In August nineteen fifty three, at age twenty four, I saw a flying saucer. It was probably a sign that I was about to meet Barbara Ann Cohn. She was studying in the Orange County General Hospital library at night when Dick and I arrived to pick up our dates. My student nurse stood me up, so Dick's date asked her friend Barbara to go for a ride in the car with us. Barbara agreed as long as we understood she would continue to study in the car. Dick drove to the middle of a quiet orange grove and parked with the radio playing dance music. We all visited for a while, Dick told stories and jokes, and that was our first date.
The next night in Anaheim, I saw her sitting in the South Seas nightclub with a young man. I was interested in her because she looked to me like a sophisticated city girl. I more or less thought of myself as a small town Anaheim boy. Barbara was three years younger but one grade ahead of me at the nurses' college.
Barbara and I went to a school Halloween party dressed in French costumes and danced like crazy. Barbara was criticized the next day at school because the teachers claimed she was "dirty dancing" with me. The teachers didn't trust us to sit close to each other after that. I suppose we caused gossip until we graduated. I acted cool, dated several other student nurses, but Barbara was the best one for me. Her classmates nick-named her Bubbly. She was consistently energetic and full of life. She became friends with people quickly. The night watchman protected her by sneaking her into the dorm when I was late getting her home. There was an inner strength in Barbara that made her friends hesitate to test her anger. She had a fun personality while taking responsibility and acting as a leader without being a show-off. Because of her natural tendency to lead, some of her teachers must have felt threatened. Fortunately, Miss Buzzel the director of the school, was a good friend for Barbara. Miss Buzzel refused to allow any of the nurse teachers to expel Barbara for any of the reasons they came up with.
My friend Tommy Hartley invited Barbara and I to go with him and his friend Richard Palamaris to Baja California. Tom planned to drive his old car to Punta Banda which is on the coast below Ensenada. At that time Punta Banda was a remote fishing village with only a few shacks where people lived, and the fishing boats had no cabins and were powered by oars except for a few fishing boats with outboard motors. We arrived close to a small fishing village about midnight and slept in sleeping bags on the dark road. We were apprehensive being in a foreign country. The next morning the car clutch slipped, and we were not able to climb the hill about a mile from Punta Banda. We left the car and hiked to a beautiful spot overlooking the wild blue water of the Pacific. It was a steep climb down to a little cove with no beach or sand, only large granite rocks to sit on. The sea was clear, clean, with dark blue water and small snow white splashes of waves on the rocks. The cove protected us from the rough sea.
I dressed in warm long underwear to enter the cold water in hopes of spearing fish for dinner. The water was crystal clear, and many fish of all sizes and colors were abundant gliding through the long stems of kelp and over the brilliant green eel-grass. After half an hour I I had speared several fish, but I was freezing cold. Tom Hartley borrowed my fins and faceplate and entered the water to try a little diving. The water was too cold for him. He acted like little dogs act when they are thrown in cold water. He dog-paddled with his head held high out of the water for less than a minute before he scrambled up on the rocks to get warm. After all, Tom is human and was only acting intelligently.
Barbara surprised all of us. She went in the water without extra clothing and swam in a large circle. We were impressed by her daring spirit, and she enjoyed seeing all the pretty fish. After spending most of the day we gathered our fish and gear. Barbara took a photo of the three of us who were about twenty four years old. We climbed back up the steep way to the top of the cliff. On the way, Barbara lost her footing and slid into a cactus. Hundreds of cactus needles stuck through her skirt and to her buttock. I was not able to pull out all the cactus needles. When we got home, my mother used tweezers to pull them out. The experience left me with new respect for Barbara. I had never met a girl with such spirit!
Barbara and I went skin diving together regularly. We dove most often below the lonely cliffs at Laguna Beach, California. On cold or rainy days Barbara sat in a cave watching out to warn me if sea lions came too close. We were afraid one might bite me. After diving for an hour or more I returned to the cave shivering, and Barbara warmed me with a towel and a few kisses. This was the kind of romance I had dreamed of. I felt lucky and happy.
Barbara graduated from nursing school and was hired at the new Mount Sinai Hospital near Beverly Hills. She rented a small apartment and was charge nurse at night on the surgery floor. A year later, I worked as a private duty nurse in Los Angeles to be close to Barbara. The lady who owned the Nurse Registry paid me a day's wages to pose with her for a newspaper article that appeared in The Los Angeles Times. It was unusual in those days to see a male registered nurse.
Barbara and I saw a lot of each other when she moved to Hollywood near Ciro's night club. My pet name for her was Barbarita. She cooked meals I still remember with pleasure, and she introduced me to using sour cream on a baked potato, and she fed me delicious flank steak for the first time in my life.
Barbara moved to Las Vegas to work in a hospital emergency room working nights. She broke dates with other guys when I showed up to see her. I drove from Anaheim and took her out on the Strip to see Louis Prima and Keeley Smith, the Trenier Twins, and the Mary Kay Trio. We enjoyed these entertainers and watched them frequently. They played at lounge shows.
Once I rented a room and spent the whole winter working at the same Las Vegas hospital with Barb. Two months before our wedding, Barbarita and her pretty room-mate lived it up on a vacation driving to Reno and Lake Tahoe. They both won money when they played black jack at the gambling tables. I can't help thinking the dealers helped them to win. They were very attractive gamblers.
Barbara loved Smoky her cat. When Smoky was little before we got married, Barbara walked her kitten on a leash. People in Las Vegas were surprised to see a cat being walked like a dog, and they were curious as they watched. Local people stopped them to talk about the kitten.
Our wedding was first class and was held at the Lakewood Country Club near Long Beach. We were without funds after the honeymoon, but Barbara drove a new car. Some of my honeymoon checks bounced. We earned money taking private duty cases. We rented an apartment in the city of Venice not far from U.C.L.A. I enrolled to prepare for physical therapy school. The cute little apartment had cockroaches, so we purchased an electric poison dispenser. It killed bugs, but Smoky, Barbarita's cat, ate the dead roaches and became ill. So, we stopped killing roaches. To get away from the bugs we moved to a nice apartment across from the U.C.L.A. tennis courts. It was worth the extra money and cost us about 100 dollars per month.
At night I took private duty cases in several hospitals near Westwood Village. This gave me the opportunity to study on the job. Barbara worked at Mount Sinai Hospital from seven in the morning to eleven at night working double shifts sometimes. In spite of the fact we didn't see much of each other, she became pregnant but neglected to tell me. She didn't tell her mother until long after she was showing. During that school year our daughter Julie Rae was born at U.C.L.A. Medical Hospital.
Barbara was alert and vivacious all the time. She would answer the phone while sleeping in bed at four in the morning and sound cheerful, wide awake, and in full command of her senses. She had the ability to find her way around any city or to drive back to anyplace she's ever been without using a map. She just remembered.
We spent two years in Loma Linda where Barbara helped me through Physical Therapy school and kept me from getting kicked out for smoking. We lived by an orange grove just out of Loma Linda. We bought the two bedroom house on one quarter acre for only $5,750 dollars owing a high mortgage. Before my graduation she gave birth to Barry Jay our first son. After my graduation we sold our house at a profit, and we bought a house for $13,000 in Garden Grove. It had a fenced yard where the children played, and they were allowed to climb trees and run naked through the sprinklers on hot days. We taught them to ride bikes as soon as they were six, but they were not allowed in the street where a car could hit them. They learned to swim in the surf at the beach, and we watched out for their safety. As toddlers they wore a harness with a long leather strap tied to Barbara's hand so she could control them when she took them shopping. We were both proud of the good behavior our children showed.
In Garden grove Barbara worked at Orange County Hospital in Orange. Then Barbarita gave birth to Daniel Lee and our baby Jennifer Lynn taking only short vacations from the hospital for birth labor.
When Barbara was forty, arthritis in her hands made it difficult for her to use a pen to write. She went to a specialist who advised her to take nine aspirin a day and hope not to get ulcers from the aspirin. He said, "There is no cure for your arthritis."
B.J.Seymour, an friend who was an R.N., had read a tabloid article describing doctors who cured arthritis with flu shots. She told Barbara who scraped up a thousand dollars with difficulty. She drove to a town near Palm Springs to see the doctor, and she expected to stay a week. I stayed home to watch out for our four kids. The lady doctor took X-rays and examined the arthritic joints in her hands and fingers. She questioned Barbara about her health and family history. Then she asked, "What is bothering you? What has happened to make you worry?"
Barbara said, "My sister in law was a piano player and the mother of three young children. Over a year ago Little Barbara became crippled with arthritis. It got so bad she was not able to play the piano. Later she had to use a wheelchair. Finally her husband took her to Tecate, Baja California to see a Mexican doctor who treated patients with medicine not authorized in the States. The medicine relieved her symptoms right away and Little Barbara was able to walk and play the piano again. She and her husband were happy. About eight months later she became very ill with kidney failure, became bedfast and died within a few days. Now, I am worried I may die. This arthritis in my hands will spread to other parts and make me crippled."
The doctor held Barbara's hands and looked her in the eyes closely for a long minute and said, "Barbara, you will not need a wheelchair. You are going to be fine. I am going to start you on flu vaccinations. You will take one shot today and come back every day to complete a series of vaccinations. I do not know if the shots will help you, but I know they have helped a lot of other people."
Barbara spent the night in a motel and returned the next day to the clinic. During the treatment the lady doctor said, "This is costing you too much money to stay here. Go home to Vista. You can drive fifty miles to a doctor in Riverside who will treat you the same as I do. He and I both graduated from Loma Linda College of Medical Evangelists where your husband studied."
Barbara drove home. The next day she drove to see the doctor in Riverside. He said, "You are a registered nurse and can give these shots to yourself or have your husband do it. I'm sending you home with a vial of the flu vaccine. You won't have to drive all this way to see me anymore. You can treat yourself. I'm also giving you some literature on proper diet. Since your husband is a Physical Therapist, he can help you. Tell him to get a paraffin bath appliance and give you paraffin treatments. Dip your hands in the hot paraffin several times until you have a thick white coat covering the skin of your hands. Then, wrap your hands in a towel, and wait twenty minutes before pealing off the wax. Do it every morning before you go to work and more often if needed. It will make your hands feel very soft and help relieve pain. Now, go, and have a good life."
Barbara used the vial of vaccine shots and learned to treat herself with hot paraffin wax. After two years her hands worked and felt much better, and she only used the wax treatment occasionally. To Barbara and I, the treatment prescribed by the desert doctors turned out to be a miracle cure. Now, after several years her hands look perfect, but she has occasional pain.
Barbara always tells people about her children, "My kids are intelligent. Julie is the best math teacher at Mira Costa College, Barry is an organ transplant surgeon, Danny has his masters degree in business and a masters degree in physical therapy. He works with us in our home health agency. Jennifer is my baby. She is a dentist and has her own office in Woodland, a town near Sacramento. I talk to my kids on the phone every day."
Barbara has helped people find jobs. Every once in a while I meet someone who tells me Barbara helped them get started by getting them a job or lending them money to start a business. When I ask Barbara about it, she pretends to have forgotten. Some were people she knew only on the phone.
When anyone gets ill from our family and friends Barbara gets a call. If a friend or relative goes to the hospital Barbara sits by their bed until they get better. She sat with and assisted our daughters to give birth to our grandchildren.
In nineteen eighty we started a business with her older brother in our kitchen. We named it Home Health Services of San Diego. It was a service oriented professional home nursing agency licensed by California and the Federal Government. The business grew and we moved into an office building in Vista. The building had a wide lighted sign that was like a belt around the top sides of the building. One day her brother Bob Cohn and I decided to put my wife's name up in lights.
Since Barbara was the spark plug of the place, all the nurses and other health professionals who worked with us decided we should change our business name. The lighted sign that reached across our building read BARBARA BROWNE HEALTH CARE.
For several years we treated the people who worked with us to a San Diego Padres baseball game. Each year we purchased a block of seats and met at Jack Murphy Stadium before the game for a tail-gate party. A tail-gate party is a picnic on a parking lot. It gets the name from pick-up truck tail-gates being used as tables.
After eating, my son Danny and I were playing catch with a football. I dropped a pass. The ball rolled close to another tail-gate party with six men standing there drinking from beer cans. Just then a San Diego police car stopped and a pretty police woman called me over to her car window. The driver was a man and he kept quiet as the young lady spoke to me, and the beer drinking men who were close enough to hear listened to every word. My tail-gait bunch was about five car lengths away, and they were staring at us and making jokes about my predicament.
The pretty policewoman told me I was breaking the law by playing games on the huge parking lot. I thanked her and said, "I'll keep what you said in mind."
I could tell she felt I was not being respectful when she displayed her citation book and asked me for my identification. I handed her my business card and she said, "Show me something with your picture on it. I see you have a picture on the back of your Price Club card. Do you know your drivers license number? What does the J. stand for in the middle of your name?" She toyed with me long enough to show everyone within sight who was boss, wrote down my vital statistics, and turned me loose. Everyone thought I had received a citation.
Later we went into the stadium to watch the game. As we gazed across the baseball stadium, we could easily read the scores and statistics. The huge score-board was lit up with colored lights. During a break in the fifth inning the big bright lights spelled out, BARBARA BROWNE HEALTH CARE. THE PADRES WELCOME YOU! We all let out a loud cheer and Barbara really had her name up in lights with twenty thousand people to see it.
It was Fathers day, Barbara was still lying in bed, and I was dressing. When I put on a long sleeved shirt, Barbara remarked, "That shirt is too tight for you. Why don't you take it off and put one on that fits you?"
I said, "I'm leaving it on because it makes me feel uncomfortable. My pants are too tight, also. I don't want to get too fat. So I tighten my belt. It will make me so uncomfortable I will not want to eat too much. If I over-eat I will really feel uncomfortable. The idea is so simple, I'm surprised you never thought of it yourself. It's simple."
Barbara asked, "But, why do you want to be simple?"
"Because I am simple, and being simple makes me happy."
"You idiot. I suppose you think stupid people are happy.!"
I replied, "Of course they are happy. It's the simple things in life that make you happy. Haven't you ever seen how idiots are always smiling? They smile because they are happy. And that's why I am wearing a tight shirt and tight pants. I want to be happy."
"You idiot!"
In 1998 we celebrated our seventeenth year as a home health agency with a party inviting almost a hundred employees and their spouses. We had people of various colors and religions. Our company was like a big happy family, and we tried to keep it that way. Of course Barbara was the big boss, and she had a big office to prove it. I shared my office with two other people who shared my feeling that Barbara should be the leader.
When Barbarita was in her late sixties she recieved a call from a person she had not seen for thirty years. It was from a blond woman in her forties who had lived with us when she was very young. She had lived with us for about three months because she was pregnant. In those days young unmarried girls tried to hide their condition, and this young girl decided to have the child adopted. A lawyer contacted a friend in another state who wanted to adopt a child with blond hair.
When the girl went into labor Barbara loaded her in our station wagon and drove her to the hospital. On the way to the hospital the girl thought the baby was coming out. Barbara looked and saw a foot hanging out. The baby was a breach. Barbara ran into the hospital, brought out a gurney, and she managed to get the girl to lie down. Barbara wheeled her inside room, transfered her to the delivery table and delivered the baby except for the head. The head would not come out. A nurse ran for a docter who came in and said, "I am a bone surgeon. I cannot deliver a baby."
The doctor decided to try, and he was succesful. The girl went to a room and rested. She knew the baby was a girl. The girl lived with us until she was recovered. Then she went home to live with her parents, and we never heard from her for thirty years.
Her baby was refused by the people who had wanted to adopt because a doctor said the baby would probably have cerebral palsey or some other birth defect from the slow delivery. The baby was sent to a foster home. Within a month the lawyer found other adoptive parents in New York. The new parent was a Jewish lawyer and didn't know he was adopting a little girl who was also born Jewish. It turned out the little girl was told she was adopted, and all her life she longed to see her real mother. She was smart and became a lawyer. At the age of thirty three she hired a detective to find her real mom.
Her real mother was the fourteen year old who had lived with us. She had grown up to become a teacher. She married a man, had three children, and she told them all she had another daughter from when she was fourteen. Now she tried to look up her daughter about the same time as the daughter was searching for her.
A detective put them together. They talked to each other on the phone and decided to meet each other. Barbara remembered when the girl had stayed with us and the whole adventure. After thirty years the girl remembered our kids' names and all about our family. She thanked Barbara for helping her when she needed it. She said since meeting Barbara her life has been wonderful.