The Lab Is Open. BOOM!!!!

I was fascinated with science from my earliest memories. I cannot remember as a child not wanting to be a scientist until I decided to become an exotic animal veterinarian (Zoo vet)(at age 9) and then a Vascular Surgeon(at age 15). The gateway drug for my jones on science was either a Gilbert or Porter Chemistry set, I've had both over the years and cannot remember which one was first. They were "safe" and "Tested" as you can see on the cover. Well I did everything to prove it was not safe and that they didn't test everything you could do with the enclosed chemicals. Even blow things up.

Our house had a finished basement that we used for entertaining. My sister had her friends over there. I played toy soldier with Joel Schiffenbauer down there. We had family gatherings down there when the first floor wasn't large enough. There was a laundry room about 20 foot by 15 foot that my mother told me to do all the science in. I eventually expanded to the entire basement after my sister Barbara got married when I was twelve. I was the talk of the neighborhood and all my cousins were afraid to go into the laundry room and later the entire basement.

I suspect that if you only did the experiments that were in the book that came with the chemistry set it was probably tested and thus safe. However, that was not fun. Plus there were lots of other chemicals around the house that made good reactions. Take Clorox (hypochloric acid) and mix it with Ammonia and you get a yellow gas that is heavier then air(very toxic chlorine gas) and hypochlorous acid . which I found burns a hole through the table, the tile on the floor under the table and an inch or two into the cement foundation of the house. I was lucky I only had a cough for a couple weeks. I do have since then chronic sinusitis and have always wondered if I caused it myself. The price we pay for our science.

I saw in the set a bottle that had a dull silver metal in oil. The label said magnesium and a warning to keep away from water. The instructions in the book said to take a small piece and place on metal pan and light with a match. It was an impressive very bright white light. I saw spots in front of my eyes for hours. I had to see what happened when you added water to the magnesium. Well that weekend my mother had to buy a new table to replace the one I was using. I understand they have taken a lot of the chemicals that came in my sets out.



This Blog Snippets of my life, is going to be a daily blog for at least one year. I will tell stories about me that I hope you find interesting. If you like them please do two things: click to become a follower; and post on your Facebook page or twitter them. I hope to have 10,000 followers by years end. Some stories will be very personal. I will try to remember the correct names of those involved, however, I have a terrible memory for names and some names will be completely fictitious. The stories however are completely truthful as far as I can remember. Hope you enjoy.

Forbiden Love

I was the chair of ticket committee at Jamaica High school, The first Junior to hold that position. I inherited it from Bruce Brodsky. Now that may sound like a boring job in High School but remember he who controls the money pulls the strings. We sold the tickets for every school event that had tickets. This included all the sports teams, all the theatrical productions and all the special events. I was responsible for thousands of dollars in revenue. I was also the one who organized the post event parties for the participants. We were given a budget to pay for some of the expenses of the cast parties etc.. So it fell on me to organize all the parties and get togethers. Sometimes we would go to Jan's Ice cream Parlor (I have a major story about Jan's) sometimes we would hit pizza parlors and sometimes we would just go to a local park and hank around and smooze or some would do a little more. Keep reading, that's what this story really is about.

Jamaica High was unique among High Schools in New York City. It was the largest High School with 5800 students (1800 in my graduating class), it was the only High school in New York with a fifty-fifty Black-White ratio. It was fed by three very interesting areas: Jamaica Estates, possibly the wealthiest neighborhood in NYC; Jamaica, one of the three poorest areas in NYC; and Kew Gardens, a community were most of the permanent staff for the United Nations lived. So we had the most international, the richest and the poorest students in NYC mixed in one of the most fascinating melting pots there could be. We had the longest posted Principal, Dr Shucker and the only school in the United States who at that time had an unbroken record of a Westinghouse Science Tallent Search Semi-finalist every year since its inception. We had more PhD's then any other High School in NYC, almost all the Chairman were Doctorates. We were the first( in 1966) High School to have it's own Main Frame Computer an IBM 360 solely for student use. The school started on a staggered schedule between 7 A.M. for the earliest and 11:30 for the latest. The students were statified into seven academic levels from Industrial (non-raegents), General (non-reagents), General Reagents, two levels of Regular reagents, Honor and extra-honor. Overall an amazing school. I just learned they are closing it this year.

Back to our story, There was this girl Michelle, she was the most beautiful girl at Jamaica High School. She was a Senior, a year ahead of me. She was also one of the brightest girls, being in almost all Honor or Extra-honor Classes. She had a bubbly personality. Yes I had a crush on her but felt she was out of my league. She was the type that if we had a Home-Coming Queen she would have been it. She was articulate, gregarious and outgoing. She was an officer of the Student Association and an athlete. It was after a a school event. I arranged for everyone to meet at Cunningham Park, there was a grove near 198th Street and Union Turnpyke that we liked to hangout in. It was about 9:30 and about 40 or 50 kids were there hanging out and doing what High School kids do on a Friday Night after letting off steam at a school event. The amazing thing was that about half the kids were black and half white. It was probably one of the only places in NYC in 1970 that there was mixing of the races to this degree. I was proud that I was a major catalyst of this. Well I was sitting on a bench and Michelle sat down on the other end. We started talking. As time went on I realized she wasn't on the other end of the bench but we were sitting next to each other. Soon we were holding hands and looking into each others eyes. The divides between us, her a senior and me a junior, her the class beauty and me a geek(yes even then we had geeks, I was one of the first), her popular with the opposite sex and me almost dateless in high school. I don't know how it happened but all of a sudden we were kissing. Time flew and the next thing I knew, almost three hours later, it was 1:30 and the last of the people with a car were leaving and we had to go. We both left with a touch of sadness because we both, wrongly, thought that we could not continue our puppy love since she was black and I was white.

Watch the Body

I arrived as a freshman at the University of Buffalo in the fall of 1971. When I walked into my dorm room (the only triple in the entire dorm) I immediately noticed the stain on the dorm wall over my bed and opposite the main window in the room. I quickly found out that the previous spring the university had student riots that dwarfed those at Kent State but fortunately no one was killed. However, a teargas grenade was shoot through the window of my dorm and permanently stained the wall. Every year for the three years I lived in the room they painted the wall shortly after we left in the spring and by the day we moved in the stain burned through the new paint.

Because of the riots the relationship between students and police was very rocky so the School of Management started the Pilot 100 program:

12. Pilot 100: Improving Relations With College Students
(Buffalo, New York)

Goals: To allow "Longhairs" to ride along with police to see problems police encounter and to allow "pigs" to learn many students are serious about their academic work.

Strategies: The School of Management/ SUNY Buffalo, through a liaison with Marine Midland Bank, secured cooperation of Amherst Police Department, Buffalo Police Department, and SUNY-Buffalo campus police. All program participants were screened and female students could ride only if accompanied by a male student. The pilot program anticipated 100 students, but in two and a half months, 250 students had participated. Both sides called the program a success, except that students expressed interest in riding only with City of Buffalo police.

I as a freshman rode more then any other student, riding over 75 times. I rode about one third of the time with a female senior sociology student Gretchen. I and Gretchen were featured in a series of news stories carried in both the Buffalo News and the Amherst paper. The headline was "No Those Students in The Back of the Police Car are not Under Arrest".

The rules were such that the police precincts were divided into five levels of crime level. You had to ride in each level once to go onto the next level, with the tactical patrol being the highest. In the next to highest level I actually enjoyed riding with two police officers. I unfortunately do not remember their names. They were a black and white team and the Black officer took home his car on a new innovative from the federal government. They were involved in a car accident while responding to a call and were critically injured. I could have been in the car with them since I rode with them almost weekly. With them I was involved in three episodes that I will write about in this blog. There were two other episodes with the tactical unit that I will also write about. The relationships I developed that year really came in handy both during my volunteer work with the FAST team and the Red Cross Disaster service.

It was a beautiful Friday afternoon and I arrived at the police precinc,t on Main Street about a half mile from Downtown, at 3:45 as ussual to ride with my favorite pair of police officers. They were walking down the stairs from their daily briefing session. They waved and I followed them to their squad car. I got into the back as usual. We drove around for about 45 minutes and it was pretty quite when the call came across the radio for silent alarm going off. With lights and sirens blaring we tore down Main Street and turned the corner to see a body lying on the sidewalk in front of a jewelry store and someone about a block down running. They pulled up and told me to jump out and watch the body. They took 0ff at about 100 miles an hour burning rubber and going after the person running away. When I got out of the car I immediately noticed the man laying there was not moving. I went over and realized he was dead. He was what in those days I would have called old (I was only 18 and anyone over 30 was old) he had a mustache and graying hair. There was a gun laying on the ground a few inches from his hand. Immediately a crowd was starting to form around the body. I did my best for what seemed like hours, but was probably only 2 or 3 minutes, until several more police units arrived and took over the scene. The perp got away.

Nothing like a nice quite spring day in Buffalo.

Snippets Of My Life: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

In walked Mary Poppins for real. It happened when as a senior medical student I studied in England for three months(part of my five month long Honeymoon). I was studying with Mister Felix Eastcott (in England surgeons are called Mister {not Mr.} instead of Doctor, this comes from their original charter from the King of England when they were Barber-Surgeons to distinguish them from medical doctors). Mister Eastcott was the vascular surgeon to the Royal family and had his offices on Upper Harley Street, London. His office backed up onto the grounds of Buckingham Palace and was once the homes for the Stable staff. He was the first person to do a Carotid endarterectomy (one of the most common operations I do) in 1953. He wrote and published the first Textbook of Vascular Surgery. I worked with him at Saint Mary's Hospital Paddington, the same hospital that Flemming discovered Penicillin in 1928 and the ECK machine was invented. They had two noble prize winning work done there the discovery of penicillin and antibodies. Many of the Royal family gave birth there, including Princess Margarette while I was there (but unfortunately I never saw her or any of the royals).

I was in a preceptor relationship with Mister Eastcott which meant I followed him and assisted on all his cases, went to his private office hours ( a very interesting story later from that), went to his public clinic and first assisted him at the private Hospitals he went to ( a very interesting story will come from that). When we were at one of these private hospitals he would occasionally take me to his club with him. It was on one of these occasions that Julie Andrews walked in and made a beeline for Mister Eastcott. He jumped up and hugged and kissed her, introduced her to me and talked for a few minutes. I was young and star struck and just sat with my jaw hanging open. She was so nice.

Snippets of my Life: Whole lot of Nothing

A Whole Lot Of Nothing.

One of the most emotionally striking moments of my life was March 10th 1981 when I spoke with Mary Gohlke. The amazing aspect was that the night before I had seen her laying on an operating table with her chest wide open and absolutely nothing in there. No heart, no lung just air and several surgical clamps and tubes. The only other person in this condition I ever saw was a corpse. You see Mrs Gohlke was the first person, in the world, ever to receive a combined heart lung transplant by Dr. Bruce Reitz assisted by Dr Norman Shumway(developed technique for heart transplant, that was stolen by Christian Barnard {another story}). You see I was a third year resident at Stanford Univ at the time and I was on call that fateful day and was in the operating room during one of the most amazing firsts in modern surgery.

While I have not read Mrs. Gohlke autobiography, "I'll take Tomorrow" I clearly remember the story of how it came about as told to the operating team that ground breaking night of March 9th 1981. You see Mrs. Gohlke was third in line on the transplant list and because of her pulmonary fibrosis she had months to live and was doomed to die before receiving her live saving transplant. If you remember the Television show Lou Grant you will remember Margaret Pynchon the strong headed publisher of the Los Angeles Tribune. Well Mrs Pynchon was fashioned after mrs Gohlke who was the real life publisher of the largest newspaper in Arizona. Shumway related that two weeks earlier she approached him with a deal. You see the first transplant was being held up by FDA approval of cyclosprorin A, a drug required to prevent rejection of the transplant. Mrs Gohlke, with very powerful political connections offered to get the drug approved quickly if she would be moved to the front of the list. Shumway felt he had nothing to loose as if she didn't get an expidited approval her and the two people above her on the list would die before the FDA approved the use of cyclosporin A for Heart-Lung transplant.

Well within one week she had gotten the approval and within 5 days of that she got her heart lung transplant. It was amazing to She her during surgery with her open chest cavity and then the next day see her sitting up in bed talking. It was one of the most surreal experiences in my life. She went on to live five years.

I decided to restart work on a memoir. In order to do this I created an outline of my life. I have put down all distinct instances I remember that I think might make an interesting story. These stories don't just tell what I did, but I try to tell the background and culturally interesting things related to the story. Therefore some of the stories may be 90 percent me and 10 percent background while others may be reversed. I hope that these stories not only give you a feel for snippets of my life,but a feel for the times and placed I have experienced. Many of these experiences no longer are available for you to experience in this world we have today. However,I hope you can enjoy them through my eyes. Anyone who knew me or had similar experiences please let me know how your memories differ from mine. Thanks and I hope you enjoy reading these. Please follow this blog.