For a young man who had never been below the Mason-Dixon Line, my first intimation of what was to come was when I woke up in my Pullman upper berth 30 June 1934 and felt as if I were in a hot shower. But it was only Baltimore in late June with its usual sweltering and oppressive heat in an era before there was any air conditioning. By the time we reached Durham, North Carolina, I began to wonder whether I could take the climate or whether it would take me. I thought back to my Southern Italian ancestry and was comforted by my belief that I must have some genetic protection against the heat. I was mighty glad to get off that train to head for Duke Hospital. That year, I was the only “northerner” or “Yankee” on the medical house staff; in fact I was the only non-Duke graduate. Clearly I was a marked man right from the start. The house staff already on the scene had appropriated the best rooms and I was treated to a hot-box facing an inner courtyard that was virtually without air circulation, resounding, especially in the early morning hours, with bedlam in the kitchens and laundries as well as the roistering of the almost entirely black staff of employees. To top it off, Howland Ward, the appropriately named pediatric unit, abutted the courtyard and was filled to the rafters with howling noisy infants and children whose clatter was enhanced by bouncing off the walls of the courtyard. Clearly, my friends-to-be on the house staff had done a job on the new man from Rochester. It took me a while to adjust to these conditions and it was not easy. Years later, Dean Davison said “our worst error [in the construction of Duke Hospital] was in having interior courtyards, which in Durham summers before air conditioning were a foretaste of Hades.” The heavy demands of my new job soon took my mind off the climate. My first assignment was one month on the laboratory service. I believe they thought this was the best way to introduce a stranger, a “Yankee” no less, to a different world. I also learned that the assignment was tough and demanding and one that was not too popular with the house staff—“too much scut work,” they said.