Chapter Fourteen

First Year of Medicine, Fall of ’53.

This was another game-changer but by this time I almost seemed to be used to it. I was by this time on alumni status at the Beta House but Hugh Geddes was finishing his last year in Arts, so we stayed in the house for another year. The medical course was all programmed and we had very busy days including Saturdays until noon. The first year was basic sciences with about half the time taken up by anatomy and microscopic anatomy (histology). We also had some physiology and biochemistry and a course in medical history given by the retired professor of pathology, Dr. William Boyd. This was not an exam course and it is with some embarrassment I confess that I missed most of the lectures.

We were in clinic groups of four students, later combined into larger groups of eight. The beautiful days in Arts with lots of time to hang around the coffee shop or visit with friends were over. I did find time to rewire the basement of the Beta House in the fall. We were totally renovating it into party space and the only wiring in most of the rooms was a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. When I looked at the main electrical panel in the basement I was appalled by the terrible job done by the journeyman electrician who had rewired the whole house a year before. I decided that I would not get into that so I wired my circuits from a separate box that didn’t touch the existing wiring. I then phoned the electrical inspector – a step required for fire insurance purposes.

A few days later, I returned from my anatomy lab for lunch to find the Beta House in turmoil and the cook in tears. Apparently, the inspector refused to pass the wiring and shut off the power to the house until we had it corrected. We had a cold lunch that day and I phoned the inspector to come over right away. When he came, I went over the wiring I had done and made it very clear that the wiring he had complained about was done by the professional electrician in the renovations a year before. The inspector muttered something under his breath but passed my work and turned the power on again. We never heard any more about it.

Hurricane Hazel

Fall rolled into winter and winter dragged on. By this time, I was becoming increasingly aware that there was a huge volume of work, most of it memory work that I never considered myself good at. On top of that, Jan and I broke up in that winter. Perhaps it was inevitable but I still took it hard. The only other event of consequence in the spring of ’54 was Hurricane Hazel. It started as a day like any other. I was at a physiology lab in the Best Institute on the extreme eastern end of the campus and had only taken a light coat. When we finished the lab, it had been raining most of the day and was so heavy at times that we couldn’t see across the street. There had been news reports of a hurricane coming our way, but the winds had died down by the time it reached Lake Ontario so most people had put it out of their minds. They hadn’t counted on the rain.

When I saw how bad it was at 5 o’clock, I called Hugh to pick us up in Betsy. When he hadn’t arrived after about half an hour, I called again to learn that he had left the house just after I had called but the traffic on St. George Street was very slow and it might take him a while. In fact, it took him well over an hour and it was another three quarters of an hour before we got back to the Beta House. I was surprised to find my mother in the parlour. Apparently, she was coming home from Barrie and was told that all the bridges over the Humber River were out except for one well north of the city. And the traffic was so bad there that the OPP was advising people not to try it. We all settled down for a very late supper. She didn’t leave until mid-night and by then the rain was easing up. She had to go north of Bolton to get across the river.

It wasn’t until the next day that we realized the full impact of the storm. The radio reports continued to interrupt regular programming and the evening papers were full of pictures. At that time television was just coming in but one of the guys in the house had a set with a 5” screen and we were all huddled around it. There was nothing on the Buffalo station about Toronto and as I recall, the Toronto station, CBLT had not yet started up. This was my first direct experience with natural calamities.

Getting Through Exams

The medical school had a longer year than most other faculties. And the exams started right after the end of classes and were all crammed into one week. By Easter, I was really upset because I knew my work was not coming along as well as expected. After working so hard to get into medical school, I didn’t want to flunk out in the first year. John Moffat and Jack Colwell, two 4^th year meds students took me under their wing and got me down to some serious work. After Jack’s roommate had finished his exams in another course, I moved in with Jack and we set a serious 12-hour work day with 15-minute breaks every two hours. It worked. I covered all the courses with no ‘all-nighters’ and I went into the exams with an air of confidence. When the results came out, I had stood just below the half-way point in the class – a considerable improvement over the marks I had obtained throughout the year.

Second Year of Medicine, Fall of ’54.

I found the ideal summer job that year. The navy had established a school for new entry training at HMCS Star in Hamilton and was looking for reserve officers to train raw recruits in the reserve. At graduation in Arts, I got my commission as an Acting Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy Reserve. This started my career in the Great Lakes Training Command.¹ I was on board ship most of the summer and the rest of the time I lived at Two Acres with occasional visits to the cottage. This is described in the next chapter.

In September it was back to school. This was the first clinical year and we seemed to spend a lot of time at the old Toronto General Hospital. I remember having at least two months with the professor of medicine, Dr. Ray Farquharson telling us about sub-acute bacterial endocarditis, a condition that I never encountered in my medical career but seemed somehow to be basic to any understanding of disease. We also had clinics on the ward with real patients and went through the embarrassed fumbling of learning physical examination and functional enquiries.

We also spent time at the coffee shop outside the main lecture theatre. Since I was an arts student who had not taken pre-meds with most of the others, there were the usual jokes about academic gad-flies. I was so fed up with this after a while that when one of the guys commented that you had to be very bright indeed to get through medical school, I exploded: “Not really. A high-grade moron could get through medical school if he was prepared to work hard enough.” I didn’t sit with that group for a while afterwards but most of my friends forgave me after a while.

Discovery of DNA Genetic Code

Research at the Cavendish Lab at the University of Cambridge in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson finally established the structure of the DNA molecule. It was a helix with three triplets and some 20 amino acids (proteins). This was further expanded by the Soviet-American George Gamow who showed that triplets must be employed to encode the 20 standard amino acids. He called this the ‘Diamond Code’.

In my second year of Medicine, the university invited Crick and Watson to make a formal presentation to students and faculty in the Department. It was a momentous event and the lecture hall was crowded to overflowing. There were so much discussion and questions that the session was extended for almost 2 hours. We were all left feeling that we had witnessed an historical event.

I had taken some genetics in Physiology and Biochemistry that had given me the basics but at that time little was known about how the chromosomes divided and produced new cells. We learned about how Gregor Mendel had experimented with pea plants to determine that certain characteristics were transmitted but had no idea of how it worked. Again I felt that I was on the threshold of a new awareness.

Most of our work was at one or other of the hospitals in the downtown core. We had many of our lectures in the old amphitheatre in the Toronto General with physiology lectures and labs in the new Best Institute and Pathological Chemistry labs at the Banting Institute across the street. There was a tunnel under College Street to the Banting Institute but we didn’t use it much because it led directly to the autopsy rooms and we had to share it with cockroaches and the occasional rat. But it was handy in a pouring rainstorm.

The medical school had a 32-week year with a week of final exams after that. It was divided into four terms of eight weeks each. The clinic groups of 8 students were kept together throughout the rest of our undergrad experience. We had three lectures in psychiatry in the second term. Aldwin Stokes was the professor and we were introduced to the ‘Bulls eye’, a series of concentric circles with cellular biology in the centre. The next circles dealt with biology of the organism, individual psychology, family, groups, society and finally the world. It generated lots of jokes from my very biologically-oriented classmates. There was an old aphorism:

Them as can, do. Them as can’t, teach.

To this my classmates added another line:

… Them as can’t even teach go into psychiatry.

This reflected the attitudes toward psychiatry and mental illness at the medical school. At best it was treated as a minor sub-specialty such as ENT or geriatrics. Some people did not even think it warranted specialty status at all. In subsequent years we had more lectures and during our final pre-internship year, the four terms were assigned to medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, and everything else.

It seemed to me that our family had a lot of funerals. My best friend Peter Kappele’s father Dr. Dan Kappele died in ’54. He had serious diabetes for years and his general health had not been good. He had given up his general practice in the old house on Main Street near Wentworth and had moved the family into a much smaller place in Dundas. Dad and I were very involved in the funeral arrangements. Then in ’55 Uncle Eric died of an acute bowel obstruction. He had had a hernia all his life and it probably had developed adhesions. It was sudden and unexpected and I remember being annoyed because the family had not called me about it until a few days later. But dad walked me through the whole process of funerals – a talent that stood me in good stead many times throughout my life.

The only other event that I remember was the opening of the Toronto Subway. The original part ran from Union Station to Eglinton Avenue but it was the latest technology in public transit and we all had to have a ride on it. I remember that they introduced tokens sold 4 for 25¢, the same as the single-ride tickets. The next year the fare went up to 10¢ and the fare gates were modified so they would also take dimes.

The rest of the year went by rapidly. I had learned my lesson from first year and had kept up with my work throughout the year so final exams were less of challenge this year. I had been between girl-friends for much of the year and my social calendar was less full. I remember defending my arts degree with one or our demonstrators who seemed to feel that I had wasted two perfectly good years and could have been graduating this year if I had done it right. Some of my classmates felt the same way. But I didn’t. I felt I had a perspective to life that many of my classmates lacked. There were about 20 students in our class who had ‘advanced standing’ as I had. They had taken a variety of courses and gained experience in several places so they were much broader in their approach to medicine and everything else.

Summer of ’55

The summer was again spent with the Great Lakes Training Command at HMCS Star but the whole program was better organized and it was an interesting and rewarding summer. Gradually the navy was beginning to take on a different perspective for me. It was now seen as a credible career option. Before this I had seen it as a good summer job but nothing more. By the time I had finished my summer and gone with HMCS Wallaceburg as far as Montreal, it was time to get ready for my third year in medicine.

Third Year of Medicine, Fall of ’55.

I was now into the routine of school and work. We were introduced to the more scientific and intensive aspects of medicine such as pathology and all its sub-specialties. We also had an excellent course on medical jurisprudence by Dr. Ken Gray who was both a physician and a lawyer – an unusual combination in those days. And our psychiatry course was getting more interesting. At one point we had a psychiatry lecture on psycho-somatics at the old Toronto Psychiatric Hospital followed by a physiology lecture at the Best Institute given by a gastro-enterologist who was burping and sipping water and eating what looked like antacid tablets. After the lecture, a classmate observed that physiology was the real stuff and what psychiatry needed was more biology. I responded that I felt that our physiology lecturer obviously had gastric ulcer problems and maybe he could use a psychiatrist. Again, I got those looks that suggested that I was not quite on the same wavelength as the rest of the group.

Social Life – Meeting Fran

My best friends, Robin Scott and Hugh Geddes were both ‘Betas’² and in Osgoode Hall Law School and I had roomed with them at the fraternity house in the years before that. In the fall of 1955 Robin was articling back home in Windsor, and Hugh felt he had been living with the “kids” at the Beta house too long, so he had found a small apartment off campus. I was living at the Beta house with another friend Ray Koski that year.

I was just one month into my third year in Medicine and between girlfriends when a class party came up and I was without a date. I spoke to a classmate, Don Crapper who said that his girlfriend, Marie Oyl was living at a women’s residence south of the campus and maybe she could find a blind date for me. Unlike some of my friends, I had no aversion to blind dates so I accepted the offer. I went with Don and Marie to Georgina House to meet my new date.

Her name was Frances Taylor and she was from Sault Ste. Marie. When she came into the front parlour, she was thin and perhaps a bit shy but there was certain warmth that I think we both felt. She was wearing a red dress that livened up her dark brown hair and brown eyes. During the course of the evening, I discovered that she had personality as well and was able to speak her mind more than some of the other dates I had had recently. I decided to invite her out again. I was still living in the Beta House and we had a party at the house every Saturday night so I invited her to the next one. Soon Saturday night became an institution that continued throughout that school year.

The Class of 5T7

I have one recollection of that year. Our class, 5T7 was unique in several ways. We had the largest number of students with advanced standing so that many had arts and sciences backgrounds as I had. Some had been in research and in related fields like one of my clinic mates, Sam Fine. Bill Tytaneck, another of my clinic mates had been a dentist in St. Catherines for several years and then decided to take medicine after he was married with several children in school. Also, we did not have a gold medalist. There were several students in the top half-dozen who were first in one or other of the years so no one was clearly the best in the class. Further, this class was the last medical year in Canada that did not require an internship. In 1958 it was required that all graduates have at least one internship year before getting a licence to practice. Everyone in our year took an internship but some like Joe Stipek who lived in a room on Huron Street (he pronounced it “Urine” Street) always said that he would not although in the end he did.

And last but by no means least, we had the largest number of women in the class that had been permitted at Toronto until that time. Dean MacFarlane was quite adamant on several occasions that medical education was so expensive on the public purse that it was not economic to graduate women who would only practice part time at best or get married and have children and drop out of practice before long. This was a bone of contention at the school, because these notions had been debunked at most schools many years before. There were 16 women in a class of 150, slightly more than 10%. In subsequent years the numbers rose gradually but steadily.

Previous classes at Toronto had 10 women or less. This presented an interesting problem in a pathological chemistry lab. We were learning how to do a urine analysis, using our own urine. Collecting it in the narrow-necked bottles was no problem for the men but was a real problem for the women. Somewhat apologetically, our demonstrator produced large glass funnels for the women much to the men’s amusement but to considerable embarrassment for several of the women who disappeared into the washroom for the longest time. One other recollection; we had to practice taking blood samples from each other. Because I had very good veins in both arms, everyone wanted to practice on me.

Plans for the Future

My romance with Fran had become more serious. By this time, I had realized that the fourth year was a clinical clerkship year leading directly into internship. The upcoming summer would be my last free summer in the foreseeable future. My friend Hugh Geddes had taken the summer of ’55 to do the grand tour of Europe because he was starting his articling year and his summers would be involved in practicum work. I faced the same problem in ’56. I was determined to spend the summer in Europe. I booked a passage on the French Line from New York to Southampton before Christmas. It was not the cheapest, but at $180 each way³ it was comparable to Cunard and others and besides, it offered a taste of France. In effect we had an extra 5 days in Europe on each end of the trip. I would be gone from just after the final exams in May until late August, just a few weeks before we returned to school.

I was torn. My common sense told me that it was unreasonable to continue the romance with Fran when we would not be getting married for another five or six years if I followed my father’s advice that I should not get married until after all post-graduate work. But most of my friends encouraged me to get married on or even before graduation. I had a long discussion with Hugh, who said: “If you love her, at least talk to her about it. I have never seen you so happy with anyone before.”

Fran and I had a long talk in Betsy outside Georgina House that night. She said that she would wait for me, but not for five years. This made my mind up. We would be married after I completed my junior intern year. I knew enough by then about the long hours on duty during that year and the constant pressure. It did not auger well for the first year of marriage.

It was with some considerable relief that I drove home that night. My final exams were over and I was preparing for my trip. I had been in touch with friends and father had contacted the Spenceleys and Cliff Deadman as well as a First World War associate who lived in Ireland. My mother had been worried that she would not be able to be in touch because I planned to go to London and then plan my itinerary from there. She knew that I would not plan much of this stuff until the day before and that meant that letters could be chasing me all over Europe. I had already turned down an offer to go to an international students’ conference in Leningrad. My experience four years before with the Institute of World Affairs told me that if I was travelling through New York, it was not a good idea.

The other big political event of that spring was the pipeline debate. The St. Laurent government had undertaken to support an oil and gas pipeline from Alberta to Ontario to provide an outlet for Alberta gas and to make eastern Canada less dependent on foreign supplies. The government had already signed a contract with a new company called the Trans Canada Pipeline Corporation that required most of it to be funded by government and with a tight deadline for approval so that the company could start construction in the spring or early summer. The opposition Conservatives saw this as a great boondoggle and references were made to the Pacific scandal that had rocked John A. Macdonald’s government some 70 years before.

C.D. Howe, a minister in the St. Laurent government was pushing the bill through the house. He received the epithet “the minister of everything” and when questioned about the excessive cost of the project was heard to say: “…what’s a million?” As the debate dragged on, closure was invoked. Procedural motions were used to delay things further and by the time I was leaving on my summer trip, the final vote on the debate was due to come up in a week or two. The outcome seemed inevitable because of the Liberal majority in the house but it was still a time of high drama in Canada.

Summer of ’56. Cook’s Tour of Europe.

I realized that I needed a new camera for the trip. I met with my friend, Hugh Geddes in Windsor before I left and sought his advice. He recommended a German camera such as a Voitländer and said that it would be cheaper if I bought it in the states. So we crossed to Detroit and bought the camera with a couple of rolls of 35 mm film. It was only a week before I was due to leave.

Both Jack Colwell and John Hemphill were doing residency work in New York. Father had booked a roomette on the night train and a hotel for me near Central Park. He had also arranged for me to stay at the English-Speaking Union when I got to London. I got into Grand Central Station at 9:05 am and took a cab to the hotel. In the afternoon I visited Jack Colwell at Kings County Hospital. As I was walking from the subway station to the hospital there was a sudden downpour which soaked me to the skin. I must have looked like a drowned rat when I finally got to Jack’s room at the hospital. I borrowed a lab coat while we dried my clothes out. It was great to see them again.

John Hemphill invited me to a party at his apartment that evening and I toured the Memorial Cancer Center the next day. I spent the afternoon shopping for 35mm film for my new Voitländer camera. It was cheaper in New York.

New York and S.S. Liberté

The next day was June 1^st; my sailing was at 11:30. Got a cab with my small hand trunk and my wardrobe bag and got on board S.S. Liberté.⁴ Finally, I was off on the great adventure. I was in a 4-man Tourist (3^rd) Class cabin that was about 7’ by 9’. With double bunks on both sides, there was very little room for luggage so my trunk was stored in the hold. My cabin mates were a Scot going home, a Yugoslavian who seemed to sleep all the time and an American student who was planning to buy a motorcycle and tour Europe. I figured with all his luggage, he would need a small truck.

By the next day we were settled into a routine. Deck chair in the morning, roaming around in the afternoon and cards or entertainment at night. Tourist class did not have a swimming pool so it became an adventure to find ways to get up into Cabin (second) class. Finally, by the end of the cruise we had found a way to get up into first class. What a difference from our digs. Thursday the 7^th of June we were disembarking at Southampton. They anchored in the Roads off Cowes and we took a lighter to the quay. The train to London was on the quay and we were at Waterloo station by 11:30. I got a cab to Dartmouth House which is the headquarters of the English-Speaking Union. It was still early in the day and I walked around the Pall Mall district. I stayed at the English Speaking Union for several nights and they helped me find the Lyndon House Hotel in Paddington.

London

I linked up with two students on the ship, Arlene and Gerry who were at New York City College. It was fun to show them around London because I had been there before in 1951 with the navy and that made me an expert. We did all the usual things, bus tours, British Museum, Soho, Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, Westminster. Arlene had an introduction to a British MP who took us for lunch on the terrace overlooking the Thames.

I visited Greville and Patricia Spenceley on the weekend. They took me to the Piccadilly Theatre to see Romanoff and Juliet, a political satire with Peter Ustinoff. Then we went to their house in Westerham and we had a tour around Kent the next day. The weather was cold, wet and generally uncertain. Greville had a projector television that we watched in the evening. I was amazed to think that British television was more advanced than ours at home.

Cliff Deadman met me and took me for dinner to his parents place in Woodside Park. I met his parents and his younger brother Ken. They promised to contact their daughter Patricia who was married to a school teacher in Devon. The next few days were a bit of a blur. I still had not heard from a fraternity brother who had promised to meet me in London. Arlene and Gerry were going on to Paris and I decided to follow them. I hoped to see Dover and Hastings on the way.

There was no Canadian news in any of the media. The only way I could find out about the outcome of the pipeline debate was to go to Canada House where they had Canadian newspapers.

Canterbury and the Continent

The next day I took the train to Dover, spoke to an American Express representative before I got on the ferry for Calais and asked if I could get to the site of the Battle of Hastings. He told me that it was almost impossible from here – it would almost be easier to go back to London and take a train from there. Instead he suggested Canterbury. There was a Green Bus leaving from the station and I was on my way. There was a football tournament on, all the rooms in the hotels were booked and I had a hard time finding a place to stay. Finally, I persuaded a publican to open up a room they were required to have but never used. It was barely adequate but they offered me a good breakfast and beggars can’t be choosers.

I visited the cathedral and also walked around the old walled city. It was Sunday and I went to evensong at St. Martin’s Church, the oldest Christian church in England, founded about 640 A.D. I spoke to the rector after the service and he gave me a bit of Roman brick from the church. The next day I went back to Dover and met the same American Express representative. When he learned that I was Canadian and a British Subject he immediately beamed and said: “I had assumed you were American. I had the afternoon off yesterday. If I had known that, I could have showed you around!” Being a Commonwealth citizen had its perks – at least in those days.

The ferry left the white cliffs behind and after an hour landed us on a low sandy coast that extended as far as the eye could see. The train to Paris was fast and soon I was getting into the small pensione that Arlene had found for me, about a block from her hotel. It was on Rue Boissey d’Anglais, a street leading directly off the Place de la Concorde – couldn’t be more central. I walked down to the Seine and felt that heady feeling one has on their first visit to Paris.

Paris

The hotel was cheap⁵ but the rest of France was more expensive. Also, the attitude to American tourists was very aggressive and unwelcoming. Arlene and Gerry knew some students at the Sorbonne. One of them told us a story about the French minister of tourism on French television who said that the French welcome American tourists. But some cynics changed the quote to read: “…it is wrong to say that the French do not welcome tourists. They love tourists. And tourist dollars are an important part of the French economy. If only the tourists would not insist on bringing them personally.” This so resonated with our experience that we actually believed this apocryphal tale.⁶ Arlene, Gerry and I saw the sights including Monmartre and all the familiar tourist sites in central Paris. Our lunch was bread and cheese and a bottle of wine in the park. It was hot, but it was late June so it was to be expected.

Gerry indicated that he had to move on as he was visiting a kibbutz in Israel in July and had a boat to catch from Naples in about three weeks. Arlene was going on to Germany. I had about four weeks before I was to be back in London. The summer was getting on and I had not heard from my Beta friend so I decided to travel with Gerry to Italy and then head north through Austria, Germany and the Low Countries to England. So, Gerry and I decided to take the train to Milan, stopping along the way.

Our last couple of days in Paris went like a flash. We went to the Louvre, had a trip to Versailles and Les Halles at 2 in the morning. Arlene, Gerry and I had a last meal in a good restaurant to celebrate our trip so far. We walked along the Champs Elysés and I took pictures of the illuminated fountains. I felt much better about Paris after that.

On to Italy

Our train left the Gare de Lyon at 8:20 the next morning so Gerry and I set off on the next adventure. We stopped over in Dijon but got into the wrong hotel so there were no Burgundy wine taps in the wall. The next day we went on to Lausanne through the foothills of the Alps. Lausanne is built on the side of the hills with steps up to the next level where the streets are too steep. The architecture is definitely different. The second day there we were planning to go to Geneva but Gerry had a bad cold and I went by myself. I took the steamer on Lake Leman to Evian aux Bains in France on the south side of the lake, and then on to Geneva. When I got back in the evening, Gerry was better so we went on to Milan the next day.

This was an exciting train ride despite the heavy rain – up the Rhone valley to Brig and then into the Simplon Tunnel. It is really three tunnels with brief glimpses of daylight between. Then we were in Italy and soon in Milan. We saw Teatro dela Scala, the famous Gothic cathedral and walked into the Great Park. The Italian Tourist Office was wonderful and we decided on a bus tour from Milan to Venice through the Italian Lake District, Verona and Padua. Venice impressed me by its Disneyland appearance yet it was all real – including the garbage-laden canals. We were then off to Florence where we spent a day at Piazza del Signiore, Michaelangelo’s sculptures and the Uffizi Gallery, then another bus tour through Assisi to Rome.

The Eternal City lives up to its name. In England, Roman ruins are excavated with a fence around them and they charge you sixpence to get in. In France they are able to collect them into enormous museums. In Italy they are all around you, many by the side of the road with no markings. Some buildings in Rome date from the 4^th century and in the case of the Pantheon are completely intact as if they had been built a few decades ago. We did all the usual sights, including a night at the opera at the Baths of Caracalla. Finally, it was time to move on. Gerry was taking the train to Naples the next day and I was going north to Innsbruch. I was to be in London in less than 2 weeks.

I stopped over in Bolzano, a small town on the Italian side of the Alps. Despite its nationality, most of the people there spoke German so I had a bad time negotiating a room in the hotel with my high school German. As I found to my embarrassment, a Bädzimmer is a bathroom, not a bedroom. I should have asked for a schlafzimmer. This gave considerable amusement to the desk clerk and other staff. The next day I went through the Brenner Pass to Innsbruch. This was the most spectacular mountain scenery I had ever seen.

I was running from one side of the coach to the other, trying not to miss anything. I began talking to an Austrian man whose English was about as good as my German. He was very helpful – even solicitous. He offered to get me a hotel room in Innsbruch. I confess I began to wonder if he was on the make or homosexual or something. When the train stopped we got our bags and we then walked to a nice hotel a few blocks from the train station. He introduced me to the proprietor and formally shook my hand and walked out of the hotel before I could even properly thank him. I flushed in embarrassment as I thought of my suspicions of a few minutes before.

Austria and Germany

I only had a day in Innsbruch but I managed to see Maximillian’s Golden Roof and take the funicular and cable car up the Nordketteln, very high, above the clouds. A few people were skiing on a glacier even though it was mid-July. I had the idea I would like to go to Vienna but the tourist office told me that the Vienna Festival was on so hotels were all booked. Besides I was running out of time. I got a train for Frankfurt via Munich. There was a two-hour stopover in Munich so I decided to go to the Hoffbrau House. That’s when I discovered that German trains leave on time. By the time I got my bag out of the locker at the station, the train was already moving down the track. I was lucky that another train for Frankfurt was leaving half an hour later.

Frankfurt was in the American Zone, had been largely destroyed in the war and the downtown was completely rebuilt. To me it looked like any American city with street signs in German. I stayed overnight and then took a train to Mainz to catch a passenger ship down the Rhine to Cologne. The Rhine Gorge was spectacular and when we finally got to Cologne I was struck by the contrast. It was in the former British Zone and the devastation of war was still around us. The bombing raids had spared the Gothic cathedral but had completely destroyed the Bahnhoff and the railway bridge across the Rhine. The bombed-out houses from the cathedral down to the river had been roughly paved over with asphalt but you could still see where they had been. I talked to a shopkeeper nearby who was very bitter about the bombing raids. She said that the incendiary bombs were the worst. In one raid the asphalt on the street was melting and running down towards the river. I decided it would not be diplomatic to mention what the Luftwaffe had done to London and other English cities during the Blitz.

Belgium and Holland

I took a train the next day to Brussels. I had dinner with the Tillie Tschiderer, a relative of Jeanine MacLay. I tried to contact Prof. Gourmaghtigh, a friend of father’s in Ghent but couldn’t get through. I went to Ghent for the day – an interesting old Flemish city. Then it was on to Amsterdam. It is also a beautiful city on the inevitable smelly canals. But I was getting a bit jaded with all the beauty and the Renaissance art. On the way to get the boat to Harwich I stopped at the Parlevliets, relatives of the Dutch family who had rented one of the apartments at Two Acres. Then as the boat was coming into the roads at Harwich, I thought that I had had a wonderful time on foreign soil but now I was coming home.

Stay with the Ravenscrofts

I stayed over with the Deadmans for one night. The next day I was on the train to West Buckland in Devon to visit the Ravenscrofts. The Deadmans had set this up for me with their daughter, Patricia Ravenscroft. Their son Peter was only 5 at that time but he spent a summer with us in 1973 and we have kept in touch ever since. They showed me the whole of Devon and then it was back on the train to London and Westerham. The whole day was stormy with gale force winds and a lot of damage. When I got to Waterloo station I saw a headline at the newsstand: “Storm in Channel. Continent Completely Cut Off.” Only in England…

Aber Soch, Dublin, Edinburgh and Home

The next morning at the Spenceleys we were off to Wales. They had the car fully loaded with the sailboat on a trailer and it was fully loaded too. It was slow going. From Westerham to Aber Soch was about 300 miles and we took about 12 hours to get there. After a few days I was off to Dublin for the final parts of my tour. Dr. Enright met me on the dock at Dun Loughaire. Over the next few days I saw Dalkey and Dublin, the races at Leopardstown, Glendalough and the Dublin Horse Show. Then I flew to Edinburgh on a DC3 with 28 seats – my first flight.⁷ I saw a lot of Edinburgh in just two days. Then it was the Flying Scotsman to Kings Cross station in London, overnight with the Deadmans and a rush through London to the boat train and Southampton Docks. S.S. Flandre was tied up alongside.

While I was in Europe, the Italian cruiser Andrea Doria had collided with a freighter off New York and sunk with some loss of life. Compared to my earlier crossing on Liberté the whole procedure had been tightened up. We had lifeboat drills and fire stations regularly. We still had a good time. Everyone was in a party mood and everyone was excited as the lights of Long Island loomed into view. My parents met me at the dock and we had a couple of days in New York before heading for Twin Lakes and then home.

Over the next few weeks before school started, I spent a lot of time in Toronto with Fran. I also started working on a model of HMCS Swansea based on drawings and photographs I had taken when I was on the ship in the summer of ’51. That model took me about 15 years to finally finish but it is now proudly displayed in our home.

Final Year of Medicine, Fall of ’56.

This would be a pre-internship year with much more hands-on stuff. Like previous years it was divided into 4 terms of 8 weeks each. Medicine, surgery and gynaecology took 3 terms and a fourth had everything else, including the minor sub-specialties like psychiatry. But during this term I worked with Don Coates at the T.P.H. Out Patient Service in the old building on Elizabeth Street south of College that had been the old Sick Children’s’ Hospital and was now used by a variety of other services.

Don was very much involved in demographic work in Toronto at a time when the Mid-Town Manhattan study by Srole and Langer had attracted a great deal of attention. Alexander Leighton was doing similar studies in rural Nova Scotia. And Don, with Stan Freeman and some of the other young bucks at T.P.H. were very involved in the East York-Leaside study and the Forest Hill study. This increased my interest in psychiatry but because of the general stigma of psychiatric patients and caregivers, I did not entertain the possibility of going into that field until several years later.

My friend Robin Scott was back at Osgoode after an articling year in Windsor. We decided not to return to the Beta House but to find our own digs in the city. We found a rooming house on Poplar Plains Road that had some students in it with kitchen facilities and parking in the back yard. We moved into a very large room on the third floor. Soon we met the other people in the house and became good friends with Brian McClelland, who was employed by the Ford Motor Company and was introducing English Fords to Canada.

Robin and I decided to cook supper for a week at a time on alternate weeks. During my week, I had hamburg one night, chops another and so-forth. When it was Robin’s turn, he spent most of Sunday afternoon cooking an immense pot of Irish Stew and it seemed that we would have that reheated for the rest of the week. I objected that we needed more variety but we had stew a lot during that year.

By this time, I had become quite expert at maintaining Betsy. Brian helped me sometimes. So did Robin, but he did not have much of a mechanical bent and one time when I tried to fix the steering box on the car, he managed to drop most of the ball bearings on the ground. We used the car for dates and shopping but parking around the university and most of the hospitals was such a problem I rode public transit most of the time.

That Thanksgiving was the first time I took Fran to the cottage. She had never been to Haliburton before but said it reminded her of the Sault. I loved the Vauxhall on the winding, twisty roads of the day. Fran told my later that as I got further up on Highway 35, I was taking the corners even faster and on the last bit up from Minden the tires were squealing on some of the corners. She remembered thinking: “What a shame to get this far and then not make it.”

Life settled into a routine. Betsy was used on weekends or maybe for a run over to the Dominion Store on St. Clair Avenue. Evenings were spent studying or working on projects. I remember that I had brought an old phonograph over to our room. The previous summer I had upgraded it so it would play my increasing collection of LP records. But the cheap tone arm was a bother to me. It skipped frequently if someone jumped on the floor of the room and could damage the delicate grooves so that the records would not track properly. I had looked at all the wonderful new players at the radio stores and realized that my tastes were far beyond my budget. One of my projects was a new tone arm that would take a new high fidelity magnetic cartridge and would not skip. I built it of aluminium and it was all internally balanced with counter-weights so that it would even track with the turntable tipped up on an angle. I was really proud of it.

On weekends we spent time with our respective girlfriends, often going on double dates. There was a proprietary theatre group on Mount Pleasant Road that had taken over the old Crest Theatre and they offered seats in the back row to students for $1. This was a popular Friday or Saturday outing. We also went to parties at the Beta House but sometimes we just sat in and watched television.

In the late fall, I remember the Hungarian Uprising was big news on radio and television. We were all rooting for the revolutionaries and it was very sad to see the Soviet tanks roll into Budapest. People were fleeing across the border into Austria and there was grave fear of war in Europe. The U.S. had previously made overtures in support of uprisings against Soviet rule and seemed to be encouraging this course of action. Perhaps appreciating the vicissitudes of the Cold War, and not wanting this to turn into a hot war, the allies demurred, but even the brief glimpses that we got of the final days on a 17” black and white screen, were shocking in their ferocity.

Our friend Brain McClelland was very much involved in the Ford Team’s entry into the Winter Car Rally. It was a rough course over some very bad roads in the worst weather of the year. Only about half the cars finished but Brian’s two Ford Escorts made it to the finish line. The only other automotive news of note was the introduction of tail fins on both the Chevrolet and Ford models for 1957.

As the year progressed, Fran and I grabbed time together whenever we could. Also, we were meeting some new friends and our social life took on a rather more settled aspect. We seemed to spend a lot of time in the front seat of the Vauxhall parked in front of Georgina House saying good night. It was such an old friend to us both that Fran began calling it Betsy.

Things Get Serious

I finished my exams in May and graduated in Medicine in mid-June, 1957. By this time my mother was very much aware that we were planning to get married and she quietly approved. But my father was firmly convinced that a doctor must not get married until he had completed all his training and was in practice and able to support a family. He kept making remarks like: “A man cannot serve two masters.” When he was more specific, he referred to the two masters as Aesculapius and Venus.⁸ I was very embarrassed when he wrote me a letter setting out his philosophy in some detail, but then he sent a separate letter to Fran explaining why I could not get married for another five years. This was not the easiest of times for both of us.

Fran was naturally pretty upset by my father’s interventions, but we agreed that we would be married at the end of my Junior Intern year. I spoke to my father but apparently not forcefully enough because he kept telling me that I should wait a few years longer. I argued that his situation was different in two respects, first, his pathology training was only 18 months in total and second, the First World War had intervened. But this did not seem to convince him. By then it was my turn to be upset.

Fran was Maid-of-Honour at her best friend, Martha’s wedding in late May. Martha was a physiotherapist, marrying Herbert Rogers who was in insurance in Toronto. Martha’s parents were both dead and she had been raised by an uncle and aunt on an old farm near Fonthill, Ontario. The wedding was at a nearby church and the reception was back at the farm. Fran had been staying at the farm overnight and I drove out there before the wedding on Saturday. This was when I got to know Herb and Martha who would be close friends of ours after that.

The big political news was the election in which the Conservatives under John Diefenbaker got a minority government. It seemed that the Liberals had won a Pyrrhic victory in the pipeline debate. They won, but their seeming arrogance in using closure to drive the bill through parliament left a bad taste in the mouths of many Canadians.

Fran and I had a week at the cottage with my mother before my graduation and a week with her parents in the Sault after it. I can remember that we flew up to the Sault on the old DC3s from Malton Airport to the Kinross Air Force Base south of Soo Michigan, because Sault Ontario did not have a commercial airport at that time. The old DC3s did not have tricycle landing gear so when they were sitting on the tarmac, the tail was on the ground and you had to climb up the centre aisle to your seat. Then when the plane was in the air, it levelled out so everything took on more normal proportions. The cruising speed of the plane was about 150 miles an hour so the 400 air miles from Toronto to Kinross took about 3 hours. We made that trip several times in the next few years.

In that week I think that I met the whole extended family. We met Fran’s grandmother Taylor and several uncles and aunts. We saw all the sights from St. Joes Island to the end of the Trans-Canada Highway at Agawa Bay, which was still under construction. We visited Ed and Lois in the Soo as well as Grandma Myers. We drove down to the Mystery Spot in northern Michigan. We had a whitefish dinner at Batchewana. They pulled all the stops.

Graduation

The graduation exercises were at Convocation Hall with a reception at Hart House. After this dad had invited everybody to a banquet at the University Club as he had done in 1953. There is no record that he had a printed program as he had done in previous years. However he was very a good host as usual. And then it was back home for a couple of days. The next phase of my great adventure was about to begin.

Notes:

1 This was described in Chapter Ten.

2 Members of Beta Theta Pi Fraternity at 126 St. George St. I was a member from 1950, my second year in Arts. Although I was considered an alumnus after graduating from Arts in 1953, I continued to live there because it was so convenient to the campus.

3 Comparable airfares were $550 return on a postwar DC4 known as the Northstar, a large four engine plane that took 13 or 14 hours to do the trip to England. They were so noisy that it was impossible to sleep or even to concentrate on serious reading. From Toronto, they stopped in Gander Newfoundland to refuel on the way over and in Goose Bay Labrador on the way back. There was really no choice. Ocean liners were cheaper, added time to your holiday and were a lot more pleasant and fun.

4 The S. S. Normandie was the finest transatlantic liner of the French Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT). In 1942, she was seized by U.S. authorities in New York harbour for conversion to a troop ship. During the conversion she caught fire and sank at the dock. She could not be salvaged and after the war was broken up for scrap. S. S. Liberté was a German ship that was renamed and given to the CGT after the war as compensation for their loss of the |Normandie.

5 The Hotel Aguesseau was 630 Fr. at a time when the exchange rate was 350 Franks to the dollar. This was about $1.80 a night but they added 15% service to everything and food was much more expensive than in England. At least the food was very good, unlike most of the meals we had had in England.

6 Another story that came out of Europe in those years was “The difference between Heaven and Hell.” In Heaven, the police are British, the technologists are German, the chefs are French, the bankers are Swiss and the lovers are Italian. In Hell, the chefs are British, the police are German, the technologists are French, the lovers are Swiss and the bankers are Italian.

7 The normal configuration for a DC3 was 21 seats, 7 rows with 2 seats on one side and 1 seat on the other side with an aisle between. This plane with 28 seats had a centre aisle so narrow that you had to walk partially sideways with your knees banging the seats on both sides.

8 Aesculapius was the Roman/Greek god of healing and treatment; Venus was the goddess of love.