Many Lives, One Lifespan: An Autobiography

By Max T. Taylor and Max T. Taylor M.D.

Great , great grandfather John Taylor braved the wilds and moved his family from the Pennsylvania Dutch country to the new state of Indiana at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Southern Indiana was sparsely settled but formed the base for the Taylor descendents. Dr. Taylors life was strongly influenced by his mothers great spiritual belief in god and the need for a Christian life and education for her children. The great depression years helped form the basis for a lifetime of hard work and accomplishments. The hope of giving something back to family and society makes life worthwhile. His choice of surgical training proved to be the basis for his subsequent success. A letter he was told he should not have written because it was not proper military protocol proved to be the source of a military career that was unsurpassed. He was chosen to help develop the medical care of Americas first men into space, Project Mercury. Forty years of pioneering surgery in the field of heart and lung surgery were the golden age of medicine. Farming, ranching, banking, real estate, flying and travel to all seven continents and over fifty countries fulfilled a life that was more than anyone could hope for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462887996

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Copyright © 2011 by Max T. Taylor M.D.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2011911010

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-4628-8798-9

                            Softcover                          978-1-4628-8797-2

                            Ebook                               978-1-4628-8799-6

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Contents

Prologue

I—1928-1946

II—Student Years

III—Training Years

IV—Soldier

V—Surgeon

VI—Farmer/Rancher

VII—Banker

VIII—Real Estate

IX—Pilot

X—Travel

XI—Travel II

XII—Travel III

XIII—The Twenty-first Century

Epilogue

To those who mean the most to me: Denise, Larisa, Maxwell, Todd, and Linda

Prologue

Lancaster County was Pennsylvania Dutch Country at the turn of the nineteenth century. Great-great-grandfather Robert Taylor was born there, in 1804, after the end of the Revolutionary War, in the early days of the new country, the United States of America. When the Taylors first came to this country is unclear, but our roots almost certainly go back to England or Scotland and Ireland. Great-grandfather William was born in Pennsylvania Dutch Country in 1839. President James Madison had signed papers making Indiana the nineteenth state of the Union on December 4, 1816, and soon after William’s birth, Robert started the 630-mile wagon trip to the new state. This dangerous trip over crude trails was made in the summer, probably lasting close to three months.

The town of Bloomington existed in the Northwest Territory prior to Indiana becoming a state. How Robert chose Hindustan, a small village ten miles north of Bloomington, in Washington Township Monroe County, is unknown. Monroe County was created in 1818, and Indiana University was opened as a seminary by the state in 1820 in Bloomington. Bloomington, however, was not incorporated until 1876. Hindustan, today, consists merely of an old country church and cemetery. William grew up as a small boy on the farm where Robert settled his family on what is now the Morgan-Monroe State Forest. The site of the farm, in the state forest, is now covered by a man-made lake. During the depth of the Depression years of 1932-1934, William’s grandson, my father, worked in a CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camp, planting thousands of small pine trees to reforest this area, the site of the old farm. At the height of the Great Depression, father’s six-dollar-a-week salary barely allowed his family to survive.

William met and married Great-grandmother Elizabeth, who was born in Ohio in 1837. They subsequently moved to a farm southwest of Bloomington in Clear Creek Township and lived there the remainder of their lives. Elizabeth died on May 14, 1898, and William on January 12, 1901. Both are buried in the small church cemetery in the town of Clear Creek.

Grandfather John Walter Taylor was born on May 21, 1852, on the farm near Hindustan prior to the move to Clear Creek. He married Florence Mitchell on October 3, 1883. Grandmother Florence was born on September 8, 1865, on a farm in Green County, about thirty miles west of Bloomington. Her parents were Elijah Mitchell and Sarah Phillip Mitchell. Both were originally from North Carolina. Great-grandfather Elijah was wounded while serving with the Indiana Lightning Brigade during the Civil War and received a medical discharge. The Indiana Lightning Brigade consisted of three regiments and an artillery battery commanded by Capt. Eli Lilly from Indianapolis, the founder of the present-day large pharmaceutical company bearing his name.

The Lightning Brigade became famous as the first Yankee troops to be equipped with the new Spencer Automatic rifles capable of firing seven shots in ten seconds. This gave them a major advantage over the rebel forces who could get off only one shot in the same time frame. Each trooper carried several of the seven-shot reloads to enhance this advantage.

John and Florence had several children: Ernest, Molly, Lizzy, Mae, and my father, Forest Edward Taylor, who was born on March 31, 1893. They left the farm in the early 1900s, moving to Bloomington and buying a small house at 1017 West Second Street. Grandfather established a business hauling freight with a wagon and a team of horses. I never knew my grandmother because she died in 1925 before I was born.

My father grew up on the farm in Clear Creek Township and attended a country grade school until the fifth grade. When World War I started, he joined the army and trained as a corpsman in the medical department. He served at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC, and later was aboard an army troop ship in the Atlantic on the way to France at the time the armistice was signed on November 11, 1919. When he returned to Bloomington after the war, he met and married the love of his life, my mother, on January 16, 1921.

My mother, Bernice Doris Kern, was born in Fayetteville (Lawrence County), Indiana, on August 31, 1902. Her ancestry goes back seven generations on her father’s side to Germany, where Maria Barbara Michael, who was born in 1714, married a Kern. We have always been told that the Kerns were Irish even though their son Coonrod Kern was born in Palatinate, Germany, in 1736. It is not known when the Kerns left Ireland for Germany. He immigrated to North Carolina, where he married Mary Magdalene Billings in 1757. Mary was born in Rowan County, North Carolina, in 1745. Coonrod died in 1812.

Coonrod and Mary moved to Monroe County, Indiana, where a son, Adam, was born on June 2, 1762. He died on May 24, 1838, in Stanford, which is approximately fifteen miles southwest of Bloomington. Adam married Catherine Biflin in 1785. She was born on November 6, 1762, in Rowan County, North Carolina, and died on October 6, 1818, in Nicholas County, Kentucky. Her father Martin was born in 1736 in Germany and married her mother Anna in North Carolina in 1760.

My great-grandfather Josephus Kern was born on September 11, 1851, in Fayetteville, Indiana, and married Nancy Sears on February 9, 1871. He died on November 9, 1908, in Fayetteville. Nancy Sears was born on September 17, 1854, in Lawrence County, Indiana, and died on December 9, 1913, in Lawrence County.

Grandfather Walter Kern was born on July 14, 1873, in Fayetteville and died on October 25, 1910, in Bedford, Indiana. He married my grandmother Eva Armina Daugherty, who was born in 1875 in Ohio. She died in May 1952 in Bloomington, during my first year in medical school. Her parents were Daniel Daugherty, born on February 22, 1842, in Bloomington, and Nancy Boyd. They had several children: Gertrude, Ora, Mae, and my mother Bernice. The other children were Daniel, who died as a young adult of tuberculosis, and two daughters Sophia and Irene, who died as young adults under circumstances that we were never made aware of. However, according to my mother’s half sister, Aunt Frieda, one of them died of a septic abortion and one was thought to have been poisoned by her husband, but this was never proven.

The year 1921 was an important year for our family. Mom and Dad were married on January 16 and moved into a house at 926 West Second Street in Bloomington where my brother Bob (Robert Edward) was born on November 11 of that year. My sister Barbara Jean was also born in that house on October 15, 1924. They moved into the house with my grandfather Taylor at 1017 West Second Street after the death of my grandmother Florence in 1925. Grandfather had already enlarged the house to six rooms with front and back porches and a cellar beneath the two rear rooms. The stairs to the cellar were through a door that could be raised from the floor of the back porch.

The depression that followed the end of World War I was starting to recover and the economy would remain good until the Great Depression in 1929. President Harding entered office in 1920, and following his death in 1923, Calvin Coolidge continued to lead the country through good years. Dad and his elder brother, Ernest, opened a grocery store across the street from the Second Street house, which was very successful until the Great Depression started. During this time much of the profit from the business went to building a large brick home for Ernest and his wife at the top of the Second Street hill. Financially, things were good and the family prospered with an automobile and a good lifestyle. During this time Grandfather had a small one-room stand beside the store where he sold ice cream, candy, cigarettes, and other small items. Also about this time, my uncle Ernest’s wife died, and Mom took Paul and John, his two sons, to care for until Ernest remarried. Everything continued to be good for the family until 1927, when my brother, Donald, was born.

All of the children were born at home and were delivered by the family physician, Dr. Frank E. Tourner. At the time of Donald’s birth, it was immediately obvious that something was not right. The baby was blue at birth and did not pink up normally when he started to breathe. With no hospital nursery or intensive care in 1927, the baby did not have a good prognosis. No incubator was available, so a small bed was made for him in the kitchen on the opened oven door to keep him warm. It was obvious that his blood was not circulating normally and was not being supplied with enough oxygen to relieve the cyanotic color. Dr. Tourner made the correct diagnosis of blue baby. This was a known condition in 1927, but there was no known treatment. Donald survived for only a short time and was buried in the family plot in Rose Hill Cemetery. It was not until November 29, 1944, that Dr. Alfred Blalock at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore performed the first operation to correct this condition. He became world famous for being responsible in saving the lives of thousands of babies who would subsequently be born with this congenital heart defect. The Blalock Procedure became the standard treatment and was the early start of the successful heart surgery that is possible today. I was fortunate many years later to be able to perform this operation and other heart operations on children at General Hospital in Indianapolis.

Approximately a year later, the most important event in my life occurred. I was born on October 2, 1928. I was also born at home, 1017 West Second Street with Dr. Tourner officiating. I am certain that my mother liked and appreciated everything that Dr. Tourner had done for her, as evidenced by her selection of my name, Max Tourner Taylor. All of my life people had questioned the spelling of my name, not knowing what its origin was. But now you know the rest of the story.

Chapter I

1928-1946

October 2, 1928, was a day full of apprehension for my mother. Even though her pregnancy had been uneventful, she could not forget her experience of one year earlier when Donald was born and then died shortly after birth from blue baby syndrome. It was a great relief for everyone when Dr. Tourner delivered me with a slap on my butt, and I cried and became nice and pink after a few deep breathes. The best spanking I would ever get. In gratitude, mother decided that my middle name would be Tourner.

My early childhood, and in fact my entire life, has been greatly influenced by my mother’s religious convictions. In the early 1930s, Beryl Sinn, a neighbor, who was a Seventh-Day Adventist, introduced Mother to her faith. Mother took Bible studies and soon joined the church and became a lifelong devout Adventist. Both she and my brother, Bob, were baptized in Salt Creek just east of Bloomington on the road to Nashville. Since the small church did not have a baptistery, the congregation drove to the creek where they sang, Shall We Gather at the River for the ceremony. Many years later, at the age of thirteen, I would be baptized at the same site. Approximately, fifty years later, this creek would be dammed up to form Lake Monroe, the largest lake in the state of Indiana.

On August 31, 1931, my sister, Helen Dolores (Dodie), was born on my mother’s birthday. My aunt Ora and my cousin, Carl (Buddy) Hodges, were also born on August 31. My elder sister, Jean, who was seven, and I were sent across the street to Beryl Sinn’s so that curious little people wouldn’t be a bother during mother’s labor and delivery.

During the depth of the Great Depression, we were living in a state of extreme poverty although as kids we did not realize it at the time. We were aware, however, that we did not have much money and that our house was not as nice as those of our friends. One vivid memory sticks in my mind. In 1933 or 1934, the church held a penny supper at our house. This was a fund-raising event where each member would bring a dish of food, and it would be sold at a penny a serving. Even though it was held at our house, we were not able to eat because we had no money. At the time it was a difficult thing for a little five-year-old to understand. After everyone had left that evening, we still had no food in the house or a ready means of solving the problem. Later that night, Curt Daggy brought us a large box of groceries. Curt was a mechanic for the Monon Railroad and had a good job throughout the depression years. All during my childhood I remember the Daggys being very kind to us. The government had a program where Dad would go once a week to pick up some of the staple items of food such as flour, oil, butter, etc.

In 1919, the eighteenth amendment to the constitution was passed making alcoholic beverages illegal. This was in effect until 1933 when it was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment. As a small boy, I remember Dad making homebrew beer for himself and his friends. The only thing I clearly remember is the hand-operated machine to put the bottle caps on the bottles. Many of the homes at that time which did not have wells had underground cisterns to collect the water off the roofs during a rain. During this time, Dad and his friends were sitting around an open cistern at Bud Ladyman’s house across the street, drinking beer while a man was down cleaning out the sludge from the bottom. They were sitting on some wooden boxes, and Dad was holding my little sister Dodie. He reached across to hand her to one of his friends when his box broke, and he dropped Dodie into the black muck at the bottom of the cistern. Fortunately, no harm was done but for a very scared father and a dirty black baby.

During this time, Dad was away from home much of the time. President Roosevelt had established work programs to ease the effects of the depression. Dad worked at a CCC(Civilian Conservation Corps) camp about ten miles north of Bloomington planting pine trees. This is now the Morgan-Monroe State Forest and covers the site where great-grandfather William Taylor was raised after the family moved to Indiana from Pennsylvania. Dad would sometimes get to come home on the weekends. His pay was one dollar a day. Although not much by today’s standards, it was helpful in trying to feed our family. He later worked for the PWA (Public Works Administration) on local projects for twelve-dollars-a-week pay. It was about this same time, after the famous veterans march on Washington, that Dad received a small bonus check that was granted to each of the World War I veterans. With this we were able to buy a used green Model A Ford from my uncle Abe for $100.

All of this time Mom did washing and ironing for several people as well as house cleaning work. Once we had a car, she was able to wash and iron shirts for the students at Indiana University. I remember my brother, Bob, driving the old Ford to the university to deliver bundles of shirts with me sitting in the back seat, completely surrounded by the laundry bundles. At sixteen years of age, he was probably not the most expert driver, and while coasting down the hill on Fifth Street in order to save gas, he collided with a city bus. Even though the Model A was not a luxury car, it did look a lot better before it had a crumpled right front fender. Mom’s laundry room was our open back porch. This was great in the summer, but when the temperature was below freezing, it was a very cold place. Her electric washing machine and two rinse tubs completely filled the small space on the porch. In the wintertime when the wet clothes would freeze outside, Mom would string rope lines from wall to wall in each room of the house to hang the shirts on to dry. In order to move about the house, we would have to duck under all of the wet clothes.

I started first grade when I was five although I would be six in a little over one month. It was the start of what would be most of my education in the Seventh-Day Adventist educational system. The system obviously had some deficiencies, but I would not be where I am today without it. I wouldn’t trade it for any other system. The church school was located in the basement of the little church on Howe Street about one block from our home. Even at age five to six, I had no problem walking a block up the hill on Second Street, crossing the busy street and then up the alley to the schoolyard. No worries in 1934 of a small child doing this by himself. All eight grades, and one year even the ninth grade, was taught in one room. Four rows of five desks each, with the teacher’s desk and a recitation bench in the front made up the room. There was a large chalkboard behind the teacher’s desk and a stove in one front corner for heat in the winter. We had a small playground outside with two toilets, one for the girls and one for the boys. This was the Bloomington Seventh-Day Adventists Church School. In the winter, the older boys would keep the stove fired with coal from the coal bin in a room behind the classroom. At times during heavy rains, the schoolroom would flood, and we would all have to sit on top of our desk with our feet on the desk seats to keep dry.

There were two other students in the first grade. Mary Potter, a little girl with flaming red hair and Gerald Fulford. Each was as poor or poorer than I was. Mary’s mother, Hazel, was a very nice lady. Her father, Otho, was thought to be lazy and sick most of the time. He would vomit blood at times and many of the people thought he would drink animal blood so that he could vomit for sympathy. Mary had an elder sister, Irene, who was the age of my sister, Jean.

The Fulfords lived in the country ten or twelve miles from Bloomington near Hindustan. Gerald would ride the public high school bus to Bloomington High School and then walk a little less than a mile to our school. They were the poorest family that I knew. They lived in an old farmhouse without electricity or water. I would spend the summers with my best friend, Gerald, and loved it. Gerald and I would carry water from a well with a pump at a schoolhouse about one-eighth of a mile from the house. We always wondered what tribe of Indians lived on the farm, perhaps over a hundred years before. In one area where the trees were cleared we could always find some old arrowheads made of stone, which were well preserved. The large sturdy trees that bordered this area had many grapevines entwined in their branches that we used to swing out over the sloping cleared area. Gerald’s mother, Carrie, was the nicest person I knew. She loved to see it rain so that she could catch a tub of fresh soft water to wash her waist-long black hair. I thought it was great to lie in bed at night and listen to the rain on the tin roof. Carrie was a good cook although all of the meals were basic simple food. One of my favorites was hot corn meal mush. Carrie would cook it in a double boiler on the wood burning stove and serve like a hot cereal. This is still one of my favorite foods. Two things remain in my memory of those summers. Glen, Gerald’s father, had a small cornfield in which he had planted watermelons between the rows of corn. One day Gerald and I decided that we would like a ripe watermelon. We took a knife and went to the field to find a melon ready to eat. We plugged many of the melons trying to find a ripe one, all without success. Needless to say, Glen was one very unhappy watermelon farmer.

They had an old mule, Jesse, which we would ride bareback. The only problem was that Jesse had a very sharp backbone making for a sore bottom if we rode too long. They also had an old barn for Jesse, their cow, and some chickens. Gerald and I had the job of cleaning out the stalls in the barn. We hitched old Jesse up to a mud sled (one without wheels) and proceeded to fill it with manure. When the sled was full, we threw in our pitchforks and jumped into the middle of the manure for the ride to the field where we were to spread it. On the farm, or course, we did this barefoot. After a short distance, Jesse made a sudden stop, and I went forward landing on a pitchfork, which went in one side of my foot and out the other. Today, this would have been a real emergency with a trip to the emergency room with x-rays, antibiotics, a tetanus shot, and who knows what else but not in the 1930s. We pulled the pitchfork out and went to the house where Carrie carefully washed my foot, put on some black salve, and sent us back out to finish our job. Absolutely no fear of anything and of course nothing happened.

Glen had an old Model T Ford car in which he allowed Gerald and me to practice our driving in one of the cow pastures which was my introduction to driving at an early age. Unfortunately, Glen was later killed when he fell from a high beam at a construction site. After high school, Carrie moved to Berrien Springs, Michigan, so that Gerald and his younger brother, Leroy, could attend college. Later while I was in medical school, both were killed in a head-on auto accident with a large tractor-trailer truck. Perhaps she suffered more tragedy than any one woman should have to bear.

I remember some of my early teachers very well. Ms. Byrd was short, plump, and very strict, but we all loved her. She was my eighth grade teacher and signed by graduation certificate from the Bloomington Seventh-Day Adventist Church School in 1942. Mr. Sanders was one of the two male teachers I had in grade school. When I was in the fifth grade, my sister Jean and three other students also took the ninth grade in the same one-room school. Mr. Kennedy was the teacher, and Jean felt that he didn’t know algebra any better than the students did.

There always seemed to be problems in the church with two sides fighting with each other. Mother always seemed to be able to be neutral and friends with everyone. I don’t know what the problem was during my sixth grade year, but I remember the conference president coming down from Indianapolis for a church meeting, and the school was closed in the middle of the year. I was very apprehensive about transferring to the large public school (Hunter). I was fearful that I would be behind all of the students in my subjects. This didn’t last long as I was on a par or ahead of all the others in the class. On the first day of health class, the teacher said she would give us a question and anyone answering correctly would be excused for the remainder of the class. The first question was to finish the sentence; cleanliness is next to_______! I raised my hand and said, godliness. I was the first one out of the class, and I think I earned the respect of the other students. I went back to the church school the following year and completed the seventh and eighth grades.

Three things stand out during my first two years of school. I had a pet dog, Spot, that I had adopted. Spot would come to meet me each afternoon, as I would come from school. One afternoon he was acting strange and when I knelt down to pet him, he bit me on the arm. Since he was acting strange, mother called the police. I remember seeing the policeman cornering Spot in the garage and shooting him with his revolver. They sent his head to the state lab in Indianapolis to have his brain examined and the result came back that Spot had rabies. I walked a mile and a half to Dr. Tourner’s office every day for fourteen days to get a rabies shot in my abdomen. At that time the rabies shots were made from horse serum with a high degree of allergic reactions. I was fortunate and did not have a reaction of any kind. Twenty years later at General Hospital in Indianapolis, I worked with Dr. Bruce Peck at Eli Lilly Company to produce a newer, safer, vaccine made from chick embryos.

In the summer between my first and second year in school, I broke my left arm. My brother, Bob, would lie flat on his back in our yard with his knees flexed, and I would sit on his feet and he would propel me through the air. This was great fun, until I landed on my left wrist and came up with my hand facing in the wrong direction. The ride to Dr. Tourner’s office sitting in the rear seat of my cousin, Harold Taylor’s, old convertible sedan was very painful. I know that Dr. Tourner did not have an x-ray machine, but he reduced the fracture and put my arm in a cast without any problem, and it has always been straight even without any x-rays.

I was born with a lazy right eye in which normal vision did not develop. This could have been corrected by simply putting a patch on my left eye forcing me to develop vision in the right eye. This, however, had to be done at an early age to be successful. Unfortunately, medical knowledge was not that developed in the 1930s. I have to give my parents credit for trying to do everything they could for me. They took me to see the local optometrist, Dr. Harry Stephenson, who fitted me with glasses, which I did not need and of course were of no help. Dr. Stephenson sent me to see Dr. Warner, the local osteopath who cracked my neck once a week for two years, again without any positive results. I have always felt that Dr. Warner knew that his treatment was of no value, for he gave me a paid-in-full bill for Christmas at the end of the treatment. They also took me to a local MD who called himself an eye doctor. He also did nothing. All that was needed was to put a patch on my left eye but none of them knew this.

Even at a young age, I had the ambition to become a doctor. All of the doctors told me that I should forget this because it would be too great a strain on my one good eye. Thank goodness I did not follow their ridiculous medical advice. Even though I know they were sincere, it scares me to think of all the poor medical advice that is given to patients because of a doctor’s ignorance of the subject that patients feel they are an authority on. Even though I did well through high school and college, it was something that I was always sensitive about. I was also always careful to avoid any activity that might carry a risk of an injury to my good eye that could leave me blind.

During my grade school years, I always worked and bought my own clothes. One of my first jobs was as the janitor at the church. I must have been in the fourth grade when I got the job with the grand pay of $5 a month. It included cleaning the church every Friday, mowing the lawn in the summer, and in the winter clearing away the snow and building a fire each Saturday so that the church would be warm for Sabbath services. There was an old coal furnace in the church basement in a room behind the schoolroom. I got up at 4:00 a.m. to walk to the church in the cold dark night. I was scared, but I didn’t let anyone know that I was when I descended into the dark basement room. I would build the fire and wait for the church to warm up before returning home to get dressed and ready to return to the church for Sabbath School at 9:00 a.m.

I also mowed lawns on the east side of town near the university. I would walk one and a half to two miles pushing my lawnmower in order to make twenty-five or fifty cents for mowing a lawn. Power mowers had not been invented so my lawn mowing was all done with a push mower. I later worked at Uncle Ernest’s Taylor’s Coffee Cup restaurant for $12 a week and thought I had struck it rich. The Taylor’s Coffee Cup was located across from the county jail on Walnut Street at the southeast corner of the town square. It had one L-shaped counter with twelve stools, and they were never empty. I worked from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. every night except Friday. My job was to wash all the dishes by hand and to keep the counter clean. There was hardly room behind the counter for the sink, me, the grill, and the cook, all three hundred pounds of him. In 1940-1941, the government opened a naval ammunition storage facility at Crane, which was about twenty miles west of Bloomington. The sailors would come to town on the military bus on Saturday and would meet the bus in front of the jail across from Taylor’s Coffee Cup at midnight for the trip back to the base. We would fry hamburgers by the dozens and put them in a warming oven, and the sailors would buy them by the peck sac full for the return trip on the bus. One of the cook’s specialties was fried brain sandwiches. I could never bring myself to try one. I would rarely see Uncle Ernest, and if I did he would act as if he hardly knew who I was. I was grateful, though, that he gave me a job.

December 18, 1936, was the day I learned that the world was not perfect. It was the day my grandpa, John Taylor, died. Grandpa John was my buddy. He had been in good health, working outside until two days before his death. He caught a cold, which rapidly became pneumonia. There were no antibiotics in 1936 to help an eighty-four-year-old man fight off the infection. I was taken to my Aunt Monzelle’s house, and I remember lying on the floor behind the stove in her living room crying for my grandpa. Grandpa was taken to the Arthur Day Funeral Home and then brought back to our living room where he lay in his casket for his friends to pay their respects. He was buried next to his wife and Donald in Rose Hill Cemetery. My brother, Bob, always had a great fear of death and would not return home until after Grandpa was buried. Mom took the featherbed from Grandpa’s bed and placed it on Bob’s bed since it was a cold December. The next morning she found it lying on the floor next to the bed with Bob asleep with only a light blanket over him. Prior to his death Grandpa had deeded the house at 1017 West Second Street to my mother, my sister Dodie, and me. This was at the height of the Great Depression, and he felt that if the worst was to happen that my dad and elder brother and sister could take care of themselves better than Bernice and the two little ones could.

Our house was comfortable but was not modern. We had running water in the kitchen but no bathroom. Mom would heat water on the kitchen stove, and we would take our Friday baths in a washtub behind the stove. With no bathroom, our outhouse was located on the back lot between the backyard and the garden. I remember Dad digging a new pit and building a two-hole outhouse when I was a young boy. The winters were cold and windy, and one of my jobs that summer was going to the grocery store and getting cardboard boxes, which I lined the inside with, to break the wind during the winter. When Dad got a job at Camp Atterbury at the start of World War II, he built a bathroom in what had been Grandpa Taylor’s room at the back of the house.

Bloomington was a small town during my early childhood. The city limit was two doors from our house with a sign that said population eighteen thousand. The west side of town was considered the poorer section including the area where we lived. It was an easy walk of slightly over a mile and one half to the downtown square. The east side was the university and nicer homes on east first and second streets with the large fraternity houses on east third street. The university was the main thing in town. Showers Brothers furniture factories closed during the depression and part of it later began the RCA radio and television plant. There was also a basket factory where my mother worked for a while. The area surrounding the town contained many limestone quarries. These were the local swimming holes as illustrated in the movie Breaking Away. Bloomington was a small, beautiful, peaceful town. Five blocks exactly north of our house was the beginning of an area called Pigeon Hill. This was a small area where most of the black population of Bloomington lived. The negroes made up a very small part of the city’s population. As a small boy, I would walk up to this area to get my hair cut in the back room of the house of the Negro barber. I was raised with no racial prejudice. Even as a small boy, I felt no fear or anxiety of going by myself for a twenty-five cent haircut.

Aunt Mae and Uncle Abe Carter lived next door, and Uncle Abe had a car repair garage behind their house. His favorite name for me was Grandpa Taylor because I would usually be working or reading rather than off playing like many of the other kids. Mina Lou, Abie, and Jimmy were the three cousins next door. There was a large area of about an eighth of an acre behind both our house and Aunt Mae’s where we always planted a big garden in the summer. Abie and I would watch Louie Walsman, an elder at the Adventist church, go by almost every afternoon on his bicycle with a string of fish from the twin lakes west of town. Fishing was a passion with Mr. Walsman. Abie and I would take our cane poles and hike the three miles to the lakes to try to duplicate his catch. If we would end up with two to three six-inch bluegills, we would be lucky. Years later after I graduated from high school, I remember standing on the steps after church and Mr. Walsman asking me what I was going to do. When I told him I was going to college, I remember him saying that I should reconsider because it would be a waste of time, for the Lord would soon be coming and I would not need a college education. He was very sincere, but fortunately I did not heed his advice.

For a while Aunt Frieda and Uncle Dale Smith lived in a small two-room house on the other side of us. Uncle Dale would make his own guitars and mandolins, and he loved to play and sing. They moved to Indianapolis during the war to find work in the factories. Aunt Frieda was the youngest of my mother’s sisters and one of my favorite aunts. I would never fail to visit her whenever I returned to Indianapolis for the rest of her life.

Later after we could afford a better car (a 1934 Chevy), we often drove to Vincennes to see Aunt Ora. She was married to Charlie Wright who had a garage and filling station behind their house on Portland Street. They lived at the end of the street, which ended at the banks of the Wabash River. There was a tall concrete levee on the Wabash River protecting their house during the spring flooding. I remember gasoline was thirteen cents a gallon at Uncle Charlie’s pumps.

My grandmother Kern married Marshall Quackenbush after her husband’s death, and they had two daughters, my aunts Monzelle and Frieda. They lived in a large house on Smith Avenue just off Walnut Street where he had a delivery service with several teams of horses. There was an old homeless woman in that area of town, and I remember being told if I misbehaved that I would be given to Janie Sawbuck. It made a big impression on a small boy. After Grandpa Quackenbush died, Grandma lived with Aunt Monzelle on Fifth Street until she married George McClintock. After they were married, they lived in a large farmhouse on Kinser Pike, west of Bloomington. Their property ended at a small airport with a grass airstrip. I used to love watching the yellow Piper Cubs taking off and landing on the grass. Perhaps this is where I developed the desire and love of flying. Later they moved to Ellettsville where they had a small restaurant and filling station.

We would occasionally go to Fayetteville on a Sunday. Mom was born there, and her aunt Lizzy and Aunt Goldie lived there. They were her father’s sisters. Aunt Goldie and Uncle John Smith owned the large general store on the corner where the two roads of the town crossed. Aunt Lizzy lived in a little house down the road. As a child I could never quite figure out how they all fit into our family. After nearly seventy years, I revisited Fayetteville, and it had changed little as I remembered it as a small child. Those working in the general store remembered the old stories about Aunt Goldie and Uncle John. They told me there was still a common expression in the town, Goldie, get your thumb off the scale. What a heritage! You never know your ancestors until they are long gone.

My sister, Jean, went to the church school for her ninth grade and to Bloomington High School for her tenth grade. She wanted to go to Indiana Academy at Cicero, but we had no money so the school arranged for Dad to work all summer at the school to pay for her tuition. She then attended the academy for her last two years of high school. After that summer, Dad’s friend, Jack Bruner, was elected mayor, and Dad got a job working for the city water works. Dad was a Republican committeeman and helped to get him elected. The water company was located next to the police and fire departments at city hall. I had wanted a bicycle but had no money to get one. The police had several stolen or unclaimed bicycles and told Dad that he could have one for me, but if anyone were to claim it, I would need to give it back to them. I was about ten years old at the time. It was the happiest day of my life when Dad brought the bicycle home. I cleaned up the bike, put a basket on the front, fixed the tires, and painted it black with silver trim. About a year later, I had it parked in the front yard and the owner recognized it, and after proving it was his, I was again on foot.

Before I lost my bike, Mom received a letter from Aunt Gertie, who lived in Arizona, stating that they would be moving back to Indiana. Uncle Carl Hodges had been given the job of managing the ice plant in Bedford. I was so excited that I jumped on my bike and rode the six or seven miles to Ellettsville to tell Grandma the news. It was a long ride for a ten-year-old, and I don’t remember if I rode both ways or if Mom and Dad came to pick me up. We did not have a telephone in those days.

We were never as close to Dad’s family as we were to Mom’s. Aunt Molly Robinson and Aunt Mae Patton both lived in Bloomington, and we would see them occasionally. Uncle Ernest and Aunt Flossie lived in the big brick house at the top of the hill on Second Street. We would rarely go there. Aunt Lizzy Robinson lived in the house next to them. I remember standing in her kitchen one day when she had one of her spells. It lasted just a few minutes, and looking back now with my medical experience, it was a case of petit mal. She was subsequently committed to the insane asylum at Madison where she spent the remainder of her life. Today this is readily treated and has absolutely no relationship to insanity. What a travesty. Another example of the lack of medical knowledge at that time.

Dad was always active in the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was a member of the firing squad and on weekends would frequently go to funerals all over southern Indiana to fire a salute to a fallen veteran. He would take me with him at times, and I enjoyed the travel and the thrill of watching the four members of the firing squad marching in and firing their rifles at the cemetery. I also enjoyed collecting the empty shell casings. Dad also liked to hunt. He would go squirrel or rabbit hunting in the woods near where he grew up. He would set me on a log and tell me not to move and then go off into the woods. At times I would wonder if he had forgotten me but he never did.

December 7, 1941, was a day that no one will ever forget. President Franklin Roosevelt addressed Congress and the nation by radio the next day on December 8. It was a bitter cold December day as we sat close to the radio in our living room to hear the speech. Mom and Dad had hung blankets over each of the doors to the room to try and contain the heat from the oil stove to the one room, but we still felt the chill. Yesterday, December 7, is a day that will live in infamy. The president then continued his speech stating that since the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had attacked Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, Wake, and Midway Islands. I don’t remember the rest of the speech, but it certainly aroused the entire country and created a patriotism that was unbelievable. Shortly after that, we drove my brother, Bob, to Indianapolis where he joined the army air corps at Fort Benjamin Harrison.

Soon after the war started, the government began building Camp Atterbury about thirty-five miles east of Bloomington. Dad got a job as a plumber at the camp and worked there until it was closed after the war was over. He was able to buy a 1939 Chevy and drove to work daily with a carload of workers to share expenses. I remember going with him on Sundays to the camp and seeing many German prisoners of war who were working for Dad. They had a free run of the camp while working and Dad treated them just like he did the other people working for him. What a contrast to the way many of the American POWs were treated by the Germans and Japanese! About this same time Mom was able to get a job at the local hospital ironing nurses’ uniforms. What an improvement over the old days of washing and ironing at home! She continued to work there for several years until she retired.

After finishing the eighth grade at the church school, I was ready for high school. I wanted to go to Indiana Academy at Cicero but we could not afford it. We still owed money from Jean’s two years at the academy. She was going to come home and work at RCA for a year so that she could afford to go to college. In the summer between her junior and senior years at the academy I remember a boyfriend, Jack Bloom, coming up from Evansville to see her. I think what I remember most was that he was driving his dad’s new black 1941 Ford. I thought this must be the ultimate in cars. In July 2005, I received a letter from Illinois soliciting a donation for a new church building with the return address, Jack Bloom. I wondered if it could possibly be the same person after sixty-four years. At the bottom of the letter was a handwritten note that said, Could you be the Max Taylor from Bedford, Indiana? If so, I was in your home once many years ago when I called on your sister Jean. What a small world!

I started Bloomington High School as a freshman in the fall of 1942. The school was twelve blocks from home. We had an hour for lunch during which I walked home and still made it back to school on time for the 1:00 p.m. class. I was a fast walker in those days and many of the guys I would pass each day would call me Flash. It was a good year and gave me a good foundation for my years at Indiana Academy.

Mom and Dad drove me to Cicero in the old 1939 Chevy to start my second year of high school in September 1943. Since Dad had a wartime job at Camp Atterbury, he had plenty of gas rationing coupons to make the trip. It was a strange feeling to see them drive off, leaving me all alone with only some bedsheets and blankets and one suitcase of clothes. The school had promised me plenty of work to pay for my tuition so that I could attend that year. I had good grades at Bloomington High School the previous year, and they placed me in some of the higher-level classes. I had taken French as a freshman, and at Indiana Academy, it was taught as a junior and senior subject, so I was placed in a class with the seniors. After that I worked for Mrs. Guth, the French teacher, for the next two years as a reader.

For some reason I was chosen as the associate editor of the school paper, The Student Echo. I did not consider myself a writer, but I did enjoy working with, Arlene Bietz, the prettiest girl in school and the daughter of the principal, who was the editor. Elder Bietz, the principal, was wonderful to me, and many years later while I was in medical school, he came through Los Angeles and treated me like a long-lost son.

My first roommate was Dale Brink from South Bend. Dale’s ambition in life was to drive an ambulance for Forest G. Hays Funeral Home in South Bend. That is exactly what he did. He ultimately became a funeral director and owned a chain of small funeral homes in northern Indiana. I don’t recall why, but he was expelled from the academy at Cicero and transferred to Broadview Academy near Chicago. That winter Jimmy Bradburn, another buddy from Indianapolis, and I hitchhiked during Christmas vacation to Chicago to see him. We got a ride in northern Indiana with a fellow in a new Oldsmobile who not only talked fast, but also drove the same way. It was snowing, and the roads were snow-packed and slick but he paid little attention to these conditions. He lost control of the car, and after making two or three 360s, we ended up in a ditch. After we got back on the road,