1942

Forage for this month's column is slight because of your secretary's penchant for bicycling. He and his wife Jane took their two-wheelers to Holland and ran up and down the countryside for much of September. It was easy going, for Holland is flat'and replete with bike paths, and the Dutch are affable and English-speaking. Holland is a small but fascinating place, and one that should be visited by all of us, on two wheels or otherwise. The intent now is to do it again next spring, when the tulips are in full flower.

A note from Proc Page brings the news of the passing of John Teal, who was internationally famous because of his work with Arctic musk oxen. John's ambition was to domesticate the musk ox enough to allow Eskimos to raise the animals and use their thick, warm, lightweight wool for garments for their own use, and for sale. He was very successful in this attempt and in others in which he tried to help the Eskimos in their endless struggle against poverty. John was a rugged, rawboned combination of scholar and adventurer.

Another achiever in our group is Tom Mc-Elin, who was recently named a recipient of the Mayo Fondation Distinguished Alumnus Award. Tom recently retired from chairing the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Evanston, Ill., Hospital, and he currently serves as professor of same at Northwestern. He has won more title's and honors in the 38 years since Dartmouth and Harvard University Medical School than we have room for here. Again we should be proud.

A Sunday New York Times last August carried the exciting story of Joe Nason, one of the few survivors of a Japanese P.O.W. camp in Raboul, New Britain, in 1944-45.Joe, a shotdown Navy dive-bomber pilot, weighed but 90 pounds when rescued. He and six others were the only survivors of this camp. Those who did not make it were done in by physical and psychological abuse, starvation, and disease.

According to the New. York Times, "while the allied armed forces reduced Raboul to rubble and swept on to victory in the South Pacific, most of the malnourished prisoners died of beriberi, dengue, dysentery, and malaria. In a medical experiment, some were injected with the blood of Japanese troops who had malaria in a test of a Japanese doctor's theory that the Americans were naturally immune to the disease. They were not. At one Raboul camp there were once nearly 70 prisoners, but only seven of them remained alive when the Australian Navy arrived and rescued them in September 1945, a month after the end of the war." Five of those seven survivors met in August of this year. One of the five was our own Joe Nason.

Joe apparently did a lot to keep contact up between the survivors and actually went back to the scene of his imprisonment while he was in the Peace Corps in 1977. Joe wrote a 114-page narrative of his two years at Raboul, the title of which is Nason, You Next Die. Among other things, the narrative describes the prisoners' bewilderment when they were told by the gloating Japanese of the death of President Roosevelt in 1945 and the elevation of "Toruman," a name they did not know.

So there you have it for this month. Hope to have seen lots of you at 1942's mini-reunion the weekend of the Yale game in Hanover, October 29 and 30. Your secretary has been to most, if not all, of these events and can testify that they are very pleasant affairs. Speaking from delightful experience, it's definitely worthwhile to pull yourself away from your regular routine and show up at these annual, low-key, greatfun functions.

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