FILE: C:\UserNathan\Data\WP Documents\NateBio Part II Chapter IX.wpd
Chapter IX Rochester, New York: September 01, 1956 to October 01, 1966
Monroe County is in northwestern New York State, northeast of Buffalo and northwest of Syracuse. Rochester, the principal city of Monroe County, is on the New York State Barge Canal near Lake Ontario. It was first settled in about 1812 and grew rapidly after the opening of the Erie Canal. The Genesee River flows north through the city and empties into Lake Ontario. Rochester is a leading center in the production of photographic, photocopying, optical, and dental equipment; process control and recording instruments; and thermometers. Several major manufacturers of these products have head offices there. Two major corporations located in Rochester are Eastman Kodak and Xerox. The city is the seat of the University of Rochester, Nazareth College of Rochester, the Rochester Institute of Technology (est. 1829), St. John Fisher College, and a theological seminary. The city's cultural features include the Rochester Philharmonic and Eastman School of Music orchestras, the Rochester Museum of Art and Sciences (with a planetarium), the Memorial Art Gallery, the historical society, a zoo, and the Rundell Memorial Building, which houses the public library and an art gallery. Numerous parks and nurseries have earned Rochester the name Flower City.
The Town of Greece borders Rochester on the western side of the Genesee and the northern border is Lake Ontario. The Town of Irondequoit is a suburb of Rochester, New York, lying on the north edge of the city. The town lies between the Genesee River on the west and Irondequoit Bay on the east. The northern border of the town is defined by Lake Ontario, and the area was once known as the "Coney Island of Western New York."
The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) was a privately endowed non-profit institution. Its roots went back to the founding of the Rochester Athenaeumin about1830 by a group of civic leaders who saw the need for an educational and cultural institution in the frontier village which later became the city of Rochester. The need of Rochester’s growing industries for capable technicians and supervisors led, in 1885, to the founding og Mechanics Institute. Te merger of the Rochester Athenaeumin and Mechanics Institute The Rochester Institute (RIT) as it wasrenamed in 1944, pioneered in many fields of education, including mechanical drawing, home economics, photography, printing, and crafts. Its cooperative educational program was the first in the country; At the time I went to work at RIT, there were ten departments of specialized instruction with an enrollment of more than 2,000 students and about 5,000 students in the Evening Division.
RIT originally was located in downtown Rochester, west of and close to the Genesee River. The buildings on the inner city campus were located just south of Main Street West and they were bounded by Washington Street South, Broad Street, Plymouth Avenue South, and Spring Street. Broad Street was about one block south of and more or less parallel to Main Street West. Within the campus there was a parking lot for faculty cars. I soon found that if one did arrive at the campus site early in the morning it would be difficult to find parking in the faculty lot. There were times that I used the local bus transportation to go to the campus. In 1968, RIT, keeping its name, moved south of the city limits to the town of Henrietta, New York When we spent several days in Rochester in 1990, we visited the RIT campus. It certainly was lot nicer than the former inner city campus.
The RIT had both cooperative and full-time courses. There was an extensive cooperative program in six departments which was an outgrowth of its belief in the value of integrating formal education and formal experience. A student in a cooperative course alternated between a period of study at the Institute and an equal period of work on a paying job in his or her chosen field. I found that work experience gave a student a better understanding of principles learned in school. Also, earnings in a comparative job made higher education possible for qualified students with limited finances.
The Chemistry Department, in the Division of Applied Science offered two programs of study. The first was a cooperative program in Industrial Chemistry. The students attended classes and worked full time in their chosen fields during alternate quarters of a year. Each of the four annual quarters consisted of about 10 or 11 week sessions and one week for final examinations. Local industry and other institutions were enthusiastic supporters of this program. Upon the successful completion of three years in this program the students were awarded the Associate of Applied Science degree. Those students with the aptitude and interest for further study could continue their education for two more years. At the end of the five year program the students were awarded the Bachelor of Science degree. The second program was a two-year, full-time program in Clinical Laboratory Technology which led to the Associate of Applied Science degree.
It was very quickly after the orientation faculty meeting on September 4, 1956 that I learned courses were scheduled in a way which permitted the most efficient use of classroom space. In most colleges and universities classes are scheduled t regular times, such as lectures at 2 pm Monday Wednesday and Friday, etc. However at RIT I found a bit of unevenness such as a three lecture course could be scheduled at 8 am on Monday, 3 pm on Tuesday, and 11:00 am on Friday, etc. The second thing that I learned was that the teaching load would be high as the instructors position did not depend on research efforts and bringing in grant money. Also there was no ranking of teaching positions; we were all instructors.
Chemistry courses had to be aimed at different groups of students. Examples are that teaching quantitative analysis, classes would consist of students majoring in chemistry or students from the Division of Photography, Printing and Graphic Arts. While there were high standards for the course, one had to consider what to emphasize in a particular chemistry course. The needs for those that would look forward to working in the field of photographic technology, the chemistry courses would be slanted toward their future needs and those going to become fully qualified chemists, chemistry courses would have be slanted for their future need. Clinical technology students and chemistry majors had slightly different needs.
During my three years as an instructor at RIT, I gave courses in quantitative analysis, instrumental methods of analysis, biochemistry, and even some general chemistry. I had at least 20 teaching hours a week, which consisted of direct contact with students in my courses. I lectured and was in attendance during sessions in the laboratory. The rest of the work week consisted of certain hours for individual students to come to my office for one reason or another. I had lectures to prepare and of course make up tests and grade papers. My work week was not only at the campus but at home where I spent many hours developing lecture material and grading tests.
The students who worked in laboratories every other quarter learned very quickly whether they wanted to become chemists. I suspect that the students who remained for the last two years for the Bachelor degree program certainly were because of their work experience in actual practice more sophisticated than students who did not have actual work experience outside of academic laboratories. For the fifth year analytical cheistry course, I had eight students. I remembered that back at Purdue University M.G. Mellon had a course in which he gave each student a rock and asked them identify the elements in the rock. So, knowing that the fifth year students had a lot of outside laboratory experience, I made an artificial mixture of various inorganic compounds znd I gave each of the eight students an aliquot of the mixture. I asked that they identify the elements in the mixture and if possible the amounts of the elements per gram of the mixture. I asked only for a term paper in which the students would show what they did and what their results were. In the lecture part of the course I talked about qualitative and quantitative procedures to identify and quantify elements in mixtures of various materials. The outcome of the course was beyond my expectations. Academic learning together with work experience certainly was worthwhile for future chemists. When I gave a course in instrumental methods of analysis along with an appropriate textbook, I tried to impart knowledge of the basic principles of instrumentation for the analytical laboratory. A number of my students went on to graduate school to earn advanced degrees. Many years after I left the teaching position I met past students at American Chemical Society and American Association for Clinical Chemistry annual meetings and they complimented me for making them work hard in my classes.
I found that as an instructor at the college level publishing companies would send me complimentary copies of textbooks. It was in their interest that I adopt their textbooks for my courses. During my first year at RIT the quantitative analysis textbook I used was written by Dr. Van Peirsem and Homer imes (Van Peursem, Ralph L. and Imes, Homer C. Elementary quantitative analyses. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1953. 383 P. $4.50). During my second and third years at RIT, for chemistry majors I adopted a textbook by Blaedel and Melocche (Blaedel, W. J.; Meloche, V. W. Elementary Quantitative Analysis: Theory and Practice, Evanston, IL, Row, Peterson and Co. 1957). It was during my third year at RIT, Van Peursem offered to make me a co-author of a new edition of his and Imes textbook. I declined, but thinking back, I should not have done that.
I found that I enjoyed the contact with students outside of the classroom. I had quite a learning experience when individual students came to my office for information and sometimes a chat about their personal lives and desires. I was particularly interested in the very small numbers of minority students. At the end of my second year at RIT, one young lady student of mine will forever remain in my mind. She was a pretty girl, about 20 years old. I noticed that her face seemed bloated and later on I learned that she was on steroids. This young lady could not find employment in spite of a good academic record. At this time I had contacts in the University of Rochester School of Medicine, so I contacted the head of the pediatric laboratory. The young lady got a job there. Toward the end of my third year I got the news that this lady died. She had lupus erythematosus. A severe flare-up occurred and she died the Rochester General Hospital. I attended the clinical pathology conference in which the young lady’s case was discussed. Apparently this was an unusual case. I was saddened mostly because I got to know her as one of my more outstanding students. At one time during my employment Galla and I were asked to act as chaperones at an RIT student’s dance social. I remember remarking that I felt old, but it was Galla who said it was just that the students were just very young. I am not sure that this remark made me feel better.
We did not have social relationships with any oi the faculty except with Stuart Hurlbert and his wife. Stuart was also a new member of the chemistry department and he and his wife were from Canada. I shared an office with Stuart. Our relationship ended at the end of the academic year 1956-57 as Stuart, his wife and a newborn retirned to Canada. Of course On campus I did have professional relationships with members of the faculty in the Chemistry Department. There were eight instructors in the chemistry department including myself plus the head of the department, Ralph Van peursem, Ph.D. Beside Dr. Van Peursem, Casselman Hess and myself had the Ph.D. degree in chemistry, the others having Master’s degrees. Bill Hayes, a member of the chemistry department went off to the University of Iowa to finish up work toward his Ph.D. degree. Casselman Hess retired from DuPont and came to RIT to teach physical chemsitry. One thing that he did do in the physical chemistry laboratory was having the students build equipment for physical measurements. I met and socialized with other members of the faculty in the Institute’s cafeteria at lunchtime. One faulty member in the General Education Division was S. John Ingram. He had an M.D. degree but he did not want to practice medicine so he taught biology. John had aspirations of becoming a singer and he was enrolled at the eastman School of Music while teaching. We went to one of his concerts and we were not impressed. Before I left RIT, John took a job writing blurbs for a pharmaceutical company.
RIT was chartered by the Legislature of the State of New York. During my last year at RIT the Institute sought accreditation by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. Accreditation is the affirmation that a school provides a quality of education that the community has a right to expect and the education world endorses. Accreditation is a means of showing confidence in a school's performance. When the Commission on Secondary Schools accredits a school, it certifies that the school has met the prescribed qualitative standards of the Middle States Association within the terms of the school's own stated philosophy and objectives. As part of the accreditation process
All member institutions are required to conduct a self evaluation of those standards as part of the accreditation process, and the standards are the lens through which accreditation decisions are made.
Casselman Hess, Bill Hayes and I were selected for the self-evaluation process in the chemistry department. When the three of us met the first time, Casselman talked about the limitations of importing course concepts in 11 week quarters. Our task was to look at the courses given in the chemsitry department and list the important concepts in each course that would be effective iper quarter. I was assigned the analytical and biochemistry courses. The three of us came up with a chart designating what we thought would be within the objectives of the middle States standards and we also list the possible textbooks to be used in each course. I still have a copy of this chart and in the year 2009 I wonder what we would come with now after all the changes in technology since I left RIT at the end of June, 1959. One change that would come out of the accreditation process s that there be a change from calling every one teaching an instructor to designating the teachers, as in other universities and colleges, professorial levels.
Strathmore Circle intersected with Norton Street, an east-west thoroughfare north of East main Street, south of East Ridge Road and east of the Genessee River. I believe Ridge Road was a major business street and also the southern border, more or less, of the Town of Irondequoit. Our apartment at 1 Strathmore Circle was in the first building of a garden apartment complex. We rented a two bedroom apartment, but the layout escapes me. We think it was one flight up in a two or three story building. What is memorable is that the movers arrived late in the day and it was very late at night that the movers finally left. Although I cannot describe the furniture we had accumulated, it does seem that among those we had were chests of drawers that we needed to paint, a sofa called a day bed (no back or arms and opens to become a double bed)/ I think by that time we had, and had for a long time, a gray molded chair on black iron legs. There were parking spaces outside of the apartment building. I still remember the first Rochester winter as almost daily, I had to brush snow off the car and scrape the ice from the windshield.
There are not any real memorable events the first year that we lived in Rochester. I had some kind of makeshift desk in our bedroom so that I could work on course lectures. I suspect that when I accepted the new job in Rochester, we never thought about the severe cold and snowy weather that we would encounter in upstate New York. The summers in Rochester were usually to our liking. There was a saying that there were two days of summer in Rochester; one day was July 4 and the day one did not remember. Air conditioning was not prevalent as it is today. Living in the northern part of the country we got by with fans. Putting a large fan in front of an open window and pulling air from a window in another part of a dwelling was sufficient to provide a cooling air current. Beside going to the beach at Lake Ontario, on a summer Saturday, we occasionally would drive south to Letchworth State Park. The park was noted for its 17-mile long gorge which reached heights of 600 feet. The Genesse River flowing through the gorge had three waterfalls, one the height of 107 feet. There were other state parks to which we drove for summer days picnics. Some of our photographs show us grilling hot dogs or hamburgers.
I do not think that we had mich of a social life the first year in Rochester. I was busy as I had my hands full in my teaching duties which included lecturing, setting up tests, and giving out grades. We did become acquainted with another apartment dweller and it was a couple and their young daughter of about Rachel’s age
Believing that we would remain in Rochester permanently, we began to thing about getting out of our apartment and buying a house. We saw an ad that a builder was planning to construct 40 new house in Irondequoit. We spent some time with the agent for the builder and discussed the possibility of buying one of the new houses. We were shown the plans for the homes to be build, but we were told that the builder would use a plan submitted by us. The cost for the house would be about 10 to 12 Dollars per Sq. Foot. According to the zoning laws the minimum size of the house would have to be about 1,000 square feet. The site for this project was off Hudson Avenue, just south of the east-west Titus Avenue and north of the east-west Ridge Road. To visit the site we drove north on Hudson Avenue and turned east onto an unnamed street and observed a large flat area where the houses in this new tract would be erected. Later we found that this tract had been an orchard owned by the Hennekes, the people who had a small grocery store and a home on the northeast corner of the unnamed street and Hudson Avenue. We also observed that the elevation of this tract of land was a bit greater than Hudson Avenue. On the west side of Hudson avenue there was a shopping center with two groceries, Stars and Wegmans, a branch of Sibleys Department Store, and a drugstore where one could buy copies of the New York Times. We also learned that there was a kindergarten to the fourth grade school within walking distance of the tract. Galla and I returned to talk with the builders agent aout a house this tract. Because of the increased elevation of the tract from the street, Galla asked if it was possible to have a ranch house built with a walkout basement. They answer was that it could be done Daleside Road. A map of the tract showed that the unnamed street would become Drake Drive. Daleside Road would be perpendicular to Drake Drive a short distance from Hudson Avenue. Drake Drive would turn left and after a short distance would turn right and cause the east end of the tract would turn left and then right to connect with Pinetree Lane and then Brookview, that site of the elementary school. On the Daleside Road there was room only for three houses. It would be possible to have walkout basements on the last two houses on Daleside Road. We chose the middle lot which would become 15 Daleside Road. Daleside Road would intersect the east-west Plaza Drive. At the east end of the tract Plaza Drive would turn right and intersect with Drake Drive. According to the records that we still have at the time I am writing about the house we were planning to buy, we paid for photostat copies of blueprints May 01, 1957.
To commit ourselves to have the house built sometime in the spring we put down $500. Although we had the means to carry a mortgage, the relatively small down payment would be a problem. Galla’s parents agreed to back us with funds for a down payment and immediately loaned us the $500 which enables us to save the desired lot.
During the spring of 1957, we often drove 400 miles to New York City on a Friday night and returned to Rochester on Sunday night. The main reason for the weekends in New York City was to spend some time with Galla’s mother who wasn’t expected to live much longer because the metastasis of colon cancer. On one of those trips, we visited my Aunt Fanny and Uncle Max. Rather then depend on Galla’s parents for funding our down payment I intended to ask Uncle Max for a loan. On this visit I talked about our attempts to settle down in Rochester and we had some conversation about a VA mortgage and whether I had the means to carry it. Then asked for a loan so we could have the funds for a down payment. I was very surprised when Uncle Max wrote a check for $5000 and he told me that it was not a loan but a gift. There was a time when Uncle Max told me that was very pleased that I earned a doctorate degree and that I had a good job and a wonderful family. He did admit that it was above his expectations for me. I felt that this was a great compliment. At that time, and many other times I wondered what would have occurred if I let Uncle Max and Aunt Fanny adopt me at the age of 13. But that can be another story.
I applied for a VA mortgage and got one at 4.5%. The mortgage was for 20 years. When we made our commitment it was specified that the house would be according to our plan . Galla then spent much time making drawings on graph paper of possible house floor plans within the minimum square footage allowed by the zoning laws. The plan which seemed to the best of several possibilities that of a ranch house with the dimensions of a bit more than 40 feet by a bit more less than 25 feet. The front of the house would be set back and parallel to Daleside Road. The entry to the house would be about halfway between the South and North walls. On the south side of the house there would still be room for a one-car garage to be built in the future. Thus, on the plans a door to the future garage was placed on the south wall about halfway between the East and West walls. A master bedroom with a powder room, a full bathroom, two smaller bedrooms and a hall were drawn to the right of the entry and would be within the area bounded by the East, North, and West walls. The area to the left of the bedrooms included in the entry, a living room, a dining area and a kitchen. Across from the door to the future garage a stairway, enclosed by two walls jutting out from the full bathroom wall, descended to the walkout basement. The stairway was enclosed by a door opposite the door to the future garage. Thus, according to the plan would let entered the house, the living room would be to the left, the dining area would be in the southwest corner of the house, and a narrow kitchen would be between the stairway wall and the outside west wall. The outside west wall of the basement would have windows and a door to the backyard.
We were called on Saturday, June 8, 1957 to inform us that Galla’s mother died. It was decided that it was not necessary for us to attend the funeral. To our surprise, it was not very long before we were notified that Galla had inherited money from her mother’s estate. This enables us quickly to add some square footage to the house and a one -car garage. By being able to expand the house area to 1120 ft,² it became possible to open a space through which one could go into the kitchen without going through the living room and dining area. This space was opposite the front door entry. It was in August, 1957, that we made down payments which totaled $2554. We also paid for some extras, such as $35 for birch kitchen cabinet facings, an electric stove, and a dishwasher. Although I do not have an exact figure at this time, it seems like the total cost of this house was in the neighborhood of about $23,000. Our mortgage payments were $123.70 per month.
We often visited the tract to watch our house being erected. The builder did a good job. The builder dug down to stable soil and erected a concrete block foundation, filled it with stones and dirt, and then build the basement foundation for the house on top of the stabilizing foundation. We were fascinated by the building process. We were able to close the deal on November 20, 1957. We moved in soon after.
At the time we moved to Rochester, Jared was five and Rachel three years old. After consulting with school authorities about Jared’s speech problem, we were allowed to enrol him in a normal kindergarten class. At that time Jared communicated with his own language plus pointing and shouting at times until we understood what he was after. I was called called ging-ging, Galla, ma-ming, and Rachel ring-ring. Not very long after we moved into our new house, while the children were playing in our basement, Jared suddenly called out daddy. Both Galla and I were startled by the call for daddy. It is of interest to note that Jared did not realize that ging-ging was now daddy. Beside buying children’s books we always took the children with us to the library. It was at an early age that Rachel began reading words back to us and it was not very long that she could read some of the children’s books herself.
Knowing that we would be moving into our new house in November, we arranged for Jared to enter the first grade in the Brookview Elementary school. We had to convince the principal that Jared could keep up with class work in spite of his speech problem. The principal’s wife who just happened to be Jared’s kindergarden teacher was of great assistance to us. Her positive recommendation made it possible for jared to start the term at the school in September. While in first grade, Jared brought Rachel to a show-and-tell session. Rachel demonstrated her reading skills which probably was at or above the first grade level. Rachel was enrolled in a nursery school in a Irondequoit Presbyterian church on the corner of Titus Avenue and Kiwais Road. Although the nursery school had a professional teacher mothers took turns as teachers assistants. Fathers took turns to clean the classroom. The church had an end-of-year holiday party for the parents of the children in attendance at the nursery school. Even though Rachel was the only Jewish nursery school attendant, The end-of-year party was designated to celebrate both Christmas and Channukah. The minister asked me to give a talk about Channukah at the party, which I did.
Inasmuch as we had only one automobile, I left the car at home for Galla’s use several times a week when we lived in the apartment on Strathmore Circle. I used local bus transportation to travel to RIT. Beginning in September, 1957, until we moved into our new house in November, Galla used the car daily to transport the children. After moving into the new house, we went back to the schedule where I left the car home for Galla’s use several times a week.
During the first three or four years after moving into the house, there were many changes. We had bathroom fixtures and install in hhe Southeast corner of the basement. While visiting us, Galla’s father and erected walls and a door which in enclosed the bathroom. A washer and dryer were placed just outside of the bathroom wall. This area also had a gas furnace and a 40 gallon water tank which was heated by gas. The the southwest corner of the basement became a haven for me. Here again, I believe that Galla’s father helped in the construction of a built-in bookcase and cabinet and some paneling to make this corner a place for me to work at home. Eventually, we placed the daybed we had next to my desk and this was used for a visitor. As time went, I painted that concrete blocks with the basement and put up a ceiling. This made it a nice space for the children.
Also, during the first three or four years we able to buy some decent furniture. Sometime or other, probably when we lived in Alexandria, Virginia, we bought a plastic molded chair with iron legs, We kept this chair for at least 50 years. From John Stuart, Inc., New York City, we purchased two chairs designed by Count Sigvard Bernadotte, of Denmark. To replace our daybed, Dania furniture corner imagination. Eventually, we purchased two sections of a couch which consisted of frames made of walnut and had yellow cushions. We also purchased a matching armchair. Sometime after 1959, we purchased furniture to replace our painted chests of drawers and a Hollywood bed. The furniture was the brand called Tuxedo and made by the furniture company Lane. The furniture consisted of a bookcase bed, two night tables, a chest of drawers, and another chest of drawers with a built-in cabinet.
As a faculty member of RIT, I was entitled to register for courses tuition free. One of the department at RIT was the School for American Craftsmen. I decided to take a woodworking course given in the evenings. During my first quarter in this course I learned how to prepare strips of wood so they can be glued together side-by-side. For the first exercise I made a drawing board. After this quarter, I made furniture for our house. I learned how to take pieces of raw walnut and plane them down to desired thicknesses with planing machines. I do not know which came first, but I ended up making out of walnut a corner table, a coffee table, a cabinet with tambour doors to be hung on a wall in our dining area, a long bench screwed into the south wall of the living room, and a divider at the entry to the house. Not only did I have to glue walnut pieces side by side, but I had to use a machine saw, a lathe, and a drill press. Galla had designed the coffee table on which she was to glue 1 inch square tiles on top. This was never done. The tiles are still. Jared and Rachel used to change the tile patterns and one time with a background of white tiles that laid out the word TABLE with light brown tiles. When we sold the house in 1966, we could only take with us the corner table and the coffee table.
During the winter of 1958 we were engaged in getting settled in our new house. The winter was typical of Rochester, freezing temperatures, ice, snow and lots of it. During the winters in Rochester snowplows and salt were used to clear the streets for driving. Actually, very few days were lost from work or school. I learned quickly to use snow tires on the rear wheels of the car and also how to use chains when the roads were icy. And of course we all learned how to dress for cold and severe weather. Galoshes and boots kept shoes dry while walking on snow and ice. It was during the winter of 1958 that our 1951 brown Ford four-door sedan had been damaged by corrosion from this salted streets. We purchased a new gray Ford four-door sedan at a cost of $2,214.54.
At the end of the winter season it was time to think about the grounds that our house stood on. I lined the sides of our driveway with a narrow sides of thin solid concrete blocks. The driveway is itself consisted of gravel. It wasn’t long before we found that pieces of gravel were found away from the driveway. To solve this problem, we have the driveway paved with black asphalt. To the left of the driveway we planted a birch tree. To the right of the driveway, in front of most of the house I used bricks to lay on a small area for plants. The ground in the back of the house was very uneven and I was out there with a shovel trying to level the area. Our neighbors, the Hennekes, saw my struggle with a shovel. Mr. Henneke offered to use his tractor to get the grounds ready for planting a lawn. This offer was accepted. We planted Merion Blue Grass even though we knew it would take quite a few years before the lawn would look good. We planted a maple tree on the back lawn area and a row of pine trees along the property line in back of the house Being a city person, I never really liked to mow lawns do general garden work.
We the first to move onto the 40-house tract. As the remaining houses were erected we began to meet the future residents. We befriended Norma and Matthew Gingold and their children, Nancy, Linda, and Joe. Matthew was a printer on one of the Rochester newspapers. Two couples and their children who became friends were Harold and Jean Schwartz (Children: Betty, Ellen, Ronnie and Martin), and Joseph and Helen Klein (Children: as he Renee and Eliot). Harold Schwartz was a school psychologist and Joe Klein was an engineer employed by Kodak. As we all got settled, we car pooled, shared babysitters, and enjoyed each others company.
Having retained my membership in the AACC, and having been listed in the membership directory, enabled Martin Murray, clinical chemist at the Genesee Hospital, and Royden
Rand, clinical chemist at the St. Mary’s Hospital, to contact me about the plans to form an AACC Upstate New York Section. On December 4, 1957, an organizational meeting was held in Batavia, New York.1 This meeting was attended by Max Chilcote, Leona Hudson, Anthony LaPaglia, William B. Mason, Martin Murray, Theodore Peters, Jr., Nathan Radin, Harold Rosenthal, and Raymond Vanderlinde. Two other signers of the petition for a charter were Edward Gill and Augusta McCord.
9 Murray MM. History of the New York State Section, AACC. Clin Chem 1976;22:1233.
Although, in the year 2008, my memory about the activities of the fledgling upstate New York section has dimmed, there are some things I still remember even though I cannot place events chronologically. I served as the secretary of the Upstate New York Section for a good number of years. I became known as the secretary who when sending out meeting notices they always included
Although, in the year 2000, my memory about the activities of the fledgling upstate New York section has dimmed, there are some things I still remember even though I cannot place events chronologically. I served as the secretary of the Upstate New York Section for a good number of years. I became known as the secretary who when sending out meeting notices they always included detailed maps so those attending the meetings would have no problem in finding how to get there. I also took a turn in serving as Chairman-Elect and Chairman (1964)
The Upstate New York Section jurisdiction was all of New York State except for the New York City Metropolitan area. It was with great enthusiasm that in spite of the about 300 mile span between Buffalo and Albany the Upstate New York section held four or five meetings a year. At first, the meetings usually lasted for one afternoon. The meetings progressively grow longer when one topic was fully explored and discussed. In October 1960, the section included Toronto for joint meetings with Canadian clinical chemists. Because of the driving distances in 1964 section members decided to hold one day and a half meetings twice a year. The first such meeting took place in Albany, New York, in September, 1964.
The first meeting of the section was planned to take place May 2, 1958. The meeting topic planned was Clinical Chemistry of the Future. As Max Friedman, the national AACC secretary, was scheduled to attend this meeting, several of us decided to surprise Dr. Friedman with some data showing the results of calcium determinations in a number of hospital laboratories. At that time, duties of Dr. Mason at the University of Rochester Medical School included being the head of a special determinations laboratory. Dr. Mason distributed aliquots of a large serum pool into vials. One day I picked up a batch of vials and drove to hospital laboratories in Rochester, then to Syracuse, Clifton Springs, and Buffalo where I left vials of serum with instructions to determine the concentration of calcium and report those results to Bill Mason. After all the results were in, Bill Mason and I took them to a statistician at the medical school. After looking at the results, the statistician asked if much money for this effort had been spent. The statistician felt that there was no value in our data as the results had no statistical relevance. Of course, we were disappointed. However, on the night of the meeting, I arose and recited the results of our effort. What we learned from our first proficiency testing effort was that there needed to be preplanning to obtain valid statistical results. I do not know if we impressed Dr. Friedman.
I quickly became acquainted with the clinical chemists in the Rochester, New York area. Harold Rosenthal, who was the clinical chemist at the Rochester General Hospital, let me know that he was leaving the hospital for a research position in St. Louis. He asked if I would be interested in replacing him. Even though at that time I was enjoying my teaching position, I made an appointment with the Director of Laboratories at the Rochester General Hospital. Along with a pleasant chat at our meeting we talked about the future of the chemistry laboratory in the field of medicine. After leaving our meeting, I had the feeling that clinical chemistry was as close as I would ever get to being a biochemist. In a letter dated October27, 1958, I received an offer from Milton G. Bohrod, M.D., Pathologist and Director of Laboratories at the Rochester General Hospital, to become the Chief Biochemist at a starting salary $8,400.00 per year, to start no later than July 1, 1959 and to become a Consulting Chemist starting November 1, 1958. Also, the offer would be open for two weeks. The monetary part of the offer would give me about $1,000 a year more than I was earning at RIT. I particularly remember a Sunday afternoon discussion of the future of clinical chemistry with Martin Murray and his wife at our house. After considering the pros and cons of making a change, I accepted the offer and I became a clinical chemist.,
During October, 1959, several weeks after recovering from a respiratory infection, my vision became increasingly cloudy. A visit with our ophthalmologist, Dr. Abram Pinsky, had the result of being diagnosed with iritis. At first, I was treated with topical atropine to keep my eyes dialated and topical steroids. Just before Thanksgiving, I was hospitalized where I had a battery of tests todetermine whether there was an underlining disease associated with iritis. The tests were negative. It was then decided to try an old treatment which was to induce a favor by injecting attenuated typhoid vaccine. The theory was that a fever would destroy the inflammatory agent. On Thanksgiving day I had an injection of a test dose of the attenuated typhoid vaccine. Unexpectedly, the test dose induced a fever causing my temperature to rise to over 104?F. Obviously, I did not receive another dose. I was very ill for the next five days and the results of the treatment was negative as the iritis got worse. Although I’ve never discussed the reason for my reaction to a test dose, I suspect that having had typhoid vaccine injected during my days in the U.S. Army played a role in my reaction. Treatment with topical atropine to keep my eyes dilated and topical steroids to stem the inflammatory condition continued for many years to come. We were very surprised when morning on reading your newspaper that Dr. Pinsky had died suddenly from a massive heart attack. This came several days after it was announced that his wife gave birth to a baby. Because of my continuing struggle with iritis, I latched on to an ophthalmologist whom I knew as an attending physician at the Rochester General Hospital. Dr. Max| Presberg continued the same treatment prescribed by Dr. Pinsky. Several times during the next few years I also had subconjunctival injections of steroids but this treatment did not stop the iris in inflammatory disease. I did a lot of literature research and reached the conclusion that I had an autoimmune disease and this was supported by Dr. Presberg.
For a reason long forgotten we took Jared for an eye exam by Dr. Pinsky. It turns out that Jared had a condition labeled strabismus, or in nonmedical language, he was cross-eyed. To correct this condition, Dr. Pinsky performed a surgical procedure in which the extraocular muscles were shortened and reattached to the eyes. After the surgery, Jared described anesthesia as “they gave me something that’s stinked (probably ether) and I disappeared.”After his recovery, refraction by Dr. Pinsky indicated that Jared would need eyeglasses. We took a prescription to Gitlin Optics where eyeglasses were ordered for Jared. On a previous visit to Gitlin Optics it turned out that Manny Gitlin and I have known each other when we were both students at the University of California at Berkeley. At that time, Manny was a graduate student in the School for Optometry. Manuel and Anne Gitlin became friends of ours. Before taking Jared to the optical shop, Rachel remarked that she did not want to wear eyeglasses. While at the optical shop we asked Rachel to read an eye chart. It became apparent that she would need eyeglasses. It also coincidently turns out that Rachel had an eye exam at school that day and she was told to let her parents know that she needed to get eyeglasses. I suspect that Rachel inherited my condition of extreme myopia, or nearsightedness.
It wasn’t long after we got settled in our new house, we enrolled Jared at the Hearing and Speech Center of Rochester, which was located in the Rochester General Hospital, on W. Main Street. For many years, Galla and Rachel escorted Jared for speech training after his regular school hours. Galla and Rachel were able to observe the training sessions through a one-way glass pane. It is probable that Jared’s speech problem was due to a genetic factor from Galla’s family. It seems that Jared could not monitor his own speech. It might be comparable to someone who is deaf, except Jared was not deaf. We would told that many aphasic children were retarded, but Jared was by no means retarded. It was in 1961 that Dr. Brown, the head of the Hearing and Speech Center told us about a University of Michigan speech camp called Shady Trails. I believe that through Dr. Brown were able to get a scholarship which reduced our payment for an eight week session at Shady Trails. It was in July, 1961, when Jared was 10 years old, that we drove to the campsite north of Traverse City, Michigan. We impressed by this camp. There were four boys to a room in a cabin. Each camper had sessions with a speech therapist during the mornings and afternoons were for recreation purposes. We are only allowed one visit during the summer and that was four weeks after we left Jared at the camp. I remember having lunch in the dining room where each camper was called upon to speak. The camp had many children who stuttered and when they were called upon to speak, we realized the difficult time one had when they stutter. At the end of the eighth week session, Jared was escorted to the Traverse City Airport where he boarded an airliner and flew to the Detroit airport. Norman met Jared at the airport and made sure that he boarded an airliner to the Rochester airport. When we met Jared as the Rochester airport, we noticed immediately a tremendous improvement in his speech, it is of interest to note that Jared said that he did not understand the speech of some of the children at Shady Trails. Jared returned to Shady Trails during the summers of 1963, 1965, and 1968. About a week before we were to pick up Jared and Sshady Trails, in August, 1965, that Galla, Rachel, and I camped at the Interlochen State Park. The park was located a bit south of Traverse City. The Interlochen Arts Camp was located next to the park. This was a camp for children to concentrate on the arts, particularly, music. Every once in a while we’ll hear the children rehearse symphonic music. We occasionally went to the camp in the evening to enjoy a night of music. I particularly remember, one night, a well-known violinist along with the children’s Symphony Orchestra performed the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. It was on a late afternoon that we drove to pick up Jared. I believe we had dinner at the camp. Before leaving, Jared demonstrated the use of a bongo board. One simply stands on a board (one leg at a time) which has a roller beneath it and tries to balance on it without letting either end of the board hit the ground. Rachel got on the bongo board and had no problem with the balancing act. Both Rachel and Jared said to me , “Try it.” I did, and for a non-athletic 45-yearold that was a big mistake. I lasted seconds and I suddenly fell. I extended my right arm to break the fall and the weight on my wrist traveled up my arm resulting in a cracked head of the radius arm bone. I was taken to an emergency room at a small hospital where I heard a technician yell something like its broke after viewing the x-ray image. My arm was placed in a plaster cast. By the time we came home, an orthopedist at the Rochester general hospital pointed out the head of the radius was shattered. This meant surgery to ecise the radial head. After recovering fro tne surgical procedure, I visited the physician in charge of the physical medicine department at our hospital. This department was located down the hall from my office, so the physical therapy sessions were convenient. For a while these sessions were pure torture. After complete recovery, I lost some rotation motion of my arm due to the missing radial head. I learned that being ill in the same hospital in which I was the Chief Biochemist did not prevent telephone calls or visits from the laboratory chief technician to discuss unexpected problems.
FILE: C:\UserNathan\Data\WP Documents\NateBio Rachel.wpd
She remembers a playground and a tall building. She rode a tricycle. She remembers a tiny room and a cardboard closet they slept in (was the dining room). A cliff on other side of fence - back terrace. Jared was screaming and she tried climbing on the window sill and she may have fallen. Playground was paved - jungle gym. Jared went to nursery school - Tom Thumb.
Apartment - upstairs - jared and rachel in same room - dressers on top of each other. Jared had maple chest of drawers. Jareds/rachels memory of the apartment plan are different than mom/dads memories. Jared went to Kindergarten. Rachel went to nursury school at church - maybe church of Christ or first united church. Dad helped clean.
Moved into new house in November. Mom/dad drove jared to new school before the move.
On Hudson avenue shopping center there were two groceries - stars + wegmans. Sibleys department store on left. On right was drugstore where we picked up the new york times. Small store Henneke(spelling?) That sold fruit and popsicles. They were nice and had tractor and leveled back yard after watching dad with shovels.
Went to Brookview for grades 1-4, except Rachel went to grade 4 in middle school as the school was crowded. Hosea Rogers middle school. West Irondequoit High School.
Jared went to hearing and speech in the Rochester General hospital. Jared went to Shady trails four times - more or less every other year, since before the fifth grade.
Walk in basement was slowly finished - Monroe Solomon helped with building of the den.
Jared was in chess and science club. Also photographer for school newspaper. Rachel was in science club, chess team and math team. Had science club party at our house and Kay Davis bought chocolate covered bugs. Rachel played in one rated tournament and won two trophies. Rachel End of 10th grade - 69.national science foundation summer program in ohio for 6 weeks. Went in 1970 to governors honors at weslyen.
College years: Jared worked at Crawford Long (70?) Alcoa painting (71?), Sloan Kettering 72.
Rachel worked at howard johnsons for 4 days, and then VA hospital. (1972). Rachel - Bell Labs Holmdel, New Jersey (1973). 1974 - After graduation from Univ Mich worked in library during summer.
In October, 1958 I received an offer from Milton G. Bohrod, M.D., Pathologist and Director of Laboratories at the Rochester General Hospital to become the Chief Biochemist at the starting no later than July 1, 1959 and to become a Consulitng Chemist starting November 1, 1958. The monetary part of the offer would give me about $1,000 a year more than I was earning at RIT. I did like the teaching position that I had and I had to consider that against entering the profession of clinical chemistry. I accepted the offer and I became a clinical chemist; there are no regrets about that decision.
The Upstate New York Section jurisdiction was all of New York State except for the New York City Metropolitan area. It was with great enthusiasm that in spite of the about 300 mile span between Buffalo and Albany the Upstate New York section held four or five meetings a year. At first, the meetings usually lasted for one afternoon. The meetings progressively grow longer when one topic was fully explored and discussed. In October 1960, the section included Toronto for joint meetings with Canadian clinical chemists. Because of the driving distances in 1964 section members decided to hold one day and a half meetings twice a year. The first such meeting took place in Albany, New York, in September, 1964.
It was on May 7, 1847 that the State of New York granted a charter to create the Rochester City Hospital.2 It was finally on January 28, 1864 that the new hospital had been built and dedicated. On January 1, 1911, the Rochester City Hospital became the Rochester General Hospital. Due to population growth after World War II, for many reasons, it became the responsibility of the Rochester General Hospital to build a new hospital in the northeast sector of the city. It was on September 16, 1956 that an open house was held at the new hospital which was located at 1425 Portland Avenue. The new hospital, eventually a 500-bed hospital, became the Northside Division of the Rochester General Hospital, and the Westside Division of Rochester General Hospital, now a 150-bed hospital, remained at 501 Main St. West. When I became the Chief Biochemist, the Westside Division was still actively accepting patients and the laboratories were located on the second floor of the old building. There was a small laboratory next to the emergency room at the Northside Division. Patient specimens were transported from the Northside Division until the Westside Division closed its doors permanently in 1966.
The microbiology and chemistry laboratories were located in a corridor off the main hallway which traversed the length of the building on the second floor. Dr. Bohrod’s office was at the back end of the corridor and I was given a small office next to his. The major chemistry laboratories were in a large room next to Dr. Bohrod’s office and in a smaller room on the same side of the hallway. The microbiology laboratories were on the other side of this hallway. The hematology laboratories were off another hallway from the main corridor. A conference room and the pathologist’s offices were located on the third floor. After becoming a full-time chief biochemist, Dr. Bohrod moved to an office on the third floor. I moved my office into a small laboratory room which had a laboratory bench at one side. Eventually, we were given a third-floor laboratory when we added protein-bound iodine as a test for thyroid function.
The chemistry laboratory was fully operational from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and operational with limited services on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon. Individual medical technologists were on call, as I was, after regular working hours. The eight months as a part-time consulting chemist at the hospital laboratory were very valuable as this gave me time to become acquainted with the staff and the tests being performed in the chemistry laboratory. Sal Buscaglia, B.S., was the chief technician who was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the chemistry laboratory. Janet Seely, B.A., M.T. (ASCP) not only was a technician in the chemistry lab but also on the faculty of the Rochester General Hospital School of Medical Technology. Eight other technicians of varying backgrounds were assigned to the chemistry laboratory. During my time at the hospital there were occasional changes of personnel among the eight technicians. Some time after I came on board full-time a replacement technician was Al Gramza, a former U.S. Army technician who was discharged after being stationed in Japan. Al Gramza became a very valuable member of the staff. Until the Westside Division tests closed its doors permanently body fluids specimens were transported from the Northside Division to the Westside Division laboratories. A review of the form for services by the chemistry laboratory shows that 22 blood tests and four spinal-fluid tests were available for requests by physicians. There also was a form for specifying a limited number of tests that were also available at the chemistry laboratory. After I came to the laboratory, I arranged for some unavailable tests to be performed at the Special Determinations Laboratory at the University of Rochester Medical School and also at the Bio-Science Laboratories in Los Angeles, California. At first, our specimens for barbiturates were sent to the special determinations laboratory at the University of Rochester Medical School and for the protein-bound iodine test to the Bioscience Laboratories.
The clinical chemistry laboratory in 1958 can be viewed as rather primitive compared to that of the laboratory of today (2008). In 1958 chemistry tests were performed manually. Those were the days of water bottles, beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, cylinders, volumetric flasks, burets, and pipettes. Water bottles and pipets were notable; one used ones mouth to blow out water from a water bottle and to suck up solutions with pipets. Of course, there were times saliva dripped down. Also one could suck up solutions to overflow into ones mouth if one was not careful. Our laboratory had a two-pan Christian Becker Chainomatic magnetically-damped balance. After my arrival on the scene, I ordered a National Bureau of Standards (NBS) set of weights and a thermometer, both which were used for calibration purposes only. There was the complicated Van Slyke apparatus for the carbon dioxide determination. The laboratory also had a Beckman Model G pH meter, a number of Coleman, Jr colorimeters, and a Beckman, Model DU spectrophotometer.
There was no specific job description for my position. As time went on, I found that there was much for me to do. Occasionally, a physician would complain about some laboratory test results. I had the laboratory repeat the test, or tests, being complained about, without charge. I attended clinical pathology conferences and physician’s meetings where I could be called upon to explain possible aberrant results. When the chemistry laboratory initiated new tests, I was expected to announce and talk about the usefulness of the test for the physician. After July 1, of each year, I would meet with incoming interns and residents to let them know about the capabilities of the chemistry laboratory. I also lectured in classes for medical technologists and for groups of residents interested in clinical pathology. Aside all the above, I was involved in the everyday operation of the chemistry laboratory. I also spend one day a week at the emergency room laboratory of the Northside Division.
One job that I took on with the help of Sal, was to update the book of standard procedures for the laboratory. When I observed the procedure used for incoming specimens and assignments of tests to specific technicians, I found that it took at least two hours before they technician staff of the laboratory could start performing tests. After investigating log-in procedures at a number of hospital chemistry laboratories, I had our laboratory adopt one that was in general use. In the laboratory of 1958, and a good part of the decade of the 60s, physicians could order individual tests. This meant that each physician’s requisition for certain individual tests was unique.
I adopted a new procedure that began with the assignment of a laboratory number to each requisition and its accompanying specimen. For each working day, I devised a large form which was placed on a drawing board. My form was essentially a spreadsheet. The first column was headed by the word NAME and the second column was headed by the words LABORATORY NUMBER. The laboratory tests headed the other columns. The laboratory tests for each requisition were checked in the appropriate column and on a horizontal line with the patient’s name and laboratory number. The laboratory technicians then obtained their laboratory assignments from this master form. At the end of the day the laboratory data were copied from their laboratory notebooks onto the master form. A T-square was then used to line up the data for each patient and the results for each patient copied onto the original requisition, a copy of which was sent to the patient’s record. I invested quite a bit of my time to prepare the master form manually.
After finding that the system was more efficient than the one used before, I went to see Mr. Cederberg, the Senior Administrator, of the Westside Division. I request permission for the hospital print shop to print copies of the large spreadsheet that I created. Mr. Cederberg did not approve this request and he suggested that I should look for other administrative means. I got in touch with the local IBM representative and after explaining our needs, I soon realized that I was talking about something they could not grasp. However, I was told by the IBM representatives that they could help me with recording the number of tests done by the laboratory. Since the hospital financial office was using a Royal McBee punched-card system, Sal and I visited with a representative of the company at their office. Again., the needs of the laboratory were not understood, but Sal and I spent a pleasant hour playing blackjack with a Royal McBee computer.
I spent some time learning about the use of punched-cards and developed a system to simplify the administrative aspects of the clinical chemistry laboratory. In it, a three-part requisition and a specimen were each assigned a unique laboratory number. A third copy of the original laboratory requisition was a charge card and was also used as a name file for the day. Pre-punched cards, coded for laboratory tests were used for each test requested. The laboratory number was stamped and punched into each test card. All test cards were then sorted into laboratory test groups, after which the laboratory data and results were recorded on them. Cards were then sorted by laboratory number and rematched with the original laboratory requisitions, which remained in numerical order. Test results were then copied directly into the requisitions, parts of which were sent to the patient records. We found this system to be very efficient, less susceptible to error, and simpler than the previous system described above. Mr. Cederberg liked this system, in spite of the fact, that it would be more expensive than having my spreadsheet forms printed.
After using this punched-card system for a while, I presented it as a paper on Tuesday, December 27, 1960 at a joint AACC-AAAS meeting at the Biltmore Library, Biltmore Hotel, Madison Avenue and 43rd Street, New York, NY. I then sent the paper to the AACC journal Clinical Chemistry. It was rejected as it was by the American Journal of Clinical Pathology and the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry. The reason given for all the rejections was that other laboratories would not be interested in the system. At some meeting in New York City, while conversing with Harry Sobotka and Harold Appleton, the Managing Editor of Clinical Chemistry, I mentioned the punched-card paper. Harold Appleton said send it in again, which I did. It was published3.
While at the meeting at the Biltmore Hotel, Dr. David Seligson asked for volunteers to join the AACC Standards Committee. When I volunteered, Dr. Seligson looked at my name tag and then said, “You are a lipid man, work on cholesterol as a standard, Norman.” My first cousin Norman Radin, was a biochemist and made a name for himself working with brain glycolipids. Anyway, I accepted the challenge.
But before beginning any work with cholesterol there was much to do in our routine laboratory as many changes were taking place. One of the outstanding changes was the beginning of the era of automation. The Technicon AutoAnalyzer was introduced in 1957. When an AutoAnalyzer was purchased, the purchaser spent a week at Technicon, in Tarrytown, New York, where one worked learning how to use the instrument being purchased. I went to Tarrytown to learn how to use the first AutoAnalyzer we purchased. This AutoAnalyzer was used interchangeably for glucose and urea determinations. We purchased another AutoAnalyzer when it could be used to determine glucose and urea simultaneously. This time, Sal and I went to Tarrytown to work with this AutoAnalyzer. On the purchase of a third AutoAnalyzer to be used with a flame photometer, both Janet Seely and I spent a week at Tecnnicon. I believe that the last purchase was financed by the ladies auxiliary group, the Twigs. Dr. Christopher Parnall, Jr., the Administrator And Director of the Rochester General Hospital, asked me to present what we had purchased a Twigs meeting, which I did.
Among other changes, we purchased a single-pan micro balance, a Bausch & Lomb Spectronic spectrophotometer, and a Beckman Model B spectrophotometer. For the chloride determination we purchased an Aminco Cotlove Chloride Titrator. The Natelson microgasometer simplified the carbon dioxide determination test.
We added a Radiometer Dr Poul Astrup instrument for blood pH, pO2 and pCO2 measurements. Beside a lecture about the principles of blood gas analyses at a general meeting of physicians, I also reviewed the subject with small groups of physicians. Once in a while I would receive a telephone call from an intern who wanted me to calculate how much acid or base needed to be added to the IV bottle for a patent with acidosis or alkalosis. Not wishing to be accused of practicing medicine, I cited references to review the biochemistry of the blood gases, and I would suggest that the intern should speak to a resident physician.
I found that the chemistry laboratory had not incorporated a quality control system for the routine analyses of desired constituents. This was not surprising because, as yet, in general, clinical chemistry laboratories were slow in adopting quality control systems. Walter Andrew Shewhart, an employee of Bell Telephone, was an American physicist, engineer and statistician, sometimes known as the father of statistical quality control. His work was summarized in his book which became known to me during my days at the Lederle Laboratories quality control labs for Aureomycin® production.4. Generally, in industrial situations, one can perform measurements on actual items being produced. There is a different situation in the case of clinical laboratories for specimens are of limited quantity. In 1950, a paper by Levey and Jennings5 addressed the situation in clinical laboratories. The procedure advocated, essentially consisted of inserting into each group of specimens designated for the determination of a specific constituent, aliquots of a large serum pool. The pools presumably had known values of desired constituents as determined by independent methods or by some reference laboratories. Then the Shewhart quality control procedure was adopted. Variations of the original Levey and Jennings system were eventually advocated.
Working with Sal, I came up with a unique quality control procedure, which I never submitted for publication. This procedure was used as long as I was the chief biochemist at the Rochester General Hospital chemistry laboratory. Instead of using serum pools we purchased large numbers of normal and abnormal General Diagnostics Versatol and Hyland Laboratories serum controls for the clinical chemistry laboratory. Presumably, the commercial control materials came with known values for many desired constituents. Using a random numbers table, I made up a table in which the columns were the days of the week and the rows consisted of either normal or abnormal serum controls from the different companies. Only Sal and I had access to this table. In the laboratory, Sal would insert among the routine specimens for each particular test, control materials designated for that particular day. After 20 days, for each constituent we calculated the differences between the tested desired constituent values and the designated values in the commercial control materials. We then calculated the means and standard deviations of the differences. On graph paper, the days of a month were designated on the horizontal x-axis. Horizontal line representing the mean and two-standard deviations were drawn on the y-axis. We now had the necessary quality control charts in which we could determine whether the analytical procedure for the desired constituent was in control. There is one large fallacy in clinical laboratories quality control procedures. What one is actually determining is whether the analytical procedure being used is in control. However, if in any particular patient specimen there is some unknown interference in the measurement of the desired constituent, such as a drug that the patient is taking, the inserted quality control materials desired constituent might still be within acceptable limits, but the desired constituent concentration value of the patient specimen might be false.
More than one pediatrician asked if I could develop a method for calcium which needed a very small amount of blood. As I recall, our routine calcium method required two mL of serum. The pediatricians were concerned not only about young children but the preemies in our Regional Premature Baby Center. After some literature search, I decided that with the dye Eriochrome Blue SE and using the Beckman Model DU, a differential spectrophotometric method could be developed. The method that I developed with the assistance of Al Gramza, used 0.1 mL of serum. The method satisfied the needs of the pediatricians. However, it wasn’t long before the atomic absorption spectrometer was developed and that instrument made it possible to use very small amounts of serum for calcium and other tests.
Al Gramza was a large man whose physical stamina amazed me. He was a very good laboratory technician who not only worked in the routine laboratory but was on call often during off hours. He could have joined in his family business which had to do with sheet metal, but he preferred working in a clinical laboratory. Al not only volunteered to work with me after hours on the calcium method, but also on my commitment to the AACC Standards Committee to determine the purity of cholesterol then available commercially. Working together with Al, we evaluated the physical properties of a number of commercial cholesterol preparations, purified these preparations, and established some physical properties of the purified cholesterol preparations
With the promised financial backing of the hospital, I submitted the results of our work with the differential spectrophotometric determination of calcium and the purity of commercial cholesterol studies for presentation at the annual meeting of the AACC, in Santa Monica, California. Both papers were accepted and presented on Tuesday, August 28, 1962. In a letter of July 9, 1962, I was invited by Richard Henry, of Bio-Science Laboratories, to participate on a panel with the subject of cholesterol and lipids. I accepted this invitation. The panel members were Bennie Zak, Chairman, Paubionsky, Radin, Boutwell, Marbach, and Bergquist. The presentation of the papers and my participation on the panel came all well.
Before my presentations, I met and had lunch with Alan Mather, Ph.D., the head of the AACC Standards Committee and a clinical chemist at the Memorial Hospital, Wilmington, Delaware. This meeting was the beginning of a long professional and social relationship. It was also with a member of the panel, Joseph Boutwell, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., that eventually developed into a professional relationship and a longtime personal friendship. Bennie Zak, Peace Paubionsky, and Richard Henry, were also to become individuals who I interacted with from time to time in the future..
On my return to Rochester, the submission and acceptance for publication of the calcium6 and cholesterol7 papers was accomplished. Because of my presentation and panel participation, I suddenly was regarded as an expert on the purity and methodology for the cholesterol determination. A request came from the Editor-in-Chief, Samuel Meites, of Standard Methods of Clinical Chemistry, asking me to submit the purification and characterization procedures for cholesterol. This I did, and after my procedures were checked by Olier L. Baril, of the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, and Marshall E. Deutsch, of the Diagnostic Research Center, Downingtown, Pennsylvania, my manuscript was published8. An invitation by the AACC Northeast Section brought me to Boston where I presented The Analytical Story of Cholesterol, on Monday, April 13, 1964. On an invitation by the New York Association of Public Health Laboratories, I attended their 49th Annual Meeting, where I conducted a cholesterol determinations workshop at the at New York State Department of Health State Laboratories, on Friday, May 21, 1965. On applying for a grant to finance a cholesterol and lipids research project, I had a visit by some representatives of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After looking at our laboratory facilities in the old Westside hospital building, we had a pleasant lunch, and sometime later I received word that our laboratory facilities were not adequate for financial support.
Inasmuch as the protein-bound iodine (PBI) test for thyroid function was not being performed in our laboratory, serum specimens were sent To the Bio-Science Laboratories in Los Angeles. However, as the test was being requested evermore frequently, Mr. Cederberg asked why we were not performing the test in our laboratory. I told him that because such small quantities of iodine were being measured there was danger in our routine laboratory of contaminating serum specimens with iodine vapor. This resulted in being assigned a special laboratory on the third floor of the building for the PBI test . After exploring available methods for determining PBI, I arranged to try out a Hycel, Inc. system. With this system iodine was isolated for the measuring step by a distillation procedure and the final measurement was made with a photometer. After working with this system for a while, we found that the results were inaccurate. After communicating with representatives of Hycel, we arranged to meet with John Moran, either the CEO or president of Hycel, and some company representatives in Syracuse, New York. With Sal, Al, and Janet in my car, I drove to Syracuse. We met in a hotel room where we presented what we thought were deficiencies of the system. After some discussion and then some lighthearted conversations, all of us were treated to a good steak dinner. This meeting is memorable because of our drive back to Rochester. I do not remember the year, but it was winter. Snow began to fall by the time we arrived in Syracuse. Normally, on the New York Thruway it would take something like a bit over an hour of drive time between Syracuse and Rochester. Because of the snow our drive back was slow; we arrived in Rochester at about 3 a.m. Later that morning a representative of Hycel came to our laboratory and ran their PBI system on specimens with known iodine concentration values. Somehow the results presented to us were accurate, however, after the representative left we suspected fudged numbers. We obtained some radioactive iodine from the radiation department, courtesy of the radiologist Ted VanZandt, M.D. We found that iodine was being lost in the distillation step of the procedure. We returned the system to Hycel. We then went ahead and purchased an oven with which nine serum specimens could be ashed over a period of three days. Then we adopted a titrimetric method for the final measurement step. On Friday, May 26, 1961,at an AACC Upstate New York Section meeting at the Northside Division, Rochester General Hospital, the topic was the PBI test.. I presented a paper entitled The Ceric-Sulfate Arsenious Acid Reaction. available methods for determining protein-boundavailable methods for protein-bound
We found that ashing serum specimens and using the titrimetric method described in the paper above gave us very good results.
It was my background and experience as an analytical chemist that made me recognize the field of clinical chemistry needed some clarity about what a standard is for the tests being performed in our medical laboratories. Alan Mather and I communicated quite frequently about the standards situation and I maintained my membership on the AACC Standards Committee. I brought up the topic often enough, that Roy Rand and Martin Murray both suggested that I should present my ideas at a local section meeting. It was decided to have a symposium on quality control at an AACC Upstate New York Section meeting at the Albany Medical Center, in Albany, New York, on Friday, September 25, 1964. The Thursday night before the meeting is quite memorable because the restaurant in which members coming to the meeting met for dinner. Although, some of us placed our orders from the menu at about 6 p.m., our dinners were not served until at least 10 p.m. Meanwhile, more and more members arriving for the meeting began to fill the tables at the restaurant. Meanwhile, alcoholic beverages were being served. The dinner became a wild party. It was interesting to see Bill Mason playing the piano at the restaurant. It was amazing that on the next day no one seemed to be suffering from any hangover from the night before.
I do not have the actual printed program for this meeting, and inquiries from some who attended the meeting also had not kept the program we distributed. Ray Vanderlinde did send me a copy of the front part of the brochure we had mailed in announcing the meeting. A thorough search of my remaining files revealed letters, with attached tentative meeting programs, from both Mike Vanko, clinical chemist at the Albany Medical Center and the Chairman of the Upstate New York Section and Ted Peters. Somehow it seems to me that the actual program differed from the tentative program. But, the differences may be minor. The tentative program listed the chairman of the opening morning session as Ted Peters, but my memory has Bill Mason as the chairman. After greetings by the chairman and Dr. Victor Tompkins, Director of the New York State Division of Laboratories and Research, I had one hour allotted to me to present my thoughts about standards. My presentation was entitled, What is a Standard?. The speakers and papers after my presentation were as follows: Herbert Minard , Manager of Quality Control, Bausch & Lomb, Rochester, New York, presented What is Quality Control?; Dr. R. Dean, Associate Director, New York State Division of Laboratories and Research, presented The New York State Program of Quality Control; Dr. D. Murray Young, Toronto General Hospital, Canada, presented Experiences with Intra- and Inter-Laboratory Control; and Dr. R.H. Allen, Laboratory of Hygiene, Department of National Health and Welfare, Ottawa, Canada, presented Experiences with Laboratory Control. Sylvia Blatt, New York City Health Department, is listed on the program notes which I have, but no topic is shown.
There were lively discussions about the presentations. It was during the first coffee break that I first met George Bowers, M.D. George, along with Robert McComb, was the co-director of the chemistry laboratory at Hartford Hospital, Connecticut. He was very enthusiastic about my standards paper. I was invited to present the standards paper and I did so at an AACC Connecticut Section meeting in the Hartford Hospital Auditorium on Wednesday, December 9, 1964. I repeatedly sent the manuscript of What is a Standard? to be considered for publication and it was repeatedly rejected by Julius Sendroy, Jr., Chairman of the Board of Editors of Clinical Chemistry. There were no good reasons given for the rejections. The rejections were brought up at the 1966 meeting of the Standards Committee. Joe Boutwell, Jr., at that time was the head of the Standards Committee, and the committee decided to recommend that the paper should be published. As I understand it, because of the recommendation, Julius Sendroy resigned as The Chairman of the Board of Editors. The paper was published9. Footnotes on the first page of the publication contained a statement by the Committee on Standards and Control and my appreciation for reviews and suggestions by Drs. Alan Mather, Joseph H. Boutwell, Jr., and Richard J. Henry.
At the annual meeting of the AACC, held at the Americana Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida, on Tuesday morning, August 16, 1966, I was a participant in the Symposium on Standards and Reference Samples. Joseph H. Boutwell, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, was the chairman of this symposium. Joe was good at delegating responsibility, so I was involved in setting up the coming symposium. My presentation was entitled Standards: Tentative Proposals. Before my presentation, W. Wayne Meinke, Ph.D., National Bureau of Standards, opened the symposium with a paper entitled Standards: Philosophy and Practice. Bradley E. Copeland, M.D., Pathologist, New England Deaconess Hospital, Boston, presented the paper entitled Standards: Accuracy and Precision Requirements for Medical Diagnosis and Therapy. The fourth paper, Reference Samples, was to be presented by Rovelle E. Allen, Ph.D., Department of National Health and Welfare, Ottawa, Canada. Because of an airline strike, James Logan, Ph.D., substituted for Dr. Allen.
After the publication of What is a Standard?, there was a large demand nationally and internationally for reprints. I do not remember how many reprints we sent out by mail, but I do know that we had to order a second batch of reprints and this supply of reprints diminished rapidly by a continuing flow of requests.. It was George Bowers who enabled the second batch to be printed. It seems as if my presentations, followed by the symposium at the AACC annual meeting and the publication of the paper What is a Standard? were an important stimulant to the establishment of standards for clinical laboratories. Not only did the National Bureau of Standards SRMs program under the able leadership of Wayne Meinke, Robert Schaffer, Paul Cali, and Tom Mears start producing pure standards and reference materials but the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) was founded. Russell J. Eilers, M.D., the first Chairman of the NCCLS was one of the major leaders who had the vision to establish this organization. In this year of 2008, I am proud to say that my paper What is a Standard? has been deemed a classical paper in the field of clinical chemistry and has been republished in two books10, 11
The paper electrophoresis Spinco Model RB system was used in our laboratory routinely for protein and hemoglobin studies. Dr. Bohrod would routinely send the laboratory blood drawn from the heart during autopsies. Paper electrophoresis studies were among the chemical tests requested for the postmortem blood specimens. I became interested in these studies as electrophoresis patterns began to accumulate from the many autopsies performed by the pathologists. Dr. Grant Wernimont, an employee of Kodak, was an analytical chemist, and in particular, became known for his work as a statistician. Dr. Wernimont began coming to our clinical chemistry meetings. It is of interest to note that Dr. Wernimont was the first student of my mentor, Dr. Thomas De Vries, to be awarded the Ph.D. degree at Purdue University. Also, Dr. Wernimont, during a visit with Dr. Elving, my first mentor at Purdue University, talked to me about the film being used in my Sargent-Heyrovsky camera recording polarograph. He then sent me a batch of film which would not shrink during the development process. At a meeting in Rochester, when I happened to mention the accumulation of the electrophoresis patterns I had, Dr. Wernimont became interested and suggested that we should apply a new statistical technique, which was multi-variance analysis. Dr. Wernimont and I met quite often over a period of two years. Three categories chosen for this study were cancer, cardiovascular disease, and infectious disease, which accounted for 698 of the 902 cases examined. Information punched directly on an IBM card for each postmortem examination consisted of the case identification number, age, sex, the time from death until the postmortem examination, the main pathological diagnosis, the physical state of the serum sample (hemolysis, icteric, etc.), the total protein values (g/dL of serum). The data from each electrophoresis pattern included the concentration levels of albumin, ?1-globulin, ?2-globulin, ?-globulin, and ?-globulin. We were able to do the complex multi-variance statistical analyses with an IBM 1620-20K computer at the Rochester Institute of Technology Computer Center. We found that it was possible to mathematically extract three protein fraction concentration patterns from a postmortem serum gross electrophoresis pattern which shows weak correlations between the fractions. As each of the globulin protein fractions included many individual proteins, further protein fractionation would probably have revealed greater correlations between these serum proteins both in normal and abnormal populations. Our second finding, was that the mathematically extracted patterns did show that there are systematic changes in the cancer, cardiovascular disease and the infectious disease population postmortem serum electrophoresis patterns. As the same systematic changes seemed to occur in more than one disease, it is probable that a disease cannot be distinguished from the electrophoresis pattern with our present knowledge. I prepared a paper which I hoped would be published. The paper was titled, Principal components analysis of data from paper electrophoresis patterns of postmortem serum proteins, and the authors listed were Nathan Radin, Grant Wernimont, Milton G. Bohrod, and Janet Seely. Although Dr. Bohrod promised to add the pathology viewpoint to the paper, he somehow never got around to it. As the laboratory workload kept increasing, I also did not get around to submitting it for publication.
At the May 14-15, 1965 Joint Meeting of the AACC Upstate New York Section and the Toronto group of the Canadian Society of Clinical Chemists at the Toronto General Hospital, the Friday, May 14, 1965 meeting topic was: Laboratory Data - Its Utilization and Management. On that day I presented the two papers, A punched card system for the laboratory and Postmortem electrophoresis studies with the aid of a computer.
I first read about immunoelectrophoresis in an article in Scientific American. As our hospital became closely affiliated with the Medical School of the University of Rochester, physicians from the medical school had access to our laboratory. I was asked to perform immunoelectrophoresis studies, but there was no money forthcoming for equipment. I went shopping and bought a knife and fork tray which had three compartments. We made the trays useful for immunoelectrophoresis. I do not remember the details, however, we ended up putting slides, on which agarose media was poured, across the three compartments of the tray. We filled the tray compartments with a buffer solution. The Spinco power supply from the routine paper electrophoresis system was used. Copper wires were placed in the end compartments of the trays and apparently they served as electrodes very well because we ended up with very good immunoelectrophoresis patterns. The physician who had requested this technique was well satisfied with the results and he was the one who interpreted the patterns.
. Occasionally, when in New York City, I would stop at the Mount Sinai Hospital Cell Research Laboratory to visit B.J. Davis and Len Ornstein. On one of my visits I was impressed by their work with acrylamide gel electrophoresis. I was shown small cylindrical gels which had been stained with a blue dye after electrophoresis. What was impressive was the great number of lines which indicated many, many more serum proteins had been separated than with paper electrophoresis. I thought that it would be very interesting to try to duplicate their work. Again, there was no money for equipment. As I was adept in using lathes, power saws, etc., a legacy from having learned how to use machine power tools as an ordnance inspector and in a cabinet making course at the American School for Craftsmen at RIT, I was permitted to use the workshop at the Rochester General Hospital. . I fashioned the proper equipment for acrylamide gel electrophoresis with plexiglass. Again, using the Spinco power supply I was able to get very nice patterns of serum proteins. After all my work, when I showed the multiple separations of proteins to Dr. Bohrod, I did not get support to continue this work.
The Beckman, Model DU Spectrophotometer was used the determine the activities of the enzymes glutamic-oxalacetic transaminase (SGOT, and currently AST), glutamic-pyruvic transaminase (SGPT and currently ALT), and lactic dehydrogenase (LDH and currently LD). The rates of the catalytic activities of each of the enzymes in measured aliquots of serum specimens incorporated into specific chemical systems meant that absorbance readings had be timed manually with a stop-watch. In 1965, communication with a company, Research Specialities, resulted in a trial of their Robot Chemist, which was modified to do enzyme rate reactions automatically. We worked with the instrument for quite a while, but time and time again, the system failed. We had numerous visits from two company representatives, however, they could not rectify the deficiencies of the instrument. Warner-Chilcott bought out Research Specialties. In a telephone conversation with a representative of Warner-Chilcott, I arranged to return the Robot Chemist. Modification and incorporation of our Beckman Model DU spectrophotometer into the Gilford system provided automated recording of enzyme rate reactions. The purchase of the Gilford system made the measurements of enzyme rate reactions simpler than with our manual methods. At the two-day AACC Upstate New York Section meeting of November 5-6, 1965,at the Midtown Tower Hotel, Rochester, the topic was enzymes in clinical chemistry. As the Chairman of the Upstate New York section I gave an opening address at the first session on Friday morning November 5. On Saturday I presented the paper Experiences With The Gilford System.
In 1964, New York State enacted a Clinical Laboratory Act. As of July 1965 there were almost 500 clinical laboratories in New York State. Until the State could set up a laboratory inspection system, members of the Upstate Section volunteered to visit laboratories and observe whether they are performing according to the regulations of the Clinical Laboratory Act. I was assigned a number of small laboratories to visit. I also brought some specimens to be subjected to a number of laboratory tests. I was to observe the handling and testing process. There were no problems in some laboratories and lots of problems in others. It is assumed that my report and the reports of other inspectors were helpful in establishing laboratory performance standards. In September 1965, Raymond Vanderlinde became the Laboratory Clnical Chemist for the New York State Health Department.
After establishing himself in his new position, Ray asked me to attend a conference on cholesterol in Boston. On the way to Boston, I made a stop in Albany and spent an afternoon with Ray. In the evening, in the midst of a thunderstorm I flew to Boston. On the next day, I went to the conference on cholesterol. Although I no longer have a record of the date and place of the meeting, I do remember that among the people at the conference were Tom Mears from the SRM program at the NBS and Louis F. Fieser, organic chemist at Harvard University. Dr. Fieser had worked with cholesterol in his laboratory. There were some pathologists in attendance at this conference. Tom Mears interest led to cholesterol being thefirst pure SRM.for the clinical chemistry laboratory. After flying back to Rochester, I did write a report and submitted it to Raymond Vanderlinde.
The workload in our hospital chemistry laboratory kept increasing because new tests were being developed and the demand for routine tests kept increasing. It was also during the early 1960s that at the hospital, a kidney dialysis unit was established and a team for heart surgery was formed. At first, our laboratory was involved in monitoring kidney dialysis and heart surgery patients. Eventually instrumentation was developed that could be used in the kidney dialysis unit itself and in the surgical suite during heart surgery.
Plans were being made to close the Westside Division. Arthur “Fritz” Liebert, hospital administrator, came into my office to tell me about the space being allocated for the chemistry laboratory at the Northside Division. I was asked to submit plans for furnishing the new laboratory space. I was to work with the architects, if necessary, and I was given plenty of time to accomplish this task. Designing a clinical chemistry laboratory is not simple as one had to think about the future development of instrumentation which could influence the placement of laboratory benches. After drawing what seemed a reasonable set of plans, I heard nothing for a while. I cannot stipulate the time, but it was probably toward the end of 1965 or early 1966 when I had a visit again by Fritz Liebert. This time I was told that there was a change of plans and that now I was being allocated a new chemistry laboratory space next to the emergency room and I have just a few days to come up with new plans. For better or worse, I came up with plans which were accepted. I do not know the exact date of the move of our laboratory, but it took place on a Friday night. The chemistry laboratory personnel with the capable leadership by Sal, Al, and Janet, pitched in to move our laboratory equipment and set everything up in the new laboratory. It was with great pride that our chemistry laboratory was in full operation on Saturday morning, with one exception.. If anyone ordered a cholesterol test, they would have to wait until Monday for results. I had an office on one side of the laboratory. A large window on one of the walls of my office enabled me to observe all the laboratory operations from my desk area.
One of the surgeons brought in grant money which enabled us to invest in a gas chromatograph. Al Gramza and I spent a week at F & M Scientific Corporation, in Avondale, Pennsylvania, where we learned how to use the gas chromatograph we ordered. At first, Al would be running the gas chromatograph back in the laboratory where we were committed to be involved with the surgeon’s research goals. Also, we would have the opportunity to use the gas chromatograph for identifying toxic substances.
Although I was quite satisfied with my position as Chief Biochemist, I understood that hospitals were paying clinical chemists higher salaries than mine. In 1966, with a 15-year-old son and a 13-year-old daughter it was time to begin to think about college expenses in the near future. I explored possibilities for a clinical chemist at other institutions. In a letter of August 3, 1966, F. Wells Brason, M.D., Director of Laboratories, at the Institute of Pathology & Research, Harrisburg Hospital, in Pennsylvania, made an offer of $17,000.00 a year with an increase of a $1,000.00 a year to a maximum of $20,000 a year. For 1966 this was good money, and I must say that I did not heed the adage that all that glitters is not gold. I accepted the position. It was with great reluctance that I tendered my resignation at the end of September. After 10 years in Rochester, we had friends and were active in the community. We sold our house quickly and moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in October of 1966.
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10 Radin N. What Is a Standard? In: Rosenfeld L Biographies and other essays on the history of clinical chemistry. Washington, DC: AACC, 1999:160-81.
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