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TI: Well, we finally settled in Boston, and it was a wonderful opportunity for me because I had, as I say, the Massachusetts General Hospital had so many famous surgeons, and they were the ones that were writing all the surgical literature at the time, and it was a real thrill for me to go see them, working in their operating rooms. I would go to other hospitals as well like the Boston City Hospital, Deaconist, the Boston Children's Hospital and observe these surgeons working. The surgeon at the Children's Hospital in Boston, name of Robert Gross, and he was the first surgeon in the United States to transplant a blood vessel which he did in the children, in the aorta in the chest. The first arterial transplant was performed by a Dr. Dubost in Paris back in 1944 replacing an aortic aneurism, so that was the very beginning of vascular surgery.

Well, Dr. Linton was doing this kind of work as well, and so I would be working seven days a week on-call at night, and the only day that I had off was a Sunday every other week, so he had a very busy service, and of course it was a great experience for me. In addition, it was my duty to conduct experimental surgery in the dog lab which I did after the day of surgery. And as a matter of fact, we developed an artificial blood vessel made out of a plastic called Ivalon. And we experimented, I implanted these artificial blood vessels in dogs and it, to work quite well. And by the end of the year, Dr. Linton decided to use these on humans. So we implanted a number of these in humans, and he followed them; and eventually, however there were other new blood vessels that came out which were better made out of, first made out of vingion cloth and next came the nylon material, and then the current blood vessels are made out of Dacron and Teflon. But initially, when I went to Boston, we were using human arteries, and after I harvested them, I would put them in packages, freeze them in liquid nitrogen. In the package, I would put in a small glass bead, and the purpose of that was that I would take the blood vessels over to MIT and have them sterilized by irradiation, and when the radiation hits the glass bead, it would turn black which would indicate that the package was sterile.

So my, our experience in Boston was not only all work, but we had some nice moments. We went to the museums there. We went to Cape Cod and saw the Plymouth Rock. We went into Vermont and Maine in the fall to see the colors. We saw the granite mine in Barre, Vermont, where they were cutting out granite which was quite an operation, and the thing that was very impressive in Barre, Vermont, was their cemetery. They had beautiful tombstones of all sizes, figures. It was quite impressive. Another interesting event that we had was to have, to watch them harvest maple sap to make maple sugar, and Dr. Linton's secretary knew the president of the Vermont Maple Sugar Association. So we went to his farm and went out in the woods with a team of horses and a sleigh with a huge galvanized tank, and we would pick up buckets of sap from the trees as it collected during the night and day and put them in the tank and bring them back to the concentration shed. And this shed was quite a large building, and the way they make maple syrup is that they have a large pan which was about, I would say, fifteen feet wide and about twenty-five feet long and has channels that starts at one corner, runs back and forth, and this whole pan is placed on a tilt so that the opposite corner is the most dependent. And under the entire pan, they have a huge fire going, and they would feed cord wood. And by the time the sap came down to the lower corner, it was concentrated enough that it was maple syrup. And the ratio of sap to syrup was fifty-five gallons to one gallon syrup, and then they would take the syrup and take it to the kitchen and further concentrate it so it became taffy-like, very thick, and this lady would pour this syrup on the snow, and it would crystallize, and we would have maple candy. So we had this, we would chew on this maple toffee and maple candy, and then she would offer us a dill pickle to counteract the sweetness. So we had a wonderful time watching how maple syrup was made.

The winter that we had in Boston was one of the most severe winters. I can remember while I was at the hospital, there was an alarm that came in and said everyone should leave the hospital this afternoon because of a snow warning. So I thought well, I have to go to Boston City Hospital to pick up something over there, so I left about two o'clock in the afternoon and went to the Boston City Hospital and picked up my materials. And I noticed that as I drove along the streets, traffic was getting slower and slower and there was getting more and more snow. And eventually, it was, the streets were blocked, and I tried to find my way around all these blocked streets. And finally, the snow was so heavy by evening that I had to abandon my car in the middle of the street just like everybody else. I got out, and I started walking to get back to our apartment which is about, I was about six miles or seven miles from the hospital. Well, eventually, there was no traffic on the streets, and of course, it was cold. I didn't have a jacket. I just had my white coat on. And so I took a blanket out of the car and started walking, and I would stop in at various stores that were open just to warm up. Eventually, I had to hail a ride from a snow plow, big truck plowing snow, and it took me until midnight to get home, and I walked home. I had icicles hanging out of my hair, my head. By next morning, there was three feet of snow on the streets, and all the cars were covered just like mounds. The traffic was at a standstill, but I went to the hospital on the trolley, on the light rail. That was the, quite an experience with the Northeast snowstorm.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.