North By Northwest

No, we're not going to discuss the movie, this is the third installment of my genealogical Peripherals trilogy. 

However, if you're being strafed or buzzed in a wide open area with no cover, like Cary Grant was, the safest position to take is not to run, but to lie down horizontally to the plane's approach thus offering the smallest target. When I was managing people, I used this trick all the time, that's how I survived. Geez, Cary, think things through, you make me nervous. 

Years before I knew anything about Giovanni Venturella, I had gone on a search for the hospital where I was born. Shouldn't be too hard, right? My brother Dave had been born in Jackson Memorial Hospital, one of the largest and most highly regarded medical institutions in the South, so I was probably also born there. Right?

Wrong.

According to my Birth Certificate, I was born at Northwest Hospital in Miami. Well, that should be easy enough. Wrong again. Even the magical Internet had nothing about it - absolute radio silence. Perhaps it was a ghost hospital. If you search today, the only results for 'Northwest Hospital in Miami' are my plaintive requests for photos and information. So, back to the Polk City Directories of Miami and yes, there it was on 79th Street.

My guess was that it was no longer a hospital, but that wouldn't stop me from getting some photos of the place. When I traveled there on one of my sentimental journeys to Miami, I went to the address as listed. Here's what I found.

There, just beyond the Rotor Rooter van was an empty lot, and I couldn't get a really good feel for the place from that. And it turns out that I hadn't missed my photo of the hospital by just a couple of months (wouldn't that be annoying!). No, as near as I can determine I had missed it by fifty years. Fifty years gone and it's still an open lot? Holy crap, was it a toxic waste dump? What the hell happened here? Was it because of me?

Maybe the hospital had been really, really old and had collapsed from the weight of years? But I checked the 1943 Fire Insurance Map, and no, it looked like farm land. But there in the 1948 Fire Insurance Map, there, Northwest Hospital in the Red box! Yay!

Wait a minute.

Northwest Hospital was about as large as a medium-sized McDonald's. Definitely smaller than Jackson Memorial Hospital by a factor of 1,000. So my brother is born in the fancy upscale hospital and I am born at McDonald's. There are no photos of Northwest Hospital because there weren't any cameras small enough! 

However, you may have noticed two other colored boxes on that Fire Map above. The address of Northwest Hospital was 1060 NW 79th Street, just across the street from 1015 NW 79th Street where Giovanni Venturella was operating the Fannie Grill (Green Box) which was next door to 1005 NW 79th Street where Giovanni's Restaurant (Yellow box) was built that same year. See how this all ties together? Well, do you? I made Giovanni's box yellow in honor of the Yellow Meat Market now located there. See what a nice guy I am!

On the Google aerial today, the outlines of some of the Northwest Hospital buildings are still evident. The hospital and the Fannie Grill are gone. Giovanni's lives on as the Yellow. 

I must speculate on how I came to be born at Northwest Hospital. Did Giovanni Venturella tell my parents about the new, little hospital across the street from him? Or perhaps they saw it as it was being built when they went to one of Giovanni's places. Or was it all just a coincidence? There is no one left to ask. Bummer.

There is another possibility. The doctor who delivered me at Northwest was Dr. Paul Vincent Dunn an Osteopath who was a co-founder of the hospital. His address at the time was 1054 NW 79th Street, next door to the hospital and right across the street from the Fannie Grill and Giovanni's. Perhaps my parents met him in one of those places. Or some other bar. 

For Dr. Dunn was an alcoholic. Later, in 1975 when he was Medical Director of Dade County's Alcohol Detoxification Program, he described his experiences to the Miami News and explained that he did not stop drinking until 1970. That was about the time the hospital went away.

His description matched perfectly with what I had seen working with my friend Mike Mulhall when we traveled all over the US together. Mike drank continuously and prodigiously and other than getting redder in the face, never showed it. Is that the way it was with Dr. Dunn?

This makes me really wish I had been there when I was born. Yeah, I guess I was, but I wasn't actively taking notes, I was too busy squalling. But you know what I mean. In addition to what was described here, Dr. Dunn was also a big-time hunter and fisherman with a houseful of trophies and championships in pistol marksmanship and skeet shooting. The Doctor had some interesting elements in his personality. I wish I could have met him again after that first brief encounter.

As I indicated at the outset of this little trilogy, it is the Peripherals that add the spice to a cold, analytic document like a birth certificate. And this particular chain of connections turned out to be spicy indeed.
  
UPDATE: June 3, 2018 - Thanks to the magic of social media, I can now provide a photo of Northwest Hospital. It turns out, it was just a very small place as I had presumed. Very plain and simple.

And that's probably Dr. Dunn's house visible through the underbrush off to the left. It turns out the Internet does have some value!
 

Conversion

Change happens.

My last entry on travel reminded me of a story. Back in the days of yore, when giants walked the earth (OK, thirty years ago), I had just begun work at Shared Medical Systems (SMS - later acquired by Siemens) and I worked in the group that did 'Conversions'. In those days, SMS was growing rapidly, getting tons of new hospital customers all the time. Converting from one electronic system to another is a hard time for a hospital, most run on very thin margins and any disruption to their cash flow is very painful. So we tried very hard to get their billings moving again as soon as we could. And we did that by 'converting' their old files from whatever system they used to run on into the SMS file structure so we could do billings right away, in many cases the very next day after the conversion.

I was very pleased to be in this group doing that work because it was SO challenging. In those days, there were many more manufacturers of computers and many more proprietary file structures, some specifically built for one hospital. So every conversion was different and each was a little like forensic archeology. We had to pick the files apart and tease the information out of them and specifications were always poor because the company or group losing the account was never tripping over themselves to supply proper information. They were probably hoping we would fail so they could get another shot at the hospital. So we wrote our conversions in a language called PL/I (Programming Language One), which allowed us to manipulate data down to the bit level so we could actually change characters around if we had to. And we often had to. This is what coding in PL/I looked like:
It was such a strong language, we could decode bizarre 7-bit junk or data with arcane random buffer lengths or files that had another file to tell where certain data was posted (which was never included in the batch they sent us). But this is where I learned my love of forcing the system to do what I wanted it to even if it had no intention of giving me what I wanted. It was a real rush to pull a jewel out of a steaming pile of crap. The executives knew we were doing magic and were grateful to us and sent us letters of appreciation. But no money.

So, what's this got to do with travel? Well, the most money came in when we acquired a group of hospitals and that was fairly regularly. The deal maker was a Vice President named Mike Mulhall who had such commanding presence that his statements were regarded as stone fact simply because he had uttered them. These were not negotiations, they were pronouncements. It was amazing to watch. So he and I would travel to these places and meet with a room full of people and 'negotiate' what was going to happen. They would bring in their technical experts and I would question them about their file structures, aging decisions, financial codes, etc. etc. right in front of everyone. Then I would give Mike my estimation of the difficulty factor for the conversion and he would apply it as one factor in the financial part of the deal. It was a little like the Pros from Dover had come to town and we were there to crack this kid's chest and get in a round of golf.

Only it wasn't golf, it was drinking. Mike drank more than any human I'd ever seen. On our fairly frequent trips, we would go the airport and into one of the many airline clubs he was a member of. I didn't sit in those cold plastic chairs at the gate for YEARS. When they called our flight, he called for another round. We only left when it was FINAL call. And then, when we boarded (always as the door was closing) he'd ask the stewardess for a drink so it would be ready as soon as we were in the air. At first, I tried to keep up with him, but that was just dumb. Mike was a studied, hardened professional drinker, but he never showed a sign of intoxication other than a reddening of the face as the evening (or day) progressed. There was more than one occasion when we would fly to our destination and go right into a meeting after drinking for hours! I have no idea how I pulled that off other than Mike expected me to, so that made me capable. It was a little worse when the meeting was first thing the next day because although he didn't feel it, I sure did.

Then my team and I actually had to DO the conversion and there was never enough time. But that's a story for another day. Imagine staying awake for three and half days straight and writing better code three-quarters of the way asleep than I did wide awake and rested. If I tried that now, I would be DEAD, DEAD, DEAD.

On the day of conversion, we didn't have any fancy file transfer, we had one of our guys hand-carry a set of tapes back from Michigan or Arizona or wherever. Timing was crucial as you can imagine. Between the day-end of the other system and the airline schedule, there was often a very tight timeframe. Our courier told the story once of his speeding across town in his rental car, squealing to a stop in front of the terminal door, jumping out with his case of tapes and as he ran through the door, he tossed his rental car keys to a cop standing there and said "Medical Emergency!" and just kept running. I can't remember if he said he made it through the airplane door as it was closing or it had already closed but either way there was no time for any rental car return.
We waited breathlessly for a ticket or bench warrant to arrive in the mail, but all we ever got was the rental car receipt. That means the officer may have personally driven the car to the rental car return himself and then had to arrange getting back to his post or made it happen some other way, but however he did it, we're grateful.

Can you IMAGINE trying a stunt like that now? We would be shot six times before we ever got through the first door. Traveling was different in those days.

Mike Mulhall died very young and it was a long time ago. He had a heart attack at the New York Athletic Club after a steam bath. I learned a lot from Mike, we traveled all over the country together, we were a good team. He is missed.