Luck of the Draw

By Lilah

"In a way, all of our lives are built on chance. We have no path predetermined for us by the fates, no next step we can fall into, and the things that come to us are only as set as a roll of a die."

Lilah: The age of dreams, of love and peace, the age of dandelions. The age of hope of wounded souls, the age of no escape. Here he lays, his heart collides with battlefield of mind. The age of dreams of love and peace, the age of silent weeping. Traveling across the world through fog, he enters heaven, but mind still back in raging war. Delirious, he reckons.

The sixties were a turbulent decade for my grandfather. While new political and cultural ideas were shifting into formation and the Vietnam war raged, my grandpa, a young adult at the time, had no idea where his life would take him. In 1965, he made his way from New York City to San Francisco, starting a life in the city of fog.

Lilah: Okay. Grandpa, would you care to talk a little bit about your experience in San Francisco from 1965 to 1967?

David: Yeah. I was working at the U.S. public health service hospital, which is right near the Golden Gate Bridge. And, um, my wife Ellen and I and our little baby were living in Marin County at the time. And one of the things that I remember that my work started on July 1st. And every day when I'm in the city, it was drizzling, and cold, and that was kind of weird.

I got to the U.S. Public Health service because I'd been living in New York, finishing out my medical residency. And… um, my wife and I decided that we would like to go into the Peace Corps, and I could go in as a doctor, and the doctors in the Peace Corps then would take a commission in the U.S. public health service. And one of the jobs that they would have would be to go around the country that they were assigned to and visit all the volunteers, and see if they were healthy. And, um, if we didn't have a child, my wife then could have accompanied me. But with a little baby that would not have been possible. When we knew she was pregnant, I didn't want to do it anymore, to be a Peace Corps doc, because of the need to leave her.

So I thought ery strongly… resigning my position in the U.S. public health service, but that was the time of the Vietnam War. And I'd already had deferments from the military to finish my training. And they would have been delighted to take me and send me to Vietnam. And I was incredibly fortunate that the U.S. public health service hospital in San Francisco needed someone with my training, in internal medicine and lung disease.

Lilah: What were some of your patients like?

David: One of our, our main people that we were taking care of were people they called merchant Marines. So they were people involved with boats coming in and out, but they themselves were not uniformed service. So they will, you know, they might, um, have something to do with tug boats bringing bigger boats into port and unloading them and loading them and stuff like that. There are occasional wives of military people that we took care of, too. But I don't remember any Vietnam veterans.

Lilah: During the Vietnam War, San Francisco was kind of a cultural hub for a lot of different artists, a lot of different creatives, lots of different new ideas. How would you describe, like… the way that you viewed the cultural scene there?

David: Um… relating to the hippie culture was sort of vicarious. I myself never got into it fully because, here I was, a physician, working for somebody else, the U.S. public health service, had a little child.

And, um, and at that time, there were much more worrisome stories about people who took LSD. We had the stories of people running naked down the streets and going crazy and, you know, actually, in retrospect, it turns out that, that, a lot had to do with the person not being totally stable who took it and taking it in bad environments, to my understanding at this time.

Lilah: Do you think that you would have been more of a hippie if you hadn't had a family?

David: Definitely. Definitely so.

Lilah: How would you say that the San Francisco Bay Area has changed since you were first a doctor there?

David: I mean, San Francisco has always had the reputation of being, uh, you know, the town where a lot of "sin" took place. Uh, a lot of… bars, and a lot of prostitutes, and other kinds of things like that. But I loved San Francisco. I mean, I was very impressed with it. I remember we'd to go to the theater. I mean, it was a different time. Essentially, I could do things that military people could do, cause I’d say I wore the uniform. But we could go to military bases and see a movie for like, 25 cents, um… I mean, San Francisco was not considered a horribly expensive city to live in at that time. Which of course it is now.

You know, a lot of parts of San Francisco have been built up, that whole… area where the, that the medical center, the new medical center. It's totally new.

In a way, all of our lives are built on chance. We have no path predetermined for us by the fates, no next step we can fall into, and the things that come to us are only as set as a roll of a die. Fortunately, my grandpa's medical career allowed him to escape the war and raise a family on the west coast. If anything had changed about his young adult life, I would not be living in San Francisco, the city which has shaped me as a person and guided me since the day I was born.