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had just graduated from University of Pennsylvania Medical School and
was returning home to Salt Lake. Two areas on this trip left an indelible
impression on me:
1. We drove down the highway in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, past the
major steel producing plants. They were silent. No smoke whatso-
ever came from their tall smoke stacks. No one was entering or leav-
ing the plants. It was ghostly – and scary that the economy was so
bad that these factories were all completely shut down.
2. We visited Nauvoo, Illinois and the Carthage Jail where Joseph and
Hyrum Smith were murdered. To see the hole in the wooden door
made by the bullet that struck and killed Hyrum Smith was a shock.
“Rich” Bryner was a genial guy and he drove the car the entire
way (Mother never learned to drive an automobile; I never understood
why). I think the drive took us a week to get home. Dad was terribly
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him. The entire trip had cost him a lot of money and we had been away
for two months. June had pitched in to cook and care for Dad, Sam and
Gord while Mother had been gone.
As I grew up in the 1930s I found it hard to enter a hospital to see
a friend or relative there. The hospitals then reeked of the smell of rub-
bing alcohol and anesthetics – all of which I hated. These trips, though,
opened up a wider world to me that, as a boy from Salt Lake, I didn’t
know even existed. For example, when I was in Washington D.C., when
the bus crossed into Virginia, the bus driver halted the bus, the whites
moved to the front, and the “Negros” moved to the back. I had never
experienced segregation and asked my mother to explain it to me.
In 1938, I took the Greyhound Bus to Berkeley, where I spent
the summer living with Grant, Laurine, Mary and Ida Laurine. I loved
those two little girls. Grant had recommended the services of Gerald
Gray, a surgeon in Oakland. Grant and I visited him for a review of what
could be done and I extracted a promise from Dr. Gray that he would use
local anesthetic exclusively. A few days later Dr. Gray operated (with
Grant assisting) in his private treatment room, which was part of his of-
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what they had accomplished, and was allowed to sit up and look. I was

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