Life as I Saw it. 1969: No

By Kenneth Toppell

My observations on my first year as a physician. We had a baby due; I was in residency training, and I had a date to go to Vietnam. It was a hell of a year ––  from Woodstock to Altamont. I had a princess as a patient and Harry the Hat Walker had a rash on his head. The Mets won the world series and a football league disappeared.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kenneth Toppell
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667820446

Kenneth Toppell

     Dr. Toppell graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1963 with a degree in History and Political Science and from Emory University School of Medicine in 1968. He then enjoyed 48 years of practice in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in Houston, Tx. with some time out for lectures in American History.  He now lives in Plano, Tx. where he reads, writes and enjoys life with his wife of fifty-one years.

Book preview

A book named The Go Between is almost totally forgotten today. But it opens with a memorable first sentence––The past is another country; they do things differently there. We can’t simply judge behaviors of the past using the standards of today. Some events or encounters, causes, or crusades are indeed contemptible. We should consider them by universal standards and norms, lest we learn nothing from them at all. 

To learn from the past, we must give voice to the memories. I look back on my life with a great deal of satisfaction. I’m not in good health but I can still type twenty-seven words a minute. (You read that right.) I’ve had two careers, medicine, and writing, and one overarching calling: husband, father, and grandfather. Thus, I write my story.

© 2021 Kenneth Toppell All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other

noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-66782-044-6 eBook 978-1-66782-045-3

A glance back at the first year I was a doctor. It was my second step on the way to becoming a physician (after medical school and before the Army). An interesting time. Thank you to all of you who helped along the way and to those who weren’t here yet. See what you missed.

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KENNETH  TOPPELL

ONE

January 1969.

542 AMERICAN TROOPS DIED IN VIETNAM

L

oretta was in her second trimester in January 1969. I swear I don’t remember conception. I was an intern in

the Ben Taub General Hospital-Veterans Hospital training program in Houston, Texas. It’s been rolled into the Baylor College of Medicine Residency Programs since then. There aren’t even internships any longer. It’s just the first year of Residency.

1969. Ken Toppell, a doctor for six months already, in front of old Ben Taub

In 1969 though, it was still an internship, an on-call every other night, report to the chief at seven in the morning internship. I’d already been accepted into the Internal Medicine residency at Baylor by then. Not everyone made it. My first resident didn’t. He was known as Killer Jack. He was gone by January. Another intern, Richard Blakely, and I worked closely together whenever Jack was on call with us. There was always another resident who’d help if we needed them. It was a matter of pride not to need them.

Medical residents are also in training. Residencies are anywhere from three to five years and then practice (also referred to as Real Life) or fellowship training in subspecialties. The residents at Ben Taub had one or two years of post-graduate training under their belts.

All of us had learned medicine in school. Now we were learning how to be physicians or surgeons, gynecologists, or other specialists as we worked on the wards at night. We consulted with neurosurgery residents or urology residents while we were preparing to present the cases to our attending physicians.

I’d graduated from Emory University School of Medicine. I was called Doctor by patients and staff. My future was coming into focus. It wasn’t completely clear to me yet, but that January, I knew I was going to be an internist, a father, and a soldier. Good lord, I was scared.

Loretta and I went about our new life as best we could.

She had to work as a Temp, someone who filled job vacancies for a week or two. It paid enough, far better than my two hundred a month. She had originally gotten work at a brokerage firm, much like she had in Atlanta. Then she became pregnant and when she began to show, she was fired. She worked in the "cage, an area in the back of the office where transactions were handled. Clients weren’t allowed there. They wouldn’t be offended by the sight of a pregnant woman. But they might. So, my beautiful wife was fired. It was 1969 and those bastards could and did get away with it.

She worked at Methodist Hospital, in the lab, calling results to anxious residents. She worked at a car agency. She kept us fed.

We didn’t know she was going to deliver a boy. Not in 1969. We didn’t know much of anything.

In the fall of 1968, sometime in November, I received an envelope from the Department of the Army. It contained the outlines of my training program. I had signed up for the Berry Plan in my senior year of medical school. So did all the other medical students in the country. The Vietnam War was still raging, defiling every news broadcast with pictures of war and devastation. Anti-war riots were rumbling across the country. Young men were running to Canada to avoid the draft.

The Berry Plan, named for Frank Berry, MD, an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health and Medical Affairs after the Korean War, was devised to provide certainty to the military, teaching hospitals, and medical students. It suc- ceeded brilliantly.

When I enlisted in the program, I received a twenty-sev- en-month deferment, meaning I was going on active duty, in the Army, in October 1970. I would be a General Medical Officer, not an internist, as I would lack nine more months of training. Ben Taub and the Veterans Hospital knew I would be there that long as part of the house staff.

General Medical Officers staffed venereal disease clinics or walk-in clinics at military camps, bases, or posts across the country. Or they went to Vietnam where they saw jock itch or foot rot. I didn’t have those orders yet. Just a notice that I had a twenty-seven-month deferment.

TWO

January 1969

O

n January 20, 1969, Richard Nixon became the 37th

President of the United States. Even before taking office, he was one of the most controversial politicians in the country. He didn’t simply campaign against political opponents, he attacked them. After WWll, there were fears of growing communist influence in the US. Nixon read those tea leaves and took off. He ran a successful red-baiting campaign against Jerry Voorhis, a five-term incumbent, in 1946 and was placed on the House Un-American Activities Committee as a reward. There he gained national attention in his relentless pursuit of Alger Hiss, a career State Department official and alleged communist agent. Hiss denied all charges. He defended him- self in front of the congressional hearing but was ultimately indicted. His first trial ended in a hung jury and a second convicted him of perjury. He served three years of a five-year term and held to his innocence for the rest of his life.

In 1950 Nixon decided to run for the senate when a seat opened due to retirement. In the general election, he ran against the activist-actress Helen Gahagan Douglas. The depth of the vitriol in this campaign was unprecedented. He referred to her as the Pink Lady, a name first used by her democratic primary opponent. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets in pink were mailed to voters to remind them of her leftist policies. She lost convincingly but coined the term Tricky Dick, which stuck to him throughout his career.

Two years later, Eisenhower chose him as his running mate. Six years after his discharge from the US Navy, Richard Nixon was running for Vice President with General of the Army, Dwight Eisenhower.

Vice Presidential candidates are often selected to balance a ticket geographically or politically. When Lyndon Johnson was chosen by John Kennedy, it wasn’t because they got along. Johnson brought Texas; Johnson was more conser- vative than the eastern liberal Catholic, Kennedy.

In 1952, the political doyens behind the General thought a young Westerner, with such exquisite anti-com- munist bona fides, would play well with the McCarthy crowd. Ike was considered to represent Eastern republicans. He was twenty-three years older than his brash running mate. No one thought Nixon could damage Ike’s brand anyway.

The Democrats picked Adlai Stevenson,