1 Boring Old Man

It didn’t stop with Martin Luther King’s murder. It was like there were low dark clouds over Memphis during the next year. The end of the garbage striked brought no real resolution between the government and the workers. On the one year anniversary, there was a memorial march downtown. The tension was so thick you could taste it in the air. It was a dark, threatening sky that seemed to mirror the electricity on the ground. The violent outbreak on King’s march the year before was started by a black power group [I can’t recall the name]. There was concern that it would happen again. But the racist set was there too. Marching down the street eight abreast, we were jumpy – startling when things happened on the sidewalks. We ended in a large plaza near the River. Famous people spoke – Ted Kennedy, Ralph Abernathy, lots of people. But we were distracted as small riots broke out on the sides of the crowd. At one point, I turned towards some shouting and met a cloud of tear gas that sent me to the ground choking. I had no idea it was that toxic. We left the march and flew to New Orleans for an unplanned weekend jaunt. There, we saw Memphis on T.V., again under Martial Law.

It seemed as though it just wouldn’t stop. The union that had organized the garbage workers had also organized the hospital employees. Our mostly white house staff supported the mostly black nurses. Then one day, there was a hospital strike. The hospital was surrounded by picket lines, and suddenly we doctors were dividing our time between doctoring, nursing, and cleaning bed pans. All but the sickest were transferred to Private Hospitals. And then, as the days turned into weeks, the hospital was empty. We all suited up and came to work every day, but there was little to do except housekeeping. Our "morning report" where we reviewed cases that had come in the previous day became a time for us all to get together and be miserable together. Grady Hospital in Atlanta offered to take us all on to finish our training, but none of us wanted to go. The strikers let us in in the morning, and out at night. We were supporting them and they treated us respectfully. But no one else made it across the picket lines. One night, a friend and I were sort of hanging out near the back door of the hospital, a someone came through the door and fainted. It was a man with jaundice who was delerious, and the strikers had let him pass. We got him to a bed, and stayed up all night turning a routine case of hepatitis into a Grand Rounds presentation – making color slides and graphs. The next morning when everyone showed up for our morning depression meeting, Jim and I marched to the podium and put on an hour long show on the history of viral hepatitis through the ages. It was our finest hour, and it helped dispel some of the gloom. Not too long after that, the strike was settled and life returned towards normal, at least in the hospital. I left Memphis in 1971 at the end of my training, but I think that cloud still hung over the city even then.