At the end of my first week in practice, I finished my only afternoon patient, looked at the four walls of my office and wondered if I’d be confined there for the next forty years. I could not have imagined that in that span of time I would visit and teach in seventy-five countries. In fact, I made so many trips abroad that I often longed for more time at home.
My wanderlust was ignited at a relatively early age. I spent the summer between college and medical school working as a merchant mariner. Ever since my aborted attempt to stow away, I’d hoped for an opportunity to go to sea. Living in a port city endowed me with a fascination for ships that exceeded any nautical skill or talent I might have had. In June of 1951, I signed on as a wiper in the engine room of an oil tanker traveling to South America. A wiper’s job is easy to describe: he walks around the hot engines of the ship, wiping up excess oil. I would have preferred starting as a mess man, where I could at least wash dishes, but even after four years of college I was not qualified to do more than wipe oil from the engines.
Even if we had not been kidnapped and held for ransom, I’d have always cherished the memory of my three months with the merchant mariners. The men were almost all veterans of World War II, either as sailors or in the merchant marine itself.
There were some misfits here, people who could not adjust to unstructured civilian life and needed a programmed job and life to survive. Onboard ship, there was no need for independent decision making. Even the work itself, on a modern ship, was carefully programmed. However, not all of the crew were unable to obtain other work—many were college graduates, and quite a few had wives and children and happy home lives, despite being away for many months at a time.
During and immediately after World War II, the navy sailors deeply resented the merchant mariners, who were subject to the same dangers and discomforts as navy personnel, but received a much higher pay rate. The merchant mariners had other benefits too. For example, they ate elaborate meals not shared by the navy. Since they were not members of the military, they could bargain and complain with impunity, a luxury not shared by the sailors, though they served on the same ships, providing antiaircraft support and other military assignments. (In recent years this resentment has now re-emerged, but in reverse: now the merchant mariners want benefits provided to the military vet, such as GI college tuition and government-subsidized life insurance.) In the postwar world, though, most merchant mariners’ career prospects had shrunk to little more than sequestering themselves on ships doing monotonous manual labor. They worked four-hour shifts, returned to their sparse cubicles to read girly magazines and looked forward to their one evening per month in port, when they promptly spent their entire month’s pay.
My immediate superior in the engine room was Arthur Smalls, a black engineer, a graduate of the Merchant Marine Academy and my wise and kindly mentor throughout my summer on the ship.
We were docked at the port of Maracaibo, the second-largest city and second-largest port in Venezuela, along with another American tanker, when we became the target of a rebel group attempting to overthrow the government. This group commandeered any foreign ships that entered its area of unofficial authority.
I’d expected, in my naïveté, to see bandanna-wearing pirates with daggers clenched in their teeth. But these modern pirates came on board wearing white linen suits. Their behavior was almost polite, until they entered the engine room. There, a senior mate, a veteran of World War II and the celebrated and deadly Murmansk Run, informed our invaders that this was an American ship, he was an American and he would not see his American ship violated. To me, this guy was a hero nonpareil. The rebels came down the steps into the engine room, where they were met with more resistance than they expected. The cook and all of his mess men were armed with meat cleavers. The cook threw a cleaver at the rebel chief, who promptly turned and ran back up the stairs. About an hour later he reappeared, backed by fully armed, wine-inebriated rebel forces. The meat-cleaving defenders, as well as the rest of us, were marched off to a waiting bus. I assumed our next stop would be prison, followed by a firing squad.
Instead, we were taken to a place that looked to me like a motel, consisting of many individual cabins facing a courtyard. In the center of the courtyard was a sandbagged hole adorned with a large, Gatling-type machine gun. As we descended from the bus, we were given a quick salute—a machine gun blast into the air, demonstrating for us its ballistic potential.
I began to worry.
Of course, I had seen enough World War II movies to know for a certainty that the marines would come to rescue us. If my father knew of my situation, he would immediately contact our senator, the local police chief and our rabbi—each of whom, I thought, had the potential for working miracles to free us. If none of them could be reached, our employer, the American Oil Company, would surely help.
The rebels informed us that they were, in fact, in touch with our bosses on the matter of a ransom. Any decision regarding our future would depend on the company’s acceptance of the rebels’ terms. This made me all the more certain that the marines were on their way. But the only American military presence in the Caribbean at that moment turned out to be a nineteenth-century training schooner from Annapolis, crewed by high school students learning rope knots on their summer vacations.
We spent two terrified days and nights as prisoners, and the only thing that kept me from sinking into uncontrollable depression was the strength of Mr. Smalls, who removed a piece of wood from the adjoining door of our cells and kept up constant conversation with me, offering encouragement and confidence. If it is possible to grow up in a day or two, I did then. When any of my later foreign adventures veered into the dangerous zone, I told myself, “Well, I survived the Venezuela incident.”
Some deal was made, some payment extracted from the American Oil Company and we were released. If the rebels considered this a victory, it was short-lived: the American-supported junta was firmly back in power by the next year.
That early experience did not deter me from travel, even in South America. The local political situations added a certain edge to what might have become routine medical seminars and lectures.
It wasn’t always easy to assess just how dangerous a situation might be. Many years after the Venezuela incident, I traveled to Bogotá, Colombia, to teach a postgraduate course to specialists in allergy-immunology. The day before Nancy and I arrived (along with John Salvaggio, a representative of the National Institutes of Health and their wives), it happened that Carlos Lehrer, a popular figure who was head of a Colombian drug cartel, was captured in the United States. Colleagues of Mr. Lehrer in Bogotá had threatened to kill an American every day that their chief was in prison.
The American embassy informed us that we might be in great danger. We were provided with guards to ensure our safety. No one considered canceling the postgraduate course; that, we thought, would only encourage the criminals. We three American couples were placed on one floor of the hotel and all of the non-Americans were moved to other floors. Three guards with high-powered weapons were positioned outside the doors to each of our rooms. “Why three?” asked my wife. The answer was chilling: two could be bought off, but it was difficult to buy off three at a time.
At least I had the thrill of my very own personal bodyguard, an obese, elderly, avuncular gentleman who followed me everywhere I went. And I mean everywhere. He was about the last person you would expect to be a security agent, but he enabled me to experience what I imagined the president and his family must feel to have Secret Service agents around at all times. I wonder if the president has the same difficulty with urinary retention in the presence of a security agent standing behind him. I guess that’s the price of leadership.
Nancy was worried, and I think she hoped that everything was being overplayed and overly dramatized. When we went to a cocktail party at the Spanish ambassador’s home that evening, she expressed her concerns about safety to the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, who assured us that everything was secure and there was no danger whatsoever to Americans. I enjoyed the evening, but later on, when I happened to look out the window, I spotted the ambassador’s wife leaving the party. Instead of going home in an automobile, she climbed into a small-armed vehicle escorted by U.S. Marines. We read in the newspaper a few days later that she had returned to the United States because of concerns for her safety.
During this visit, one of my Colombian colleagues told me something troubling: the Soviets were taking advantage of the political unrest in South America and America’s waning support of our Latin American neighbors. They were inviting medical graduates from South America to visit the Soviet Union for advanced training. While these graduates were given some marginal state-of-the-art training, they were also heavily indoctrinated with Soviet propaganda relative to East-West relationships. They were, in effect, buying a segment of the future intelligentsia as advocates for the Soviet cause. We, as Americans, offered nothing like that for these young, sometimes impoverished graduates.
Nancy and I decided to inform the State Department. They must not be aware of this effort, or, we thought, they would have taken some counteraction. We made an appointment with the U.S. embassy in Bogotá and were assigned to a very nice agent, who was quite concerned about what we told him. He asked if we would help with names and places, and try to collect some of the information that was being provided by the Russians to these South American physicians. We spent some of our time in Colombia doing exactly that. We were in an excellent position to learn many details through our Latin American hosts that might not be available or obvious to a formal fact-finding group. We really felt that we were of service to our government.
When we returned to the embassy, our handler told us that we needed a little basic training in intelligence gathering. We couldn’t imagine how we could possibly be more discreet, so our young agent elaborated: we had faced the window when we sat in the room with the State Department interrogator assigned to the embassy. High-efficiency listening devices in another building can be trained on a speaker’s lips. We should always sit with our backs to the window.
In our ventures around the city we were supposed to appear as casual pedestrians, not as American tourists. Nancy asked, “Do you think anyone really takes me for an American?”
I looked at her, with the Herald-Tribune in her left jacket pocket, a Walt Disney sun hat on and a tourist guide in her right pocket, and thought to myself, “Who would ever suspect that this lady is not a resident of Bogotá?”
Back in the 1960s I attended an international forum on mental health held in London. As this was my first trip to Europe, Nancy and I took the opportunity to visit France. Naturally, things did not go smoothly. First, there was some confusion with our reservations, and we found ourselves without a hotel room in Paris. A friendly receptionist at the fully booked Maurice Hotel told us about a nearby hotel, the Continental, which might have some rooms, as tourists rarely used it.
As we walked the two blocks to the hotel, I kept recalling the name Continental but could not remember where I had heard it. Suddenly it came to me that this was the hotel mentioned in the book and subsequent movie Is Paris Burning? During the German occupation of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz and his staff had used the Maurice for their headquarters. However, lower-ranking German soldiers apparently were quartered or had offices in the Continental Hotel. When the liberation of Paris took place, there was a fierce battle in the hotel. After it ended, emaciated American prisoners were found chained to a bedroom wall on the fifth floor. In other accounts of the liberation of Paris, the Continental Hotel was used by the Gestapo for interrogations.
The Continental had a room for us. That night, returning from dinner, the passenger elevator was filled, but we noticed a back elevator that seemed to open on our floor. Running that elevator was an Englishman who happened to be a World War II buff. When I told him about this hotel’s particular history, he took me to the assistant manager, who led us to the basement to try to verify what was described in the book. While the fifth floor had been repaired and the moaning of the mistreated prisoners had long ago dissipated into the air of history, the basement of the Continental was unchanged from the war years of the 1940s. Nancy, the elevator operator, the assistant manager and I all went down the elevator into the past.
There were a number of mattresses stacked up, with mounds of dust blocking the exit door from the elevator. As we pushed these out of the way and opened the door, we encountered more obstructions of dust-covered items. Clearly this area had not been entered for a number of years.
Twenty-three years, in fact. No one had been in this area of the hotel since 1945. As we walked farther into the darkened area, we came upon a wall to which was attached leather straps and metal ankle restraints. The wall was peppered with bullet holes. We had uncovered the interrogation center of the Gestapo headquarters!
No one knew that the interrogation center was so intact, but as the English elevator operator told us, people were aware that this hotel had played a part in the history of the German occupation of Paris. In fact, the hotel was used two years earlier for a few scenes in the movie version of Is Paris Burning? Apparently they never visited the basement.
At the same time, he also told us that an overbooked tour agency had placed some of their American customers in this hotel. They were asked to use the back elevator to ease congestion on the other elevators. The actors playing the roles of the Germans, with their Nazi uniforms on, used the elevator during filming. The tourists had not been informed that there were movie scenes being filmed here. All they saw were a number of German storm troopers going up and down in the elevator. Finally, one of the guests asked our Englishman what was taking place.
“In every war,” he replied, “there are some administrative people who never get the word that the war is over. These German officers have been going up and down to their office all these years. Eventually someone will tell them.”
When, in the late 1980s, I received an invitation to go to Peru, I thought it would be a safe and interesting place to visit. Nancy, who was up on current events, was not so cavalier. She had read about the Shining Path guerillas, known to be particularly vicious in the area of Machu Picchu. She bid me bon voyage and wished me luck.
However, Michael, one of our two medical student sons, agreed enthusiastically to accompany me. Upon arriving in Lima, the local police informed us that there was a curfew in all of Peru. If one were found on the street after midnight, he would be shot. If there was an accident or a problem with an automobile—if one could not get off the street by midnight—he should stop the car, open the door and lie down flat on the road, with arms and legs extended. He should explain the automotive problem to the police officer standing over him with a rifle, but there was a possibility that he would be immediately executed. That would depend on the individual police officer.
I was feeling safer already.
In South American postgraduate meetings there is always an opening ceremony. During this one, the band played the Peruvian national anthem as soldiers marched up and down the aisles of the auditorium. It was a very impressive sight. While the band played, I noticed a beautiful girl who, to my excitement, couldn’t seem to take her eyes off me. When the music ended she walked straight toward me—then right past me, and up to my son, Michael. She invited him to go out with her and some friends the following Saturday night, two days away.
Saturday night came and Michael went out on his date. I had gone up to my room to sleep when I noticed it was just a few minutes before midnight and my son had not yet come in. I called the desk; they told me that this was a serious matter and that I should call the consul, which I did. A young marine at the desk told me that nothing could be done. I should just hope my son was unexpectedly delayed and that the attending troops would be merciful.
At approximately one minute before midnight I heard the rumble of military vehicles in the street. Fifteen seconds before midnight my son knocked on the door of my room and came in. He was completely calm, but by then my hands were shaking and I could barely speak, much less ask him if his date had been so wonderful that it was worth risking his life. So, like a good father, I kept my mouth shut. But I still wonder.
The next day I was asked to make grand rounds at the local medical school. Michael, who had just finished his first year of medical school, was invited along. The protocol in South American medical schools is similar to that in Europe, where the senior professor is at the head of a long line of junior professors, instructors, residents, interns and, finally, medical students, in decreasing proximity to the patient.
The senior professor was always very happy to have guests from other countries make rounds with him, for one reason—a disease called verruga peruana, transmitted by a sand fly unique to a thirty-mile radius of Lima, Peru, and no other place in the world, except for the rare outbreak in other South American countries. The lesions on the leg are well demarked and very specific for this disease. The senior professor enjoyed quizzing all visiting medical dignitaries to see if they had any hint of what this locally common condition was. So he was extremely disappointed when Michael’s turn came at the bedside of a sufferer of this unique type of bartonella. Michael was able to diagnose him immediately. The reason he knew the answer was that freshman medical students study obscure things they will never need. Or not unless they happen to be seeing a patient in Lima, Peru, and making rounds with a senior professor.
At the South American postgraduate meetings, I could always count on a national anthem, as well as something more exciting. One memorable opening ceremony took place before a course in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While the Argentine national anthem was being sung, the director of the course came over to me and whispered in my ear, “Well, Doctor, are you ready for your talk?”
I said that I was, but added that this was only Thursday night. My talk was Saturday morning.
“Not your scientific lecture. I meant your social lecture.”
I asked him what in the world my social lecture was.
He pointed to the television cameras around the auditorium and said, “Why, you are the main speaker tonight. Right after the opening ceremony.”
After a short silence, I asked what my subject was.
“Don’t you remember?” he asked. “When I contacted you I asked you to speak about the improvement or lack of improvement of professional relationships between North and South American physicians.”
Nancy thought this was hilarious. I didn’t. Should I confess that I had never received this notification, or should I try to bluff my way through? Nancy wasn’t helping with the decision. “Let’s see how you get out of this one!” she said.
At the end of the national anthem, I moved to the podium and began my talk. Nancy condescended to feed me questions and statements, and we somehow produced a completely extemporaneous, forty-five-minute plenary lecture, which was well received. The local media wrote glowing descriptions of the desire of Americans to cooperate with the new North-South spirit.
In addition to their opening ceremonies, the South American medical professional community has other customary activities that might be hard to believe to one who hasn’t been there. These folks know how to have a good time. They have very serious medical meetings during the day, but at night they have plenty of energy for carnival-like activities that include periods of wild, frenzied dancing.
There is no warning when the dancing will begin or end. It is up to the orchestra. One could be in the midst of a serious award presentation, and then receive a signal from the bandleader indicating that at the end of a presentation the dancing will begin.
The scientific lectures are a bit more organized, although they follow the principle of más o menos, which in Spanish means “more or less.” If one is to present a formal lecture, it may be listed in the program for five o’clock but not begin until nine o’clock, with some dancing and perhaps an unscheduled light meal in between. The main meal may not begin until midnight. If the host is to pick you up at the hotel at eight o’clock, he may arrive one to two hours later. After a while, a seasoned medical lecturer, which I thought myself to be, may decide to buck the system and arrive a mere hour late, only to find that the host arrived at exactly the right time, and the lecture hall is filled with a punctual (just that once), impatient audience.
At these meetings one always receives an elaborate plaque or diploma. Some of them are very large and beautifully designed. I collected a number of these awards over the years, and Nancy decided it would be an effective decorating scheme to hang them in one examining room. We put a good deal of thought into the appropriate arrangement on the wall. But the first patient who came into the examining room looked at the wall and said, “You seem like a good doctor. Why did you have to go to South America to study medicine?”
We took down the awards.
In 1976 I thought that any fears of kidnapping were well in my past, or at least beyond the borders of my own country. But I was wrong.
It happened one summer afternoon. I was busy in my office seeing patients when my receptionist buzzed me to say that my wife was on the phone. I knew it must be urgent because Nancy would never normally call me during office hours. Nevertheless, I was shocked at her opening statement: “Charles, they’ve got Lori!”
She had received a telephone call. The voice at the other end said calmly, “Listen carefully. We have your daughter. This is not a crank call.”
He then recited all of our teenage daughter’s clothing sizes, from her blouse to her underwear. He obviously had Lori. At that moment, my son picked up the extension and asked, “Who is this?” The caller hung up.
My wife sat there in horror. It so happened that a terrible kidnapping, resulting in the deaths of two teenagers, had occurred at nearby Folly Beach some time earlier.
At that time, Lori was receiving guitar lessons from a male instructor in an area close to where that crime had occurred. Although the murderer had been caught, the recollection of the details of the crime, in which the two children were slowly hanged, was fresh in our minds. Although this instructor was known to some of the teenagers and was recommended by our daughter’s friends, we did not know his address. We did know the telephone number, but I was afraid that if he were indeed the kidnapper and our daughter’s life was truly in danger, then a call from the police or from us, unless it was very carefully handled, could result in a tragedy.
For some reason, I was calmer and more in control of my emotions than I would have expected. Perhaps my training as a physician in emergencies, or maybe the fact that I watched enough TV and heard enough horror stories, enabled me to know that there were steps to be taken. I simply did not want an inexperienced officer sending a group of siren-wailing police cars in the direction of our jeopardized daughter.
I called the chief of police, who I knew, but he was out of town. One of my boyhood friends and current patients was an FBI agent in town, and I was able to get in touch with him immediately. He told me that according to FBI protocol at that time, they could not enter the case for forty-eight hours, unless there was some proof that our daughter had been taken out of the state.
This was obviously a local matter. After we called the police, a cordial but obviously inexperienced officer arrived at our home. I instructed him to contact his supervisors to see if a kidnap crisis team could be quickly organized, or if we could get some advice from experts on how to proceed.
By then I’d learned that our neighbor’s daughter was to have a lesson from the same instructor within the next hour. She was preparing to drive out there. I got into my car and followed her out to the instructor’s house.
At some point during the thirty to forty minutes in which all of this occurred, I realized that if the police could not become organized and demonstrate that they had an appropriate team to handle the matter, I would have to do something myself. My office manager reminded me much later that she knew it was serious because I stopped by the office to pick up a gun, and she knew I had the determination to use it if necessary.
Following my neighbor’s child to a possible kidnap scene was not the nicest thing I could have done to a neighbor and friend, but I was desperate. There was no way I could tell the police where she was located because I did not know. It took less than thirty minutes to reach the guitar instructor’s home, but during that drive, I found out a good deal about myself and my ability, if necessary, to kill another human being. If my daughter had been harmed, I decided I could and would shoot the individual responsible on the spot. I made this decision calmly and with thought of all the repercussions, but I would not allow anyone who had harmed my child to walk away unscathed.
Meanwhile, the police simply called the phone number. My daughter was there, unharmed. The guitar instructor knew nothing about a kidnapping. But had he been the perpetrator, and had a crime been committed, that telephone call could have been disastrous.
I arrived before the police. I got out of the car and walked toward the house. As I did so, the door opened and out ran the instructor with his hands in the air, and Lori, running a bit faster—just as the police had instructed them to do.
All I could see was my daughter running and a man with his hands in the air. I yelled for Lori to drop to the ground (which, she recently reminded me, she did not do). With the gun held on him, I told her instructor to remain exactly where he was—any movement would be his last. Within a few minutes, the police arrived, sirens blaring. They quickly verified that no crime had been committed. Only then did I lower the gun.
The kidnap story was a gigantic hoax. It happened to a number of people in a three-week period. A police task force was formed and the victims were brought together. They all told the same story: the day before the kidnap phone call, a call was made to those homes that had domestic help. The caller said he was from the Sears-Roebuck Company, and that someone wished to give the teenager in the home a gift of some clothing. Would the housekeeper check the closet and give him the sizes of the various garments that would be assembled as a gift?
Since this was to be a surprise, the housekeeper was cautioned not to tell anyone about it, or the surprise would be ruined. Seven other people also were taken in by the ruse. Ours was complicated by the fact that our daughter was taking lessons in the area where a murder had recently occurred and was out of the home when the call came. In all of the other calls, it became apparent after a short period that this was a hoax, but ours was just the wrong circumstance at the wrong time.
The perpetrator was indicted, charged and punished for his antics. All was well—except that I found that I had the potential to take a life. This left a disturbing mark on me that I would never forget.
I recently asked Lori, now the mother of four children, what she remembered about the ordeal and why she did not comply with my command to drop to the ground. I’d never really discussed the incident with her since it happened, wary of initiating recall of a suppressed memory—the psychiatric stuff we were taught in medical school. But her answer revealed the mind of a teenager at work: “Dad, I remember it all very well. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life!”
So much for being a hero to my children.