curate, my drama teacher, may have been a closet gay with the hots for me. He instructed me alone for communion and introduced me to Gilbert and Sullivan. We visited his mother at Chelmsford, a 40 mile round trip on our bicycles . She lived a huge old house like the English manor houses in movies and we played croquet on the lawn before tea. Philip also took me swimming to Romford Swimming Baths, but if he ever hinted to me about homosexual stuff it must have gone right over my head. At any rate, we didn’t do it. Perhaps I confessed to him that I had discovered sex and girls, I don’t remember.

My next bout of acting was 15 years later In Baltimore. I acted in several shows with the Johns Hopkins Playshop. In Rochester I worked for a pharmaceutical company and played major roles in Othello, King Lear and other plays with nationally-known Blackfriars Company. In Tallahassee I joined the academic world as a professor and played the role of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s history on FSU’s main stage over and comedy roles with Tallahassee’s Little Theatre. From Tuckahoe, New York I was in an Equity Showcase in Manhattan’s East Village, Macbeth in Macbett in Yonkers and She Stoops to Conquer in Chappaqua.

Until 1986 acting was an occasional thing I could live without for long periods. In Miami it became more important after playing the lead as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady at Hialeah. Audrey was also keen and enjoyed acting. Since then she and/or I have acted in more than 30 plays put on by the local theatre group. We’ve also been on the Board of Directors for many years and have done most backstage jobs at different times.

A Schoolboy's War

Before World War II Romford was urban enough to have big stores and an open air market twice weekly. In winter it was dark at 4 pm. Sometimes I went to the market after school, when the stalls were lit by flaming lanterns. At some stalls hucksters sold patent medicines, others sold huge hands of bananas and would throw us the odd ones. On Wednesdays, local farmers sold sheep and cattle there by auction.

In 1938, I passed the examination to Romford Intermediate School. The next year three important things happened. I started my first job with a newspaper round, became interested in chemistry and World War II began. I hated getting up at 5.30. It meant cycling to the newsagent's store, marking which papers went to which address, filling my shoulder bag and delivering them; but I loved my 5 shillings a week wages. All daily papers in England were national and four or five were popular. Then I went home for breakfast before cycling to school.

By 1940, when bombs were falling all around, The air raid shelter in our backyard was my chemistry laboratory. Mum and Dad were too scared of my chemicals to use it. Every night they walked past it, out the back gate and over the road to sleep in the shelter in Aunt Nell’s back yard. I refused to sleep in their cramped damp shelter, so I shared a bed with my cousin’s granddad, the only other person in the house during heavy air raids.

Thousands of anti-aircraft guns ringed London. Romford was in this ring, so there were antiaircraft guns everywhere. One of them often set up at night on the road near our house, which shook whenever it fired, it was as loud as a bomb exploding. Nearer London there were barrage balloons on steel cables to deter dive bombers but no guns, as shell shrapnel was dangerous. For night raids, German pilots often used moonlight reflected from the Thames to guide them to London. When they reached the anti-aircraft guns, some dropped their bombs on the nearest town and fled. Romford was near, so it was heavily bombed.

Daylight raids were fun at first, as our school had above-ground concrete shelters with benches to sit on but no lights, so our teachers led us in singing – I learned a lot of old songs there. They were less fun after lights were installed and we had to continue regular lessons. We all had a secret hope that the school would be bombed but only one tiny bomb fell at the edge of the grounds and destroyed the gardener’s incinerator.

Every antiaircraft shell that went up came down as jagged steel shrapnel that was dangerous to people and to the slate roofs of houses. My early morning paper round had an extra benefit during the 1940 blitz. After a heavy raid I scoured the streets on my route for antiaircraft shell fragments. At school I traded them for other war junk like bits of fuselage of shot-down planes.

My favorite trophy was an un-burnt piece of a German magnesium incendiary bomb. I spent hours filing it to make magnesium powder. Mixed with sulfur and potassium nitrate it made a great flash powder. I lit some of the mixture in the boys’ lavatories before school and the flash was over a foot high but I had forgotten how much white smoke (magnesium oxide) it made. You couldn't see more than a few inches in front of you. The head boy saw it and said if it hadn’t cleared by morning break, he would have to report it to the Old Man (The principal). Lots of us took off our jackets to fan it, but it didn’t clear so I was on the carpet.

It wasn't my first run in with the Old Man over chemistry. I bought some calcium carbide in an old bicycle shop, (it was once used to fuel bicycle lamps). In those days we dipped our pens in ink to write. One day I put some in my desk inkwell. It reacted with the water of the ink and emitted ethyne gas in perfect smoke rings that exploded when touched with a spark but the teacher came in unexpectedly. Another time I made nitrogen iodide at home and smeared wet crystals on wash-basin faucets in the boys’ lavatories. After they dried, the crystals popped when touched but were not dangerous. Fun with chemicals was popular in those days. Boy’s magazines had ads for stink bombs, smoke bombs, sneezing and itching powder.

Good things came to me through chemistry. A green half penny George V stamp could be turned blue by bleaching powder and a farthing rubbed with mercury turned ‘silver’. These items traded like hot cakes at school. My fireworks also found a ready market. The income from this commerce and my newspaper round was spent on chemicals and apparatus for my laboratory. I enjoyed smelly things; hydrogen sulfide, like rotten eggs or farts, was a favorite. I was the chemistry teacher’s helper, cleaning up after class experiments and re-labeling stockroom chemical bottles. She even let me take a few grams of hard-to-get chemicals for experiments at home.

First Jobs

I graduated high school shortly before my 15th birthday. Perhaps my misdeeds with chemicals led the Old Man to recommend me to May & Baker, a chemical company. M & B developed the drug that saved Winston Churchill when he had pneumonia, before penicillin was discovered. I cycled to work and to evening classes most nights. M & B’s factory sprawled over two square miles and was a prime target for German bombs. One building was hit in a night raid but there were no daylight raids while I worked there. The lab I worked in was next to the building where highly explosive ether was made and stored. If a bomb had hit it many buildings could have been destroyed.

The next year I worked in the lab at the Cape Asbestos factory. The young factory women were a randy lot I wrote about in a poem.

Asbestos

It was a strategic material, important in war, they said.

It was spun into yarn then woven to cloth and made into clothes

That never caught fire in a fire, or burnt like regular clothes.

Beautiful people span the yarn and wove the cloth to make the clothes

From this strategic material. That beauty has long ago died.

They came to England from Gibraltar when the war began.

Gib was a strategic army base not good for civilians, they said.

Teenaged Spanish beauties with untamed raven-black hair

They did this menial factory job that English workers spurned

As English workers knew about the deadly dust it made.

I was a teen just out of school in the lab when our paths crossed.

I sampled yarn and cloth to test and was madly in love with them all. 

Their overseers told the girls to wear the dust-masks they supplied, 

But masks are ugly and they were vain about their feminine charms. 

Men were in short supply from war so they practiced charms on me. 

Fast forward 10 years I was back as a student and ran into Rosa one day 

Her eyes were red, her face chalk white, her beauty had long since gone 

She had news of the others and we both cried over horrid tales she told 

Most stayed on in England after the war. It was cheaper to die there. 

I mourned my lost loves and lovers, the innocent victims of war. 

A few months later I changed jobs again to work in the pathology lab of a mental hospital in Brentwood. Some of the hospital buildings had been a priory in the twelfth century - they had six foot thick walls. Many patients had tertiary syphilis that affected their brains. One treatment was to infect them with malaria. The plasmodia of malaria destroyed the spirochetes of syphilis, in preference to their usual target of red blood cells.

We did regular assays of the blood of the syphilis patients and the test required fresh guinea pig blood for standards. We bred our own guinea pigs and allowed the chosen animal some extra petting before it was sacrificed. The senior technician cut its throat and I held a basin underneath to collect its blood.

Late in 1943 part of the hospital was taken over to treat soldiers wounded in the Sicily landings. Ours was the first lab in the area to make and use penicillin. The pathologist returned from a meeting with spores and directions. We took the furniture out of a room next to the lab and put in metal racks, sealed its window and kept the gas fire on so it became a big incubator. The dispensary gave us two hundred medicine bottles that were cleaned, sterilized and capped with cotton plugs. We made and sterilized a batch of nutrient medium, poured some in each bottle and inoculated them with a few spores of penicillium. After three days of fermenting on the racks, the mold was filtered and dressings soaked in the penicillin broth were used on infected wounds with great success.

The last job I had for a few months in 1944 was in a lab at Ilford Ltd., the photographic film makers. Most of the day we worked by a dim safelight and sometimes we worked in total darkness. We made new combinations of film ingredients, usually silver salts in gelatin. After coating them in thin films on glass plates, measured the speed and graininess of the film. They also taught me about photography and film processing.

The work was particularly scary as doodlebugs (flying bombs) were dropping regularly at that time. There was seldom enough warning of an attack to get to a shelter. We would stay in the lab, surrounded by glassware and toxic chemicals or go outside to watch and listen. They flew at very low altitude (50-100 feet) and the engine made a characteristic loud thump thump sound,. When we heard one coming we prayed it would pass us before its engine cut out. When that happened, it might wobble and glide around for a minute or it might dive straight to the ground. They were devastating as the plane was a huge bomb and with its shallow approach almost none of its explosive force was wasted on a crater. It was directed sideways, so a single doodlebug could destroy many houses and kill people in several neighboring streets. Part of the Ilford factory, but not the labs, was hit after I’d left it.

At that time we also had rocket attacks but they weren’t as scary to me because there was nothing you could do about them. The first thing you heard was its explosion. It traveled at several times the speed of sound. If you were near enough, you heard the explosion first, followed by the whistle as it came over. Unlike the doodlebugs, rockets left huge craters in the ground.

Traumatic 1944 

I met Marguerite at evening classes in the fall of 1943 and we were soon dating regularly. I worked in the darkroom laboratories of Ilford Ltd., the photo film makers. Marguerite lived close by. She would meet me at the factory gates after work and we’d walk to Wanstead Park. (Three and a half centuries ago, the park manor house belonged to the Earl of Essex, a favorite and probable lover of Queen Elizabeth I). In the park we frolicked and had hot sex in a tiny clearing surrounded by thick bushes, until I saw men watching us through the bushes. (Marguerite told me later she had seen them and it turned her on). Then we found that the air raid shelter near the park keeper's house had an empty bed in it. Inside it was dim but light enough to see, perfect conditions for a first affair. I was sixteen; Marguerite was twenty-one, a real woman. By about April I worried that Marguerite was getting too serious and so we broke up.

June 6 1944 was D-Day, when the invasion of Normandy began for thousands of young men. It was a turning point of World War II. It was also a sad day for my family. I was 16. living with Mum and Dad. Romford, our home town, had been bombed a lot in the Blitz of ‘40 and ‘41, but in 1944 our only “incidents” were occasional rockets (V1s) or doodlebugs (V2’s). Late that night, a rocket landed less than a mile from our house. Its ear-splitting explosion was followed by the sound it made coming over and sounds of falling debris. Our house was shaken but no windows were broken. Soon after that Dad had a major heart attack.

Dad died several days later. He’d always had a weak heart. I was devastated but Mum was much worse. She literally refused to eat and went crazy. My sister Joan came home from the WRAF and we sent Mum to stay with her Uncle Syd at Tunbridge Wells. Several weeks later Uncle Syd had Mum incarcerated. She died on August 12. The death certificate said pneumonia but we knew it was really a broken heart. Mum and Dad were both 47 years old.

Joan and Aunt Nell pondered what do with me. Joan had married Norman, who worked on the same RAF base and came from Exeter. Joan made enquiries and found that the University at Exeter was accepting students. I had passed the matriculation exam, so Joan enrolled me there. During my year there I studied chemistry, physics, pure and applied math and learned about nine card brag, poker and women.

Exeter gave me my first contact with young men and women from wealthy families, brought up by rigid English standards. The college had quaint customs. At regular intervals students from our hall of residence entertained ladies from a women’s hall. Twenty men went to their hall and twenty women came to ours. We were expected to host or be hosted on a one to one basis. Exchange luncheons were on Sundays. After lunch if it was raining, the men would entertain the ladies by singing songs from a book with a white cover. When it was fine out, the men were expected to take the ladies for a walk in the country. It was a great way to get the sexes to mingle and there was stiff competition to host the cute ones.

I lost money at cards, passed the chemistry and physics exams but failed in pure and applied math so I was thrown out at the end of the academic year. I moved back to Romford, rented a room and took a job as a lab assistant until I was drafted to the army. On my army pay book, my previous occupation was listed as ‘student’. I didn’t know it, but that made me eligible later for a government grant to “complete my education”. Before leaving the army I applied for and was accepted to read chemistry at prestigious Battersea Polytechnic. That was the start of my formal education, which culminated, 17 years later, with a pharmacology doctorate from the University Of Maryland School of Medicine.

If Mum and Dad had not died, so Joan had enough money to enroll me as a student, and if I hadn’t written my former occupation as “student” in my army pay-book (even though I’d been thrown out of college), I would not have qualified for a grant to study at university and my life would have been very different.

Kathleen

In September 1944 I was drafted into the army. My first six weeks of primary training was at Chichester, where I met Kathleen. When I transferred, she wrote and invited me to spend my Christmas leave with her family, so I did. In early 1947 she wrote to tell me that she was pregnant, so I agreed to marry her on my next leave, at Easter. On our honeymoon at the island of Guernsey, she said she had lied about being pregnant, so I cut short the honeymoon, returned to my army unit and never saw her again. Several months later she filed for divorce.

After corps training with the Royal Artillery, I was accepted into the Royal Army Educational Corps and sent to Göttingen, Germany, for training and then to Berlin, where I stayed until my army discharge in 1948.

A Displaced Party

I was drafted into the British Army just after WWII ended. After a horrid year of basic training and the Royal Artillery I passed some tests and transferred to the Royal Army Educational Corps. It was formed after the war to improve the education of soldiers in occupied countries and keep them busy enough to stay out of trouble.

We trained at the University of Göttingen in the British zone of Germany. It is a lovely old town, and the university is world famous. I bought a German grammar, studied the language and learned enough to interact with the locals, including a lady who worked at the Toc H, a local bierstube which had been taken over for British soldiers.

There was a huge camp of Displaced Persons (DPs) near town, where families brought to Germany as forced labor were assembled before repatriation. The DPs were terribly poor, so I persuaded the men in my unit to put on a Christmas party for their children. I had organized socials in Romford and this seemed a worthwhile project.

Through my lady friend, we rented the Toc H for an evening. We needed decorations, toys and party favors and the favored currency was cigarettes. One cigarette was worth 5 marks and stores preferred them to marks. We received 50 free cigarettes each week, and non-smokers like myself had previously refused them, but not now. We collected several hundred cigarettes and the buying team went shopping. Our quartermaster was sympathetic, and promised us foodstuffs, oranges and other Christmas goodies.

One problem was a lack of balloons. The shopping team was discouraged until someone thought of condoms; could they be blown up and used as balloons? They could, so a team of condom blower-uppers was organized. I persuaded five other soldiers to join me as dancers in a clodhopping “fairy” ballet, to classical records. A local fraulein sewed costumes and wings of diaphanous material, all paid for by cigarettes as money. In our army boots, rehearsals were chaotic fun.

When the great day arrived, instead of the 50 kids we had expected, more than 100 showed up. There was frantic phoning to the quartermaster, extra food and packing of goodies. The kids were a great audience. They thought our fairy ballet was wildly funny, with soldiers prancing around in tutus, fairy wings and hobnail boots. It ended as a pile up on stage and they loved it. We also hired a juggler and a magician. The most poignant and unexpected part of the evening was when one kid came on stage and led the others in “Tannenbaum” and “Silent Night’. I still remember those beautiful children’s voices. There wasn’t a dry eye among the soldiers and our helpers.

After the food and the show, as the kids were leaving, they each received a package with cookies and an orange. We also gave each a bar of soap, which was in short supply, a book or toy and a “balloon” on a stick. As we watched them walking through the snow back to their camp, it gave us a great feeling that this was the true spirit of Christmas.

Teaching Troops

Training for the Royal Army Educational Corps was in Göttingen, a lovely German university town untouched by the war. There I met Inge, an attractive young German lady who taught me the language and other things. The army training course was fun. I graduated top of the class so was given a good assignment: to West Berlin, an isolated Western enclave surrounded by the Soviet zone.

Berlin was divided into four sectors. Looking at it like a clock face, the entire east side, from 12 to 6 was Soviet. The Americans were at 6 to 8, the British 8 to 10 and the French 10 to 12. We were free to travel in any sector, but there was no barrier between the Soviet sector and the surrounding Soviet zone, where we could be arrested.

My initial billet was at a study center on Berlinerstrasse, a main east-west road. Then I moved to a barracks in the western suburb of Spandau to set up my own study center. Speaking some German was a big advantage and I soon had rooms equipped for woodworking, a darkroom for photo processing and a classroom with desks, blackboard etc. I also started a library by cadging sack-loads of books from the U.S. Educational Supply Center in the American sector.

At one time I flew back to Hamburg to get a medical check-up. I was left to my own devices for the return trip to Berlin. In Hamburg station, I saw a strange-shaped single compartment train. Both ends of it were tapered and fitted with propellers. I was told it was Hitler’s own private train and it was about to leave for the south, so I rode in it. It was very fast and quiet inside. I was supposed to get off at Hanover, but I stayed on to Gottingen, the next stop, and visited with Inge.

At Hanover, a few days later, I had not been missed as the Soviets temporarily closed the autobahn to Berlin. I was put in charge of the first convoy of trucks to go through after it re-opened. I had large paper passes with a huge colored British flag embossed on the paper, one for each man At the border the guards counted the men and the number of passes and we were in East Germany heading to Berlin.

A Cowboy in Berlin

Initially, occupied West Berlin was great. I was a sergeant instructor in the Education Corps a “schoolie” stationed at Spandau in West Berlin. I had converted a suite of rooms on the top floor of our barracks into a study center. We were next to the prison holding Nazi war criminals Doenitz, Raeder and Hess. I could look out of a window and sometimes see them in the exercise yard.

I had my own chauffeur in an armored car. Berlin is honeycombed with lakes and I could use a rental boat free by signing a form. The Control Commission Germany (CCG) picked up the tab. I spoke enough German now to wheel and deal. I met another lady in Berlin. We attended operas at the opera house in the Soviet sector and shopped on swanky Kurfûrstendamm.

Then the other shoe fell. In early 1948, the Soviets closed the autobahn from the West. All gasoline supplies dried up and the Berlin Airlift started. There were no more cars, drivers or motorboats, The only way to get down town was by streetcar. After the airlift started, most of life’s luxuries were in short supply. Only coal and necessities came in via nearby Tempelhof airport. We felt isolated, our water and electricity came from the Soviet zone. We were even more scared when massive Stalin tanks began exercises with live ammunition in the Soviet zone, a few miles west of us. We heard that the Western Allies didn’t have any heavy weapons in Berlin.

In the midst of our jitters, the sentry at the entrance to our barracks reported a detachment of Soviet troops marching along the road toward us with fixed bayonets on their rifles. The Guard Officer sounded a General Alarm and we all ran to panic stations. When I joined the Education Corps, I’d been issued a revolver but I had no idea how to use it; I didn’t think it mattered now the war was over. I buckled it on and prepared to do or die for my country.

The Soviet detachment was soon identified as the relief detail for the prison guards. The occupying powers, United States,France, Britain and the Soviet Union took turns guarding the prisoners each month. As the Colonel was visiting our barracks, he turned the alarm into an arms inspection on the parade ground.

The soldiers lined up in rows and I was at one end of a row. The colonel walked up and down the rows. When he came to me, he burst out laughing, and said, “Who the hell do you think you are, schoolie, a f-------- cowboy? Double that man to the guardhouse”. Double means run, so the Guard Commander ordered me to the guardhouse at the double and we both ran off the parade ground. It was a very embarrassing moment.

When we reached the guardhouse and the guard commander told the story to the men on guard duty, they couldn’t stop laughing. They explained to me that army revolvers, called sidearms, are worn butt forward on the left, to be drawn and fired by the right hand, not the way they are buckled on in cowboy movies. All wasn’t lost though; the story spread quickly to other army units in West Berlin and my study center became even more popular.

When my time in the army was up, the Airlift was still on. I flew out of Templehof airport in a DC 9 that brought in coal, There were no seats; the seatbelts were attached to fuselage struts and there was a big hole in the fuselage for rapid loading and unloading. We flew at a low altitude and were relieved to land in Hanover and complete the journey to England in a civilized way.

Dorothy

Back in Romford after leaving the army I rented a room from an elderly couple and went out to eat at a restaurant, where I bumped into Dorothy (Dot) Coulson. We had been in the same class at infant school and I had had a crush on her. I told Dot I had a bottle of Schnapps at home and Dot, ever pragmatic, said let’s get it and drink it.

We renewed our friendship over the Schnapps and I rolled home drunk as a skunk. My straight-laced landlady told me she didn’t cater to alcoholics and asked me to leave next day, so I moved to London. This fitted my plans as I’d been accepted for the fall term at Battersea Polytechnic, London University, reading chemistry.

 I took a temporary job as a lab assistant at the College of St. Mark & St. John in Chelsea. The Polytechnic student assistance people kept a list of nearby rooms to rent and I was referred to Mrs. Gunnis. She and her husband lived in a posh block of flats near the college. Mary Gunnis was young, attractive and very solicitous. Soon after I moved in she was eager to start a wild affair. This nearly ended in tragedy when Mr Gunnis came home from the City at lunchtime one day and nearly caught us en flagrante. It was time to move on.

Fortunately, I’d just turned 21 and was legally able to own property, so I bought a house at Parson’s Green, a London district just north of the Thames. Dot worked a few miles away for the perfumer Goya in the West End, so she came regularly on overnight visits. Then an embarrassing thing happened. Inge, my fraulein friend in Berlin showed up on my doorstep one day while Dot was visiting. Inge had been recruited as an ‘au pair’ and now lived with a family in Putney, two miles from my house! I had been faithful in Berlin but didn’t expect to see her in London. It pained me but I had to break her heart.

The house at Parsons Green was over a hundred years old. It was divided into flatlets. The first floor front and entire second floor, were rented unfurnished. Tenants in unfurnished accommodation had security of tenure by London law, so they came with the house. The upside was that as the house was partly occupied, it was much cheaper to buy. Soon after buying the house, Dot moved in, I passed the pure and applied math I’d previously failed, started full time classes and received my first check from the government. For the next four years I studied at Battersea Poly. Dot became pregnant and we were married before Christopher was born in 1951.

I passed the BSc (Honours) exam in 1954 and Royal Institute of Chemistry exam in 1955, the same year Caroline was born. I took a job as a chemical analyst at Glaxo Laboratories and then as a chemist for a small drug company that specialized in laxatives.

After helping in local elections, I joined the Labour Party and learned that it's good to have influential friends. Soon after I told the friend about the rent-protected family living in my house, they were whisked to the top of the waiting list for their own council flat. The day they left, the house doubled in value. We furnished their flat and re-rented it to Peter Featherstone, a music student, and his wife Muriel. They were the homeliest and happiest couple I’ve ever known. Peter was fat and jolly and Muriel was skinny. They both wore thick glasses and were madly in love.

With the rent money and my salary as a chemist, we had a little spare cash so we bought a beach chalet at Leysdown, Kent County, about 50 miles away. It was a fun place to take the kids at weekends. We rented the chalet over the summer season for families on holiday and let friends use it when it was vacant. This brought us hard-to-get foods and other quid pro quo presents.

Post-war cars were expensive and there were long waiting lists for them, so we bought an old '34 Rover for trips to Leysdown. Soon it began to belch black smoke. It needed a ring job we couldn’t afford and burnt almost as much oil as gas. We called it Smokey Joe.

I joined the Peace Party, a loosely organized group of rich left wing radicals. They sponsored me as a delegate to a World Peace Conference in Finland just after I'd graduated with a bachelor’s degree so I went. This may have put me on a CIA list of Communist Sympathizers. I enjoyed the trip and made a Helsinki friend who took me to a student Midsummer Festival, a fascinating pagan ritual that lasted all through the twilight night. The trip did not leave a political message with me. I favored the British Labor Party and wasn’t interested enough in communism to join the party. I found the Kensington Linguist's Club more enjoyable, as it had lots of au pair girl members.

Horace of Aynhoe

In 1956 I met and became friends with a man who resembled a character in a Dickens novel. He wore a formal cutaway, wing collar and top hat. He was sitting when we met. We chatted and I told him about my studies and work. He said he was a frustrated scientist, who couldn’t pursue his dream as his father owned lots of property and he had to manage it. When he stood up I was astonished. He was at least eight foot tall with another foot for the top hat. It was hard not to smile as he looked like a circus or carnival actor. Later, this man, whose name I can't remember, offered to rent us a 4-bedroom apartment in a Victorian building he owned in Brook Green, West Kensington. Brook Green is a very prestigious address in snob-conscious London, so we promptly accepted. Peter, in our Parsons Green house, had graduated and landed a job as a music teacher outside London. He and Muriel were leaving the house so it was a good time to sell it.

 Our new address was 1 Aynhoe Mansions, a ground floor apartment in a five storey building. The house sold quickly so we could afford to furnish the apartment tastefully. Then two friends brought us an unusual present in exchange for two weeks at the chalet in Leysdown. It was a five-foot snake, complete with its own vivarium (a glass-sided aquarium and lid furnished with sand, rocks, branches to climb and a pool of water at one end). We named the snake Horace.

Horace was a fierce-looking but non-venomous Aesculapian snake, native to Greece and associated with healing in Roman mythology. He enjoyed white mice. Once a week we’d put one in his vivarium and later it disappeared. Mostly Horace kept to himself, though we found him great at speeding slow-to-depart guests. At our bed time we brought out Horace, who’d dutifully coil round the arm, leg or neck of the visitor to keep warm. We felt he earned his keep.

One day Dot was ironing in our living room and she let Horace out to exercise on the floor and to amuse the kids. Horace promptly slid around the edge of the room, chased by Christopher. I came into the room in time to see his last few inches slide behind a heavy cedar chest. I remembered there was a mouse-hole in the paneling behind the chest that I meant to plug. I quickly pulled the chest away from the wall but Horace had gone.

This was an emergency. I sent Dot to the park with the kids and set to with tools to rip up the floorboards. My first thought was that Horace was trapped between our floor and the basement ceiling, but when I used a flashlight, I saw a big hole in the basement ceiling, so he could also have been anywhere in the basement.

There was no electric light in the basement. Each apartment had a storage area separated from others by a wall ending just below the ceiling for water and other pipes. Most storage areas contained coal for fireplaces. Each had a door and some had padlocks. Many tenants of upper flats were frail old ladies. I had visions of one coming down with a candle to get a bucket of coal. If Horace dropped on her from a water pipe and coiled round her neck to get warm we might be sued for a fortune or even tried for murder.

I hunted among the coals of open compartments without luck, but didn’t know how to get in the locked ones. I made up a story about taking up floorboards and Chris dropped one of Dot’s rings through it. This worked for the compartment just below but was hard to explain for compartments below the other end of the building.

The Serpent House at Regent’s Park Zoo had no useful advice. An expert told us to get a snake of the same species but opposite sex as a lure. Though we called our snake Horace, we had no idea of his true sex (we didn’t think it mattered). Also that sounded like a great way to lose two snakes instead of one. Then he suggested that we place food near where we last saw Horace, to lure him out when he was hungry. We said his food was live mice and if we left one by a mouse hole it might not stay there.  He was upset by our smart Alec replies and gave us a lecture on illegally feeding live food to a pet.

Months after Horace left we were alert for screams from the basement, but the following summer, when there was an odor of rotting flesh for a couple of weeks, we hoped Horace was quietly decomposing somewhere below.  

 Toronto

By 1957 Dot and I were having marital problems. I had had a short affair with Elfriede, a young lady from Austria I had met at the Linguist's Club. I felt guilty about it and wanted to get away from temptation. We had discussed moving and decided to emigrate to Canada. People at the Canadian Embassy in London told us that chemists were a high priority need in Toronto, so I would go ahead of the rest of the family to get a job and somewhere for us to live.  

I made the journey by Icelandic Airlines (the cheapest ones) with refueling stops at Prestwick, Reykjavik, Gander and New York City before reaching Toronto. In Toronto. None of the companies I applied at turned me down but no-one made a definite work offer either. A common line was “We are impressed with your resume and expect to have an opening next week”. After 3 weeks canvassing pharmaceutical companies I took a job at the University of Toronto, doing combustion research. A professor offered to rent me a big apartment so I wrote asking Dot to come. After several months I joined a social club for British immigrants. Later I dated two English nurses living together for jolly threesomes.

My combustion research generated two publications in good refereed journals. Then I worked a few months at Connaught Labs of the University of Toronto, separating phosphatidyl serine and related phospholipids from beef brain. This gave me insights into phospholipid properties that helped in later carcinogenesis work on bioelectricity and cell membranes.

Dot came from England nearly a year later with Christopher and Caroline. By that time I had an established social life. Dot also brought Bente, a lovely young Danish au pair to look after the children. We moved into the apartment together. Soon after, Bente and I had a backstairs affair but Dot walked in on us during a heavy petting session. I was thrown out but Bente stayed. I arranged regular maintenance payments to Dot and resumed my bachelor life. My lady friend was Bernice, daughter of a wealthy Toronto family, so we joined the local social set.

Toward fall of 1959 I saw a journal ad for a pharmacology fellowship at the School of Medicine of the University of Maryland. At that time I didn’t know the meaning of “pharmacology”. I learned it was study of the effects of drugs and poisons on people. It married my favorite subjects, pharmaceutical chemistry and physiology. I applied for it and after a couple of interviews and a brief exam was offered the fellowship. I joined two other fellows in a prestigious Ph.D/M.D. Program. The stipend was miserable but I was keen to learn.

Student in Baltimore

            

I moved into a cheap apartment in a half empty old house in Baltimore. It was a few minutes walk from the Medical School and University Hospital, a good thing as I didn’t have a car. Peabody School of Music was half a block away. Washington’s statue at the top of a monument was a few steps farther. The apartment was so infested with cockroaches that I put each leg of the bed in an old coffee can with kerosene and moved it away from the wall to sleep at night.

There were two other apartments in the building. Aileen, next door, was a young prostitute who plied her trade at home. The tenant of the upstairs apartment was rarely seen and never heard. Aileen was friendly but made no attempt to get me in the sack. Shortly after we met she showed me why Washington is called the Father of his Country. By standing at a special spot on the east side of the mound and looking up, one of his arms looks as though he has the world’s biggest penis. Aileen also made great pasta. She bought dry pasta at the store and cooked it up in delicious sauces using an Italian family recipe.

Monique, Helmut and I were the three in the joint program. We dubbed ourselves the last slaves in America. In addition to regular medical student lectures and labs we had pharmacology classes and our own research programs. If an experiment ended late at night, we were expected to be there to disconnect it and clear it up. Saturdays and Sundays were free at the whim of our advisor, Dr. Burgison, and many weekends all three of us were in our laboratories.

Dot divorced me in 1962 but there were nurses. I was sometimes a sub in a lecture to nursing students and usually had one as a significant other, living in or visiting for household and other benefits. My longest affair was with Virginia, a practical nurse. We once had sex on an ob/gyn examination table and I recommend this if you get the chance. The affair with Virginia lasted a year and included visits to her family farm in Western Maryland.

My research went well. I synthesized six new chemicals with related structures that showed good promise of anticancer activity in initial tests and built a complicated glass setup for one stage of the syntheses. To keep it stable I needed a stand, so I designed a wooden one and used the table saw in the tool-room upstairs to make it.

As I finished sawing the wood, a professor came into the room behind me and slammed the door. I jumped at the noise and chopped off my right thumb and two fingers. University Hospital was across the road from the Medical School, so I was in surgery 15 minutes later. They couldn’t find my thumb until too late but they re-attached the fingers.

That led to a two month hiatus from work and a decision to give up the MD part of the program. At that time I was research-oriented, and the PhD work alone was a lot less demanding. Later, I had various reconstructive surgeries, I decided to move to healthier accommodation, five blocks north in a posh high-rise building at 1010 St. Paul Street.

(Later, I discovered I could have claimed nearly half a million dollars workman’s compensation for loss of my right thumb from an unshielded table saw, but by that time the Statute of Limitations time limit had expired.)

Polly

I supplemented my meagre fellowship income by working the night shift as the lab technician at Church Home and Hospital, near Johns Hopkins Hospital. In their cafeteria another regular night customer was a strikingly attractive redhead named Polly. Her husband was dying of Hodgkin's Disease. We became passing friends after a few weeks. The night he died I typed and cross matched 10 pints of blood for him and spent some time trying to console her.

Looking back on that time I was stupid to try to court her. She had been very much in love with her husband and I was a rebound consolation. After a few months we were married. We rented a house close to two maiden aunts who adored her.  After about a month we agreed that it was not working and I moved out. She went to Florida with the aunts, bought a motel and filed for divorce.

Stickwithitiveness

It’s a combination of dumb tenacity and perseverance. A story about Scottish clan leader Robert Bruce fascinated me when I was young. After Bruce was defeated by the English he hid in a cave. As he sat pondering his future he watched a spider hanging from the roof of the cave by a slender thread it was trying to climb. Over and over the spider slipped and fell but wouldn’t give up. After many hours it succeeded and reached the roof. Robert Burns took fresh heart from the spider. He rallied the clans to fight and beat a bigger English army at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Later the English accepted Scottish independence and Robert Bruce became the first king of Scotland.

British schoolchildren all know that story. I believe it helps to infuse a similar value in many of them. It certainly did with me. At age 11 I fell in love with chemistry and my chemistry set. I never forgot my love of chemistry. After I was ‘demobbed’ I applied for a service grant to study at London University. Four years later I was the proud recipient of an honors degree in chemistry. With a prestige job at Glaxo, the pharmaceutical giant, it should have been enough, but wasn’t.

In 1957 England was still slowly recovering from WWII and the Canadian government made Canada sound like the land of milk and honey, so I moved there. After tramping from factory to factory for weeks I found a job at the University of Toronto. My work there was published as a research paper and that helped me to land a fellowship to the Medical School of the University of Maryland. In my 30’s I was back to being a student again. My grant just covered tuition and food. With the few dollars remaining I rented a cockroach infested room in an old building in downtown Baltimore.

My research involved synthesis of two new series of drugs and then testing them for anti-cancer properties. When most of my drugs had been made I had a heart-stopping traumatic event. When I arrived at the lab one morning, I noticed immediately all my new drugs in wide-necked jars with red screw caps, were missing. It was instant panic: the contents of the jars had taken years of my blood, toil, tears and sweat. The first thing we did was interview the janitor. He told us the jars were near the trash bin so he assumed they were to be thrown out. The whole floor of the research building was now on alert. We ran out to the building dumpster but it had also been emptied.

Fortunately, our department head, Dr. Krantz, was an internationally known figure. Whoever he called resulted in a police car escort for a whole gang of my colleagues, piled into two cars and headed to the city trash dump. What is even more amazing is that we recovered all my precious new compounds within a few minutes of getting to the dump. The truck that held them had just unloaded. We recognized the jars by their red caps and rescued them from the mountain of other trash. This story is even hard for me to accept and I’m the one who found them. This is the first time I have recalled it and written it down.

From my room I could walk to the college. In my third year I had an accident at work and cut off my right thumb and two fingers. This put me behind a few months, but I stuck with it and in 1964 my dissertation was accepted, I aced the oral exam and received my PhD diploma.

Betty

I met Betty Stevenson at 1010 St. Paul Street in Baltimore. She was in her twenties, a delightful chick that I first met by nearly running her over and who was always in the elevator when I left for work. Later she confessed she waited in it until I got in. Betty would not move in with me. She was a legal secretary and her boss, Kemp Bartlett, was a Baltimore attorney who paid her rent at 1010 in exchange for occasional service.

Betty and I were both smitten, but her mother preferred her daughter to marry a wealthy attorney rather than a poor student so she persuaded Betty to elope with Kemp. He drove her to Gretna, Maryland, for a quickie marriage followed by a first class passage on the Queen Elizabeth and honeymoon in England. Betty took the bait then regretted it. During the voyage and stay in London she wrote me passionate love letters. It is hard to re-live the intensity and jealousy of that love. My world was in turmoil. I was usually the one to end love affairs without thinking about other people's feelings. Now I had a taste of my own medicine.

When they returned, Betty moved into Kemp’s townhouse, a few yards from 1010. For a few days she tried to keep us both sexually satisfied, but I gave her an ultimatum and she left him. We rented an apartment for the next two years. I defended my Ph D dissertation May 1963 and it was published in ’64.

The head of the pharmacology department of Johns Hopkins University offered me a post-doctoral fellowship and I accepted it. I became a technical laborer for the department research. One of my jobs was to isolate endoplasmic reticulum (ER) from dog kidney cells. Part of the recipe involved using a sophisticated ultracentrifuge to separate the ER from other cell fragments. One day I may have improperly balanced samples in the rotor of the ultracentrifuge. When it reached maximum speed it exploded. Fortunately no-one was in the wrecked centrifuge room. The company absolved me from blame and replaced the centrifuge free of charge, but the suspicion remained and I was under a cloud.

I had also been offered a job studying blood amino acids at University Hospital, so I decided to accept it and break my post-doc agreement. The department head, Dr Paul Talalay, was very upset and threatened to black-ball me at the Licensing Committee on Medical Education (LCME). I did not expect ever to teach in a medical school so this meant nothing to me. In my new post at Baltimore's University Hospital I did a lot of research and published two papers about plasma amino acids in shock patients.

Our daughter Emily was born in February 1965. Shortly after that, we gave up our apartment, put the furniture in storage and moved to a tiny shack in a field ten miles from Baltimore to try living a “back-to-nature life. The owner allowed us to use it rent free. It was fun for a few months. The outhouse was next to a barn. We had an old hand pump next to the sink for water and no electricity.

Kemp refused to give Betty a divorce until we left Baltimore and she was pregnant with Geoffrey. Dot divorced me while I was in medical school, so as soon as Betty’s divorce came through we flew to Baltimore and were married at the registrar’s office in 1966. Betty’s sister Louise was a witness.

 On the Farm

In August 1965 I took a job as pharmacologist at Strassenburgh Laboratories, a small drug company near Rochester in New York. We wanted to live in a farmhouse and the personnel department at Strassenburgh found one we loved and rented at first sight. It was over a hundred years old, with lots of nooks and crannies but only two bedrooms. It had a half mile dirt road leading to it and it was at least that far to the next farm. We rented it in summer, when the fields in front of the house were growing hay. There were two barns; the smaller one would become our garage. On one side of the house was an old apple orchard. Behind it a field led downhill to a stream and up again on the other side. The landowner bred quarter horses that roamed freely in this field.

Shortly after we moved into our farmhouse Dot sent Christopher to live with us as she was finding it hard to raise a teenage boy alone.Summer in upstate New York is a delightful but short season. Our first frost was usually in August and we had snow by September. Fall and winter left indelible memories of being snowed in. Our driveway was pretty in the fall when its blackberry bushes were loaded with fruit; but was impassable with snow in winter. It was plowed last, after all the country roads had been cleared.

Fortunately our neighbors had ski-doos. They zoomed over with fresh milk and other necessities, so being snowed in was like a holiday. The slope behind the house became our toboggan run and we had a great time. Emily was nearly two years old, she loved the snow so we frequently changed into and out of overshoes, Wellington boots and other clothes. The house had a separate snow-room for wet, snowy and muddy garments and boots.

In December 1966 Geoffrey was born. He was a tiny baby, and for several months his home was a wicker clothes basket. We now had two cars, so when our driveway was clear, Betty could visit neighbors or go shopping. We had two large farm dogs, until a third one adopted us. His fur was covered with tight black curls, so we named him Ringo after Ringo Starr of the Beatles. The dogs were not allowed in the house. We fed them by leaving open 50 pound bags of dog food in the small barn. They could get water from snow or the stream and they slept under the cars.

As we lived in the sticks we had to take our trash to the local dump. This was one of my weekend chores, and the dogs loved to come along. When I loaded the trash-cans into the station wagon they jumped in too. I also usually took tools with me to the dump. We were becoming interested in antiques, and there was no better place to find antique hardware like hinges and handles than unscrewing them from broken antiques in the dump.

One day in midwinter at the dump we found the gutted carcass of a young buck. Though it was below freezing the carcass wasn’t frozen, so someone had recently left it, I imagined some young hunter who shot and cleaned it as a present for his wife and his wife yelling at him to get that disgusting thing out of the house. The dogs and I had no such qualms. I dragged it to the wagon and packed it in with dogs and empty trash cans. Back at the farm I offloaded the carcass near one corner of a field for the dogs to nibble on. They loved it. The meat was preserved by the cold weather. After a few weeks the dogs were much fatter and only the bare skull of the deer remained.

The dogs also supplemented their diet in other ways. They developed great skill at catching ground hogs. When they saw one in a field all three dogs would run around it in a big circle to confuse it. They’d gradually tighten the circle then one of them would dart in to grab the groundhog and break its neck by shaking it.

By spring of the following year, Geoffrey was starting to crawl. One Saturday morning Betty left him crawling on the lawn in front of the house while she did the laundry. I happened to look out of the window to see the three dogs circling around Geoffrey on the lawn. I rushed out to save him just before they swooped in for the kill. That was the end of the dogs. About the same time we had reports from farmers miles away, that our dogs had been identified worrying sheep. Sheep worrying by dogs is forbidden as it may be fatal to them. We advertised to try to find someone to take the dogs, but two of them were euthanized. That was enough farm life for us. We moved back to civilization.

Honeoye Falls

In 1968 Richard was born. He was anoxic at birth and we were worried about him, but he soon started to thrive. We moved to a big house in Honeoye Falls, a quaint village near Rochester. Betty became friendly with wives of the village doctor and the village lawyer. The three women opened an antique store and I was their buyer. For years I’d gone to farm auctions and we furnished our home with antiques. Once I paid $5 for a huge barrel full of a liquid that turned out to be super hard cider. I siphoned 50 gallons and sold the barrel for a profit.

Our farming friends told us the best and most economical way to buy beef was on the hoof. So early in 1966 I asked the farmer next door to reserve a yearling Hereford steer for us. He was a cute young fellow we called Harold, He grew and grazed with the herd over spring and summer. In fall the farmer put Harold in a stall in a barn and told me to feed him fattening feed. I hadn’t expected to get to know my beefsteak personally, but every day after work I drove to the barn to feed Harold. He recognized the sound of my car and bellowed a greeting. He loved fattening feed and scarfed it down by the bucketful.

One day I drove to the barn and there was no welcoming greeting. Harold’s stall was empty. A couple of weeks later the abattoir called. We should go to oversee the butchering of Harold’s carcass. Decisions were needed about how much for hamburger and the thickness of steaks and what to do with organ meats. Nobody said it would be like this. I was the only one who felt sad about Harold, but I hand fed him and remembered the pleasure in his eyes. It took a while, but finally I enjoyed his steaks. He was tender and delicious.

Christopher had apparently settled in with us at the farm but when we moved to Honeoye Falls he had trouble at the new school. Then Dot sent Caroline to join us, but she didn’t like her new home and ran away. Chris then moved back with Dot in Canada. Despite all our efforts, we didn't hear from Caroline until 6 years later, when she was 18. 

After four years at Strassenburgh Laboratories,where the bosses were regularly fired and I witnessed the common business practice of knifing in the back I had enough of it. I found a job as a pharmacology professor.

Professor

In 1969, I accepted a post at Florida A & M University (FAMU) as their pharmacology professor. FAMU, in Tallahassee, is a traditionally Black College. They had never had a pharmacologist on the faculty before and only a small percent of their graduates passed the Florida Board of Pharmacy examination.

I was given a classroom, an office and a huge unfinished room for a laboratory on the deserted top floor of the pharmacy building. A dumb waiter opened into my office and was used for mail and supplies. I designed a year long pharmacology course and started to teach 4^th year (senior) students a week later arriving. There was one white and 15 black students in that class. I couldn’t understand the speech of students from upstate (tuppentine) country and another student translated for me. We had no textbooks or teaching aids.

Pharmacology is study of the effects of drugs. It is a difficult subject. Students need a good background knowledge of chemistry and physiology. We had no drugs or a lab in which to study them. The large room had been designated as a pharmacology lab, but the floors were unfinished, there were no benches and it was full of emergency air raid supplies. I moved them out and emptied the water barrels, but ones full of crackers stayed in the corridor for years.

I heard that some old laboratory benches had been dumped at the edge of campus, so I had them hauled up to the empty room. The haulers weren’t happy as they were heavy and too big for the elevator. When they were in, I had a half-ready pharmacology laboratory, but with no equipment, drugs or animals for the students to study.

Before computers simplified multiple letter writing, I used the School’s letterhead to write to over a hundred drug companies, asking for pure samples of drugs that they marketed. I copied their addresses from an old Physician’s Desk Reference. In a short time we had received lots of drug samples. One company sent 10 gm of cocaine hydrochloride that I hid from prying eyes.

I appealed to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital and to a surgical supply store. TMH sent old anesthesia equipment, an old operating table and  used surgical instruments and the supply store gave us a free supply of syringes and needles. This encouraged the Dean to give me a small budget and enough funds for a full-time lab assistant.

We bought cages and started breeding rats and rabbits, and the first laboratory course began at Easter 1970, six months after I arrived. Our first experiments involved local anesthesia. I operated to expose a frog sciatic nerve. The students saw cocaine and lidocaine solutions block nerve transmission; then my bottle of 1% cocaine disappeared.

Medicinal drugs were stored in a locked cupboard in my office. One night it was ransacked. The office door was locked so we figured the thief was a midget who came up in the dumb waiter, controlled by an outside accomplice They didn’t get the cocaine, but after another break-in, where other drugs were stolen, I determined to get rid of it. Rather than throwing the cocaine away, I gave it to a poor couple we liked. I thought they would sell it to buy food, but one weekend they snorted it day and night until it was gone.

During race riots just before we came to Tallahassee, FAMU students complained that their facilities were inferior to those at nearby FSU. To help redress this, Florida’s Legislature granted funds for a new pharmacy building. The building was up and occupied a year later and I had hired an additional professor to teach pharmacology.

The image of FAMU Pharmacy School improved rapidly. By my third year the percentage of our students passing the Florida Board of Pharmacy exam exceeded that of the University of Florida Pharmacy School for the first time ever and white students were enrolling in FAMU Pharmacy School in large numbers.

Dr. Winter Griffiths, a well-known author, was hired at FSU to start a Medical Sciences program. He needed a pharmacologist to teach the course/ I was the only one in Tallahassee so he recruited me and gave me a joint appointment as an FSU professor. This brought FAMU into the medical program. We set up a five year course at FSU with FAMU teaching pharmacology. Students graduating from this program are accepted to the 2nd year of medical school at the University of Florida.

Winter applied for the new Program In Medical Sciences (PIMS) to receive national recognition. Shortly after this I was invited to hire another pharmacology professor to share the load. When I did this, I was immediately replaced as the pharmacology teacher in the joint medical program. I had no idea why.

                            

Hippie and Earth Day

It was 1969 and the hippie decade was ending when we moved to Tallahassee. In the academic environment I felt freer to embrace liberal causes. It started gradually. I had a lot of empty 55 gallon drums that had held emergency water supplies. When I heard of approaching Earth Day in 1970 I contacted the student councils of FSU and FAMU with a plan. It was to get students from both universities to spend the day cleaning trash from the beach at Shell Point, a local student trysting ground.

I arranged with Wakulla County authorities to pick up the empty drums and leave them at intervals along the dunes near the beach and empty them regularly. I had flyers printed and distributed at both campuses to generate student interest. By Earth Day we had lots of volunteers, so we took a convoy of cars loaded with students and let them loose on the beach with empty trash bags. They did a great job and cleaned the beach thoroughly, A reporter came with us and gave me a full page spread with pictures in the Tallahassee paper.

Some of my volunteers were Hippies. They heard I was a pharmacology professor and they asked me if I could give a course on psychotropic drugs. I spoke to my Dean about it and he liked the idea so we set it up as a non-credit general interest course at the FSU Center for Participant Education. I was also invited to give a series of ten weekly talks about drugs on FSU’s radio program.

Wow! General interest is putting it mildly. Every Hippie from miles around Tallahassee came to the course. The Sheriff’s office asked if they could enroll agents in the class. We refused, based on legal advice and I threatened to cancel it if they did it. The course was a huge success and I received invitations to visit hippies in the area.

One place Betty and I visited was the Miccosukee Land Co-op, part capitalist and part commune, It covered 170 acres and each member owned one or more, maximum five acres at a fair price. The Dean of the PIMS medical program lived there, so did other professors. People built their own houses using novel designs and materials. I bought an acre and visited it regularly.

Taken Down a Peg

I’ve had many embarrassing moments that weren’t funny. I’ve never told this before. I was about forty, a professor teaching classes at FAMU and FSU. I also liked stage acting and won the role of Julius Caesar at FSU’s main stage production of the play by Shakespeare. We played 12 shows and each night I was assassinated in Act 3 Scene 1.

My stage wife, Calpurnia, was actually a beautiful young lady named Shirley. Almost every man in the show was in love with Shirley, but, as Caesar, I thought I had the inside track. Backstage in the Green Room, I would chat her up whenever the opportunity arose.

In Act II scene II I had a dialog with her on stage about how brave I was and that I would ignore the prophecies of the soothsayer. My last speech in this part was “ How foolish your fears seem now, Calpurnia, I am ashamed that I did yield to them. Give me my robe for I will go”. With that she draped a toga over me and exited. Two other actors entered and the scene continued.

For the final show, my boss, the Dean of Faculty, was in one of the front rows of the audience. I had noticed earlier in the Green Room that Shirley seemed annoyed about something, so I pulled her leg a bit, trying to cheer her up. Apparently it didn’t work because when Shirley, as Calpurnia, started to put on my toga, she fetched me a hefty swipe across the face that left me dizzy, before marching offstage.

Alone on that huge stage I recovered quickly, but apparently not fast enough. My Dean noticed and realized something was wrong. The next day he came to my classroom to congratulate me on the performance, but also to find out what had happened. When I explained it he burst out laughing and later shared the story with my colleagues.

They thought it was funny too, perhaps it was, but I never saw Shirley again.

Ali and Break-up with Betty

 Soon after we moved to Tallahassee we bought a lovely 4 bedroom brick home. It was in an old section of town near the capitol opposite a park. It had live oaks with Spanish moss and a landscaped garden with azaleas, camellias, and magnolias. Betty decided she didn’t want more children, so I had a vasectomy. Several months later she changed her mind so we applied to become adoptive parents. Alison came in the middle of 1971. We collected her from Fort Walton Beach. She was the cutest and tiniest baby. She grew up tiny but very feisty.

We played the role of university professor and family. We joined the Tallahassee Unitarian Church and met lots of liberal-minded friends. Betty didn’t work outside the home. In addition to looking after our four children, she became interested in the Lamaze preparation for childbirth and regularly taught classes to pregnant women and their significant others on our large living room carpet.

While I was a pharmacy school professor in 1972 I won the role of Caesar in an FSU production of “Julius Caesar”. One place we rehearsed was a large empty barn in the country owned by a student’s father. One evening a local farmer came by with a bag of psilocybe mushrooms as a gift to our company. Psilocybe are fragile, anemic-looking fungi on long thin stalks that grow out of cow-patties. They are found after dew falls late at night or early morning in cow pastures.

We were invited to a party, and the mushrooms were brewed into a tea that we drank to get a delightful experience. The atmosphere was comfortable with friends, candlelight and floor cushions. When I closed my eyes there were dark brooding images on the left or brilliant flashing colorful images on the right. I chose to look at the bright ones. They were a constantly changing kaleidoscope of colors and patterns. I have a foot fetish and one kind lady let me fondle her feet. The tactile and visual images took me to new highs of sensual pleasure.

Gil, the director of “Julius Caesar” was a drama professor and a friend who later became Dean of the school and is now retired. He did not share the psilocybe mushroom bounty, but sometime after that, Gil and his wife Sandy, invited Betty and I to dinner. After the meal Sandy produced a couple of 10 microgram wafers of LSD, one for Gil and one for me. I was to place it under my tongue in a relaxed setting with Betty close at hand.

Like psilocybe mushrooms, LSD hallucinations were vivid. If memory serves, the colors were not as bright with LSD but they were very exciting and constantly changed shape. LSD was also a potent aphrodisiac and pleasurable feelings like touching were exacerbated. Betty did not get much sleep that night but I had a great time.

By 1974, Betty and I were becoming restless. I received compliments from students about my lectures but my Dean mysteriously pulled me from teaching in the joint FSU/FAMU medical program I had helped to start. Bob McGrath, a friend, wanted me to work with him as Research Director of Schick Laboratories in Seattle. Its research was dedicated to trying to cure alcoholism (apparently Mr. Schick’s problem). I flew out and was royally feted. On my second trip Betty came too. Unknown to us, Schick Corporation had been sold to the Eversharp Pencil Co. a few days before our trip and a team from Eversharp was there when we arrived. By Tuesday we decided to buy a lovely old stone house overlooking Puget Sound and had put down a deposit. We made a courtesy call on Schick Laboratories, and Bob McGrath told us he and his colleagues at Schick had just been fired. He said that his job offer to me still stood if I wanted it - I didn’t. We were able to get our house deposit back and had a holiday in Seattle.

Betty and I continued to grow apart. We experimented a little with threesomes. When Betty began a relationship with a woman who helped her to teach Lamaze classes, I moved out. We put our home on the market for much less than it was worth and it sold the same day. Betty moved to a small house with the children and I bought one nearby. Then Betty moved to Lynn Haven to be near another woman friend and away from me. I kept the small house in Tallahassee but spent more time at the Miccosukee Land Co-op. I moved an old mobile home on to my acre, hooked up electricity, had a well and a latrine dug to live there.

Drug Guru

As a pharmacologist I became the drug guru of Miccosukee Land Co-op. I was introduced when I became a part-time resident. People there were generally in one of three groups. Those who had rejected city living for a back-to-nature life often built domes and other unique structures. The university students who wanted a cheap place to crash and sexual freedom mostly lived in shacks and mobile homes, so did the third group, the poor whites. The groups met to discuss business and build projects but otherwise kept separate.

Some houses were impressive. There were polyurethane domes and wood geodesic domes built to Buckminster Fuller’s formula and other beautiful and unique designs. There were also some crazies. One was built using the formula “Start here and build in this direction.” It had staircases in weird places like a Dr. Seuss creation.

Havana Florida was once an important place where American shade tobacco was grown. This is the high quality leaf used to wrap cigars, but the industry died. There were lots of old tobacco barns that farmers wanted removed, and the folk at Miccosukee Land Co-op were eager to get tobacco-seasoned wood for building, so parties were organized to dismantle them. It was dangerous work as a barn could cover half an acre and be three stories high but each one yielded a huge bonanza of lumber.

Joe was my closest neighbor. His claim to fame was three female marijuana plants he grew from seed. It all started accidentally after he swept his cabin floor in a fit of cleaning before a new girl friend came to visit. The seeds landed a few feet from the door and grew where they fell. They were well fertilized, as every night he opened the door and relieved himself in that area. As the plants grew, Joe fussed over them, watered and weeded round them. In a few months they were six feet high, with lots of leaves and buds. Before they would bloom, he covered each cluster of buds with a baggie to shield it from stray pollen. “When they don’t get sex, they get frustrated, and make more THC”, he said.

As harvest time approached, so did our anticipation. “That will make one hell ‘ve a of lot of sensimilla”, he crowed. As a neighbor I stayed in Joe’s good books in hopes of sharing the bounty, but someone else got there first. The three plants were cut down and hauled off in the night by persons unknown and Joe was furious. “You’re supposed to be a drug expert, so who ripped off my pot?”  I wanted to help, but detective work wasn’t my line. I said. “You were so proud of them you showed them to everyone. There are lots of suspects. We all planned to visit you after the harvest.”

Getting ripped off is a common hazard for folks who grow marijuana. You can’t call the police for help! Clever thieves may recognize the characteristic shape of the leaves early in the growing season and let the grower assume all the risks until the plants are close to harvest, then steal them. Joe never caught the thief but we suspected kids who lived nearby. I moved on to take a job in New York City.

The commune is still there. In 2009 Audrey and I made a detour on our way home to Miami to visit the Miccosukee Land Co-op  It was a sad reunion. First, we couldn’t find it. It wasn’t accessible by the road we used to use. Eventually we found it. As we drove through its dirt roads I tried to identify the homes from that brave new world 30 odd years before. Some were still there and lived in, guarded by growling dogs, but most had been abandoned. Probably their owners, like me, decided that life with air-conditioning and modern creature comforts trumped primitive living in the woods.

Expensive Executive

 My next post was near New York City. Bob McGrath, who had offered me a job in Seattle, was now the Research Director at USV Pharmaceutical Co in Tuckahoe. He offered me the post of Assistant Research Director. I have lots of skill at organizing but little at managing. PhD’s who had worked at USV for years were passed over and resented me. I was not a good fit for the job.

I cost USV a lot of money. They bought my little house in Tallahassee and paid to move my furniture to New York. They also paid for several jaunts that I took. One to Orlando for a course on pharmacokinetics. After the course I spent a week at Lynn Haven with the kids. Then USV paid me to write and present a paper at a meeting in El Salvador. After my presentation I rented a car to explore the country. My near kidnapping adventure in El Salvador has previously been described in "Near Death Experiences".

The excuse for my last trip at USV was a drug conference in Helsinki, Finland. I combined it with a vacation. I flew to Copenhagen and met Miriam when she disembarked from a Norwegian Fiord cruise. (She was my first millionaire lady friend. We met at a play-reading group in New York. Her father left her a fortune from his wholesale plumbing supply company. Her cousin was now the CEO and he paid her a huge salary to stay away from the business). We planned a two week vacation in England before I headed out to Helsinki, but we quarreled. Miriam went home to New York and I visited my sister in Exeter. It was 1976 and my first visit since leaving England 19 years before.

When I finally reached Helsinki and the conference, I visited a family I’d met on my earlier visit with the Peace Corps.  I told friends of Bob McGrath about this visit and someone apparently called him to say I was wasting my time. I was recalled on the next plane out and summarily fired from USV.

During the 18 months I worked at USV I missed Florida and my family and didn’t do much work, but I saw a lot of shows in Manhattan and acted in three plays. At one time I stood up in a posh Bronxville church and defended legalization of marijuana. If news of any of that filtered back it probably did not endear me to the Board of Directors. After I was fired from USV I returned to Florida and rented a room close to the kids and Lynn Haven.

Fiddling in Florida

After licking my wounds and spending as much time with the kids as Betty allowed, I moved into Panama City and was cast to play the role of Dickenson in the musical “1776”. After a brief affair with the wife of an ex-marine cast member, I quickly moved to Tallahassee for safety. The Department of Environmental Regulation hired me to oversee quality assurance in the Florida Water Quality (208) Program. My job was to inspect and write reports on the water-testing laboratories. I rode or flew all over Florida, sometimes in the governor’s plane when he didn’t need it. My acrophobia kicked in. I hated small planes, especially in thunderstorms.

I met Beverly at a party. She was divorced from an FSU professor. We discovered a secluded beach at Fiddler’s Point, about 10 miles south of Tallahassee, where we could cavort together naked all day. An inlet near the Point was a mating ground for horseshoe crabs. The water in the inlet was warm with a fast current that stirred up the fine sand. It was fun to swim in and feel huge bundles of harmless but horny horseshoe crabs press against you. In the evening the lovely sandy beach turned black when thousands of fiddler crabs came out of their holes. We couldn’t avoid them to get back to our car.

Soon after that Beverly found another love and I met Margaret at the Unitarian church. We had known each other socially when I was a professor in Tallahassee. She lived with her husband a professor at FSU. Margaret was ripe for an affair. She wooed me and soon left her husband to move in with me. She was my second millionaire lady friend. Her grandfather pioneered the phone company that served Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point in North Carolina. The company had sold out to Bell Telephone but in addition to the sale price she was still getting royalties from Ma Bell. We visited her home at High Point. It is a big house on a peninsula jutting into a lake, with a boat in a boathouse and a gatekeeper in a gatehouse at the entrance.

Margaret was paranoid that her husband would learn that she had moved in with me, so we moved to Miami and I found a job there. Margaret had a masters’ degree in furniture design and she furnished our rental house exquisitely. My new job at Florida International University had the title of professor. I was hired to do research on Water Quality. I published two papers and wrote a chapter in a book about contaminants in the water of commercial swimming pools. In 1980, a year after we’d set up house together, Margaret landed a job as a professor at the University of North Carolina near her home. She wanted me to go too, but I declined.

                  

Marty

I moved to a condo and went back to the Unitarian Church, where I met Marty, a professor in the Education Department of the University of Miami. Marty had two small daughters. After a while we agreed to jointly buy a 3-bedroom townhouse. Then Betty sent Geoffrey and Richard to me, as they’d become too difficult for her to raise. We decided to go ahead with our plans and combine families. Marty’s girls were more put out by the arrangement than the boys, who were used to having sisters around. The girls gradually overcame their shyness and we set up a hot tub in the back yard. We were married just before Christmas 1981. On our honeymoon at Club Med in Eleuthra, I learned that Marty was into more kinky stuff than I was.

The next year, I heard that an osteopathic medical school was going to open, so I applied for and became the first professor of Pharmacology at Southeastern College of Osteopathic Medicine, North Miami Beach, teaching pharmacology to the first students in the fall term.

Two former Tallahassee Unitarians willed their Pinecrest home to the church when they died. It was auctioned by sealed bid and Marty and I put in the winning bid. The house was old and spacious with 4-bedrooms and a swimming pool on half an acre, perfect for our big family. We had lots of wild parties there. Our friends enjoyed the pool and hot tub. Skinny-dipping was standard late night fun. The first ones naked in the pool or tub were generally the young ladies with super figures. They were followed by most males who were followed by their wives or significant other chaperones.

Geoffrey left to live with his mother again and Emily and Alison came to live with us. Emily only stayed a short while as she didn’t like my curfews. In 1983 Marty emptied our joint bank account and moved out with her daughters. Soon after this, Alison stayed away from home for several nights and I only found where she was by searching at her friends' homes, so I sent her back again to Betty, and only Richard stayed with me.

Coping

In 1981, I was a single father in Miami with two teenage sons and a 10 year old daughter. When the circus came to town, a lady friend managed to get five complimentary tickets for a Friday performance, so we decided to give Geoffrey, Richard and Alison a surprise treat by taking them with us.

The night before, at dinner, I brought the talk round to the circus and how much I used to enjoy it, then I told them my plans for us. Yukkh! All hell broke loose. I sat with my mouth open while Geoffrey screamed at me for five minutes non-stop, except when Richard was louder. "You're a tyrant". "You aint worth --it". "You are ruining our weekend" "I've already got plans" etc.

My normal response to an onslaught like that would have been to give in, but this time I'd told my friend the kids would love to come. Honor was at stake so I stood my ground. They gradually calmed down but still didn't want to go. The carrot and stick finally won the day. I'd give them an extra dollar on next week's allowance if they came or I'd lock up the TV if they refused. (I had made a lock box for our TV – it helped to get the homework done).

So we went. Alison wanted to take her best friend (whose name and face changed weekly) but I vetoed that. The show was magnificent. I've always loved the fun and thrills of the circus, the animals and clowns, the glitter and shouting of the crowd. While it was going on, there was plenty of light, so I turned to watch my kids. They were radiant. For me, that moment was the greatest part of the greatest show on Earth. Their faces reflected the joy I remembered when my Dad took me to a circus, long ago in England.

Suddenly I needed some Kleenex My friend was worried when she saw tears streaming down my face. How could I tell her I'd just realized that the pain and frustration of being a single parent was worth it for times like this. Though I sometimes hated their guts for giving me a hard time, I was wrong.

I recovered a few moments later when Richard drew Alison's attention to an act on our left by poking her in the ribs and I had to stop the argument before the fight began. Still, all in all, it was a great evening. The kids had a wonderful time and I certainly did. The circus was great and I learned two lessons. Teenagers can enjoy family outings and I love them dearly.

Barbados

During my second year teaching pharmacology at Southeastern College of Osteopathic Medicine I was asked to hire a pharmacologist, who I expected to help me, but as soon as he was on board the full teaching course was given to him, and no reason given to me. It was weird, one minute I was pharmacology professor and the next I was told to rework the curriculum for a new textbook.

I was upset, so I looked round and after an interview in New York I was offered a job as professor of pharmacology at the Medical School of St. George’s University on the island of Barbados. St. George’s University had moved out of their medical school campus on the island of Grenada when President Reagan sent troops to overthrow their left wing government. When I was hired St. George's had re-started the Grenada campus and was trying to turn the interim campus at Barbados into a permanent one.

Richard moved to a mobile home near our house in Miami. I was dating Chen, a Chinese lady who agreed to keep an eye on Richard and to store my car. I met two hippies who agreed to look after the house and pool in exchange for living in it rent-free.

So I moved to Barbados, where my teaching load was light, only one hour's lecture and one other hour at the office daily. They had no research or laboratory facilities. I bought a car, explored the island and joined the Barbados social set, where I met Valerie, who came to the island from England as a girl. She had been a local beauty queen, divorced from a rich and powerful local politician. She knew the places to go, people to meet and things to do on the island. She was a good lover who knew all the tricks. A never-ending supply of strong marijuana was available from a Rastafarian neighbor. It was paradise on Earth.

I wrote to Richard and occasionally to Chen. I invited Richard to Barbados for his Christmas holidays and Chen heard and decided to come too. I was in a panic over the inevitable clash. It happened on the third day, when Valerie let herself in with her key.

Chen flew back to Miami in a huff and asked me to remove my car that was on blocks in her back yard, so I flew back to do it. But I was glad I did as the hippies who were supposed to look after the house had taken off with most of the furniture. The pool was black; the local authorities had condemned the house and posted a notice to that effect on the garage door. I retrieved my car from Chen’s house, cleaned the pool, had the condemnation removed and installed Richard as caretaker before flying back to Barbados.

Other trouble also loomed. Medical college reviewers came from New York and New Jersey to examine our teaching facilities and found them wanting. They refused to re-certify our campus as an off-shore university. I was suddenly pulled from teaching pharmacology and a substitute teacher flown in from New York. 

At the time I thought Valerie’s ex had complained to the University. It is only since I’ve retired that I realized that this and all the other times I was pulled from teaching were in Medical School programs and that the Licensing Committee of Medical Education black ball from my post-doc with Paul Talalay at Johns Hopkins University in 1965 was most likely responsible. There is no way to find out for sure, though I’d love to do so. I left Barbados at the end of the academic year in 1985.

Audrey

Alison came back to live with Richard and I in Miami for a while, I met Audrey at a singles club in 1987 and we were married the following year. I was approaching retirement with only the prospect of social security, needing two more years of service to the State of Florida to get a state pension. S I took a teaching job at Hialeah-Miami Lakes High School and retired from full time work in 1989. I taught physics and biology and was certified to teach chemistry, physics, biology and mathematics. After retiring I worked part time for ten years as an adjunct professor in the Science department of Miami Dade College. 

Audrey is a wonderful woman. It took a lot of tries before I found her. She smiles a lot and projects happiness. She tamed me by refusing kinky suggestions, had convenient lapses of memory when I was unreasonable and did not hold grudges. Our early years of enjoyable physical love matured into love anchored by mutual respect. Now she is my nursemaid, keeping me alive After nearly 30 years we still enjoy each other's company. 

Obit

My life had many peaks and valleys but flat lives make dull reading, just as the peaks and valleys of Alaska  are more scenic than the prairies of Kansas.

Last decision, what be writ

When I compose my own obit?

Obits are dull, I’ll keep it short

My trip was long. I’m now in port.

From tiny bits of passing fame 

Time will soon erase my name. 

I railed at superstitious lore 

Heaven is here, don't look for more. 

My mantra is 'love, work and play, 

With just one life, don’t waste a day'.