2014 is the 70th anniversary of a change that altered the course of my life. I was eleven years old but I remember it very clearly. In early March 1954, my father met me as I stepped off the PTC “N” bus on my way home from Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Northeast Philadelphia. Ordinarily, my father would have still been out working. He was a huckster, selling fruits and vegetables from a truck he drove through the streets of West Philadelphia.
My father was the only member of our family who was still going to the old doctor we saw before we moved. (I don’t think that doctor had read a medical journal since he became an MD). My father had a smoker’s cough most of his life; when I knew him, he was smoking up to three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. His doctor prescribed cough medicines, which had no effect, and then suggested it might be tuberculosis and had my father tested. I remember an after-dinner conversation between my mother and one of my (four older) sisters. My sister was tearful as she said she wished it was anything but TB. As she recalled this conversation, she blamed herself for what the illness really was: cancer
The morning of the day my father met my bus, he had finally gone to the doctor the rest of us were seeing. The doctor had a fluoroscope in his office, a device that uses x-rays to obtain real-time moving images of the internal structures of a patient. That type of fluoroscope was later banned because of the high dose of radiation it delivered. The doctor took one look and knew: it was inoperable lung cancer. In addition to being a heavy smoker, my father was exposed to mustard gas during his time in France during World War I; mustard gas is now known to be a carcinogen.
My father told me he would be going into the Veterans Administration Hospital the next day, and that from then on, I was to be the “man of the house.” At age 11.
The VA doctors told my parents my father had six months to live.
The doctors did offer to try something, X-ray treatments. Every day for about a month, my father suffered radiation treatments that burned his chest so it looked like a checker board. The treatments worked; they destroyed the cancer. But they also destroyed the nerves in my father’s spinal column, and he became paralyzed from the waist down. In 1954, doctors did not know as much about the use of radiation.
For four and a half years, my father remained in a ward on the fifth floor of the VA hospital in West Philadelphia, except for an occasional weekend and one summer at home.
My mother, who hadn’t worked outside the home since she married my father in 1922, had to get a job at age 51. My sister was working at Gimbels department store in center city Philadelphia, so she helped my mother get a full-time clerical job in the furniture department. Suddenly, life was nothing like it had been before, my father no longer a daily presence in my life, and my mother no longer the stay-at-home mom I assumed she always would be. And I, an out-going boy who acted in school plays and was student council president in the sixth grade, changed, becoming withdrawn.
Irvin Berg was born in Russia in 1899. His family emigrated to the United States in when he was five years old in 1904. Russian Jews were the victims of three large-scale waves of pogroms, each one more savage than the one before, between the years 1881 and 1884, 1903 and 1906, and 1917 and 1921. In the old country, the family name was Trachtenberg; the story was that there were too many members of the family to write out Trachtenberg on so many immigration forms, so it was shortened to Berg.
The family settled in Philadelphia, where my father and grandfather made money collecting bottles for recycling using a horse and wagon. When World War I began, my father enlisted in the Army on June 1, 1917. He was under age, and probably had no birth certificate from Russia. He sailed for France on May 3, 1918. My father told stories of working with horses and mules in the mud. My guess is that because he was young and because he had experience working with horses – perhaps not common among soldiers from Philadelphia – he was assigned to work in supply, and never went “over the top.”
In October 1958, when I was 16, my father passed away one month short of his 59th birthday. His heart had given out.
Mark Berg is a community activist in Adams County and a proud Liberal. His email address is MABerg175@Comcast.net.