— CHAPTER 5 —
BREAKING AWAY
By January 1962, my world had crumbled. My dream of getting an elite education to prepare me for my ultimate goal of finding a cure for cancer had been shattered.
Only 18, in Florida I was still a minor and therefore subject to parental control.1 My father demanded that I live in his house on Snead Island, outside of Bradenton and comply with the “rules of the house.” If I tried to leave, I would be arrested and returned to my parents in handcuffs. I had no car. There was no bus service where we lived. My father disconnected the phone line in my room and forbade me to make long distance calls. He was determined to cut me off from my connections up north. I was basically under house arrest and isolated on remote Snead Island. For weeks, my only relief from this confinement was to accompany my father to his office and do his tedious clerical work. (I didn’t even know how to type.) He paid me one dollar per day, so I would have money to buy lunch, which he watched me eat. Are we under control yet?
I was miserable. When I complained to my mother, she said that she was powerless to stop my father. She simply had too much at risk to voice any objection. And my younger sister was essentially in the same situation I was.
But there were still some people in my life that my father did not control, particularly on my mother’s side of the family. Her half-sister, Aunt Elsie, and my Grandpa lived nearby and were well aware of the problems in our house.
I had always been very close to Aunt Elsie. She was born during an earlier marriage, so was older than my mother. Aunt Elsie was a veteran parent who understood the games of marriage and parenting as well as anyone. She had successfully raised her three sons, but she never had a daughter. Due to the attention and affection I received from her since childhood, I felt that Aunt Elsie loved me as the daughter she never had.
Aunt Elsie and Uncle Emery were “snowbirds” who spent their winters in St. Petersburg. On some Sundays, she drove over the Skyway to attend Mass with our family. But when my father refused to allow Elsie to take me anywhere — even to Mass — and told her that he also planned to keep my sister out of college, and close to home, she became concerned. Observing that I was locked in my room whenever my father couldn’t keep an eye on me, she quietly made it clear to my mother, who was terrified to interfere, that she wanted to help. But how? I needed something just short of a miracle to dislodge myself from the grasp of my father, plus a boat-load of resources to get my education back on track.
Complicating matters further was the fact that it was now late January. The colleges had all started their spring semesters and classes had been in session for nearly a month. Unless something happened immediately, I would have to wait until fall term to be admitted. All this would have to happen without proper applications and past all deadlines. Who would have the power to pick up the phone, tell a college to admit me immediately, and inform them that they were to provide me with a full scholarship? There was only one person I could think of who had that kind of power and might be willing to help: Florida’s U.S. Senator George Smathers.
Senator Smathers had made it clear to me the year before that he wanted me to go to his alma mater, the University of Florida, and it was well known that he had been funneling large amounts of money into UF for new buildings, libraries and a new teaching hospital. This was the kind of influence I would need to fix my situation, but would the senator still be willing after I had turned down his offer the year before? And how could I reach him when I could not even use the phone in my own house? Aunt Elsie had offered to help, but how could I ask my little old Auntie to call the powerful U.S. Senator and get past his protective staff? I needed an intermediary, someone with the strength and confidence to call the Senator’s office, navigate past his staff, and who knew about Smathers’ interest in me. The answer was Col. Doyle.
I asked Aunt Elsie to call Col. Doyle, and tell him that I was “desperate to return to college immediately.” Amazingly, it worked. Senator Smathers promptly picked up the phone and got me admitted to the University of Florida through the back door. Aunt Elsie got a call from Col. Doyle, and it was done. But we had to move fast, as they were expecting me soon. Of course, all of this had to happen without my father’s knowledge, right under his nose.
Grandpa stepped in and used his influence on my mother to convince her to let me go, and pledged her to secrecy.
But how would I get there? What about money? And what would I wear? Virtually my entire wardrobe had been abandoned at St. Francis. My blessed grandfather took out a personal loan at the bank, picked me up in Elsie’s car and took me out shopping.
We stopped at Sharp’s Pharmacy in Bradenton so I could buy some personal items. It had been our favorite place to meet for a chocolate soda when I was in high school but, today, Grandpa said he didn’t want one. He stayed in the car while I went in to shop. When I came back, Grandpa took my hand and looked at me with his faded blue eyes. He reminded me that Grandma had died in 1956 of cancer, and that he was proud of my work.
“Judy,” he said, “you have to keep going in cancer research.”
Why was he saying this now? Was it because I had mentioned that Sharp’s Pharmacy was located in the same building where I had given my mice radiation during high school? Or was he trying to tell me something else? Then I heard him sigh. After the sigh, he went into one of his coughing spasms. Grandpa had been exposed to mustard gas in World War I and his lungs had been permanently damaged. He had chronic emphysema and I was used to his coughing, but this time I heard something different: the telltale wheezing sound that I had been taught to recognize at Roswell Park. It was at this moment that I realized my dear grandfather had lung cancer. Must I lose yet another family member to this plague? “No!” I cried, hugging him. “Please — no!”
Jesse Whiting
Jesse Whiting was Judyth’s maternal grandfather. Born in Indiana in 1890, he became a professional baseball player in his teens and played on minor league teams in the Midwest, northwest U.S. and Canada. In 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought on the frontlines in France with the 347th Machine Gun Battalion. After being wounded twice in action, he was poisoned with Mustard Gas which damaged his lungs.
“Don’t worry,” Grandpa said, “I’m tough. It’s just in one lung — and I’ve got two of those puppies! If I end up losing the fight, just remember, I’ve been separated too long from your grandmother.” Tears filled our eyes as we held each other tight. Grimly, I promised to do my best to continue my cancer research.
After hospitalization in France, he was returned to the United States to be honorably discharged in 1919. The damage to his lungs prevented him from returning to baseball and plagued him throughout his life. He lived in Bradenton when Judyth was a senior in high school and was instrumental in getting her into the University of Florida in 1962. He died of lung cancer complications in March 1965.
Jesse Whiting in 1960 with Judyth’s prize-winning Magnesium exhibit.
After shopping, we met Auntie Elsie, who had purchased a bedspread, lamp and other things for my dorm room. Then we skipped town, heading for Gainesville and UF in Elsie’s car.2 It was early February 1962.
Upon my arrival at the University, I checked in with the Dean of Women who promptly slipped me into the computer system as easily as if she were correcting a typo. The Dean was Miss Marna Brady, a Ph.D. who had spent the first 15 years of her career teaching at the college level up East. During World War II, Dr. Brady interrupted her university career to join the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Auxiliary and rose to the rank of major. After the war, she became the first Dean of Women when UF went co-ed. 3 By the time we met, Dean Brady had already spoken to St. Francis College and heard about my sudden removal in the middle of the night by my parents. She expressed her sympathy and concluded our short meeting by earnestly saying: “Come see me if you run into trouble with your parents.”
So I started attending classes, which were already in their fifth week. I had to work hard to catch up, but I was happy to be there. I was back in a good college and had decent clothes to wear. My dream of finding a cure for cancer was still alive, and part of the deal was that I would be working in a well-equipped laboratory on campus doing research on the chemistry of cancerous human blood. My instructions from Senator Smathers included sending monthly research reports to Dr. Ochsner in New Orleans, which made it clear to me that he had been involved somehow in Senator Smather’s decision to intervene under such extreme circumstances.3
I enrolled in the normal freshman curriculum, but I also audited two additional premed classes.
I started working in the laboratory at once, which was euphemistically called the Nutrition Lab. Because both my grandparents suffered from cancers that were well-developed before they were discovered, I wanted to create a diagnostic test to detect rapidly growing cancers. I eventually got permission to tag human cancer cells with radioisotopes. By injecting such cells into the bloodstreams of mice, I hoped to track how long they stayed alive, where they went, and where they died. Such foreign cells wouldn’t live long in mice, so these tests were very time-sensitive.4 One of my goals was to develop a blood sedimentation test which would identify the presence of cancerous activity in the human body. The other was the use of radioactive isotopes to track metastasis as the cancer spread to other parts of the body. The combination of the two would provide a simple clinical test to establish if the person had cancer, and to prove whether that cancer had metastasized or not. Because I was still a minor and not legally allowed to conduct this type of research, I was asked to keep my age and activities secret. To further complicate matters, the radioactive portions of my research required that I have access to rooms in the nuclear engineering building where minors were not even allowed. In essence, I had become two people: just another freshman co-ed who was of little interest to anyone other than boys, and a scientist quietly conducting stealthy cancer research after-hours in the university’s laboratories.
My late arrival guaranteed that I was housed in the seediest dorm on campus. It was called “Grove Hall.” But it was miles better than being stuck on Snead Island with my father. As in high school, I quickly became involved in campus life, became editor of the dorm paper, the Grove Groan, got elected to the Honor Council, and joined the Women’s Intramural Sports Team.
No more fasting and prayers for me! Life was good again. The days flew by and the pace increased. I struggled to catch up in my classes and managed to get by on just a few hours of sleep, trying to keep up with my new premed friends who seemed to live on coffee and Dex-edrine. I gradually began wearing shorts, lipstick and tight sweaters buttoned down the back, like most of the coeds. There were far more men on campus than women, and my social life began blooming. I was 18 years old, and my figure was practically perfect. Surrounded by popular female friends, and being “the new girl,” I quickly attracted the attention of a number of boys and started dating right away. If I didn’t have my faith anymore, at least I had boys!
Back at home, my father was furious that I’d vanished. Piquing his anger was an exchange we’d had before I left in which I bluntly told him that if I ever got free, I was determined to lose my virginity. These were strong words from a girl in a strict Catholic household to say to her father, but I was trying to get back at him for ruining my life at St. Francis. As a result, he stormed around the house fuming over the image of me prowling the college campus trying to lose my virginity.
He tried to make my efforts to receive a decent education look vain by accusing me of chasing the fictitious pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; as if becoming a cancer researcher would somehow interfere with my ability to earn a decent living. He even wrote a letter to me, articulating his numerous frustrations and objections, along with a rare bit of praise: “Put you on a horse, and you’ll ride like a pro. Put you among nuns, and you’ll become a saint. Put you in a lab, and you’ll be a scientist. Put you in a college with a lot of boys, and you’ll be the Campus Queen.”
My father decided to take action. He knew I was still technically a minor, and quickly decided to use this authority. First, he cleaned out the money from my bank account in Bradenton that Grandpa had given me.5 Then he called me at school to demand my return. When I refused to answer his calls, he called the police in Gainesville and told them I had run away. He instructed them to arrest and hold me.
Dean Marna Brady
Mama Brady became the first Dean of Women at the University of Florida in 1948 and remained in that position until 1966. Originally from Ohio, she received a B.S. degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1925 and taught there for two years. In 1928 she earned a MA degree from Columbia University in 1928 and spent the next ten years teaching at Bryn Mawr College, followed by five years at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. In 1943, she joined the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, advancing from the rank of Private to Major. She returned to Columbia University and got her Doctorate in Education in 1948 and immediately became Dean of Women at the University of Florida, shortly after it became coeducational in 1947. After retiring as Dean in 1966 Brady remained an associate professor until 1970. She died in 1984.
My distraught mother overheard everything, and as soon as Dad left for work, she called Aunt Elsie, afraid to contact the university herself because the long-distance call record would tell Dad what she had done. Aunt Elsie immediately called me – just in time. I ran to Dean Brady’s office, arriving breathless with the police only minutes behind. Dean Brady immediately locked her office door, just as the police entered the building, saying that would slow them down. Then there was the knock: “Police. Open up.”
“Do you have a warrant?” she bellowed through the door.
“No,” they admitted.
“Well, I am not going to open the door until you do.”
The cops left and Dean Brady went to work. It was easy to see why she held her position as Dean of Women. She promptly prepared a “writ of emancipation” for me. This is a legal document that would change my legal status from minor to adult. Usually, it requires a signature from one of the parents, but one could “self-emancipate” if you could prove you were self-supporting. I signed Dean Brady’s documents, and they were notarized by someone on her staff. Next, she prepared the paperwork showing I had three part-time jobs on campus, to prove I was self-supporting. She made no mention of my grant monies, to eliminate the possibility that my father might seize them as he had done with my bank account.
When the police returned with their warrant, she showed them the documents and argued that I could not now be detained as a minor. The police scratched their heads and went back to the judge who had issued the warrant. For the next several hours, I sat in Brady’s office, awaiting the judge’s decision. To pass the time I reviewed her family genealogy books. It turned out we both had distant relatives from Rensselauer County, New York. Finally, the police returned to confirm that the warrant had been withdrawn. My father’s attack had been repelled. From then on, Dean Brady remained my firm ally, and I her grateful friend.6
I had already begun my work in earnest at several laboratories, officially working as a lab assistant, but with access to everything I needed for my assigned projects. This was the real reason I had been allowed into the system under such extraordinary circumstances. Most of my work was done in the nutrition lab, but I also had keys to several others, including the botany lab.
I saw very little of the professors who oversaw my “official” work in the nutrition lab, and they knew only that grants and equipment came along with me. The bottom line was that I was allowed to “putter around” in their labs after hours, once my required work on their projects had been done. They also understood, but would have been hesitant to acknowledge, that I had access to a couple of other labs in the medical center, though they never knew the full extent of what I was doing. And since I was an 18-year old coed, it would have been reasonable to conclude that it could not have been much.
The use of radiation in research involving human cells is considered dangerous and was highly regulated by licenses from the Atomic Energy Commission. Various departments at UF individually petitioned the AEC for its coveted permission. It was not only a time-consuming process, but it put UF in competition for licenses with other universities. Without licenses, there would be no research, and without research there would be no funding. The result was a combination of red tape and an unhealthy competition for favor.
By the early 1960s, UF was set to receive an avalanche of funding for scientific and medical research, thanks mostly to the influence of Florida’s powerful political delegation, especially UF’s own Senator Smathers.7 But the complex AEC licensing process was frustrating their efforts. They turned to those Florida politicians, such as Senator Smathers, who cared the most about university growth in the sciences in an era when NASA’s space program brought huge revenues and employment to the state. The idea was that the AEC would issue a master license to the university, which would issue sub-licenses to its various departments and be responsible for oversight. Technically, the AEC still issued the final licenses, but the real decisions as to which research got licensed would be made at the university level. It was a matter of patriotism to support such efforts, and the AEC agreed to allow the University of Florida to establish its own special committee to streamline the red tape problem and monitor research involving radioactive isotopes and human cells.8 It was called the Committee for the Human Use of Radio-isotopes, or CHUR, for short.
Coincidentally, all of this came about the same month I arrived at UF. And in order to facilitate the generous grants, CHUR was quick to relax the restrictive AEC standards, for the “greater good.” Applications for licenses for the “broad human use” of radiation were suddenly expedited. Thus I was able to pursue my work under an umbrella of various licenses issued to several professors, in whose labs I worked during this year of rapid expansion. While they knew what I was doing for them individually, none of them had any real knowledge of my other work.
I was at the peak of my physical attractiveness, and due to some good looks, my natural ability to get along with the opposite sex, and my unrestrained joy at having escaped months of tyrannical isolation, I welcomed the attentions of a rather large group of smart young male suitors.
One such suitor was a graduate engineering student from Iran. What I knew about him may have been shallow, but it was very important at the time: His father owned oil wells, and he drove a red Ferrari! We dated many times. When he asked me to convert to Islam so we could marry, I declined his offer, wondering how many wives he would eventually accumulate.
If this Persian prince attracted me, so did a handsome German student who almost won my heart. I remember one day when he took me riding on his motorcycle, and drove up to a plate-glass window where we could view our reflections.
“Look how good we look together, my darling!” he said.
The semester ended with no victors, and I was not about to go home, so I continued to study at UF during the summer session of 1962.
In June 1962, I took a world history class and there I met a young man named Robert Baker. I challenged him with some Russian phrases, and he countered with ancient Greek. I was charmed. Robert wanted to be a writer. Tall with dark wavy hair, deep blue eyes and a strong quiet personality, Robert possessed the requisite combination of good looks, brains and self-confidence that qualified him for my attention. He gladly entered the clutch of beaus who were making my days so happy.
My German boyfriend, impelled to send a love letter after spotting me at Robert’s side in the Campus Club, added that I shouldn’t be afraid of his wrath. “There is no need to fear me,” he wrote, knowing that I indeed did fear another suitor.9 This was an upperclassman from India who was studying nuclear physics. Armed with a compulsive personality, his affection turned to obsession, and he became so possessive that when he spotted me with another man, he would come up to me and say, “I keel you!”10
Despite this international cadre of prospective mates, all of whom were basically looking for a loose American girl to conquer, my Catholic upbringing prevailed. I still wanted to save myself for my future husband. Admittedly, this stands in sharp contrast to the amount of time I intentionally spent being pursued by the opposite sex. But I had a strategy that worked, at least for a while. I protected my virginity by playing my boyfriends off against each other. I frequently walked around campus with three or four guys at a time, all of them “guarding” me from the other. Over the next several weeks, Robert drove the others away, one by one, with his dominating behavior.
The last to surrender was a young Jewish boy named Don who stubbornly refused to give up my companionship. I was very fond of the slightly built young man, who visited me day and night for weeks. Don was passionate about life, and it was from him that I learned a man doesn’t have to have a big body to have a big heart. But Robert became my choice, or, more precisely, I became his. Perhaps he was just the last man standing in this Darwinian competition. Whatever the reason, by mid-summer of 1962, Robert and I were “going steady.”
But UF was not paying my tuition so I could flirt with boys. I was there because they knew I could work in profitable laboratories and conduct sophisticated research that few college students knew how to do.
Thanks to my training at Roswell Park, I knew a large number of advanced lab routines, so I was able to spend many hours helping in various UF laboratories whenever a substitute was needed.
Robert remained oblivious to my work. Unlike my other friends, he never even asked why I spent so much time at the Medical Center and in the basement of the Engineering Building where he would come to meet me. His disinterest in my personal life was actually a relief. Nor did he ask me what my life goals were, so I never told him. He towered over me both physically (by 10 inches) and psychologically; and he was cute, too. I felt safe at his elbow, and that he would defend me like a Doberman should the situation ever arise.
Robert’s parents, however, were growing suspicious of his romantic activities, because he had obviously moved away from a long steady relationship with his previous girlfriend, the daughter of an important business associate of theirs whom they hoped he would marry. So his parents decided to visit him in Gainesville to investigate. Something like, “Daddy has business in town. Let us take you and your lady friend out to dinner.”
At the same time, my own father was looking for an opportunity to re-open channels of communication with me after the calamity in Dean Brady’s office. He heard that a ham radio operators’ convention was being held in Gainesville, and used it as an excuse to inject himself into my life.11 So the forces of parental intervention collided one night at a dinner table in a nice restaurant in Gainesville. Robert and I felt obliged to attend, and make nice with both sets of our unwelcome and self-invited parents.
My father assumed that Robert had taken my virginity, though he did not ask me any direct questions to determine if it were true. In fact my virginity was doing just fine, thank you, but I wasn’t about to explain that to him. Let him think what he wanted and drive himself mad, if he must!
Things were tense from the beginning, particularly between my father and Robert. As dinner progressed, things got worse. Robert’s mother was obviously a blue-blooded snob who looked down on my family. When my father attempted to impress her with his social contacts in the entertainment industry, Robert’s mother rolled her eyes. My father’s contempt for “that stuck-up Protestant bitch” turned to hatred. I watched the meltdown with cold resignation.
My mother, who was a shade more diplomatic than my father, saw a tactical opportunity to extort an agreement out of me to return home for a visit before the next semester started. It would have been very awkward to refuse such an invitation in front of Robert’s parents, so I accepted. In fact, her invitation was little more than a plot to sabotage my relationship with Robert on her home court and in her own way.
The following week I decided to make the visit home because I missed my sister, who would soon graduate from high school, and was worried about my sick grandpa. Robert said he’d drive down to pick me up if I got trapped on Snead Island again. At first, things went well. I visited my grandfather in the hospital, and he was feeling better. I was also pleased to see that my aunt Elsie’s son, Ronnie, was living with my parents while he attended college. That relieved my concerns about Lynda: Ronnie knew how to defuse family squabbles and would protect her. He even worked after school with Lynda at Morrison’s cafeteria, so she had some income and wasn’t going to be isolated as I had been.
But things got tense that brief weekend when my mother informed me that she had set up a date with a nice young Catholic man, who’d been my boyfriend when I was thirteen. Even taller than Robert, he was now in medical school. If I married him, my mother said, I’d be the wife of a doctor in Winter Park. Surely the perfect match!
I felt obliged to honor her request so I went on the date, but in the end, as we stood together watching a fiery red Florida sunset I told him: “Sorry, it’s too late.”
My heart belonged to Robert.
That Sunday night I was supposed to catch the bus to return to Gainesville, but my father had started drinking and began to accuse me of being morally depraved. When my sister tried to intervene he slapped her so hard that I took Lynda’s hand and hurried her to her room, Dad following close behind. I shut the door and locked it, but he unlocked it in an instant and stood there yelling. “Forget about going to the bus station!” he shouted.
Finally, he left. At that time, I noticed a small scar on my sister’s forehead. “How did you get that scar?” I asked her.
“Oh,” she answered, “I just hit my head in the swimming pool.”
No way did I believe that: I knew her too well. She just didn’t want me worrying about her. The mark of the slap on Lynda’s face had turned an ugly red. Dad had gone outside to his boat so now Mama knocked on the door, offering to take me to the bus station. I told her I’d just call a cab, but she sadly admitted that Dad had torn all the telephones out of the walls, so I couldn’t call anybody! That’s when I realized how sick my father was becoming.12 We had to sneak out of the house while Dad was with his boat, and I managed to get on the bus in time, vowing never to return.
In September 1962, Gainesville hummed with the rhythm of a new school year about to begin. There was excitement in the air, and football games to attend, though for me, they lacked the excitement I had known at Manatee High School. But I was glad to be away again from my former life in Bradenton.
Grove Hall was being torn down, so we were removed to Yulee Hall. There I became the editor of its big dorm newspaper: Yuleevents. My friend Diane and I also won medals that semester for being members of the best Intramural Women’s team on campus, scoring tops in basketball, volleyball, and so on.
That year, the University of Florida adopted the new Trimester System, which divided the school year into three equal instructional periods instead of two long semesters and a short Summer Session: Fall 1962 was 1st Trimester of the 1962-63 school year. The Trimester System is a better system for many reasons, and most universities eventually switched over to it. At the time, though, that made UF out of synch with other schools, and this caused problems in terms of planning summer jobs and scholarship grants.
Once settled in my new dorm and snugly back in Robert’s arms, and with a job at the Craft Shop earning pin money, I plunged again into my studies and cancer research. Curiously, though Robert would observe me and my friend, Kathy Santi,13 working hard in our pre med classes — and he carried all those heavy science books for me when we met at Shands Hospital — he never asked what I planned to do with my life. His silence I took for great depth of thought rather than thoughtlessness, for his taciturnity, his chess-playing, his well-written short stories and his plans to become a writer had impressed me. But my science-oriented world influenced him more deeply than he would ever admit: soon Robert was blazing A’s through science and geology courses. After I encouraged him to visit the computer center, he was hooked, his truly great talents in mathematics awakened within him.
And meanwhile, the Cold War had started heating up again. In October, the U.S. Government announced that the Russians were moving offensive nuclear missiles into Cuba, less than 100 miles off the coast of Florida! On October 23, 1962, President Kennedy signed an order quarantining Cuba, to stop the arrival of Russian ships loaded with more missiles. A shiver rippled through the campus. Then the Cubans used a Russian surface-to-air missile to shoot down an American U-2 spy plane in Cuban airspace. 14 The tensions increased dramatically and the world drifted closer to the edge of nuclear annihilation. What would be next? Would America attack Cuba in retaliation? Would Castro launch his nuclear missiles at us? Would we all die before midterms?
I couldn’t help but remember my Cuban friend Tony López Fresquet and his passionate hatred for Fidel Castro. I sought out and found new anti-Castro friends drinking coffee in the Commons where they gathered to share their bitter frustrations. But Robert ignored my new friends. He thought I was interested in other cultures and languages because my roommate was an anthropologist. Nor did he see why I should be so excited about politics. “The world was here yesterday, it’s here today, and it will be here tomorrow,” he said. “Your worry or mine will never change a thing.”
One night at a football game, my Cuban friends in the section next to ours held an anti-Castro protest. I rose from my seat to join in, but Robert continued to sit quietly. “I stay out of everything,” he said calmly. “I just like to watch.”
I enjoyed all the petting and smooching, but by December, 1962, Robert’s patience was ending. I still refused to sleep with him, despite his relentless advances for nearly six months, for my Catholic upbringing trumped my amorous desires. After yet another fruitless expedition without success, Robert dropped me off at the dorm and said, “I’m not coming back until you grow up.”
I just let him go, figuring that if he really wanted me, he would be back. But after waiting two miserable weeks for his return I sought advice from some girl friends. They encouraged me to let him have his way.
So I called Robert, and simply said, “I give up. You win.”
He said, “I’ll be right over.”
Like everyone else, I still remember that fateful day. My friends Kathy, Diane and Mickey cheered me on as I ran out of the dormitory to embrace Robert. He promptly picked me up and carried me away to his blue Ford coupe. It was not long before I kissed my virginity goodbye. Truly emancipated! Or so I thought.
January and February were a delightful time for me, as indicated by the frilly layout of the Valentine’s Day edition of my dorm’s newspaper. As a result of my new night-time hobby, I had to resign from Honor Council for repeatedly breaking curfew. Then, in the early spring of 1963, despite all my precautions and the fact that I had been told I was incapable of having children, I became pregnant. I was shocked.
What if my parents found out? What if Ochsner and Smathers found out?
Even Robert’s deep-keeled calm was shaken. He vanished for several days to think over his options. Abortion was out of the question, a legacy of my Catholic upbringing. Then the problem was solved. I suffered a miscarriage. I made it to the school’s infirmary with so much blood dripping down my legs that there was no way to hide my condition. Since I was obviously not married, the staff quickly deduced that I had lost an “illegitimate” conception, a big taboo back in 1963. I collapsed into a hospital bed and did my best to rest and recover my health.
A couple of days later, Robert strolled into my room. The staff could scarcely believe that the fellow responsible for my condition dared show his face. The fact that he did so in such a nonchalant manner galled them even more. In contrast, my friend Don visited me with deference and empathy. His honest face was scarlet the whole time he stood at my bedside, even though he was not the one responsible for my pregnancy.
Robert returned, ignoring the conspicuous stares and whispers. He took my limp hand and whispered to me, “I’ve decided I don’t want to take this kind of risk again.”
Huh? What did he mean? Was he going to leave me? Or have a vasectomy? I was bewildered and remained silent.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he said. “So I’ve decided to marry you.”
I was still weak from the miscarriage, so I simply looked at him blankly.
Later, I began thinking about his “proposal” and realized that Robert had not asked me to marry him. He had simply informed me we would be married. How romantic! No diamond, no flowers, no sunset, and no bended knee. To receive such an “offer” in that time and place stunned me. I did not know how to feel. I was numb from it all.
My stay in the infirmary was longer than I expected. I missed classes, assignments, lab work and an important interview for a summer position. When I finally recovered my strength enough to return to classes, I left the Infirmary and headed to the Nutrition Lab. As I raced to catch up on my classwork, I finished up my blood sedimentation research, which developed a titration model able to provide statistically significant evidence of live cancer cells in the human body. Simply said, I did not have time to sit around the Craft Shop earning petty cash. So, by the time the school year ended I was broke.
I also missed important interviews that had been scheduled for summer job positions I had applied for. It was the end of March, 1963.
UF was now firmly on a trimester system, but its grant schedule had not yet adapted to it. Of particular concern to me was that my scholarships were set up for only two payouts a year, so I needed summer income.
I had already applied for summer lab internships in three different states and expected to be accepted, so I did not make plans at UF. But due to my miscarriage I missed required phone interviews, and lost out.
Facing a summer without study or income I telephoned Smathers’ office, hoping he would be willing to sponsor me for a summer internship at Miami University. But the senator was out of town, so I explained to a sympathetic female aide about how my miscarriage had affected my summer plans, and made my request. She said she’d see what she could do. Several hours later I received a call, not from Senator Smathers’ office but from Dr. Ochsner himself. I was thrilled to hear his voice and figured he was calling to help me, but soon he had me cowering.
“What is the matter with you?” he thundered.
“First, you wanted to be a nun. The stupidest thing in the world!”
I humbly agreed. It had been stupid. But Ochsner wasn’t finished.
“The next thing I know,” he went on, “after all the pains we took to rescue you from your own parents, you get pregnant and have a miscarriage!”
I sadly admitted that this was so.
“Judy!” Ochsner roared, “Will you please make up your mind?”
I said that I was sorry and asked for his forgiveness. Mollified, Dr. Ochsner revealed that his star cancer specialist was interested in having me work in her lab as an intern for the summer. Would I like to come to New Orleans and work with Dr. Mary Sherman?
I had heard of Dr. Sherman through my study of cancer research. She directed the bone pathology laboratory at Ochsner Clinic, which helped put them on the map as a respected medical center. She also wrote brilliant articles that influenced the debate about the fundamental nature of cancer, and was considered one of the foremost cancer researchers in America.
“She’s a good steady woman,” Ochsner explained. “Just what you need to guide you.” He told me that he had shown Dr. Sherman some of the reports I continued to send him, and she was interested in my blood sedimentation research. She also needed a lab assistant familiar with handling the carcinogenic SV-40 virus and fast-growing cancers. She would like me to work in her lab this summer, should I decide to come to New Orleans instead of Miami.
Dr. Ochsner suddenly changed subjects and asked me how I felt about Fidel Castro. I assured him that I thought Castro was a dreadful Communist dictator whose behavior was criminal, and who should be removed from power, by force if necessary. “Good girl,” he chimed in with amusement and approval.
Then Dr. Ochsner sweetened the pot, making his offer irresistible. If I came and worked with Mary Sherman for the summer, I could skip the rest of my undergraduate education and enter Tulane Medical School in the fall. Tulane accepted undergrad students only on rare occasions, he cautioned, but he stressed he had influence there. What an offer!
Next Dr. Ochsner put the cherry on top. He reminded me that Mary Sherman was from the University of Chicago and he would see to it that she used her influence there to get me into the UC medical school the following spring, should I still desire to go. He had me, hook, line and sinker. I gratefully accepted his offer and promised heaven and earth in return.
Then, with the air of a man covering a few routine details, he said my tuition to Medical School would be paid, my room and board would be covered and a stipend would be provided to cover other expenses. The good Dr. said he would send me a oneway bus ticket to New Orleans, and that I would stay at a YWCA where my rent would be taken care of as it had been in Buffalo. Then Dr. Ochsner said, “I’ll see you the second week in May!” and abruptly hung up.
Uh-oh! The second week in May was almost a month away. UF was on the trimester system, but Tulane was obviously not. My school year had already ended. How was I going to survive in the meantime? I was already almost completely broke, and I was about to lose my dorm room because I wasn’t registered for the summer.
Normally, a student who lived in Florida would simply have gone home for a summer break, but my disastrous home life had passed far beyond such simple solutions. The idea of being a guest in my father’s house repulsed me. We had gone our separate ways, and with good reason. I just couldn’t go home. I needed a game plan. Most of my friends were already out of town, and Robert lived in a boarding house that didn’t allow girlfriends. I thought about calling Dr. Ochsner back, but he had called long distance from Washington, D.C. I didn’t even know where he was.
Suddenly, I realized that I could have my cake and eat it too, if I could lure Robert to a university in New Orleans. Their petroleum geology schools were superior to anything in Florida at the time. We’d have time to marry and have a honeymoon before I started my summer work for Dr. Sherman.
I took Robert to the university’s library and showed him a New Orleans newspaper full of ads from petroleum companies pleading for summer help, and saw to it that he wrote some of the addresses down.
I told him that I would probably be working in a medical lab in New Orleans, but held back the idea of starting medical school in the fall.15 I didn’t want him to think I was leaving him. Robert had only one trimester left at Gainesville before graduation. If we married, we would only have to live apart for about four months. Given his disposition I was concerned that he might not marry me under those circumstances so I wanted him to see New Orleans first, get to know their superior geology departments, and then decide for himself.
I did tell Robert I was out of money and would not be returning to UF. Though he drooped when I told him I would be leaving UF, he also understood my problems with my family. He said, quietly, “I still want to marry you.”
“Honey, I don’t want to push you,” I told him. “But you haven’t mentioned any particular time for us to get married... and I can’t stay any longer.”
What I didn’t mention was my disappointment that Robert hadn’t purchased an engagement ring, but I did not dare bring it up.
Maybe he just couldn’t afford it.
Knowing I couldn’t bring up the ring gracefully, I told Robert that if he didn’t marry me I couldn’t get birth control pills. He would just have to use condoms, because I wasn’t going to risk another traumatic episode in an infirmary. If anything could inspire Robert to marry it was the specter of having to use condoms. Only married couples could obtain birth control pills in 1963. At least in Florida, bachelors had to take their showers wearing a raincoat. The decision was now up to him.
On April 16, 1963, I heard the words I longed for: Robert said he would apply for a job in New Orleans and come there to marry me. At last!
As he held me in his arms and kissed me I heard him say, “I love you,” for the first time. Robert was a man of few words, but these were the magic ones.
“But first, I have to go home to Fort Walton Beach,” he told me, sucking the air from my romantic balloon. “My folks need me at their office. But I’ll convince them that going to Louisiana means a moneymaking career in geoscience, instead of starvation as a writer.” Robert smiled. “That should do the trick.”
Tensions were still high over the girlfriend issue and he dared not mention me to his parents, since they still felt I had somehow derailed him from fulfilling their dreams. “We’ll have to figure out how to stay in contact,” he told me. Meanwhile, I could go on to New Orleans alone. He would join me when he could.
A courier service delivered the bus ticket to my dorm box and I now held in my hand the ability to try a little life on my own before having to report to Dr. Sherman for a summer of disciplined science and research. I savored the thought that this would include my right to take a husband if I so chose. If the conditions were right, and if he showed up.
After I told Robert that the campus cafeterias had closed and I would need to find another place to eat, he decided to drive me to the bus station so I could begin free housing at the “Y.” The cheapskate!
He dropped me off at the bus station on his way to a beer bust at Lake Wauberg celebrating the trimester’s early end. He did invite me to come with him, but due to my solemn oath against drinking alcohol I declined. As I waited to board the bus, Robert warmed me with kisses and gave me fourteen little pink pages. On each page were the words “I love you,” in different script styles.
“Tear them off one by one, once a day” he said, “I’ll be there before you look at the last one.”
As I waved goodbye to Robert, my eyes misted with tears. A whole new life was twenty-four hours away! What if he got cold feet and didn’t show? What if I changed my mind? Either way, I still had a future in New Orleans. If Robert did come, I would then confide much more about my plans. I’d tell him I would be staying in New Orleans to start medical school in the fall, and not returning to Gainesville. If he really cared, he could work all summer with me in New Orleans, get interviews at the fine grad schools there, make the contacts he would need, and together, we could start building ourselves a little love nest.
Then he would return to Florida, remain loyal and faithful for one more trimester, graduate, and return to his loving wife in New Orleans. Both of us would then be properly positioned to embark on our glittering new careers: me, the insightful cancer researcher, and he, the well-compensated geologist.
Meanwhile, I would enjoy the history and romance of America’s most exotic city. The same famous doctor who had quietly shepherded my career for the past few years would be there directing and protecting me with his gruff, fatherly concern. I held his commitment in my hand, in the form of a prepaid bus ticket. Plus I had $42.00 in cash, for emergencies. I had it all worked out.
What could go wrong?
_____________________________________
1. Today, the age of majority is 18, but in the 1960s, you were legally considered a child until the age of 21, except that you could join the military, if you chose.
2. Gainesville is located in the central part of northern Florida, halfway between Miami and Atlanta, Ga., about 130 miles southwest of Jacksonville.
3. Monthly reports were sent religiously to Dr. Ochsner from the fall of 1961 through spring, 1963, though I never received any feedback.
4. Dr. Moore was my inspiration for this idea: he was the world pioneer in detecting cancer cells in vivo using fluorescence and radioisotopes, via his virtual invention of scintigraphy, the science of tracking the distribution of radioactive tracer substances in body tissues. He reported the basics relating to this science, using radio-fluorescence, at the 4th annual Science Writer’s Seminar that I had attended in Florida in 1961.
5. I later learned that my Grandpa’s college loan money was used to buy my mother a mink cape and a set of golf clubs. I had significant funds that were left behind at St. Francis, too, but I never saw a dime of it and assume my father confiscated the money from that account as well.
6. But the combination of my late registration and these legal maneuvers created a technical problem for me. A new student number had to be generated for me in the computer to replace my original number which was needed to pay my dorm bills, get my meals, and pay for my books. The confusion as to my identity in the U of F record system continued for years. The good news was it was guaranteed that I’d pass every subject, so I didn’t have to attend classes regularly. The down side was that at the end of the semester the computer awarded me randomly generated grades. I received an A, two Bs, a C and a D. This resulted in an average GPA, but the D was in chemistry! Grrr! The computer generated a second set of similar trash the next semester, too, before I could straighten some of it out with petitions. Despite those unimpressive grades, I continued with a full scholarship and was awarded a letter of recognition for ‘outstanding’ scholarship (see Appendix) for what I accomplished behind the scenes. My premed classes were not on the “official record” either, since those classes were closed before I’d even arrived, but I was told this would last only one year. My records became so jumbled that eventually I was blessed with two identical degrees. But I was told the computer problem didn’t matter, because the people who really mattered would take good care of me.
7. Florida was blessed with legendary Congressmen such as Claude Pepper, Robert Sikes and Wilbur Mills and led by Senior Senator George Smathers. Smathers helped secure Senate support for Kennedy’s proposal to ban nuclear bomb tests in the atmosphere (Ref: interview with Harold Brown, Director of Research Engineering, Dept. of Defense: 1963 Partial test ban treaty, JFK Doc. #5, 6/26/1964, p.38)
8. I have referred to this as the “window of opportunity” in various interviews. CHUR only existed for two years, and was shut down.
9. My editors decided that his letter should not be reprinted in this book. Steve was a fine fellow, though. I think he returned to Germany.
10. Once, my former boyfriend from India pretended to offer reconciliation to Robert by inviting us to dine at his sparsely-furnished apartment (we sat on the floor to eat there). Sneakily, he laced Robert’s food with so much cayenne pepper that he nearly choked on it. Robert’s face turned red and he started perspiring, but Robert stoically ate every bite, too proud to admit that the conspicuously over-spiced food bothered him. Mine, however, had not been spiced in the same manner.
11. My father had been a licensed ham radio operator since childhood. Besides having been an electrical engineer who had run the technical end of a television station, he wrote a column, “CALLING C-Q” that ran in the South Bend Tribune in his high school years. Two of his call letter IDs were W8AUG and K4KDM.
12. My father’s leg kept him in agony: he had become a man I no longer recognized. About a decade later, his leg was finally amputated at the knee. For the next few years, Dad was his old self again, free of pain, sober, and willing to forgive me. He earned commendations when a hurricane hit Florida in 1972, using his ham radio operator skills to keep police radio contacts going where floods had stranded elderly people, despite his amputated leg and the possibility that he could have drowned. I began to be proud of him again. But then an infection from his amputation created blood poisoning. It began destroying his mitral heart valve, and Daddy died of a heart attack on my birthday — May 15, 1977, just as we had finally forgiven each other and tried to make up for the past.
13. Kathy Santi would become a respected and admired doctor.
14. On October 27, 1962 Cuba shot down an American military plane (U-2), which brought us dangerously close to war. On October 17, Cuba was discovered to be readying missiles armed with nuclear warheads — and they were aimed at the major cities of America. It would only take a few minutes for them to hit the Capitol. October 18-29, 1962, the famed Thirteen Days of the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world nearly to the brink. Nuclear war was a real possibility between Russia and the USA: being only 90 miles from Cuba, Florida would have been annihilated if Castro shot missiles carrying nuclear bombs at us. I remember seeing tanks rolling down the highway toward the Florida Keys. I showed Robert where the University’s underground computer facility was at this time, in case we had more than a minute to take cover.
15. Robert’s mother regularly drove up to Ochsner Clinic for therapy on her arm (a recurring rotator cuff injury in her shoulder), and sometimes took her ailing mother (Nonnie) there, too, so I didn’t specifically mention Ochsner Clinic to Robert, in case he might accidentally reveal my whereabouts to someone who might tell his mother, or my parents. I only told Robert I was going to take a Civil service exam so I could get a permanent job in New Orleans “in a lab or clinic.” In fact, I was advised to take the Civil service Exam when I filled out my application papers so that I could “do lab work, if necessary” at the U.S. Public Health Service facility. Edward T. Haslam has uncovered information about this facility and goes into some detail about the clandestine work that went on there in 1963 in his book Dr. Mary’s Monkey. Here is an excerpt from the letter I wrote to Robert a week after my arrival, mentioning the Civil Service exam:
The all-important first birth control pill was taped to the letter after we got married! Note name “Raleigh” (Raleigh Rourke, Robert’s friend). Also note auto accident of the stripper’s fiancé mentioned in second-last line...
