What was your childhood like?

I was born in Chicago at a hospital which became part of the University of Chicago after some years. I remember our apartment between 78^th and 79^th Street on South Shore Drive. These were sort of U-shaped buildings, the interior of the U being the service part, the exterior being the more formal part. And these buildings backed up to a park and the lake. So earliest memories involve the park, playing in the park, playing on the beach, learning to swim. It was a very nice place to grow up—there were a lot of nice kids around there. But on the National scene, the Great Depression continued on. I was totally unaware of it, but every now and then, my father couldn’t come home in the evening because he didn’t have the train fare to pay for his ticket. He tried to practice medicine, profoundly differently than it is nowadays, in a building in downtown Chicago. I have no idea how patients ever found him, or how he ever appealed to patients. But, that’s the way it was then. He didn’t have a secretary, or a nurse or anything else. If you wanted to see him, you’d knock on his door and he’d let you in. I would have to say the childhood was probably a pretty happy childhood. I don’t really recall suffering. I had a younger brother—still do. He didn’t really impact much upon my life. We played together, particularly in the park and on the beach.

Tell me about going to school.

Little by little, I got to the point where I was supposed to go to school. I did not go to kindergarten, but I started in the first grade. It was in the basement classroom of a thing called Mira Bradwell Elementary School. I don’t remember my teacher’s name, or anything, classmates… A couple of details did stick out. I remember it was there that I began to learn to read. I hadn’t been instructed in reading before that. Actually, I caught on pretty quickly. Every now and then I had lunch at school. Lunch consisted of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, with a small container of chocolate milk, for which I paid one or two cents.

Grammar school—I didn’t much like grammar school—I thought it was a lot of filler, and not so much substance. And parenthetically thinking about school all along, I really didn’t enjoy school until I went to college. Then I liked it. Everything was fine in the school. My class eventually got out of the basement, we got into a better school room, and toward the end we got into the modern addition of the school itself. I had kind of a leadership role, unconsciously sought, and some of my classmates suggested that I run for mayor of the school. So I did that, and that included giving a talk to the assembled school people. It was a big school—probably two thousand or so kids in there. Which involved giving a talk, which everyone in the family wanted to contribute to. And so by the time I actually walked on the stage, I really didn’t know what to say. So I stood there like a dope and after a while I gave up and walked off the stage. My brother was so distressed with my behavior that he almost cried. Maybe he did cry a little bit.

But anyhow, I went onto high school. The high school I went to was a brand new school. A brand new building that had just been completed. I knew some of the kids in it. It was not particularly wonderful, or attractive or anything else. Just went in it, and there was a chance to go to the University of Chicago before I completed high school. Now, they had a special program for kids who wanted to study. So, they let me in. It was called The College of the University of Chicago. It was an innovation of the then president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins. So he was an educational reformer, and of course, was not popular with everyone, but most people looking back at it regarded him well. But then when I got there, I really began to think, “gee, this is pretty nice.” That is to say after the first couple of weeks, because during the first couple of weeks I didn’t know anybody.

You were sixteen?

Maybe before. I think fifteen, more likely. I remember being in a physics class with a Russian physicist, who had an accent. But he just radiated enthusiasm for his subject, and it was very pleasant to be subject to that. And the kids were all smart, as you can imagine. And then, of course, I developed some friends among the classmates, and ended up spending a lot of time playing basketball, and then swimming, and trying to swim on the swim team after a while. But I was never really good at either thing.

And then, of course, the Great War was going on then. I was facing being drafted at age 18. Anyhow, there was a possibility of joining the Merchant Marine as a naval officer. They had the idea that they would put the entire American Merchant Marine under the department of Navy, so all of the officers of the Merchant ships would be naval officers. So I was in a class preparing me to be a Naval officer. That was just south of San Francisco. San Mateo, California. That was pretty much fun. Academically, it was easy for me. I had to take a test to get in, which I did very well on, and the classwork was easy. So then the war was over, and the program I was in was voluntary, so I was able to resign from it and go back to Chicago. So I was able to go back and be incorporated as an official kind of pre-medical student, which merited a deferment from the draft. The program was still part of the college, with some courses slightly beyond the college. You could take courses all over the University, whatever you wanted to. And then I applied to medical school, just one, which is rather foolhardy looking back on it, and in 1947 I started. I liked medical school. Hard work. Many a night I stayed up late, late, late studying.

Tell me about your parents.

Sort of the typical story. Mother and father. Father, physician. Nice guy. Talkative. Could tell great stories. Was very fond of his children. Mother was quietly like him. Hardworking. Of Polish immigrant parents. Who was, I think, much smarter than people gave her credit for. She spoke Polish, and of course English, and on an aside studied French, and in later years Spanish. But she came from a large family, and they too were helpful to us during the Depression times. I can remember several times…this goes back to before college…we would all get on the street car—that’s how you got around Chicago largely in those days, on the street cars—and we would go to her sister’s house for dinner. There was never much discussed, but my conviction was we didn’t have enough food in the house to serve dinner. But Aunt Lucille and Uncle John always came through.

What jobs did you have growing up?

I had lots of jobs growing up. Started off selling magazines. Saturday Evening Post, which was kind of a flop. I inherited a route, delivering the Saturday Evening Post, to maybe ten or twelve people. I would earn a profit of one or two cents per magazine. I did that for a couple years, I’m sure. Another job was raking leaves, in a rather eccentric woman’s large holdings, on South Shore Drive in Chicago, whose hearth must have been built in the 1880’s. And she was a weirdo. She was big on composting then. She was big on that. So all the leaves I raked up, then I had to put in a big stack of things, a big wooden box—a tall box—for composting. And little by little I guess, the stuff on the bottom got to be composted. I forgot how much she paid me—not much. Then I got another job, as delivery boy for a drug store. Maybe you heard that one before. And I got fifteen cents a night. Six p.m. to midnight. Plus tips. So little by little, I got a little money of my own. Then later on my brother got a job as a delivery boy for a liquor store. Then I would substitute for him on some occasions. In fact, the very night of the day that I graduated from medical school, I delivered liquor for the Twins’ Liquor Store. So I thought, “hey, here it’s pretty good. Here’s a physician delivering liquor.” I’ve forgotten what the pay was, but they had a car we used and of course there were tips.

And I’ve forgotten one other job. I guess just before I started medical school, I was a guard: an armed guard at the Argon National Labratories. I wore a big pistol on my hip, walked around in the lab looking for security defects, [and] occasionally finding one or two—people leaving classified papers out. Then I would put the classified papers back in their desks and file an incident report. That went on for quite a while. That was quite interesting. Somehow I worked till about 8 or 9 in the evening. After that I would go to UT—University Tap—and have a beer, find some friends and talk.

And I had a couple of jobs during medical school. One was promoting the student newspaper, The Maroon, and then delivering it to various spots on the campus. So I think it was either two or three times a week, I would get up at something like 2 o’clock in the morning. I would borrow my father’s car, went (sic) to the printer, picked up the newspapers that were stacked and waiting for me. In those days, security was not the problem that it is today. I would walk into the printing plant, load up the newspapers, drive to the University, distribute them all over, drive back home, go to bed for another hour or two. At one point in neurophysiology class, I fell asleep. Dropped my head. And the professor, whose name was Gerard, threw chalk at me. The whole class laughed and I didn’t even realize it was going on. Anyway, I got past it.

How do you personally remember the Great Depression and its impact throughout your life?

Well I mentioned to you my father not having enough money to come home from the office. And other times going to my aunt’s home for dinner because we didn’t have enough food in the house. I remember frugality was always important. My mother was always very frugal, and always continued to be. In a way we were protected from all of that. Kids don’t know what is going on around them as a generality, and that was true for us. If we were playing in a park, it didn’t make any difference—we didn’t have any money anyhow. So the impact on a kid was not great. On my parents, it was a miserable challenge, as I look back on it now. I often joke about being a child of the Depression. Which means you learn to be frugal, you learn to attempt to understand the value of things that you had—monetary value—and that has stayed with me. I’ve noticed that some people who got through the Great Depression financially very easily had a tendency to be more splendiferous, more inclined to invite, more inclined to suggest a party, to suggest going to one place or another, wherein it would cost money. So, that made me prudent and frugal, I think. So now I’m a spendthrift.

So you graduated from medical school, and at 24 years old, you interned at the University of Chicago Clinics. What was that like?

So where are we…I graduated from medical school, and after that period working in hematology, I started my, what was then called, “internship,” where I lived in the hospital. That’s kind of part of the word. And I liked that. I liked being an intern. But it was a lot of work.

So at one point there was a period of three weeks when I did not get out of the hospital at all. I was there day and night, day and night. But I liked it. I guess then after six or seven months, I met your grandmother.

What was your first date with my grandmother like? When did you get married?

There wasn’t much of a formal first date that I remember. As an intern I was paid zero—room, board, and laundry. So I didn’t have a lot of money to be a big shot with. I think our very first date was, we took a walk. We both lived in the hospital complex. So I would go to visit her, and at one point we were reading Earnest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, supposedly to help her with English, but it was a mechanism to attempt to be romantic. Let’s see, what else did we do? I presume we went to a movie or two. So that was the extent of dating.

Let’s say we met January 1952, and we married in May 1953.

Can you tell me about one or two of the people who have had the biggest impact on your life?

There are two divisions. There are the family people. Certainly my father had a huge impact on my life. He was wise, and foreseeing and encouraged me to go into medical school, which didn’t take much encouraging. He encouraged me to join the Merchant Marine, as I described to you. But that was his role. And then professionally, I have two professors that stand out. One was named Dragestet, who was a leader in understanding ulcers of the stomach and the duodenum. And after the internship, I worked in his laboratory, working on dogs to understand the stomach and its secretion of acid. I did that for a year and some months, during which time [my wife and I] married. And another big influence on me was Dr. Charles Huggins, who was the winner of the Noble Prize in 1964 for his discoveries about the hormonal control carcinoma of the prostate and carcinoma of the breast. He perhaps had a bigger influence on me interiorly than Dragestet. And through him, several things happened: I was able to switch to the University of Michigan to finish surgical training, and after the University of Michigan he arranged for a so-called Guggenheim Fellowship, Guggenheim Scholarship, [for me] to go to Sweden. So both of them were marvelous men—smart, dedicated to helping younger people, encouraging progress and understanding. Both were, call them rebels in a way. They didn’t fit very well into the rigid university system.

What is the biggest change or difference you see in the world today?

The impact of reduced personal freedom, the growth of restrictive regulatory government on all sorts of activities. It’s profoundly easy to see in medicine, but in most every aspect of human life there is a regulation to follow. Maybe I’m hypersensitive to that, but that’s what I would say.

Briefly, how has medicine changed in your lifetime?

Well, there was a period of enormous change. My whole medical life essentially began following World War II, which influenced all sorts of things. So after World War II, more and more attention was paid by the government to, so called medical progress—medical investigation, so it was very easy to get research funds right after [World War ii], say after, till perhaps the early 1960s. My father, being a solitary practitioner, always was enthusiastic about the Mayo Clinic. He thought the way they did things was admirable, and he convinced me of the same. So, finally, I was looking for a job after Sweden, and the possibility of coming to the Lovelace Clinic and Research Foundation was very appealing to me. It was some place where I could continue with research interests, and yet do clinical medicine. That’s not totally answering your question, but the whole idea is that group practices of one type or another were more common than solitary practice, which was less and less common—particularly in cities. At the very beginning of all this, federal money flowed like water to the docs. Lots of docs got very, very rich—not that they were illegal, but just taking advantage of the situation. So the government promised money, and for a while, that was true. But then, of course, restrictions and regulations came on to break all of that. We are still caught in that era. So a brief answer is that solitary solo practitioners gave way to group practitioners, and group practitioners activities modified by government.

What advice or wisdom would you give your family many generations from now, knowing that they might read or listen to this interview?

I deny having much wisdom. I think the bottom line is, which is not an unusual insight, is that you’ve got to keep going. There are all sorts of opportunities that life presents, which cannot be anticipated. Accept them. Keep in mind the flow, keep in mind what you really would like to do, and be honest with yourself, and don’t let other people boss you around. That’s it. Life in an eggshell.