Oral History: Sheldon Cook – July, 2005

Summary:

Sheldon Cook was interviewed by Julie Sullivan in July, 2005. Dr. Cook set up his office in Lafayette and began to practice pediatrics in 1953. He practiced for the next 28 years, always making house calls–as many as 52 in one weekend. He says that people would recognize his car and request that he visit their home after he finished with his current patient. When he retired in 1981 he and his wife Marilyn spent 4 years touring on their sailboat, on both the West Coast and the East Coast of the U.S.

Oral History:

“I made house calls from 1953 up until the time I retired in 1981,” Sheldon Cook remembers his 28 years as a Lafayette pediatrician. “I loved to make house calls, because you could see all the workings of the household and what’s possible and what’s not possible to recommend for them to do. They were very entertaining and worthwhile. You never said, ‘Oh, I didn’t have to go there.’ Little did you know what was creating the concern until you got there.”

Dr. Cook, the son of a pediatrician, was born in San Jose and attended undergraduate school at UC Berkeley. He served as a Navy pharmacist mate for nine months during World War II then finished college, graduating with the class of 1944. He attended medical school at Temple University in Philadelphia where he also interned, followed by a year of Pediatric residency at Children’s Hospital and a year of residency at U. C. San Francisco. He served in the Navy again from 1950-53.

“I opened my office on Dewing Avenue here in town in 1953. The first month I saw four patients. I had a temporary job at the county hospital in the Pediatrics Department. I borrowed some money, then I had to go back and borrow some more money. This one patient whom I was seeing for the first few times, who subsequently stayed for 30 years, came into the office once early on. I was talking to her about her newborn baby. I was trying to cover the situation if the baby wanted something more to eat, and I said, ‘If the baby wants any more money,’ then I sort of stopped and swallowed and kept on going. I asked her a couple of years later, ‘Did you hear me say that?’ and she said, ‘No.’ I’d been under the guilt trip since then.

“I had one office nurse. It was a very small office, 720 square feet. My office had two examining rooms, a waiting room, a consultation room, a little lab, and the front office, 938 Dewing. I guess it was just word of mouth that helped me get established. George Perlain, a pediatrician in Orinda, had a solo practice like mine, so we both traded calls. Every Wednesday I was off and every other weekend. George was off on Thursday.

“Fundamentally, I was on call more than I was off call. A typical day I’d get up at six and go into say Alta Bates Hospital to see newborns and maybe Childrens Hospital if I had a patient there. Merritt Hospital and Providence Hospital both had nurseries then, and the worst thing was when John Muir opened their nursery. I’d get to the office about ten and start the regular day. I didn’t ever schedule patients less than fifteen minutes apart, because even if it was just coming back to look at an ear or do a quick redressing, there was always stuff that would happen.

“There were all kinds of emergency things, kids falling off bicycles, and since they opened the Reservoir, fish hooks would get caught in people’s ears and arms. Lots of emergency stuff with kids, and I did a lot of it in the office. I think it was early 54 when there was a widespread, but not serious epidemic of measles. I parked my car in a certain area, and by then somebody knew the car, and I’d make four house calls without moving the car, because of this need and recognition. We finally decided to slow down on house calls when one weekend I made 52 house calls, and George made about the same number.

“There were some people that lived a rather Bohemian life. I remember making a house call. I was sitting on the bed with the patient and talking to him, and all of a sudden something jumped on the bed behind me. I turned around and there was a skunk. It had been de- perfumed.

“In 1953 polio was still very much a threat. There was a lot of non-paralytic polio too. People wouldn’t let their children go into large swimming pools and crowded areas. It really had a tremendous impact on the population. A lot of my cases were non-paralytic. They’d have the headache and the stiff back and stiff neck and a fever, and if you didn’t find any neurologic symptoms you might do an LP (lumbar puncture). That was quite traumatic, and you didn’t want to expose them to anything of that sort if they did have polio, because you’d worsen the course of things. Sometimes you’d do a spinal tap, but not always. That usually involved taking them to an emergency room, and I don’t think I ever did that. The prognosis was fairly good for the non-paralytic type, but you didn’t know it was non-paralytic until the end of the game. You couldn’t give the parents any assurance other than, ‘We’ll watch this thing carefully.’ It was just support, keeping the child nourished, keeping them hydrated, keeping them at rest. Really there was no active treatment.

“Salk was the first polio vaccine, then Sabin. The Salk vaccine came along when I started practicing. Polio certainly was a dread disease, that goes without saying. When you see some of these movies, it appears anybody with polio is going to be in a respirator and never be able to walk again. There are a lot of people living with the results of polio. I think for a period of time the incidents of polio I saw were maybe one in 200-300 patients; but it was on everyone’s mind, and you knew you were going to have to answer that question some place along the line when the child was brought in with a fever of undetermined origin. It was such a widespread thought in everyone’s mind. It had no socioeconomic implications.

“One of the major innovations during my years in practice was the development of all the antibiotics. Penicillin had certainly been very available for quite a few years. The first penicillin came out when I was an intern in the ‘40’s, so it wasn’t brand new. When I started practicing I gave only DPT’s (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) vaccines and the smallpox vaccine, and there wasn’t anything else. (I saw) the upsurge of antibiotics, the whole upsurge of immunizations, then the socialization of some of these problems as they would get into school, such as attention deficit disorder, so the doctor and the parent and the school would get involved. You were drawn into the community much more as time went on. I liked that mainly because it made my office job a lot easier, because they were getting information from a preventative standpoint. Pediatrics is fundamentally a preventive before it gets to a troublesome level.

“I saw some children with abuse. If you had a general pediatric practice you saw quite a breadth of things. As time went on I was able to do what I enjoyed doing here as well as rushing in and out of the hospital. I just loved it.”

Sheldon and his wife, Marilyn, met at U.C. Berkeley. They were married when he was in medical school, and by the time they moved to Lafayette, their family included two girls and one boy. A third daughter was born here. Two of the Cook daughters have followed in their father’s footsteps: Sarah and Elizabeth are nurse practitioners. The Cooks also have four grandchildren.

“Marilyn loved being a doctor’s wife. She was involved in Childrens Hospital. I think my kids kind of liked my being a doctor, because I usually took care of them. We were renting here and there. We were kind of bouncing around for quite a while until we finally bought a house on Thompson Road in 1953. We lived on Thompson Road about six years, then Nordstrom Lane 12 years, and we moved to our current house on Tilden Lane in 1970. All the kids went to Acalanes High School.

“The other thing that moved along with that social aspect of medicine was what we used to call well baby care, giving the mother ideas that would make child-raising easier for her as well as for the child. I continued seeing my patients until they walked out and said, ‘I’m not going to sit in the waiting room with that crying kid.’ Then, strangely enough, you’d see a great big football player out there with a little kid beside them, so a percentage would continue to come into the office. Some people make a cutoff point in pediatrics. I didn’t, because I enjoyed watching them grow and develop. Then afterwards they’d get married, and I’d see their child with the parent who had been my patient.

“I always enjoyed the horizontal aspect of pediatrics, the time line – is this behavior here connected to what happened here from a behavioral standpoint? It was fun seeing my patients when we went in town or to a restaurant. There was already one pediatrician, Bill Ornduff, in town when I opened my practice. A Berkeley office moved to Orinda, and Walnut Creek had a center even before John Muir started.

“There was Kaiser in Walnut Creek when I opened my office. I had privileges to see newborns there, even though I wasn’t on the Kaiser panel. Kaiser had a rooming-in system where the bed had a drawer beside it, and you could put the baby in the drawer and it went out through the wall to where the nursing station was. It was very new in 1953-54. It was quite advanced.

“I miss my practice,” Sheldon acknowledges. “People still come up to me, and it’s very heart warming. I left because I wanted to go to something else. I had to find somebody to take my practice, which took two years. I got the greatest guy going, Dr. Sheldon Winnick. He’s now on Moraga Road. I’ve been in sailing since I was fourteen. Marilyn loved it, too. After I retired, we went sailing for four years. We had this boat built in Vancouver, spent three months in Alaska, then down the coast and through the Panama Canal and up the east coast, up the intercostal waterway all the way up to Norfolk, Virginia. Then through the Chesapeake and into Delaware Bay then around New York and up to the Americas Cup in 1983 in Newport, Rhode Island. We wintered in Maine about five months. The next year we sailed back down the East Coast and out to the Virgin Islands then back to the Bahamas. Most of the time it was just the two of us, but occasionally friends would go on this segment or that segment.

“We got back here in 1985 and had the boat for another few years. We sold it around 1991. I have a different set of goals now. I have a little boat, a Ranger 26, that’s 26 feet long.

“Lafayette in 1953, all the traffic went through Mt. Diablo Boulevard. Route 24 wasn’t here,” Sheldon remembers. “In our first house, Barbara and Adolph Panfilli of the Seafood Grotto were on one side of us, and Rita and Bob Rosso were on the other side. Bob had half an acre of grapes, and chickens and goats. We’d always help with the harvesting of the grapes, and he’d make about 400 gallons of wine. We knew the Jacuzzis and the Rossos, and the Ghigliones and the Cossos on down the road. That whole area used to be filled with grapes. “They had a limit as to how much wine you could make for a family. As the revenuers came up the valley, the word would go out to get rid of your excess wine. Bob Rosso would come over the little hill between his place and ours, kicking this barrel along and he’d have this green plastic hose. We’d put an empty barrel up and use the hose to fill it with wine. He and his wife were both from Italy. At one point he was a custodian in the Lafayette School District, but he was fundamentally a farmer. He had two boys, Ray Rosso, who was a good football player at UC Berkeley, and Eddie, who had a landscape gardening business. Rita and Bob spoke English, but they were very Italian. All of Happy Valley was filled with Italian families.

“The Seafood Grotto was our staple for a long time, and Rick’s Drive-In out at the crossroads. We’d go down to Cape Cod once in a while. I got involved in scout troops and scouting and hiking, along with Jack Eyman.

“I felt there was more of a sense of community then than there is now. There was a simplicity of living. We could walk from Thompson Road down to Jim’s Food Center, and we had time to do it. It was a neat place to raise children, a neat place to have a practice. I was interested in the schools, and we’d have conferences on various topics, behavioral things, raising teenagers. There would be a roomful of parents in the evening and a panel of speakers.

“I think there are some outstanding developments in Lafayette. The Veteran’s Memorial Building is outstanding, but the redevelopment stuff in the center of town is an abomination. I think the library is going to be another outstanding building. I think the city planners have an idea they’re trying to lay on Lafayette that may or may not be what the citizenry would like. They get this idea of having this a walking community, sort of a European little village, and they know it’s what we want. The worst thing was not building that Golden Gateway. If there’d been a road through there that would have saved so much traffic.” (In 1972 Gateway Boulevard was proposed from Alamo through Moraga and Lafayette to provide access to Highway 24 west of Orinda, near where the entrance to the Shakespeare Festival is today. The proposal never gained widespread approval.)

“I think Lafayette is becoming a community where money is going to determine many more things. It is becoming more difficult for people who just want to do simple things, although there’s always the Reservoir. Remember when they had the alligator there? Somebody dumped an alligator there and he grew. There are photographs of it. They closed it for three or four days and got him out. I don’t remember gated houses, I don’t remember the size of some of these houses. People don’t know their neighbors. They live in these little cocoons and do elaborate things elsewhere rather than just sort of simpler things locally.

“I miss Bill Eames in his bunny ears at Easter. (Eames, who operated Bill’s Drugs, gave out candy in costume at Easter for years.) I always held Bill Eames in the highest regard, because if I was out making a house call at midnight and I’d need something, he’d be down here. I never heard him refuse a situation like that when there was somebody that needed help. It was a great relationship.

“I miss some of these characters around town. There was a cadre of kind of wild guys. One guy had a body shop, one was Jim Cunningham (Big O Tires). There were always wild stories about some of the early characters. I miss Mickey (Mickey MacPherson, former parking lot attendant at Longs Drugs). I miss the Panfillis. The Seafood Grotto was such a focal point – Barbara and Adolph, and Sonny and his wife, and Beverly. I miss the Rossos, Jack Eyman, Ned Robinson, just a peach of a guy. And he is responsible for the fact we have no houses on our ridge lines.

“I miss no stoplights,” Sheldon concludes with a smile.

Excerpted from “Voices of Lafayette” by Julie Sullivan. This book is available for purchase in the History Room.