The two-day journey took us through the vast, flat country of Louisiana and Texas. Old memories of the sugar-cane days in St. Martinville came to life as the train passed through Shreveport. New Mexico and our first experience as American prisoners-of war in Roswell flashed through my mind as the train made its way through that state. We reached Arizona and finally California! When we rolled through San Bernardino, we knew that Los Angeles and our sponsors in Pasadena were waiting for us. For three years they had collected food, clothing and many valuable objects which could be used for barter. Only with their help had we managed to survive the toughest postwar period. They had packed the monthly parcels with the love only a mother could have had. They had kept us alive and well. Now we were about to meet Arthur and Friedel.

The train station in Pasadena consisted of a single brick house with no platform. As the train came to a stop we could spot the tall figure of Arthur next to a white-haired women who looked like Friedel as I remembered her. They gave us a warm embrace and led us to an old Model A Ford which Arthur called "Stinky." I had checked our baggage through to Union Station in Los Angeles.

Friedel had rented a tiny apartment in the large apartment house on Madison Avenue. It had a small kitchen with an old fashioned cooking stove. The living room served also as a bedroom with the double bed hidden upright in an closet during the day. The mattress was very "lumpy" with some of the springs pushing through to the surface.

The next day Arthur took us to Union Station to pick up our baggage. He drove on the first finished freeway from Pasadena to downtown, where we loaded our belongings into his car. During the next few days he decided that I needed a car to get around in Los Angeles. Arthur looked in the newspaper and saw an advertisement of a 1936 Pontiac for 60 dollars. It was an old retired schoolteacher's vehicle with bald tires and a dead battery. He argued with the teacher's son that 60 dollars was an outrageous price, particularly for a recently arrived immigrant. We got the car for 30 dollars in case we could get it to run. We had to take the battery to a garage to give it a quick charge, and to our delight it started after only a few moments of hesitation.

With the latest AMA Journal in my pocket I went through a long list of Los Angeles hospitals that needed interns. I went to the highest-paying places first, those who were willing to pay 150 dollars a month. But they all required citizenship. After two days of going from hospital to hospital, we were invited for Thanksgiving dinner to friends of Arthur, where we ate a turkey dinner for the first time. Arthur's friend worked in the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, and the turkey was given to him for the holiday.

I had already fixed two flat tires during my trips to Los Angeles. The water pump was the next thing which needed replacing. I gradually became a successful mechanic.

On the third floor of the apparent house lived a elderly German teacher who worked for the president of the Union Oil Company in Pasadena. She assisted in the education of the family's children, but also did some housework. The wife of the president was planning a German party. When the German teacher mentioned that there was a German artist living next to her, Irmgard got the job of designing and making the invitations in calligraphy. She also helped serve the dinner at the party. For that she received 50 dollars and a tricycle for Rainer, our first earned money in America.

Arthur decided to get another used car. He knew a friend who worked with him as a gardener in the Pasadena School District, whose deceased mother had left her old car in his garage. We took a look at it. It was a 1935 Pontiac. The tires were almost new, but it had a leak in the gas line. The tank was totally empty. For 25 dollars plus five gallons of gasoline, donated by his friend, we drove the car to the courtyard on Madison Avenue, where I exchanged the tires and put them on my 1936 Pontiac and also installed the radio from the old car into mine. I found the gas leak and could fix it without any difficulty. The following week I sold the car for 35 dollars to a gas station attendant.

I continued my hospital rounds and ended up in the administrator's office of the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Mr. Elliot was a elderly fatherlike figure. He looked at me critically over the rim of his reading glasses. In between puffs on his cigarette he coughed up same phlegm, pulled out the lower drawer of his desk where he apparently kept a container for his sputum. He ask me how much money I was expecting to be paid. I had the AMA Journal with me where the Presbyterian Hospital's intern salary was stated as 60 a month. He told me that they had had a good experience with an intern from Germany who had just taken and passed his State Board examination and was starting his own practice .

"Do you know a Dr. Hans Walther? Maybe you know him from Germany?" he asked me. I answered "no" to his question, but I told him that I was married and had a two-year-old son. "Elliot" was not a Jewish name, so I ventured to tell him my story of having fought in Africa with Rommel and that I had been a prisoner of war in the U.S. for over four years.

"Can you start tomorrow?" he asked me. After a week of my going to ten different hospital administrators, this offer sounded too good to be true. He then explained, "We have bought several small houses in back of the hospital where our interns can live with their families and I am negotiating for another small house where eventually you could move. We have eleven interns at the hospital, all from different nations. All together they can speak at least fourteen different languages. So, you see, you will be in an international community. You will have twelve hours on duty and twelve hours off, but during those second twelve hours you will be on second back-up call."

The prospect of moving Irmgard and Rainer to a house nearby seemed more than just luck. I drove the almost empty Pasadena Freeway as fast as my old Pontiac would allow me, to break the good news to Irmgard and Arthur. I knew we would manage somehow on 60 dollars a month.

Rainer was enlisted in a Pasadena nursery as soon as he was two years old. Irmgard had in the meantime accepted a job at Gladding McBean, a china factory 10 miles from Pasadena. For $1.25 an hour she hand-painted pottery eight hours a day. That meant Rainer had to be dropped off by "Stinky" at 7:30 a.m. at the nursery school while Irmgard took the bus to Los Feliz Drive to start working at 8:00. She came back home after five o'clock and had to pick up Rainer from the nursery. Those were hard times for the whole family. I was home only three nights a week. Irmgard had to cook and manage the household.

It was a great relief when Mr. Elliot told me in February 1951 that I could move into the tiny house on De Lompre Street behind the hospital. We met all the other interns, who had families and we shared our experiences and sorrows with them, soon becoming a closely-knit intern community. All had only one common goal in mind: to pass the California State Board examination as soon as possible. If this examination was behind me, the way would be open to start up my own practice anywhere in California.

To be an intern was a 18-hour job. Since the registered nurses were limited in what they were allowed to do, all I.V's. and I.V.-medications had to be started by interns, so was the passing of nasogastric tubes. The surgeons always requested an intern for assistance or as a third assistant of the surgical team. In the evening one had to write up the history and physical reports of the recently admitted patients. There was little time in between these jobs. The hospital had seven different clinics which had to be staffed by an intern. We had to listen to lectures during the luncheon break. One staff physician ran an experimental program for children with leukemia. He was trying out Arginine infusion to see whether it changed the course of leukemia. The poor children already had a multitude of treatments for their leukemia and this was the last resort. The intern had to start an I.V. and then put the medication into the I.V-drip. The children had no more veins left. Frequently the nurses called me in my off-hours when an intern failed to find a vein. I frequently was successful in starting the I.V. with the family members anxiously watching. They suffered as much or more than the children. Twice Irmgard discovered a 50-dollar bill in my clothes which a parent must have slipped into one of my pockets while I was trying to find a vein.

In between the shifts I came down with acute appendicitis and underwent surgery. The fear of being stuck with a large hospital bill with my 60-dollar salary panicked me and I left the hospital the day after surgery. Five days later I was back at work. I received a small hospital bill with the note "paid" from the administrator.

During the spring of 1951 the staff announced a reward of 100 dollars would be given for any scientific study done by an intern. I volunteered and for three weeks I went through several hundred charts of patients who were admitted with the diagnosis of acute pancreatitis. When I presented the results to a staff committee, they awarded me the 100 dollars, but the results of the treatment with many missed diagnoses were such that I was not allowed to present it to the whole staff. It would have been too great an embarrassment.

After I finished one year internship, I was promoted to a senior intern. My salary was increased from 60 to 75 dollars. I had finally more time to prepare myself for the state board examination. A three-day vacation was a welcome distraction. I bought a five-gallon can of oil, since the old Pontiac used a quart of oil every 100 miles, and purchased two blocks of ice to place in the front of the forward seat to keep cool in the summer heat. We took off for the Sequoia National Park. I had some misgivings whether our car would make it up the hill. It worked out O.K. When on the uphill grade the radiator started boiling, which happened approximately every three to five miles, I turned the car around and went a half mile downhill to cool off the engine and then again went uphill. With these maneuvers I made it to the top. To Rainer's great delight we had our first encounter with bears. During a long hike up by a lake at 9,500 altitude I placed Rainer in a large knapsack. Irmgard was a few hundred yards ahead of us when I stepped over a creek where hundreds of wasps had settled down. They swarmed angrily around Rainer and me, attacking us at our exposed skin area. Irmgard only observed us running and hitting with our arms right and left to ward off the attacking wasps. She laughed out loud watching our crazy behavior not knowing what was happening to us. On the way down I placed Rainer in the harness. He jumped on the steep downhill track relying only on the harness expecting that I would hold him and keep him from falling.

In May 1952 I passed the state board on the first try with 92%. The door was open to start my final career into the practice of medicine. I was now almost 33 years of age and had not made any money in the United States. When I received my California State Board license several Hollywood physician approached me and made me an offer to join their practices. I traveled to different areas of Los Angeles where a practice was for sale. Our 1937 Pontiac was now spitting out blue smoke and was swallowing one quart of oil every 75 miles. I started working in the Los Angeles Cancer Clinic during several days and evenings of the week, and with the first money I earned we bought a new Plymouth for 600 Dollars. As a proud owner of a new car I made the rounds in the city to look at the many offers which were a response to an ad I had placed in the Los Angeles Medical Bulletin.

We rented a small house near the east end of Sunset Boulevard and enjoyed for the first time in our life the view from the hill down on Los Angeles. Irmgard had already the first nausea of pregnancy. We went to the Barker Brother basement, an old large furniture store, and bought several pieces of used furniture. In the middle of our planing for our future a letter from the draft boards arrived. I had to appear at the draft board at Washington Boulevard in down town, where a group of Army physicians gave me physical examination and told me, I should get ready to join the armed Forces in Korea, where they needed a lot of physicians. I should consider myself as good as beings drafted already. In a four page questionnaire one question was whether I had served already in the army. The question did not question, which army. I answered that I had served 5 and a half years in the Army not stating in which army. After I did not hear anything for several months I forgot all about the draft board. In summer 1952 I met a German physician, who was practicing in Compton and decided to start as his assistant in summer 1952 to gain more experience practicing in a foreign country. This was the beginning of my long successful medical career. But that is another story.