Long before medicine and science were able to recognize and diagnose the physical and mental conditions collectively called learning disabilities, people struggled with them, often frustratingly unaware their difficulties were the result of something they were not responsible for and couldn’t fix on their own. Many gave up, condemning themselves to stigma and a second-class life. Others applied their remaining powers to invent work-arounds. In no profession is this more difficult than the military.
The son of two Lockheed employees, Don Ray was born in Hollywood and grew up in the eastern parts of the San Fernando Valley, the huge, football-shaped valley that is mostly the northern half of the city of Los Angeles. Both his father and later his stepfather physically abused Don and his siblings. By the time Don started high school, he exhibited the symptoms of what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. He was also moderately dyslexic.
Despite his reading disorder, Don made his way through high school by devising strategies that hid his problem from teachers. To create a science report, he would copy text from an encyclopedia and then rewrite it. For a bibliography, he gambled the teacher wouldn’t check the book titles and authors he invented. He made it to graduation and immediately enlisted. After basic training at Fort Ord, California, he went through MP training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Then he was sent to Okinawa for training with a canine partner, Fritz.
“We met our dogs, all German shepherds, on Okinawa. Then, after six weeks of training together, we all went to Vietnam,” Ray recalled.
He was sent to Soc Trang, deep in the Mekong delta, where he volunteered with the Soc Trang Civic Action Group to teach English. “In our free time, we helped rebuild schools and orphanages,” he said. At night, Ray and Fritz were tasked with patrolling the airfield perimeter. Within two months, many of the dog handlers who were old-timers went home, and Ray became the ranking dog handler in the detachment. “Then the sergeant in charge of our unit and our veterinarian technician were both arrested for black marketing,” Ray explained. And he suddenly found himself in the role of the detachment’s acting veterinarian technician.
The nearest qualified veterinarian technician was a helicopter ride away in Dong Tam. Ray wrote to friends at home and asked them to send books on the care of dogs. “I used an old encyclopedia and those books to try and learn anything about canine health issues. Just before I became the acting vet tech, one of our dogs got sick. His nose started bleeding, and he was sent to the veterinary hospital at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. That was when I learned there was a disease going around that affected only American dogs. They called it idiopathic hemorrhagic syndrome, or nosebleed disease. No one knew what caused it.”
Before a cure was found, this disease took the lives of some 250 army dogs. One night, another of Ray’s dogs began to bleed. “Our dogs had priority over soldiers when it came to an emergency medevac,” he explained. “I demanded the medevac take me and this dog to Saigon.”
For some reason, the pilot said he could take them only as far as Dong Tam. Ray awakened the duty officer there and asked for a helicopter to take his dog to Saigon. When the duty officer declined, Ray demanded that the commanding officer be awakened. “He ordered two pilots to fly us to Saigon in a gunship.”
By the time the gunship landed at Tan Son Nhut’s hospital, the dog had stopped breathing. “This was the hospital that treated people, and it caused a stir. Everyone came to see my dog. I had my books, and I ran through the encyclopedia to see how to give artificial respiration to a dog,” he continued. This involved lifting the dog’s leg while pushing on its chest. But first, Ray had to cut the gauze tied around the dog’s legs to prevent him from jumping off the helicopter. Ray called out for help. “A nurse pushed her way through the crowd and asked what she could do.” He told her to cut off the leg restraints. When the dog’s legs were free, “I pushed on his chest and the nurse lifted his leg—and suddenly the dog was breathing again,” Ray recalled. Veterinarian clinic doctors sent a Jeep to fetch the dog. “I never got to thank that nurse or find out who she was,” Ray recalled, still grateful for her help.
During his brief stay at the hospital, Ray saw the full effects of this ailment and vowed to do something about it. The dog he brought to Saigon, however, died of the disease as well.
Ray had made it through high school with a mixture of hard work and cunning ideas to hide his limited reading skills. Now he took it upon himself to find a way to save not only his beloved Fritz but every American dog in Vietnam.
Back in the delta, at Can Tho, he met with a veterinarian who explained the first symptom of this disease was inflammation of the nose, but by then it was too late to save the dog, because they had not yet identified the particular virus or bacterium that caused the disease. A dog could be saved only if the disease was discovered before the symptoms appeared. That meant taking blood from the dogs every week to measure the ratio of red blood cells to white blood cells, the hematocrit. Soc Trang had no veterinary facility, but Ray asked the doctor to teach him how to take the dogs’ blood.
“The next day I took blood from a dog and went to a dispensary at the airfield where technicians could test it,” Ray recalled. He asked a technician to give him a white blood cell count and a hematocrit for the blood he had drawn.
When the technicians examined the sample, they realized it wasn’t human blood and refused to test it. Ray asked them to teach him how to examine the blood and determine the hematocrit for each sample. “I told them I had twelve dogs and needed to get their individual hematocrits every week.”
One of the technicians said, “What do we get out of this?”
They struck a bargain. The technicians were required to give weekly blood samples that could be compared with other blood cultures. If Ray would give his own blood every week, they would teach him how to determine hematocrits and allow him to use the lab to work up his dogs’ blood. Ray agreed.
He began by charting each dog’s hematocrit. After three or four weeks he noticed one of the dog’s white cell count had dipped, so he sent it to Tan Son Nhut Air Base.
When Ray was transferred to Vung Tau, a seaside community where American soldiers took in-country R & R, he was assigned a new dog, Ralph, and returned to patrolling the perimeter of the local ammunition dump. In February 1969, the enemy launched a second Tet Offensive, and Vung Tau was hit with dozens of rockets and mortar rounds. Ray and Ralph survived.
Shortly afterward, the dog handlers were ordered to clean their dogs’ teeth, a complicated and sensitive procedure that few handlers knew how to do. But Ray knew. One of his peers asked where he had learned to do it, and he explained he had been a vet tech at Soc Trang.
“Then you’re the one whose dog survived,” said another MP. “The dog you sent was the first dog ever to survive nosebleed disease.”
Because Ray had detected the decrease in white blood cells before the symptoms had started, the dog had survived, and Ray’s work gave other doctors the opportunity to isolate the offending bacterium and develop a vaccine to protect the dogs from infection. The cure was tetracycline, a broad-spectrum antibiotic often used to cure human infections.
In his own offbeat, dogged way, Don Ray opened the door to saving thousands of valuable dogs. He said, “There are many people who hold a pipe in their hand and say, ‘Ah, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,’ but many Vietnam veterans just solve the problem and don’t wait for the pipe smokers. So I solved that problem myself.”
Although he didn’t pursue a medical career, Ray’s experience in Vietnam became the foundation for his lifelong interest in research. When he was honorably discharged in 1972, he had his heart set on becoming a veterinarian. It was not to be. The preveterinary classes he needed to take at Pierce College in Los Angeles were full.
Still, it was during this period Ray learned his reading problem had a name. “I had scotopic sensitivity syndrome, and that prevented me from being able to read for more than five or ten minutes without my eyes watering and the words jumping all over the page,” he recalled. He was also diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “I wasn’t the hyperactive kind,” he explained. “I was just disorganized.”
Rising to the challenge, Ray remembered an eleventh-grade experience. As part of a journalism class, he was on the staff of the school newspaper. One day he learned the teacher had assigned the students to write an editorial. He hadn’t brought any research materials, had done no reading, and knew he would flunk the class if he didn’t turn in some kind of editorial.
“I had taken notes and paid attention in class. I knew all the elements of an editorial, but I didn’t have a topic,” Ray recalled. “I looked up at the clock. Next to it was the American flag, which I already knew had forty-eight stars. But this was 1966. Alaska and Hawaii had joined the union years earlier.
“So I wrote an editorial noting that we daily pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,” Ray continued. “But every day thousands of Burbank students pledged the allegiance to a flag that is not the flag of the United States, because that flag has fifty stars and ours had only forty-eight.”
Outraged parents called the board of education and were told that, no, the flags were all fifty stars. The teacher/publisher of the paper demanded to know how Ray had researched his editorial. He said he had counted the stars on all the flags in all his classes. The editor sent people to every school in the district; none found a fifty-star flag.
The fifty-star flags were eventually found in a district warehouse.
Ray got an A in the class.
That memory prompted him to enroll at California State University, Northridge, where he studied journalism. When he graduated, he accepted a job as an administrator with the US Postal Inspection Service. He didn’t much care for the work, but in his spare time, he began working on recovering the history of the 1928 St. Francis Dam flood, California’s second-worst disaster after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
The Los Angeles Times published a lengthy account of the disaster, including the following facts. Built under the direction of William Mulholland, the thirteen-hundred-foot-long concrete dam held a reservoir of some twelve billion gallons of water. At midnight on March 12, 1928, the dam burst, sending a ten-story-high wall of water toward the Pacific Ocean. Several towns, dozens of ranches, an Edison construction camp, an Indian reservation and trading post, and an enormous electrical powerhouse were flooded. Twelve hundred houses were demolished and ten bridges were destroyed.
No one knows how many died. In August 1928, the official toll was 385, but the remains of victims continued to be found; though many victims were swept out to sea, so far their remains have not been recovered. Some were washed ashore as far south as Mexico. The remains of those lost turned up along the California coast into the 1990s.
Among those assumed to have perished was the wife of the dam keeper, Tony Harnischfeger. As part of the volunteer project to recover the lost history of this disaster, Ray went looking for the former Mrs. Harnischfeger. He learned she had died, but he found some of her relatives, which led him to a few survivors.
The volunteer project then planned a fiftieth anniversary banquet for the handful of survivors. The event received national publicity and 175 people showed up.
“We realized each of these survivors had an incredible story of their survival fifty years earlier—an unknown and unsuspected history. And we decided we needed to record their accounts,” Ray said.
This and other discoveries Ray made for the project led to a job at the NBC station in Los Angeles, the start of a long career in journalism. Ray became widely known as the go-to guy to teach anyone how to mine data from the public records.
As part of a Channel 4 investigative team, Ray scored many scoops, the first of which involved Jim Jones, the charismatic cult leader of the 1978 Jonestown massacre in which 909 followers died, all but two from cyanide poisoning. While researching the event shortly after it happened, Ray discovered that Jones had been previously arrested for lewd conduct, but the case had never gone to trial, and the records had been sealed. He realized that if this arrest had been public knowledge, Jones might never have been able to take his followers out of the country, and their lives might have been saved.
Over the next decades, Ray uncovered other scoops while working at a variety of TV stations, including:
• a 1993 accusation of child abuse by entertainer Michael Jackson;
• a price-fixing conspiracy by America’s largest oil refiners;
• an unreported partial meltdown and release of radioactive gas by a Southern California nuclear reactor in 1959;
• a music teacher who led a group that staged fraudulent auto accidents to collect insurance money;
• a legal error that allowed attorneys to unseal boxes of documents related to the infamous Skid Row Stabber, revealing a possible second suspect;
• a scheme whereby President Ronald Reagan’s friends bought an expensive home in elite Bel Air and, through an elaborate sequence of events, transferred ownership to Reagan in such a way that he paid nothing for a house valued at more than $3 million1;
• a prominent man who for years falsely claimed to have flown in combat over North Korea during the war.
For some forty years, Ray trained law enforcement officials, paralegals, reporters, and private investigators from coast to coast in the intricacies of searching every sort of public record to find facts relevant to civil and criminal cases and to investigations of every sort. Long before it became easy and fashionable, he self-published A Public Records Primer and Investigator’s Handbook, a book on accessing public records. Even today there’s a copy of this book on the desk of every reporter in Southern California.
Today, he’s still dedicated to preserving important records. He created the nonprofit The Endangered History Project Inc., which preserves “almost anything of possible historical value, including old films, old recordings, old photos, manuscripts, letters, World War II letters, and so forth,” he explained.
He’s now working on a book about finding lost relatives by researching public records.