Westchester Clubmen

I'll ask you now, but we'll keep going in chronological order. Well, why was that not an option for you? Why did you not see that as a path for you to take?$$I wasn't interested. I was afraid to fly. I was afraid to ride a horse. I was afraid to ride, I fell off a pony at camp and never rode a horse, and I had no interest in it, and I was active, and I wanted to go to medical school, and I was fortunate, they needed doctors.$$Had you always been interested in medicine?$$I never thought of anything else.$$For how long? How far back can you remember?$$Well, as far as I can remember. That's the only think I knew. I lived in a community of doctors, my father [George Clayton Branche, Sr.] was a doctor, his close friends were physicians. I didn't know what kind I would be, but I never thought, as I said, and I'll get to the, once I got into Bowdoin College [Brunswick, Maine], I had spent almost two years there, 1944, I had finished my, I finished Boston Latin [Boston Latin School, Boston, Massachusetts] in '42 [1942]. I spent two years at Bowdoin and was told that unless I got into medical school that I would be subject to the draft. I only, didn't have enough, yeah, I only had two years, but I took a summer and at that time all, many of my classmates were in the same situation I was. We were only nineteen and twenty and so the colleges, Williams [Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts], Bowdoin, many of us, my friend Garrett [John Garrett, Jr.] at Amherst [Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts], we were allowed to go to medical school and we, and then we accelerated very rapidly, but then in 1945, the war [World War II, WWII] sort of ended and we decelerated so we spent a couple, one six-month period without going to school, and we had to write a little thesis and do something else, and then went on back and finished. And, but the reason, as I said, I was always interested in medicine. And at Boston University [Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts], it was a very tiny school. When my father went there, there were only twenty-three students at the medical school. And three of 'em was black, including my father. And when I went to BU medical school, it was still small. There were only fifty-nine and now there're over 160 in each class.$$How many blacks were there when you were there of the fifty-nine?$$Very, I was the only one in my class, just like I was the only one at Bowdoin, except for a young fellow who was there for a year and left to go in the [U.S.] Army.$$Where did you live when you went out to Bowdoin?$$When I went back, when I came back from Bowdoin? My mother [Lillian Davidson Branche] had moved to 71 Highland Street. A family moved out and she moved in the same building, apartment, little apartment in Boston [Massachusetts], and I used to ride a bicycle from my apartment to the medical school. I'd get on my, had my books on the back and I'd get on my little bike and kids would say look, there's a man on a bike. So I rode that and they would let me hook it up inside the building and then I would bicycle back up to, it was a couple, maybe mile and a half, two miles.$But I only spent a, no more than four or five weeks, and then I was allowed, I traded places with this fellow, as I told you I don't like flying, but I was willing to get into a little tiny two-seater with my duffel bag and fly south. And while I was there I was--you had to have a dispensary. You had to have a dispensary for soldiers when they had various problems, whether they're STS [significant threshold shift], sexually transmitted disorders, or various other things, or whether the common cold or whether they were this or that. They would come to the dispensary. Now--$$A dispensary is a pharmacy basically.$$The dispensary is a little tent where I had, had a little desk and things, and I had pills and so forth to treat--injections for certain disorders. But I saw very few sick people in this little--now there weren't, there wasn't a great deal of fighting going on. You remember there were little lulls in fighting. Now we're talking now, we're talking, I got to this hospital and about February of 1993 [sic. 1953], and there were no major battles or anything going on. Occasionally there was a push so to speak when the Chinese became involved and there were skirmishes and so they came, they did bring in, as I said, this was Evacuation Hospital [11th Evacuation Hospital, Korea]. They would bring troops down from the lines and so there were times when there were troops who had to have emergency surgical procedures which is what some of my friends were involved with. But I couldn't help out because I knew nothing about surgical tech. In fact, they would ask all of the officers, medical officers, to come and give a hand, and I recall, I never will forget it, when I got in the operating room, and my friend Wharton [ph.] would be operating, really working hard, and I would try to, he said, "Gee you're all thumbs," he said, "please leave." And I was, I had to leave. But anyhow, as things passed on, what happened was I allowed the Korean civilians to come into the clinic, those who had medical problems that I could handle, and so each morning you would see a line up outside, see it was a gate, not a gate, but a guard would be there opening, letting them into our little ground, camp, whatever you want to call them, you'd find maybe fifteen, twenty or so lined up coming in, and so it was okay. In fact, the U.S., my superiors said, sure, you can see as many as you, so they would line up and take their time and I would see them for various forms of anemia, a lot of parasitic diseases and minor problems that I could handle and they were grateful, and I enjoyed it, because otherwise I wouldn't have been practicing any medicine.$$You wouldn't have had anything to do.$$Very little.$$Very little.$$And so anyhow, I was there for about ten, let's see, from oh about eight to ten months and then I was transferred to the area near Seoul [South Korea], to the 121st Evacuation Hospital. That was in the town across from the Han River from Yeongam-eup [South Korea], I got promoted to captaincy, I was captain, and did primarily--much bigger facility and we, the general medical, we had medical wards and treated more medical problems, I left there. The war ended as you will recall only a few months after I got to Korea actually. And I left Korea in 1954, and came to, back to the states.