CHAPTER 143: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET BABIES AND MORE HOSPITAL FIXER 1978-1980

 CHAPTER 143. HOPITAL FIXER.      1978 - 1980

 In making the rounds to the various cost centers to introduce myself and talk budgets, I met a manager in the same building I worked who had something called a Wang Word Processor.  I had heard of such a thing, but this was the first time I actually saw one and I asked him to show me how it worked. He did. When I learned how little he utilized it for his own department I boldly went a step further and asked if I could share it.

Each month we printed out a budget report, which was sent to several people, with portions going to specific cost centers so the managers could see their numbers. With 192 cost centers it was a fairly thick report, not overly complicated, but certainly repetitive and a pain to do every month. Sue had to type the original, then do the various copies on a photocopier. 

 The report consisted of a list of major categories overall for the
medical Center, then breakdowns by each cost center comparing actual to budget for the particular month and for the totals year-to-date. Most of the lines of print did not change much month-to-month, but all the number data did. It required a complete retyping of everything each month. However with the use of the Wang processor I could program in all the boilerplate and only the numbers had to be updated. I would write the new number on a copy of the previous report and Sue would enter them into the Wang and it did all the formatting and printing. It saved a ton of time, and error, and I could utilize Sue in other ways, especially in increasing the analysis of the data so we could help units improve.

 It also freed up Sue to help me put together the next round of budgeting. We began the setup of the budget packets not long after the New Year. I had finalized the fiscal 1978-79 budget by the end of December, only six months late. The former Budget Director I had replaced left before it was finished. I was not unhappy to see him go. He was a friendly man, but I got tired of his, “we always done it this way” attitude and his lazy approach to deadlines. At the start of calendar year this baby was all mine and I was determined budgets going forward would be completed and approved and disseminated by July 1, the beginning of the fiscal year.

I had started improving communications the prior year, now I went around to every cost center in January and emphasized I was there to help them with their budgeting and that a packet would be coming to them in February. We were going to start the process as early as possible. I put together the plan and packet and hand delivered it myself, clearly (I hoped) explaining it to each and every manager.

 Getting everybody on board was quite an education. I quickly

learned to sit in the chair nearest the door so I could exit quickly at the end of any meeting before it turned violent. Three areas were the worse: nursing, doctors and the upper administration.

First of all, I discovered the nurses were not big fans of the doctors. These women (there were no male nurses at MCMC that I’m aware of in 1979) felt the doctors took them for granted, which was true. The nurses felt they spent more time with and treating the patients than the doctors did. This was also true. But the doctors ran the wards and treated them as their own little fiefdoms and the nurses and orderlies as serfs, who should snap to at the doctor’s orders and never, ever question anything. The nurses felt the doctors’ arrogance made them susceptible to sloppy work and error. And of course there was a great discrepancy between what nurses were paid and what doctors earned. Despite all this, the nurses still held a good bit of power at the Medical Center,  so I didn’t want to cross them.

The doctors themselves were like a bunch of spoiled children when it came to budgeting, all yelling I want, I want, I want or “If he can have it, why can’t I”. Hospitals are made up of different specialties of care, oncology, cardiology, pediatrics, orthopedics and so on and so forth. Some, perhaps all, need some sort of equipment beyond a stethoscope and sphygmomanometer. Equipment can range from a CT Scan to an EKG Monitor and the individual prices stretch from several thousand, maybe even up to a million, dollars to just a few hundred. For instance, a hospital bed can run from around $600 to over $3,000, and certain treatment beds can exceed $13,000. (And that was in 1980.)

In our capital budget meeting where doctors would state equipment they hoped to buy in the next fiscal period things would get testy. The chief of cardiology might say he needs equipment costing $100,000 and give very valid reasons why this is required. Therefore, we might list it on the Capital submissions list. Immediately, I would have several other physicians clamoring for an equipment budget of $100,000 as well. I might know that for one or more of these departments there is nothing in that range and not much they need, but because some other doctor got $100,000 they thought they were equally entitled.  This can even be jealousy directed toward other hospitals.

In my case, one doctor requested a very expensive and very specialized machine that only had application in fairly rare cases. It hardly justified the cost of purchase, but before someone hit me with saving one life is worth any cost (and I would even argue that concept with you) this was not a matter of putting a limit on the value of a life. There was a Philadelphia Hospital that had this particular equipment and specialized in that affliction. All such cases in the region were sent there and were so rare that it could adequately handle any and all cases. There was no call for a second hospital to compete for these type of patients. He simply wanted the equipment because someone else in his field had one.

 The biggest challenge was the upper administration. I am not
talking about people like Jim Schlief or any other secular manager of high title; I am speaking of the nuns who actually owned and operated the medical center. They  got to make requests and in the end would have the final approval sign off on the budget. During this period they had in mind that the hospital needed a helicopter and a heliport. Why? Again, because some other area hospitals had helicopters and heliports. Low cost transport helicopters today can cost a million dollars. They may have been cheaper in 1979-80, but they were still highly expensive, plus you need pilots, insurance, maintenance, fuel. The vast majority of people could be gotten to the hospital just fine by ambulance. If someone was in such dire distress that a helicopter was the only hope there were area hospitals they could be flown to. Ours did not have to join those so equipped. It was not financially feasible and could have led to insolvency.

With this or any expenditure you received two responses from the nuns. “It is for the patients” or “We’re a non-profit, we don’t have to worry about cost.”  Yes, sometimes you spend extra money because of the benefit to the patients; however, the patients did not need a helicopter. That money would best serve the patients by not being spent on such an item.

As to the being non-profit, it was very difficult getting them to understand this didn’t mean you did not have to concern yourself with expenditures. True, you did not have owners or stockholders you had to please by the profit you generated, but you had to make a profit anyway. We didn’t call it a profit, of course, and it didn’t go into a Capital Account, it went into Reserve. Yeah, you could break even and you could carry a deficit, but what if you needed emergency funds or expansion? Prices do go up and funding sometimes goes down and you must have some money to operate. You don’t want to have to borrow a lot and build up liabilities. Being a non-profit does not mean throwing away good business practices. 

One other thing concerning medical costs, at least then, perhaps the rules have changed these 40 years later. When we budgeted for supplies we had to select from registered medical supply businesses. This was Federal Law. These usually charged much higher prices than we could have paid elsewhere for the same thing. The example I remember the best were the metal ice buckets. I know when I’ve been in hospitals the ice buckets have usually been a thin plastic, but in this case the request was for metal

ice buckets and we had to buy them from one of the official medical suppliers. The cost was $100 per bucket. My goodness, they weren’t bad looking buckets, but nothing special about them. I looked in a nearby Woolworths and could have purchased the exact same buckets for $10 each, but of course I couldn’t do that because Woolworths wasn’t a certified medical supplier.

I did have a budget in place for the new fiscal year on time, something they told me hadn’t happened in a decade. We were running a decent department I felt. We were communicating, which the cost center managers liked, and being on time with the budgets. Our monthly budget reports were coming out sooner in the month thanks to the Wang Processor. Going into 1980 everything was coming up roses again.

Even the snarky Mr. Simon disappeared from my life off to some other "Heart of Darknesss", I suppose.

CHAPTER 142: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET BABIES AND MORE AN END TO SOMETHING 1976-1978

 CHAPTER 142. AN END TO SOMETHING 1976 -1978

 

The announcement came sudden and unexpectedly. 1976 had been a record year for Welded Tube, $80 million in sales. 1977 started off looking like it would be even better, but then as we crept toward 1978 things went the other way.

Why so? Nothing had changed with our product. We were still top of the line. Yes, we were, but in 1977-78 the Empire of Japan began dumping lower priced steel in the United States.  Mr. Baylis, unlike a number of other manufacturers, was stubbornly loyal to the idea of buying American. We continued to purchase coils from domestic companies at a higher cost than we could get it elsewhere and consequently we had to sell product at a higher price than our competitors who were not so patriotic. In the fall of 1978 it was announced the Philadelphia operation would be shut down and sold. Headquarters and all operations would be moved to our Chicago plant, where apparently both supply and shipping were less costly. 

It was a shock and Lou Bailis could not have been happy about his own decision. The Philadelphia area had been his home and it was here that he founded and built the company. We were told by the end of the year this location would be gone. I had been called upstair to the main office where they offered me a 47% raise to stay with the company and go to Chicago with them.  It was a difficult decision.

I was torn, but my wife was adamant that she didn’t want to move. We had lived all our lives in this area, our families were here as were all our friends. She did not want to move, and honestly, I didn’t either. But not to do so meant we would face that old bug-a-boo, unemployment and the challenge of finding a new job. Not only that, it wasn’t just us anymore. We had a baby now. A new crisis to take to Laurel Hill Bible Church for prayer. 

Two week before Halloween the phone rang. It was Jim Schlief (left), who I had been reporting to at Welded Tube. He had left there a month before the announcement was made. He had seen the handwriting on the wall and obtained a new position as CFO (Chief Financial Officer) for Mercy Catholic Medical Center. He had called to see if I would consider coming there as the Budget Manager.

Of course I would.

I would start my new job in early November. I immediately let
Welded Tube know I wasn’t going to Chicago with them and in fact was giving them my two-week notice. They were  upset by my decision and tried to dissuade me, but couldn’t. 

It was a relief to know I wouldn’t face unemployment when Welded Tube closed up come January, but there wasn’t time to dwell on my good luck, if you could call it that. I didn’t know what I was in for at Mercy Catholic. We did know we would have to change addresses. The headquarters for the Medical Center was on Main Street, Darby, Pennsylvania.

Actually, it sat just outside the town proper and behind Holy Cross Cemetery at the border of Yeadon. Main Street had been South Lansdowne Avenue until the street crossed West Providence Road. There was irony in this for a decade earlier we had lived in The Lansdowne Towers, which sat along West Providence Road within walking distance of Mercy Catholic.

We weren’t in walking distance anymore. Between Chalet at Ski Mountain and my new workplace was a distance of 24 miles. If you look it up on Google Maps its says a 35-minute trip. Yeah, right, if you’re the proverbial crow. I’d be traveling during rush hour up Route 42 out of Jersey, crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge onto the Schuylkill Expressway until I turned off on  Route 291. This would take me through southwest Philadelphia, pass the airport, eventually through Darby to the Hospital, and then reverse it every evening. Maybe you could do it in 35 minutes if everybody else died and the highways were clear, but not in that daily traffic and certainly not on Friday evenings and Monday mornings during the Jersey shore season. No, the only sane thing to do was move and do it quickly. So we were heading back to Pennsylvania.

Lois did not want to go into another apartment, but we didn’t have enough money to afford a down payment on a house. We drove over to a Realtor Office in Springfield, Delaware County and we told the Real Estate Agent we were looking for a house to rent. I told her we wanted to stay in it for a good while, we didn’t want any place where the owner would sell it out from under us. We wanted to rent from somebody who only wanted to rent their property long term.

She assured us she had the perfect home right  in Springfield. It belonged to a woman who had no interest in selling. We began moving our furniture and stuff there on November 8. We left Laurel at my parents over the weekend. We moved to 338 Rambling way on November 11. When we picked Laurel up on Sunday evening we had managed to move two more loads that Sunday, but still had a few more to do. (Probably all  those blasted books I had accumulated. My personal library grew year after year until a few years ago I had over 5,000 volumes, only a few showing in this photo. Every time we moved the volume of books was greater. A decade ago I donated a great deal of my books to the local library. I only had a few hundred  volumes left and I have since gotten rid of most of them.)

My mom and grandmother were down on the 16 to help Lois unpack. They brought dinner with them. My dad got there in time to eat with us. They thought the house was nice. We had Christmas at our house that year. My parents  gave Lois a washer and drier.

We have not mentioned anything for a long time about my wife’s
Bipolar Disorder. I recall the house as being fairly decent, but she saw it as a decrepit dump, falling apart with the bathtub coming through the ceiling (not true), a place she feared would collapse about us at any instance. (Photos of 338 Rambling Way’s interior line the sides along these passages.) It certainly wasn’t perfect, but it also wasn’t ready to collapse. I have no recall of the bathtub legs sticking

through  the kitchen ceiling. Age bathtub was fine. The basement was somewhat spooky, but most basements are. It had a furnace like they used to terrify Kevin in “Home Alone”, but otherwise I didn’t fear for my child living there.

 It had a nice backyard and the neighborhood was quiet. The home
was conveniently situated, sitting less than a block back from Baltimore Pike, the main drag through Springfield. It had easy access to stores and restaurants, yet when you walked away from Baltimore Pike it was a quiet, peaceful stroll. 

The house still stands 40 years since we lived there and looks the same as in this picture, except for a picket fence about the yard. (It did not collapse)

 It was only a 12-minute
drive to the headquarters of Mercy Catholic Medical Center (MCMC) and my new job as Budget Director. MCMC consisted of, besides the administration building, two major Philadelphia Hospitals, the 204 bed Fitzgerald Mercy in Darby (on the left) and the 157 bed Misericordia Hospital in southwest Philadelphia (on the right). Since I was there  they have changed the names to Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital and Mercy Philadelphia Hospital.

That is okay, I always thought Misericordia was a terrible name for a hospital; sounds too much like misery. Actually, Misericordia is the Latin word for mercy.   The Medical Center also included a nursing school and several ancillary clinics scattered about the area. It was owned and operated by the Sisters of Mercy (a misnomer if ever there was one).

I was nervous about the size of the operation and the fact I had
never been a budget manager before and wasn’t at all familiar with hospital accounting, but I was also looking forward to working with Jim Schlief again. I would soon be rudely awakened to a different reality.

I walked into a disaster. First of all, the fiscal year, as it is for many non-profits, ran from July 1 through June 30, not by calendar year. I began my new job in early November and learned right away that the 1978-79 budget was not yet in place. We were better than a third through the year and no budget had been completed, which means it was all ready 5 month late. The former Budget Director, the man I was replacing, was still on board. He was a nice guy and a jovial sort, and he didn’t see this situation as very serious at all. He laughed it off. “We didn’t get a budget set last year until almost May” he told me,”so we’re actually ahead of the game. It was even worse the year before that.”

No wonder they were bouncing this guy. He showed me around both hospitals, introducing me to department heads, but he showed no sense of urgency about inquiring where they were in the budget process. Well, I knew where they were, almost five months behind.

He left after another week and the department was all mine. I didn’t hardly know where to begin, but I knew it had to be quick. I personally began visiting every cost center manager and I issued a memorandum that all budget paperwork needed to be in my hands within two weeks. That is when I discovered a lot of these managers had never received paperwork in the first place or if they had, couldn’t understand it. I therefore carried extra paperwork with me and sat down with each and every manager to explain it. Now frankly, this stuff was new to me too and I was learning it as I taught them, but we got her done. Before Christmas came we had a budget in place and at the end of December we were comparing budget to actual. It wasn’t totally accurate, but it was better than nothing and I had made myself known to every cost center head in the system.

My second shock came as I was finalizing this budget. One of my biggest reason to be excited about my new employment, besides being employed, was the opportunity to work for Jim again.  It was not to be. Jim was the Chief Financial Officer, which meant he sat up top. He wasn’t the guy giving the day by day instructions. There was an in between management position of Finance Department Vice President. The new boss started sometime that December.

He was new, too.

It was hate at first sight.

He was a short man named Simons, a New Yorker with a heavy Bronx accent full of curses. The first thing he said to me was I should fire my secretary/assistant. My secretary, Sue, was a nice middle-aged lady who had worked for the Medical Center forever. She took orders well and did her job without mistakes and was very dedicated to MCMC. She had to type up all those monthly budget reports and did so without complaint and with efficiently. Why should I fire her? 

I asked him that very question. 

“Because then the other employees will fear you,” he answered.

That was his management philosophy, and he did fire a number of long time employees and people did fear him. I didn’t show the same fear. I refused to fire Sue. He didn’t like me from that time forward. Unfortunately for him he had to walk cautiously where I was concerned. He knew that Jim Schlief, who was his boss, and I had a prior relationship and friendship, and Jim had hired me. He would have to have real cause to fire me and that he didn’t have. I had done something the last two Budget Managers had failed to do, pull a budget together.

He would never speak a kind word to me, in fact usually sneered when he had to address me, but for the most part he stayed away from me. Like it or not, he had to put up with me, 

My home life during 1979 was fairly normal, no big traumas.  Our old friends had dwindled down to basically two couples, the Rubios and the Ernests. 

Joe and Linda Rubio had their first child in 1973 and named her

Meredith after me. In September  1978, shortly after having their second child, another girl whom they named Kristen, they visited us at 338 Rambling Way. The photo shows Laurel, Meredith and  Kristen playing together. 

This visit would be the last we saw each other in person. Not long afterward ARCo closed its Philadelphia headquarters on South Broad Street and moved it to downtown Los Angeles (right
ARCo headquarters, L.A. in 1970s). Unlike myself, he went with his company to the West Coast, buying a home with a swimming pool. We corresponded for a while, but that drifted off. I do not know where Joe or any of his family are today. 

Victor and Marsha Ernest continued their friendship with us a couple more years, but with the closing of Welded Tube he moved on elsewhere as well. By 1982 they disappeared from our lives. I heard from Victor a year or so ago, but nothing since. Both of he and his wife were now having serous health issues.  

In January 1979 I had to go take a driving exam to get a Pennsylvania Driver’s License to replace my New Jersey one. On February 3 we dropped Laurel off at my parents and they took her to a birthday party for her cousin Kelly, who had been born a month before Laurel. (Left, Kelly and Laurel.)

Meanwhile, Lois and I went to a party at the Ernests.

On March 3 we had a intimate party for Laurel’s first birthday. My mother, father and grandfather were at our place for dinner, as was Mr. Heaney and Evelyn Weinmann, Lois’ lifetime friend, who we now referred to as Aunt Evelyn,

We were to my parents for Easter Sunday, as usual.  

On May 19 my parents and grandmother came down for a belated
Mother’s Day. We took them to the Longhorn Ranch Restaurant on Baltimore Pike in Glen Mills. We enjoyed that eatery and took Laurel there often. It had a Western theme with live country bands performing in the dining room. We had a table ringside and one of the bands fell in love with Laurel and kept directing their music at her. This was a different place from the chain restaurants using the name Long Horn today. 

It eventually closed and a nightclub called Pulsations was built where it had been. This was very popular for a couple years, drawing long lines, but it too closed and disappeared. 

On June 27 for my birthday, we met my mom and grandmother and went to Dutch Wonderland.  This was an amusement park and was brand new in the ‘sixties and rather limited in rides, but they added a new ride each year and became pretty large over the decades. 

In August was the Wilson family reunion. We also received the bad news in August that we would have to move again. Despite the assurances of the Realtor when we rented 338 Rambling Way and that the lady owner had no intensions of selling it, she did just that. She offered it to us, but we couldn’t afford to buy and thus it was sold out from under us and we had to be out by the end of September.

On October 1 we were moving our stuff once more. This was a nicer, if smaller house, on Congress Avenue in Springfield. The owner hadn’t wanted to rent to a family with children, but the Realtor assured her we were a very nice family and talked her into it. The Realtor felt guilty because she had told us the first home would never be sold and it was. Boy, were we getting tired of moving. This was the ninth time since we married. That was nine times in less than 20 year

On October 30, Lois and I were baptized by emersion at the Lowndes Free Church, also known as the Blue Church, where we were now attending after having to move from Laurel Hill  Bible. Mr. Heaney and my parents and grandmother were there. It was a Sunday evening service. I had been baptized in the Grove Methodist Church as a baby and had reaffirmed my baptism at Laurel Hill, but I felt strongly we should be emerged and so we arranged it.  (On the left is The Blue Church in Springfield, Delaware County, named so because the stone had a blue hue.)

Thanksgiving was at my parents, but once again we had Christmas at our home and this would be the pattern for years to come. I didn’t think it was fair to pack the kids up after they opened their gifts and hauling them several miles away for the day. Let them be home and enjoy their new toys, and boy did Laurel get new toys.

 

You could say 1979 was a typical family year, little drama on the home front, other than the unexpected moving to a new home. The turmoil remained with Mercy Catholic Medical Center and then the years immediately ahead.

CHAPTER 141: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET BABIES AND MORE THING RIGHT AND THINGS WRONG 1977-1978

 CHAPTER 141. THINGS THAT ARE RIGHT ANS THINGS WRONG  1977 - 1978

 Besides my job and my church work and the youth ministry, I had gone back to evening college in 1977 . At Temple I had majored in Sociology, but when I registered at Camden County College as a student I went in another direction — computers. I had a course in COBOL programming and another in Systems Analysis. The latter was to become very handy to me in the near future and one of the most useful tools I ever gained from education. I never actually got to apply COBOL anywhere. The programming language I did learn and use regularly at Welded Tube and later at Wilmington Trust was RPG II.  (Eventually I also picked up Basic and HTML.)

I also took Accounting Principles I and II. I had an A average overall, but it was hardly surprising, I had been doing accounting in the real world for several years by then. Everything  we were being taught, I had already done, but on a more complex and larger level.

But like several other things, the miraculous birth of my daughter,
Laurel, complicated things. Lois and I had given up our involvement in the youth ministry due to her pregnancy. Obviously having to remain in bed for term made it impossible to continue. Having a baby added to the responsibilities at home.

Now that I was a Born Again Christian, my life became incredibly easy, right?  Saved Christians are assured to be happy, healthy and prosperous are they not?  Did not Jesus say in John 10:10 that He came so we could have the abundant life? Didn’t Paul tell us in 2 Corinthians 8:9 that Jesus “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich”?  Didn’t Jesus also say, in John 14:14, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it?”

 At the time I accepted Christ as my Savior, Prosperity Preaching was very much in favor with radio and TV “evangelists” (I use quotes because the term is being used pretty loosely here.)  A lot of people fell victims to these false prophets and send their savings and money they couldn’t spare to receive prayer handkerchiefs or a miraculous piece of cloth and the false idea that if they gave a dollar to a Leroy  Jenkins (pictured left) or some other charlatan that they would magically receive a $100 or a $1,000 or even more riches.

The only ones really prospering were people like Reverend Ike
(pictured right), who distorted the Word of God to fill his coffers with millions of dollars. The so-called Reverend Ike died of a stroke at age 74 in 2009. 

 Sad to say, Leroy Jenkins was still at it in his eighties, even after being convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison for assaulting two men and plotting arson to two homes; despite his arrest in 1994 on grand theft (charges were dropped after he agreed to pay restitution.)

He attempted marriage a 77-year-old widow. Eloise Thomas,  a black woman, when she won the Ohio Lottery for $6 million. The marriage was annulled by a Delaware Judge . The marriage was annulled by the courts on the basis the women was incompetent and incapable of knowing what she was doing at the time. In 2003 the Ohio Department of Agriculture found Jenkins cure-all “miracle water” contained coliform bacteria. He was at least fined $200 for not having a license to sell water. Jenkins  died on June 21, 2017 from pneumonia..He  was 83. 

These so-called preachers cherry-picked verses from the Bible that
suited their deception without including the context. They overlooked the fact that it is hard to find true people of God within the Bible who didn’t suffer for their faith. Being faithful followers of Christ certainly didn’t lead to easy street nor a prosperous life for the Apostles, now did it? Jesus, who was closer to God than any of us, because he was God, was born in a borrowed stable and buried in a borrowed grave. He never had a big Galilean Estate or a luxury chariot to tool about in.

  On the 18^th of March some of the ladies of the Bible Baptist Church threw a baby shower for Lois.  No one had given her any during the pregnancy because of fear she would lose another. The joy of gifting an expectant mother with baby needs would turn into deep sorrow if the child was lost. The mother would not want to see what could have been represented in the gifts that would been the Childs. 

Lois’ longtime friends also gave her a shower at Mary Lou’s Bryn
Mawr home on April 9. This was a rare baby shower where one of the guests of horror was the baby. 

Then two weeks after these parties came a scare. Laurel began gasping and struggling for breath. It would be a real concern in any baby, but Laurel was a preemie as well, and her lung growth had been a concern with the doctors. Before she was born, during that tense week when we thought we were going to lose an eighth child, the doctors had approached us about their concerns. They wanted to use a then experimental drug in hopes it would strength her lungs. The drug was steroids. It had certainly appeared to do the trick since she had come out into the world howling. Now we were facing a new threat to her breathing.

After seeing the pediatrician, we were sent to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where  Laurel was admitted with suspected Whooping Cough (Pertussis). The hospital provided sleeping arrangements for a parent (right Laurel with my mother) to be with the child during the stay and Lois remained with Laurel the two nights she was being treated. She had been admitted on April 25 and came home on the 28^th, now fine and dandy.

On Mother’s Day, my dad gave us money to  have dinner at the
Black Angus, then one of our favorite restaurants. It was a fairly upscale place located in Ludwig’s Corner, not far from the horse show grounds. Lois was an adventurous eater, but I was pretty predictable. I think I had the same meal every time we went there: Two Whiskey Sours on the sweet side, a fruit cup with orange sherbet, a house salad with blue cheese dressing, a medium filet mignon with onion ring, mashed potatoes and gravy, fried eggplant and some kind of pie for desert. I no longer drink alcohol and I cannot eat such a large meal anymore because it is so big. Frankly, I can’t afford filet mignon these days anyway. 

I gave my mother a framed 8x10 photo of four generations of family women, my mother, grandmother, wife and daughter. That did not cost anywhere near as much as our dinner, but to them it was a more valued gift.

Laurel was dedicated on June 25. Laurel Hill Bible, as a Fundamentalist church, did not believe in infant baptism. Such a practice is not Scriptural. Baptism is an acknowledgement of your acceptation of Christ as your savior, a symbolic burial and resurrecting in to a second birth, and so must be done with  complete understanding of what you are engaging in, and a baby cannot understand this nor accept Jesus of their own will. Therefore, what substituted as a Christening was a dedication on the parent’s part to raise their child in the faith.

My parents, Lois’ father and my friend, Victor Ernest along with his wife Marsha.  Attended. Victor also brought his mother and cousin, who were currently visiting him from their home, and his birthplace, of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean Sea. Although the Island was then under the United Kingdom, it had bounced back and forth between French and British colonization for centuries. (A year later, in 1979, it would become an independent state.) Victor had a distinct accent of Saint Lucian Creole French, although Lois always swears he sounded like the Muppet Elmo.

Since the end of the slave trade, the African population has become the majority on the island. A small minority of the population are Indian (from India). Victor was part Indian and part African. By the mid-1970s he had become my best friend. 

On July 8 something happened that became a life-changing event
for my dad. He was changing a tire on his truck when the locking ring exploded. It flew at him and he threw an arm up, which the rim hit and then careened off a far distance into a nearby field. The blow  shattered his arm and they took him to Coatesville Hospital. This was his first stay in a hospital and the first time he realized he was mortal. He said if he hadn’t got his arm in the way that rim would have probably taken his head clean off. He had seen that happen to a trucker one time. My father had always saw himself as John Wayne, something bigger than life; now he realized he was human after all.

The arm was in bad shape with multiple fractures. It had to be pieced back together like a puzzle and put together again with rods. The resulting scar would run pretty much the length of his arm. We visited him in the hospital several times over that month. The hospital was a place where he wasn’t happy. On August 10 my mom took him to a doctor in West Chester to remove the stitches. My father was a tough man, but they had to get smelling salts to keep him from fainting during the removal. His arm was placed in a sling. It wasn’t until August 16 that he was able to drive again, when he drove himself to a clam bake at The Gap. He wasn’t able to work until mid-September when he began escorting drivers hauling oversized loads locally. 

On Halloween 1978 we surprised my parents on Halloween by
showing up in costume. But the Devil’s Holiday was a warning to this Christian boy that Satan was still about and our lives began to take a turn toward trouble. So much for the lie that being a Born Again Christian guaranteed you’d be happy, healthy and prosperous life, and safe from any harm. Harms were heading for this Christian Man.