The Ghosts of Balboa Park
When my father arrived in San Diego in March 1946, there were still 20,000 war wounded lying in the Naval Hospital there. Although World War II had ended 6 months earlier, the number of wounded recovering there was staggering. My father had just graduated from medical school and had come to San Diego to do his medical internship as a newly commissioned Naval officer. He served at the San Diego Naval Hospital for a year. The facility was so short staffed at times during that year, that on some rotations he was overseeing a thousand patients. He was 23 years old. In April 1947, my father was shipped overseas for two years. He was stationed on a ship docked in the harbor at Tsing Tao, China. The American Navy was making its presence known along the coast of China in an attempt to aid the Nationalists in their war against the Communists sweeping down from the North. My father was responsible for the health of the 120 sailors and officers on the ship. Sometimes, he would write home to my mother and complain that the penicillin so badly needed for the wounded there and elsewhere was being wasted instead on treating the diseases that the sailors were picking up during their shore leave. Somewhere in early 1948, my father contracted a severe case of hepatitis. He was flown to Guam and Pearl Harbor, en route home to recover in San Diego. When he arrived at Pearl Harbor, he was hospitalized briefly in the facilities there. That hospital were so short staffed, however - the doctors has not been relieved in months and months - that one of the medical officers seeing that my father only had hepatitis, declared my father to be the new medical officer on that wing and promptly got himself shipped back to the States. My father would get up out of his hospital bed and attend to the other patients on his ward. A senior medical officer on the staff, hearing of my father’s predicament and knowing that my father had never seen his second child - born in San Diego in December 1947 - declared my father too ill to serve and had my father shipped back to San Diego. When my father returned to San Diego, he was hospitalized for several more months until he was recovered from the hepatitis. During that time, he continued to serve as a staff doctor at the Naval Hospital. He finally came home to my parents’ apartment in Naval Housing on a Friday morning in mid-1948. Sunday morning, two days later, my mother could not awake him. He had contracted a case of bulbar polio and was in a semi-coma. There was an epidemic underway on the San Diego Navy Base. Of the 13 cases on the base, my father and one other man - also a doctor - were the only ones who survived. The theory was that they had perhaps built up immunities from exposure to the disease. My father spent another 6 months in the hospital - this time however, too sick to serve. When my father was finally given a medical discharge from the Navy in 1950, he was 27 years old. He was 6 feet tall and weighed 138 pounds. He and my mother made their way back to San Francisco, where he began his residency in radiology and his career in academics. I was born in 1952 just before he began teaching at UCSF. When I was growing up, my father rarely spoke about his years in the Navy. He rarely spoke about the wounded lying in such great numbers in the Naval Hospital in San Diego. He rarely spoke of the thousands of civilians he saw on the streets of Tsing Tao, refugees flooding into the city by the hundreds of thousands running from the onslaught of war. He never spoke about his bouts of hepatitis or polio. I was only vaguely aware as a child that he sometimes had to rush from the dinner table because he was choking on his food. Bulbar polio attacks the thoracic region and the lingering damage from the ravages of the disease was expressed in his inability to swallow or breathe at times. When I was a child, I knew my father as a tall, lanky man who on occasion had difficulty seeing the humor in things. My father passed away several years ago. As I was leaving to drive to San Diego for DAC earlier this month, my mother said to me, "You know, your father and I had some very meaningful years in San Diego." That was all she said. ****************************** My father was raised a Quaker. The Quakers have been pacifists for many, many generations. However, the circumstances around World War II were so intense that my uncle, my father's older brother, enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943 and was shipped out to the Pacific from Long Beach, California. Before my uncle’s ship left Long Beach, he had a visit onboard from the elders of the Friends Meeting House in Whittier where he and my father had been raised. My uncle loved to tell the story of the Quaker elders sitting on a bunk facing him as he sat across from them on the opposite bunk down in the hold of the ship. The Quaker way was such that few words were ever exchanged. After a long silence, one of the elders said to my uncle, "Has thee examined thy conscience?" My uncle paused and then said, "Yes." The elders nodded, stood up, shook his hand, and left. ************************ I had all of this in mind when I arrived in San Diego. As the days at DAC unfolded, I sometimes found myself looking out at the city from the Convention Center and wondering if the spirits of the thousands who had suffered and died there, or suffered and recovered there, weren’t somehow imbued in the place. As the evenings at DAC unfolded, full of dinners and parties and gatherings, it was hard not to dwell on my father, my mother, and the tens of thousands of others who had come through that place en route to war and the thousands more who had awaited their return. During all the days and nights at DAC, I think I was looking for the ghosts of those tens of thousands and for the meaning in their suffering and loss. And every morning at DAC, it was hard to look at the headlines from the Middle East and not make a connection between the ‘then’ of my parents and their peers, and the ‘now’ of the thousands of soldiers and civilians who have more recently endured suffering and loss in the present, complex age of war in a time of enlightenment. Tuesday night, I went to the Magma party. The party was held up on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Midway, now docked permanently at the San Diego Marina. There were perhaps 800 revelers at the party, enjoying the music, food, and drink. I knew few people at the party and it was easy to make my way to the edge of the mighty ship and look out over the city in the gathering gloom. I looked up at the hills of the city and knew that the Naval Hospital was there hidden beyond the shadows of the trees of Balboa Park. My mother had told me that when they arrived in San Diego in March 1946, there were so many wounded that they could not be housed in the Naval Hospital alone. In fact, many buildings in Balboa Park - the ones that now house museums and elegant restaurants - were filled to the brim with the wounded. Balboa Park in 1946 was not a tourist destination. It was a military hospital. Standing on the deck of the Midway, I wished my father were still alive. I would like to have engaged him in conversation about the irony of standing on that great ship - one that had been commissioned at the height of World War II - and looking in one direction up to the shadows of Balboa park, and back in the other direction to masses of party goers reveling under the looming presence of the ship’s bridge. I wondered if he would have celebrated the fact that, although there are still places of extreme suffering and violence in the world, a weapon of war like the U.S.S. Midway is now a venue for peace. A venue for people to gather and mingle and celebrate their well being, their technology, their economic opportunities and successes. I wondered if he would have said to me and my fellow citizens of this nation and the world, how are you living your lives. Are you celebrating the opportunities granted to you by those who went before? Are you working to correct the ills that still plague the world? I wondered if he would have said to all of us, "Has thee examined thy conscience?"
June 30, 2004 Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com
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