When my father Leon was a boy he had rheumatic fever. They sent him upstate to a rest home called Valhalla. It’s a good thing he didn’t know what “Valhalla” meant! They fed him nothing but boiled fish. That was the treatment for rheumatic fever and other heart ailments in the 20’s and 30’s. He never ate fish again until I was an adult, and then he always ate it smothered with sauces and vegetables, so it didn’t taste like fish. He had the same aversion to cruise ships for years because of the troop transport ships which took him to and from Europe in World War II.
When the war started he was 18. He had been an excellent student with good grades and had attended Boy’s Science High in Brooklyn, so he thought he had an excellent chance for Naval Officers’ Candidate School. He failed the physical because of his heart murmur.
A year later they instituted the 19-year-old draft. He was drafted. At the physical they asked about his exam the year before and his rejection. They weren’t so particular this time around. At the time a New York cardiologist, Dr. Paul Dudley White, who later became famous partly as Eisenhower’s doctor during his two presidential heart attacks (and ended up himself on a US postage stamp), was examining heart cases for the draft board.
They sent Leon across the Brooklyn Bridge to his office in Manhattan. White asked him why he was there. Leon told him about his rheumatic fever and heart murmur. Upon examining him, White said “How would you like to trade your heart for mine right now?” At the time White was already elderly and “white” haired. Leon was so elated at the news that he didn’t have a bad heart that he was almost back to Brooklyn before he realized, in his own words, that “The bastard had drafted me!” He ended up in the cavalry, which still had horse drawn caissons at the beginning of the war. Leon loved animals, probably the influence of time spent at his Grandparents Philip (one of my namesakes) and Johanna’s farm at Hollis in a section called Jamaica on Long Island.
More on the war soon.