Uncle Kent writes about Grandfather Denzil

The letter below is from uncle Kent to cousin Tish in 1996. I've been working with OCR (optical character recognition), so expect several of these old missives over the next few months. The 4 page addendum mentioned has Grandfather Denzil's work history and will be posted separately later. The letter is long and perhaps only of interest to my blood relatives, but I am thrilled to have the heritage hereby preserved.

In this and all future "Old Letters" posts, my words are blue, Kent's (or TGP's or whoever the original authors are) will be in black

Kent Hollingsworth

September 11, 1996

Dear Tish:
Here's that letter. I would like to tell you about your Grandfather, my Father, but this is no easy thing, for I never really knew him.

Oh, I knew about him. Mother forever talked about him in his absence, when he was off somewhere on a construction job, about how tall and handsome he was, how neat and well dressed he always was. How very smart he was, and how hard he worked. Mother said he would get to the job early, return home late, dead tired, and fall asleep; then wake up in the middle of the night, get out of bed to check the job again, to see how the night shift was working under lights.

Also, how athletic he was. Mother said he was marvelous at golf, and he did have a picture swing, but he never broke 80. Mother reminded that he was good enough to swim on the varsity team at the University of Illinois. In an era when Johnny Weissmuller's flutter kick won Olympic golds by lowering the 400-meter freestyle record by more than 22 seconds, and by becoming the first swimmer to do 100 meters in less than a minute, with that little flutter—Father had an outboard-motor kick, thumpa-thumpa-thumpa, gutters awash, here he comes, you children better get out of his way!

While Mother conceded Weissmuller's chest was as big as Father's (when the star showed up for an exhibition at the Missouri Athletic Club pool) she noted that Father certainly was better spoken. Weissmuller's movie lines were limited to "Me Tarzan. You Jane." And while Clark Gable did have a mustache and parted his hair in the middle like Father, he had enormous ears, so there really was no comparison...

At home, I was instructed that my Father was a nonpareil. At school, I further learned that he was rich. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, "rich" was pejorative, used by sneering schoolmates to separate me from the crowd, at an age and place where one desperately wanted to blend-in and be an inconspicuous part of the crowd.

Anyway, I grew up knowing my Father only by reputation. I never really knew who he was as a young man, what he did, how he did it. We had photographs, proving he was every bit as handsome as his adoring wife thought he was, but I had no admissible evidence as to what sort of person he was when he began making his own way in the 1920s and 1930s. For all that Mother, and Donn, and Hall told me about Father before I was old enough to look at him and listen to him myself, I understood nothing of the inherited and environmental bases on which he built whatever he was. I had no facts, just hearsay, and conclusions from non-expert witnesses.

I needed some first-hand data. So I went first (hand) to the U.S. Census records and found that in 1870, my great grandfather, Joe Hollingsworth, at age 28, and wife Ellen, age 23, were living on a farm in the Allison Prairie Township near Lawrenceville, Illinois. In 1880, Joe, age 38, and Ellen, age 33, were still living there, together with their four children: Charles H., age 9; Ethelbert C. my grandfather, then age 5; Dollie D. (also known as Daisy), age 3, and Joseph J., age 1; plus two live-in workers, Belle Gannen, age 9, and George Kronkenberger, age 20.

The 1880 census for Bishop Township, near Effingham, Illinois, about 50 miles northwest of Allison Prairie, showed that another of my great grandfathers, August Piel, age 41, and wife Sophia, age 40, both born in Germany, had immigrated in 1862 to Illinois where six of their seven children were born, the youngest being Bertha, my grandmother, then age 3.

Most of the 1890 census records have been lost in a fire. The 1900 census, however, reveals that during the last two decades of the 19th Century, Ethelbert, age 25, had married Bertha Piel, age 23, and they still lived there on the family farm in Allison Prairie with their son, listed as Maurice D., then age 1. (Donn said Mother could not stand the name Maurice, and used his middle name, Denzil; Father promptly switched, signing on as Denzil M. Hollingsworth in high school.)
In checking the census for Illinois and Indiana, in the genealogical library at the University of Vincennes, I happened to peek into the town marriage-license book and discovered that Bert Hollingsworth had married Bertha Piel in Vincennes, Knox County, Indiana, about 10 miles east and across the Wabash River from Allison Prairie, on February 10, 1898.

Five years ago, Donn, Hall, and I drove over to Lawrenceville, Illinois, looking for some record of Father and his family in the Lawrence County Courthouse. We found that on July 27, 1870, great grandfather Joe Hollingsworth paid $2,500 [equivalent to $24,625 in 1994 dollars] for a 160-acre farm about four miles east of Lawrenceville in Allison Prairie Township. This farm was in two 80-acre tracts about a quarter-mile apart, one with no improvements, for it cost only $500, the other tract probably having a house on it, costing $2,000.

This, as Old Home Places go, may not have been majestic, considering what $20,000 today would get you on 80 acres—maybe a second-hand mobile home. Be that as it may, Joe worked that 160 acres for 11 years, until he died at the age of 39 on Nov. 7, 1881; his widow Ellen raised three boys and a girl in that trailer, and lived off that flat prairie farm for another 18 years after her husband died.

At the age of 23, my grandfather Bert built a $500, two-story, frame house on the back portion of the farm, married Bertha, and apparently became involved in a family squabble over who owned what. Bert was named defendant in a lawsuit filed in 1898 by his older brother, younger sister and brother, and his mother, to partition the family farm they had shared for 28 years. Pending final order in this suit, Bert's mother, Ellen Jones Hollingsworth, sold the unimproved 80-acre tract to Charles E. Jones, perhaps a relative, for $500, what Joe had paid for it 29 years earlier.

The court then awarded Ellen her old house and 10 acres, valued at $1,000 as her homestead, and another 10 acres as her dower; the remaining back 40 acres were partitioned equally among the four children, Bert getting the 10 acres on which he had built his house two years earlier.

Last month I drove to Allison Prairie to see this house where Father and his younger sister, our Aunt Dorothy, were born. It was unimposing. It was the only house in sight, surrounded as far as one could see by irrigated soybeans and tall, corn, directly south of the Lawrenceville-Vincennes International Airport. In weathering a century on a windswept plain, the clapboard house had lost some paint, but was livable. A young couple and their children were having lunch under a large shade tree beside the house. The young man said he did not know how old the house was, but he understood his grandparents had lived there when they were young, before World War II, and his Father had been born in the house. He said he and his brother farmed some 500 acres on this side, and the other side of Highway 1100N, which the house faced.

My grandmother Bertha apparently did not care for this house, and its surrounding 10 acres, although she had caused her husband to deed over all his rights in it to her in 1899. Also, she did not care for the lifestyle out there on Allison Prairie. Further, she doubted her handsome young husband (Mother said Bert looked like Hall) had any sense of upward mobility, and suspected he was not going anywhere--certainly not upward, socially or economically, and not even to town, geographically.

One evening, Bert returned and was stunned to find the house empty. No wife, no children, no furniture. He was soon to learn that she had sold the property, cleaned out the bank account, and had gone—to where, he knew not. The 1901 St. Louis City Directory lists Bertha Hollingsworth, forewoman, as renting an apartment at 3505 Itaska Street in south St. Louis. (Randolph says a forewoman was a supervisor of other women in a sweatshop; Bertha was making her own way sewing lace.)

Three weeks ago, Dorcas and I drove to St. Louis, checked land and marriage records in City Hall, city directories in the library. Dorcas took pictures of buildings still standing where Father, Mother, Bert, Bertha, Uncle Jim Addis, Chum and Grandmother resided from 1901-40. The neighborhoods around Tower Grove Park, where Father and Mother grew up, contain multi-family brick dwellings built in the early decades of this century. Mother indicated they were occupied by low-income German and Italian immigrants. Now these neighborhoods are all black, save Flora Place,

six blocks with center parkway, leading west from Grand Avenue to the old entrance to Shaw's Garden on Tower Grove Avenue.

Bert did not catch up with Bertha until 1903, when the St. Louis City Directory lists him, as a laborer, residing at 3435A LaSalle Street, a building now razed, in a business zone. At the same address in 1905, we find James T. Addis, listed as a contractor. In 1906, Bert, then and thereafter listed as a locomotive fireman, moved with Uncle Jim a few blocks over to Park Avenue.

We could not find a record of Bertha's divorce from Bert in the St. Louis Civil Courts Building, but we did obtain a copy of Bertha's and Uncle Jim's marriage license, showing the marriage was performed by a justice of peace in St. Louis on Nov. 11, 1908.

The City Directories did not show where Bertha and her children lived from 1902 through 1908. Father told me that he remembered his mother had placed him and little Dorothy in a St. Louis orphanage when he was four or five years old; it was just for a few months, until his mother could find a job and place to live. After a week or so, Father thought she had abandoned them forever, and he had a hard time comforting his younger sister, who cried a lot. Dorcas recalls Father saying they lived for a while in Clayton, a St. Louis suburb just west of Forest Park (site of the 1903 World's Fair which celebrated the Centennial of the Louisiana Purchase).

After Bertha's marriage to Uncle Jim late in 1908, it may be presumed she moved with her children to Uncle Jim's address at 2900 Park Avenue. This was not your usual New York Park Avenue flat. Urban renewal has razed many of the old tenements in this area, but Dorcas was able to take some pictures of young black residents of 2900 Park Avenue. Father probably lived in an apartment at this address for four years, until he was 14; then Bertha moved Uncle Jim and her children to a house of their own, in a little better neighborhood, three blocks west of Grand Avenue, one block south of Tower Grove Park, at 3924 Juniata Street.

Father lived in this two-story red brick house for the next nine years, while going to high school and college; he listed it as his residence on his marriage license in 1923. Dorcas' photograph of this house, shows it was situated quite close to a neighboring house. Donn said Bert worked his way up between these two houses, climbed through a second-story window, snatched Uncle Jim out of bed, told him if he ever drank whiskey at home, in front of his children, he, Bert, would kill him. Uncle Jim recognized the earnestness in this threat and Donn said he believed Uncle Jim never had another drink at home. Which must have been tough, for he was an Irishman, and whiskey fueled his crew of Irishmen who wrecked buildings as a business.

Father said his father never drank or smoked, "but he sure gave women hell”; then he would laugh, embarrassed, and slap his knee. Father said Bert lost his job with the railroad many times, usually for fighting, or arguing with his superiors. Father said Bert was not tall, only about 5-foot-8, but he was robust, very strong, and athletic. Father remembered Bert's lifting him on his shoulders, and jumping off a street car before it stopped, running as fast as Olympic sprinter Archie Hahn, to keep from falling on his face with his top-heavy load. Bertha heard about the stunt and got a restraining order to keep Bert away from her children, and Uncle Jim.

Father did not seem to inherit much from his father, in the way of physical features, mental acuity, or cultural awareness. He had no chance to learn anything from his father, because he never lived with him, never saw him except for brief, uncomfortable visits which his mother
discouraged.

Father probably inherited his drive from his ambitious mother. Bertha devoted all her energies and street smarts to make her handsome son into someone important, whose success might reflect on her. She abandoned a dusty, Illinois prairie, and her unpromising first husband, for the excitement of a big city, and she latched on to a man who had his own company, and who could provide her and her children with a solid brick home.

To expand her social contacts, Bertha formed a sewing circle, inviting the most attractive ladies in the neighborhood; among these was the beautiful and elegantly mannered young wife of a university-educated physicist— Blanche Parrott and Chum. He was graduated from the University of Michigan, with honors in mathematics; while teaching in Saint Johns and Saginaw in Michigan, he had written several scientific articles that brought him some out-of-state notice. In 1909, he accepted an offer to teach at McKinley High School in St. Louis, and moved with his wife and 11-year-old daughter into a nice duplex at 3867 Utah Place.

My grandmothers, Bertha and Blanche, became friends and during sewing circle sessions, exchanged glowing reports on their children. They arranged for Mother and Father to be introduced to each other. Soon thereafter, Father suffered a broken leg playing baseball in Tower Grove Park, and asked Mother to visit him in the hospital.

According to family tradition (compiled mostly by Mother) neither looked for love elsewhere, ever after. Mother was born in June, eight months before Father, and while they were the same age February through June, every September Mother remained an academic year ahead of Father.

In the fall of 1916, Mother matriculated at the University of Missouri in Columbia. While she was gone, Bertha began looking around for a better prospect for her son. To insure that Mother could not tie him up in Columbia, Bertha insisted that Uncle Jim pay out-of-state tuition for Father and shipped him off to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the fall of 1917. Mother transferred to the University of Illinois for her junior and senior years, and there, the twain having met again, they never were to part--Rudyard Kipling notwithstanding.

I have annexed hereto, a four-page chronology of Father's construction work and financial success, abstracted from Father's 1943 application for a commission in the Navy SeaBees. These are facts, over Father's signature, interspersed with my parenthetical notes intended to amplify stark data; I have converted 1920 and 1930 dollars into 1994 dollars, using the U.S. Labor Department's Consumer Price Index table, to place in current perspective Father's earnings in his business-active years.

Father's initial success in the construction business cannot be attributed to his stepfather's guidance. Jim Addis ran a building-wrecking crew of Irishmen, pick-and-shovel men who moved dirt with horse-drawn drag buckets in the first decades of this century. Father ran grades, laid out the work, and supervised the men for his stepfather while he was in college; but he thought in terms of machines and mechanical advantages, and he spoke the language of a university-trained civil engineer, a language Uncle Jim did not fully comprehend. They did not work together long.

Measured in today's dollars, Father earned $147,610 at the age of 26, during his first year of business as his own boss. His stepfather and father never got within 31 lengths of that kind of money. That he was able to buy a $293,000 house
(left to right Blanche, Dorcas, Denzil, Kent, Donn, Hall, Polly, Chum)
two years later at the age of 28 was an indication of precocious business success, attained sooner and in greater measure than anything realized by his forebears, or his descendants. He earned some $321,000 at the age of 32, and he earned about $5 million at the age of 40, from his own physical efforts, his own thought processes, his initiatives, his inventions. No one handed this monetary success to him in a pay envelope. No board voted him a stock option. He earned it, by himself, without apparent benefit of inherited and environmental influences.

For much of my professional writing career, I have been pointing out the incidence of exceptional performers in the pedigrees of successful race horses; and I have emphasized the importance of environment — good food and care during the early years, expert training, and adherence to a well designed strategic plan — to attain success in any endeavor.

I see little of this in my Father's background. He may have been guided, motivated, by his mother and his wife, but many individuals have been guided and motivated toward success, yet failed to realize it for want of other essential ingredients in the mix. Father did what he did mainly on his own. His success was self-made.

I sorely regret that I never really got to know him, that I was so self-absorbed in making my own way, I did not appreciate my Father during his last 25 years, when I had the opportunity to walk at his side.

So I have set out for you here, some of the things your Grandfather did when he was young, about your age, that you might perceive a vague image in the mist from whence you came.
With love,

Father (Kent)

TGP Autobiography 1993

Muv found this somewhere and I read it to the immediate family at the beach last July. I thought it was worth transcribing and sharing. I've been asking TGP to write for the blog and haven't gotten much reaction, so I'm using the writing I have from him. Remember this is almost 15 years old as of today.

Part the First - Where I have been

My parents began their lives at the turn of the century:

• my mother born first in 1898 as the only child of the union between a hotel/resort wealthy mama and an imperious country farmer turned mathematician/teacher father (whom she worshiped)
• my father one year later as the second/last child of a German beer-maker descendant (grandmother Addis) and a flashy con-artist alcoholic (who left his posterity nothing except the Hollingsworth name, being a poor side trip down from Valentine Hollingsworth's 1640 arrival in Delaware)

Mother grew up in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, where she:

1. learned the resort/hotel business,
2. gained a vast respect for books
3. was spoiled rotten by her doting father

thereby giving her deep recesses of self-confidence and a literary bent.

Father grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and acquired a smattering of German, a strong aversion to alcohol and a fondness for things mechanical.

They met as undergraduates at the University of Illinois and were soulmates for 48 years. What a bedrock upon which to lay my foundations! Mother brought intelligence, joie de vivre, literacy and interpersonal skills; Father was a Tau Beta Pi and had a Masters in Mechanical Engineering... a genius at that which seized his attention for the moment.

Throughout the 20s and 30s, my family grew to four very quickly (boy, boy, girl, boy) and while Father earned and lost several fortunes in the construction business. Mother wrote and published multiple volumes of poetry and some plays; she learned to go from two cars and several servants to scrubbing the brick sidewalk of our large St. Louis home without losing a beat. I put in an appearance 8 years after number four, in 1937, much to everyone's surprise ("Polly, dammit, you can't be. We can't afford this right now"), apparently having been acquired on a one year trip around the US and Canada in 1936, looking for military contracts to build another dam similar to Father's success at Ft. Peck.

Father struck it rich one more time in 1938 (found a flaw in the Texas Oil Company's mineral rights to the Salem oil pool in Illinois: obtained them for the "cauliflower strip", a road 1/2 mile long and 30 feet wide from which he and some other connivers took so much oil that Texaco bought them out) and so moved his brood to Kentucky in 1939. We bought a Bluegrass horse/tobacco farm 10 miles north of Lexington and set about learning the thoroughbred/sheep/cattle/fighting-banty-rooster business (everyone should grow up on a farm: the value of one dollar an hour wages is very apparent to all that have worked from dawn to dusk). My first real memory, other than those home movie induced, is one of the announcement of WW II and the departure of two older brothers: the eldest to Camp Blanding, Florida, to be a drill instructor for the duration and the second eventually to Europe with Patton's Army. The rest of the group stayed to run the farm and the horses. Father had retired by this time; two heart attacks before age 41, a severed arm in the 30's (implausibly sewed back on ... Mother wouldn't let them take it off as they should have and it worked! Never have understood that) and Graves disease about finished him. He claimed he had been put up on blocks by the war, just as his V-12 Lincoln Continental was. Mother was never phased by anything. She wrote and directed a major musical production in 1943 at the University of Kentucky and I tasted the theater, gaining accolades from which I never recovered. She led the family in Christmas plays written so that all had parts that fit our personalities. I was usually the goody-two-shoes.

Schooling for me began in 1943 at an eight-classes-in-four-rooms school that Mother thought would be good. "To walk with Princes nor lose the common touch" was quoted all the time, but sounded too fancy for my taste. It was close and I got to ride my bike the 1 1/2 miles each way. There I learned the 3 R's, a rigid meritocracy in which one had to earn the right to play in recess games and a rural approach to sexual education. We were all sexperts by second grade, seeing it practiced every day outside the school by various and sundry animals. Since Mother was the volunteer drama coach, I played the lead in several dramatic operettas.... even though lacking the requisite vocal talent. By the seventh grade, the total lack of social graces caused some concern, so I was sent to a private school in Lexington and discovered that money and privilege covered a multitude of ineptitudes. Quickly, back to my country place for the eight and final year of rural education and then on to a small semi-private "model" high school in Lexington: still possible before the consolidation of districts in the early 50's.

High school is a pivotal experience for most; mine was a pleasant four years with 28 people in the class, and inordinate number of whom would end up in relatively fancy institutions of higher learning. I began to learn about girls instead of cows, boys instead of horses/tobacco, and discovered I had modest skills in a number of areas but was outstanding in none. The choice of becoming a Renaissance Man or a Dilettante struck me. I played several sports, but could "start" only in swimming; I was in plays, in the band, the glee club and eventually was Valedictorian, the only area in which I actually emerged as a winner. I had a remarkably untrammeled child & young adult-hood. I was a fairly strong-willed, somewhat spoiled youth to whom opportunity had come as a genetic and cultural gift, unfought-for. It was now 1955: all my siblings were married and had appropriately multiplied..... I was known as "Uncle Vert" to at least 15 nephews and nieces. My kind and wise brother-in-law touted me on a trip east to school and I became the first of the clan to venture outside the state. I arrived in New Haven, Connecticut on a train and was greener than the grass on the Commons.
Four years later, I could write, think a little, knew my way around New York City and had been accepted to several medical schools. I carried music (I was in the Glee Club and the Band) and theater with me, but majored in American Studies and have loved history, education and teaching ever since. (Didn't give a fig about managing anything until about three years ago).

I met the love of my life in a Lexington summer production of "Carousel" and we were married in 1960, after one year (the worst) of medical school in Cincinnati.
The draft was still with us, so I joined a Navy scholarship program that paid nothing, but let me pick when I would enter upon active duty. Two children, one MD degree and a hellacious year at Receiving Hospital (Detroit's answer to Bellevue) later, the four of us were in Camp Pendleton, California for the most relaxed time of our lives. My wife is an accomplished musician and we were active in singing and church work out there until April of 1965 when Viet Nam began in earnest. By a miracle of uncertain origin, I was taken off the ship on two occasions and not allowed to go to Chu Lai or Saigon (both of which subsequently had Naval Hospitals with several of our friends in them soon thereafter).


We left Naval service and California in 1966, returning to Georgetown, Kentucky to join my closest friend from high school and an older established physician in the general practice of medicine. This would later become Family Practice as we shifted with the times and learned to treat things beside diseases. This was the growth time in our life cycle: family, work, responsibilities..... they all grew. I began to experiment with teaching at the Medical School a few miles down the road in Lexington.

Having found a true California baby in 1966, we had our last in 1968 and upon the latter's entry into kindergarten 5 years later, my wife returned to teaching music. Drama slipped for a little while as the time constraints of a 72 hour work week for me, and 80 hour work week for Alice (full time classroom teacher, church organist/choir director at two churches and +/- 20 voice or piano students!) made for a hectic 14 years.

We grew in the community, added to our home, made lots of friends and worked like crazy. Some 200 deliveries, medical student precepting and sundry medical procedures later (I was a "skin and its contents doctor") there had to be other things to do. Et voila! .............. the Navy casually sent me a recruiting letter.

Part the Second - Where I am Now

It was January of 1980. I began dreaming of three things: teaching, travel and time off (my three T's). We had a family conference with Alice and the three still at home, (#1 was a freshman at Yale by now, so we all decided his vote didn't count). #2 was a Junior in High School (JIHS) and the thought of moving for her last year (to Charleston, South Carolina, the duty station I had been offered) was anathema: one against. #2 was 14 and quickly figured out that he would be 15 in March, a full three months before he could get to South Carolina and take the driver's test that would let him drive a FULL YEAR before Kentucky would allow it: one for. #4 was finishing the sixth grade and figured she was going to a new school anyhow... and fourth children will do anything to avoid a fuss: one neutral/for. Alice looked at me and said, "Whatever you want is OK with me".. not a resounding for, but I counted it.

We sold the practice to my remaining three partners, sold the house (finally, in 1982!) cried with the folks on the staff at the little hospital and wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper to explain why I was taking no new pregnant patients. (I managed to deliver the last one while my wife oversaw the packout....smooth move). We arrived in hot, humid Charleston on 30 June 1980 and a new career/life began for all of us. The three T's and more!

I began the full time teaching required of a Graduate Medical Education (GME); to take young physicians, just out of medical school and convert them into knowledgeable specialists in Family Medicine in three short years. My wife taught in the SC school system and was selected as Teacher of the Year by 1983. I was learning and, having more field experience than the other faculty, became Assistant Head of the department. I spent some time at sea with the Saudi Navy (got a Navy Commendation Medal for teaching them how to use condoms without letting their Admiral know such were needed; adultery is an offense requiring removal of the offending "member".......my wife calls it my rubber medal to this day). By this time # 3 was a JIHS so the Navy naturally picked 1983 to send me to Pensacola, Florida to become head of that residency program. I joined the Faculty of Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), in Bethesda, Maryland at that time, since they sent medical students to us for training. BY 1986, #4 had been graduated from high school, so we moved to Washington to work in medical school academia on a full time basis. There followed two pleasant years as an Associate Professor of Clinical Family Practice, while Alice taught music to angels of the (North) Chevy Chase Elementary.

I became involved in Health Care Planning while in DC and, as the Surgeon General's Advisor for Family Practice, began to visualize changes needed in the organization/delivery of medical care to DOD beneficiaries. That led to several cross-specialty committees and before I knew it, Rota, Spain and Newport, Rhode Island had been selected as Family Practice Demonstration Project hospitals. The idea was to demonstrate the cost effectiveness/customer satisfaction achievable by introducing into the socialized system of Navy Medicine, the concept of continuity of care from a broadly trained specialist who would provide 85% of all care to a command/ship/finite number of families. The first hospital staffed with resources sufficient to the task was Rota; I went there as Medical Director in 1988 and became the Executive Officer in 1989, as we moved into a new facility.

What a gorgeous opportunity it is to live in another culture. To learn new values and an appreciation of one's own is enriching. My wife and I were visited by 3 of our offspring, various college and work related friends; we toured most of Europe and a little bit of Africa; she led the base chapel in song, the base choir in two huge fests and provided music for three theatre productions; I played parts in four plays and was the "face of the base", since I was always on TV explaining health care. I began pursuing the Masters in Management in earnest while there (via Salve's GIS program), having earlier completed the Naval War College curriculum by seminar. As Operation Desert Shield became Storm, I was suddenly ordered back to Newport as Commanding Officer of the local Naval Hospital; one that is undergoing a dramatic set of paradigm shifts. We are embarking on the Navy's first ever use of a civilian facility for our in-patients, while our doctors will be supplying the care. The out-patient portion of care will be rendered in a new facility by a large group of Family Physicians with lots of available consultants. Lots of challenges, lots of opportunities. Thus far, I have been challenged by no major setbacks/disappointments; I have been rewarded by not yet having reached my own private Peter Principle.

Part the Third - Where I am Going

This actually represents my first serious look at the future, at least as it affects my wife and me. As an ENFP (a Myers-Briggs classification that describes one who does not tolerate repetition or sameness for very long), I doubt that the challenges of my current position will hold sway for long. After the political and organizational complexities are ironed out and the mission becomes one of keeping a straight course, I will tire of it and request a change. The Naval Hospital in Charleston holds allure; nearby grandchildren, a residency training program, a large facility (250 beds) and a community with which we are both familiar and comfortable. After that, I have flatly refused to plan.....if flag rank is a possibility (and there is nothing more uncertain than that!), the thereafter will be taken care of by higher challenges. If not, I shall gladly serve out the requisite time to register my twenty years of active duty in whatever capacity the Navy wishes. There are not bad jobs, just bad attitudes (rather like the theater: "No small parts, only small players"). Therein lies my small secret of success....... I have enjoyed everything I have done and have had no major lasting disappointments. Each step along life's path has had a delightful form of recompense, not the least of which has been a wonderful marriage, a super set of offspring and a rewarding career.

In any event, in July of 1998 (at age 61) I intend to hang up my ancient stethoscope/Cross pen and embark on a set of world travels that will include exotic destinations, grandchildren, reading, music, theater and raconteur-ing. I intend to enjoy the trip through the rest of my life; the destination and the stops along the way no longer hold much in the way of fear or trepidation. I rather look forward to each day's challenges as the stimuli that will keep the blood flowing smoothly.

My epitaph? Simple:

You only live once,
but if you work it right,
once is enough.

As he says, it's great to be well brought up. Understanding the heritage helps us understand the present. Since this was written, he went to San Diego, then retirement from the Navy and several years in Pinehurst, where he and Muv still reside. He is now nine-toed, one-eyed stroke man, living and loving life.