No more about the war or politics for the time being...
Saranac Lake, Summer 1970
Sometime in early 1970, I was
working on my research project in Pharmacology during my final year at
Cambridge, in the rather drab old laboratories, up above the physiology
department on the Downing Street site. I
was trying to establish whether a new drug called cinanserin was an antagonist
of 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin). This
involved delicate assessment of contractions of guinea-pig ileum, and required
much time between exposures of drug and antagonist. Mooching about between experiments I passed
the office of Dr Alan Cuthbert. He told
me that he had just heard from a colleague in the USA who was inviting students
to work with him and other scientists during a sabbatical in upstate New
York. The clincher was, ‘I think they
pay you quite well’. Being virtually
penniless, the prospect of $500 for two months’ work seemed like a golden
opportunity. Further enquiry revealed
that we were expected to be laboratory workers for U.S. and Canadian senior
scientists who had been invited by a charity called the Will Rogers foundation
to spend the summer doing research and teaching in a hospital founded by the National
Vaudeville Artists in Saranac Lake, New York state.
The small matter of getting there was solved with help from
my parents. The prohibitive costs of
flying in those days were circumvented only by charter flights, and to book on
a charter flight required you to be in a ‘club’. The British Universities North America Club
(BUNAC) charged a minimal joining fee, and the return fare was £58
(approximately £750 in 2022), which included a night in a shared room in a
hotel in Manhattan. A trip to London was
required for a U.S. visa in one’s passport – a long queue outside the U.S.
Embassy in Grosvenor Square. My mother
insisted that the only suitcase of any worth was a Globetrotter, and I bought
one in a cut-price shop in Praed Street, just opposite St Mary’s Hospital.
Eventually, missing out on my Cambridge graduation, I turned
up at Heathrow airport and embarked on a World Airways chartered Boeing 707 for
New York, together with 180 other university students, clutching a few dollars
and some American Express traveller’s cheques.
The flight attendants were sleek and attractive. One wag thought he was doing quite well with
one called Cindy. ‘Would you like to
meet for a date tonight’? He enquired. ‘Sure’, she said, ‘If you can meet me in San
Francisco’. The drinks were free and
unlimited. Several passengers fell at
the first hurdle, barely making it off the plane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Airways
The flight to New York - see the history of the airline:
In a room with three or four others in an unattractive
downtown hotel, I slept with my passport and money under my pillow, but in the
morning one of the others said that all his money had been stolen.
Leaving the unfortunate I found my way to the Greyhound bus station and purchased a ticket for Saranac Lake, NY, anticipated to be a journey of around eight hours or so. Boarding the bus, I noted its number was 1203, the same as the ill-fated flight that the Everly Brothers’ fiancée had caught in the death classic, ‘Ebony Eyes’. But the bus rumbled uneventfully north, with stops in Albany and Saratoga Springs (memorised for ‘O’ level history as a location for a battle in what Americans call ‘The Revolutionary War’).
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| A Greyhound bus of the same era - standing next to Ho Jo's! |
As we approached
the Adirondack Mountains, rolling forests and fewer towns, the driver (called
confusingly in the U.S. the conductor) became somewhat more affable. After Lake Placid, he told me that he could
drop me right outside the Will Rogers Hospital, which itself is situated a
little south of the small town of Saranac Lake, NY, Zip Code 12983. Walking up the drive, hefting the unduly
heavy ‘Globetrotter’, I found myself in between a small community of apartment
blocks and a hospital, built in the 1920s as a Tudor revival style building, and
somehow, was welcomed and allocated an apartment which seemed like a luxury
suite, amid the pine trees and unbroken countryside to the east.
Aerial view of the Will Rogers Memorial Hospital. My apartment was in the building top right.
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| Our prospectus on arrival |
All meals were paid for, and the following morning I queued
in the hospital canteen for breakfast.
We were a mixed group of students, mostly from medical
schools in New York and Boston, and students in both sciences and medicine from
the UK. The mentors were as follows:
Alvin Zipursky, a paediatric haematologist from McMaster
University, Canada
Bob Silber, a charismatic New York based haematologist.
Lowell Greenbaum, a pharmacologist from Athens, Georgia.
Norman Krasnow, a cardiologist from New York.
Stanley Wallach, an endocrinologist.
Art Karmen, a chemical pathologist (famous for being the
originator of assays for liver transaminases which for some years were quoted
in Karmen units, but ultimately superseded by International Units).
There were some local physicians, Dr Blide, a pulmonologist
(reflecting the reason for the hospital’s origin), and a senior physician, Dr
Ayvazian, an escapee as a child from the Armenian genocide, who had written
crime novels under the name Fred Levon.
The single on-site researcher was a pathologist, who, curiously, was
researching something to do with silicon.
I was assigned to Dr Zipursky’s lab, together with a local
boy, David Meyer, then currently studying at University of Vermont, and hoping
to go to medical school.
There were three unmarried male U.S. students, Bill
Handelman (Downstate), Al Weiss (Columbia), and another called Marty, also from
Downstate. A single female was Evlin
McKinney, also a clinical student at Columbia, and a devoted Women’s Lib
adherent. Her favourite author was Kate
Millet. She delighted in confronting
male prejudices. Once, so Al told me,
she had been directed to assist in surgery.
The female changing room was exclusively for the nurses. She chose to enter the (all male) surgeons’
changing room where she calmly took off all her clothes in front of the
astonished surgeons and anaesthetists and donned her scrubs. The married couples were Jack and Laurie, and
Joe and Margo – from Boston. The latter
were interesting and unusual (at least to me) in that Joe seemed very laid back
and intelligent, and Margo came across as a sort of loud ‘wired’ person, with
high vitality, and looked a bit like Liza Minelli’s character in Cabaret. They also kept their ‘grass’ in a large
storage jar in their kitchen, together with jars of all of their other less vital
ingredients – flour, sugar, salt, etc.
The person who organised us all, acted as secretary, and
made everything happen in the Will Rogers Institute (as the research lab was
called) was a lovely lady called Audrey Lumpkin, a former smoker with COPD, and
lacking one lung due to TB. She was a
recipient in fact, of the largesse of the entertainment industry, who financed
the Will Rogers Hospital, and provided free treatment to anyone working in movies
or theatre who suffered from any lung diseases.
During my stay there, she took me under her wing. I spent several evenings chatting to her in
her apartment on campus. She enquired
once if I had ever been to a Drive-In cinema.
Of course I never had. We went
together to watch ‘The Lion in Winter’, which starred Peter O’Toole and
Katharine Hepburn (Audrey’s favourite actress).
This was before Drive-Ins descended to the role of being the main
vehicle for Triple X movies.
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| Here we are - though some may find it difficult to recognise me - with hair - back left next to Dr Zipursky and Dr Lowell Greenbaum. Drs Norman Krasnow and Robert Silber front right |
Saranac Lake itself, as an upstate vacation resort, had come
into prominence as a centre for the treatment of tuberculosis, and there were a
number of cottages or dormitories on the other side of the lake. Robert Louis Stevenson, on his fruitless
wanderings to alleviate his TB, had come there in the winter of 1887-8. Subsequent guests, for relaxation, included
Charles Ives and Mark Twain.
Zip, as we were very quickly instructed to call him, was a
senior investigator, paediatrician, and researcher in various blood
diseases. Although I did not know at the
time he had been instrumental in masterminding Canada’s approach to the
prevention of Rhesus Haemolytic Disease of the newborn. Now he was working on immunological aspects
of haemolysis, and he had brought his forceful and energetic lab technician,
Betty Brown, with him. Under Betty’s
guidance, we learned how to take blood from one another, centrifuge and isolate
monocytes from blood plasma, and look at their interaction with antibody primed
red blood cells.
The small campus of the hospital was attractive and surrounded
by pine trees. A beautiful new building
housed the library. In those
pre-internet days, all Scientific Research was catalogued in a set of enormous
volumes called Index Medicus. A number
of key journals were also held here. Any
scientific paper could be obtained for us by the helpful library assistant,
Katie Easter, a recent high school graduate who hoped to go to college sometime
in the next year. Visiting lecturers
arrived once a week, courtesy of the Will Rogers fund. The whole atmosphere was relaxed and happy.
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| The newly built library, Will Rogers Memorial Hospital, Saranac Lake |
We quickly learned that the great American outdoors was a
fun place to be. The Adirondacks were
almost at the end of their tenure as the great vacation destination for the
northeastern USA. Aviation and
widespread air conditioning had made it easier for Americans to go further
south during the summer. A little
further south of Saranac was also the so-called ‘Borscht Belt’, in the Catskill
mountains, of Jewish residential hotels where entertainers such as Jackie Mason
and Woody Allen forged their careers.
Soon after my arrival, David Meyer invited me to go
water-skiing. He took with him a local
friend, Chip Gallagher, a laid-back long haired individual who turned out to be
a skiing ace. Within a trip or two they
had me confidently skiing on two skis, and then dropping one to monoski. It seemed like American paradise. On my first evening, just as I had got the
hang of crossing the wake, as we zoomed through a narrow gap between the lake
shores, they motioned me frantically over to the shore side of the boat. I had no idea why this was until a little
seaplane came cruising past us, kissing the surface of the lake just ahead of
the boat. It was another world to simple
old Britain.
Evenings were often accompanied by invitations to join our
mentors at their accommodation, some lovely lodges beside the lake, where we
played tennis and swam. On the first
occasion, Freda, Zip’s wife, said, ‘It will be simple, I’ve just made a tray of
lasagne’. It seems hard to believe that
I had never heard of lasagne.
I don’t think any of us made any research breakthroughs
during the summer, but we bonded, learned a lot about the hard graft of
research, and were exposed to some real high-fliers in the world of medical
research.
Later in the summer, knowing of my interest in sailing,
Katie Easter invited me to her family’s ‘camp’ – their summer home on the St
Regis lakes. The only way to get there
was by boat. I was to help her family
crew on a superb traditional sailing yacht, an ‘Idem’, in their local races. The Idem (from Latin ‘the same’), has some
claims to being the first ever one-design yacht, certainly in the USA. It was designed in 1899, specifically for
shallow lake sailing. An exquisite
traditional looking gaff-rigged boat, with a large sail area and an enormously
heavy (600lbs) steel drop keel. This was
an effort to get up and down, and racing rules stated that it should be left in
the down position for racing, only being pulled up if the yacht went
aground. Some of the elegance of this
yacht stemmed from its 32-foot length overall, but a 19ft waterline. It was completely unsuitable for heavy seas,
but ideal for the lakes of northern New York state. We also sailed a Sunfish, and did some more
water skiing, this time behind one of those American classics, which used a motor
industry inboard V8 engine of enormous capacity and speed. I felt hugely privileged to be a part of
this, and a recipient of what is fairly standard in America – genuine and
generous hospitality. On one occasion
that weekend, a smart traditional motor launch was seen crossing the lake in
front of us. ‘That’s Mrs Post’ announced
Katie. ‘Mrs Who’? ‘Haven’t you heard of Post Toasties’? She enquired.
I hadn’t. The Posts were one of
the richest families in America, and clung to their traditional holiday venues,
a little like the Kennedys on Cape Cod.
Summer mornings as we walked across to the hospital labs
were memorable for the heat of the sun on the pines and the wonderful smell of
pine resin in the air. It was hard to
believe, as the locals assured us, that winter would bring huge amounts of snow
and temperatures of minus 40. No wonder
David Meyer was on the University of Vermont ski team.
The only uncomfortable note came in the run-up to July 4th,
and its consequences. I had become
friends with one of the hospital cooks, named Stuart, and had enjoyed dinner at
his apartment, which he shared with his attractive bronzed Californian
wife. He had various friends who were somewhat
hippyish and counterculture. One, named
John, drove around in a psychedelic looking VW van, adorned with the usual mind-expanding
motifs from the pop albums of the later 1960s.
One evening, en route to a town bar with several of the other students
in the van, after John had honked his horn for no other reason than joie de
vivre (and probably some cannabis), the police pulled us over. To me this was terrifying; after all, these
guys carried guns. To the others it was
standard. As the cops wrenched open the
back doors of the van, we tumbled out to be ordered to stand with our hands on
the roof. ‘Where you from buddy’?
enquired the cop. ‘Cambridge, …
England’, I added firmly. My neighbour
answered, ‘Glasgow, Scotland.’ ‘Hey
Cal’, said the cop, ‘We got the Yoo-nited Nations here’. Eventually we were allowed to carry on. ‘Lay off the horn, buddy’, was the final
advice.
It was definitely ‘them and us’. The staid and conservative, and no doubt
Republican citizens of Saranac Lake, had a mission to ‘run the long hairs out
of town’. But evenings in the local bars
were fun. There was beer, there was
music, there was dancing. I remember one
of our long-haired friends dancing ecstatically in a downtown bar to the song
from ‘Hair’ – ‘Aquarius; Let the Sunshine in’, as though the Promised Land was
about to descend through the amplifiers.
There was a real sense of rebellion and revolution – the youth of
America did not want to go to Vietnam, and didn’t agree with how the country
was being run. Paradoxically, three
years later, President Richard Nixon would signal the end of U.S. involvement
in Vietnam, but this was July 1970, shortly after National Guardsmen had ended
a student demonstration at Kent State University with live ammunition and
fatalities of four unarmed students only two months earlier. Woodstock had taken place the previous
year. The film of the time was ‘Easy
Rider’, starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.
M*A*S*H, an anti-establishment film about the Korean war was popular,
grittier and less saccharine than the subsequent TV series. ‘How did someone like that get into the
Army?’ Was a line. ‘He was drafted,
Sir.’ Was the reply. Many students had already left the country
for Canada to avoid being drafted into the U.S. military. Medical students stayed on – Bill Handelman told
me that it was politically unwise, even for the Republican party, to draft
doctors or medical students.
Handelman was both entertaining and witty, as well as
cultured. His accent was the archetype
of the English impression of someone from Brooklyn. He tried to explain to me the subtleties of
the U.S. press. ‘The Daily News, Andy’,
he opined, is like your Sun or your Daily Mirror. For example, consider the day when World War
III is declared. The Daily News
headlines might run: 1. Mets win. 2.
Jackie in New York. 3. World War Three declared’. I kept in touch with him, and shortly after I
had started back at medical school in London, he came to St Thomas’s Hospital
for his final year elective. We met one
evening to go to a Prom concert. ‘Andy’,
he asked me, in semi-serious tones; ‘Do you have to have a double-barrelled
name to go to St Thomas’s’? He insisted
we both attend the Prom at which the Shostakovich 10th symphony
would be played. My knowledge of
Shostakovich was limited to the fifth symphony, to which a friend of Cambridge had
introduced me. ‘You have to hear the
scherzo of the 10th, Andy’, stated Bill. ‘It’s fantastic. It’s triple forte throughout’. And it was.
Back in Saranac Lake in 1970, the summer ended tragically
for both Stuart and John. In a melée
downtown on July 4th, which most of us had the good sense to leave
early, a group of Hells Angels rode into town, parking their expensive machines
outside the bars on Main Street. Stuart,
more than tipsy, unwisely threw a beer bottle at the mob. It hit one of the precious and immaculate
Harley-Davidsons, scratching the paintwork.
All hell (without any angels) broke loose. ‘Who threw that bottle?’ shouted the cop who
arrived on the scene. I was later to
hear the same cop in court testify that he had actually seen Stuart throw the
bottle. During the court hearing which I
attended, the judge, a severe looking man called Karl J (Run the Long Hairs Out
of Town) Greibsch, suddenly shouted, ‘Take off that cap’. John had been sitting in the public gallery in
his fishing cap. At first he didn’t
realise that this was directed at him.
When the judge shouted even louder, he defiantly sat there, cap on head. ‘Arrest that man’ shouted Greibsch. Two burly cops charged across the courtroom,
and dragged John by his plaid donkey jacket across the courtroom floor. ‘Take him down’ ordered Greibsch. Almost immediately he announced a recess,
during which he descended to the cells and summarily sentenced John to two
weeks in jail for contempt of court.
Stuart got four weeks’ jail, and that seemed to be the end of the
summer…
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| The Saranac Lake newspaper covered it in detail - probably the most exciting thing to happen in the town for months, if not years |
Zip was upset. He too had taken to the friendly hospital cook. ‘Do you guys realise what that means to your future employment prospects in this country? He enquired of us. ‘It’s a disaster’.
At the end of my eventful two months it was time to validate
my $99 one-month unlimited Greyhound ticket.
Zip kindly invited me back to Canada with him and his family, and we
drove north, and circuited the north side of Lake Ontario to his home in
Hamilton. During my brief stay with him,
we visited the Stratford Festival (seeing Cymbeline), and the lively city of
Toronto. It was the start of a long
friendship with the Zipurskys, which saw me back at McMaster to work during
student electives and later after graduation as a doctor. Finally, after being dropped at the Trailways
bus station in Hamilton, I caught the coach to Toronto, and began the long
journey out west to Vancouver.
