Life of a Traveling Psychiatrist
When I was in college in 1954, I worked in the summer as a nursing assistant in Illinois. I was 18, so I got ten years of education until I was 28 years old. I was a psychiatrist. I was raised in Milwaukee, and I had a Nazi mother. She went to two Hitler rallies in the 1920s. She went with some of her cousins, but her uncle told her that nothing good will come of doing this. Her dad was a pharmacist, and she had relatives in Germany. I’m German-Irish. She didn’t think Hitler was that bad, but I thought otherwise, from what we used to learn in school. We used to argue. She’d whack us, my siblings and I, breaking hairbrushes. Child abuse today!
Ministry, medicine, and engineering were my three career choices in college. I took analytic geometry in college, and that’s when I knew there was no way I wanted to become an engineer!
I lived in Milwaukee twice. I finished my residency and went into the Army. From ‘66–67 I was with the Army. I served in Vietnam as a psychiatrist for a year, I had a good boss. He had me write a paper, and I got it published. So he made me sort of an academic. I just saw patients in Vietnam. They had sent me a draft notice, then an offer of commission. I was living in DC and the Arizona position was open for a year, so I went to Vietnam for one year and Arizona for a year, for the two-year obligation. We were obligated volunteers, that’s the way the Selective Service described it! A year in Vietnam, then Arizona, then a private hospital in Maryland, then Massachusetts. I moved around a lot. Better job, more pay!
My favorite part of being a psychiatrist was doing infant/toddler psychiatry. For me, that was the most fun. I liked to teach mothers, fathers, aunties, and uncles a special way to be with infants and toddlers, whoever wants to sit down with a kid for half an hour. I’ve helped people from babies to 85 years old. I also liked swimming, I was a lifeguard. I used to teach swimming.
I first came to Hawai’i on an R&R from Vietnam. I used to work at the state hospital in Kaneohe, my last job, for 12 years. I’ve been to the Soviet Union and traveled to Portgual. The Soviet Union was very klunky. Consistently inconsistent, I’d say. I was there for two weeks.
