For Patriots Dream

San Francisco was the focal point of a restless nation in the mid sixties. Defined by a liberated and restless youth movement and ignited by the VN war, the “flower children” descended on this citadel from all over America. And I arrived too but in a different venue – as a young doctor drafted immediately after internship, commissioned a captain in the US army medical corp and assigned to Ft Lewis, Wa. It was August 1966 and I had just completed basic training at Ft Sam Houston in San Antonio. Now, after three interesting crazy weeks of accelerated training several hundred young medical doctors, nurses, and related personnel scattered to their assigned duty stations across the country. Don Paradise, a young dental officer whom I met at Ft Sam and I caravanned across the Southwest and up the coast to Tacoma, WA and Ft Lewis – he with a new 66’ Buick Gran Sport convertible and I with a 66” Cutlass Supreme, my first new car. Seeing this iconic city the first time in the midst of the spirited counter culture revolution was exhilarating “to the max” – mind blowing, perhaps a better term. Read more