CHAPTER FOUR

BEGINNING THE SEARCH

Altogether I as off work for five and a half weeks. When I back, I wasn’t able to function as I should have, but my employer never missed sending me a paycheck. I worked in Portland for KATU TV Channel 2. The parent company was Fisher’s Blend Flour Mills of Seattle, Washington.

All my life, I have read about why we needed unions to protect us from the heartlessness of big business. Well, in this case I know there was nothing in the union contract that would have forced the company to pay me or even to continue to employ me, but it did and maybe this book is the place to acknowledge the company’s philanthropy. It wasn’t just because I was president of the union local, either. One of the other engineers had a heart attack earlier that year, but his family never missed a paycheck and he was off work for almost a full year. In those days our contracts only covered on-the-job accidents, not illness.

In order for me to be able to see doctors and to try and find some help, the company arranged my work schedule so that I had half days off in the middle of the week. I haunted the VA, but all they were able to do was to keep sending me to the psychiatrist. They had already written me off as a lost cause, but I wasn’t about to just lay down and die because they didn’t know what could be done to help me.

I stayed in contact with Dr. Swank because he was the only one who gave me any hope at all, but the comments of the VA doctors, such as, “Oh, you’re seeing the diet nut,” didn’t give me a great deal of confidence. I was following the diet in spite of all the negative comments, mostly because it gave me a feeling of doing something positive for myself, instead of giving up. I slowly went into an almost complete remission and I began to feel better about my chances. But I still had a great deal of gnawing fear.

Changing my diet was not as easy as it appeared to be. Dr. Swank had the family keep a log of everything I had to eat and drink and his office checked the log weekly. Knowing I would be checked on helped keep my food urges in line around the house, but didn’t really assure that I wouldn’t cheat away from home. I had my wife start packing me a lunch, but even then, if the guys at the station would send out for pizza or barbecue in the evenings, I had to struggle with myself.

Finally I got all the men on the shift together and told them my problem. Suddenly, I had twenty guardians of my diet on my hands. If I tried to cheat, there was always someone to say, “Come on John; you know better than that.” Thank goodness it became easier fairly quickly. After the first couple months the pizza didn’t even look good to me any more.

I started talking to other MS patients, both those who swear by Dr. Swank and those who swear at him! There were even two rival MS societies in Oregon, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, which seems to think Swank is some kind of charlatan and the Swank Society, who think he is the maligned messiah of the MS world.

One thing became very apparent to me while attending the meetings of the two societies. The patients who despised Dr. Swank and belonged to the National MS Society had just about universally given up hope. Many of them had tried Swank’s diet, but hadn’t had enough will power to stick to it, so they had quit claiming it didn’t work. They went to their meetings to be with others who had also given up their fight for a disease-free life. They all seemed to be waiting for someone to invent a magic potion that would free them from the disease without any effort on their part. I can only describe many of them as losers.

The Swank people, on the other hand, seemed to be upbeat. They compared notes on what they could do, not on what they couldn’t. While it would be stretching the truth to say they were a fun group to be with, at least I didn’t come away feeling as if I were going into an irreversible tailspin. There was a great deal of hope. In my own unofficial survey, it seemed that those who followed Swank’s Diet faithfully got along much better than those who didn’t. But neither group seemed to have anyone getting totally well again, at least not that I could see.

PLANNING AHEAD

I bought some more life insurance; under a policy I already had that allowed for increases with a physical exam. The VA gave me another opportunity to take out the NSLI Government Life Insurance that I had passed up while in the service and I went from the minimum group life coverage at work to the maximum.

I thought a lot about what I would do if the VA was right and Swank was wrong. As I had gone to the various MS society meetings, I had noted how debilitated some of the people were. I decided that if I ever got to the wheel chair stage or blind for good, that I wouldn’t want to live anymore. But all that new life insurance would never do my family any good if I killed myself, because all the policies had suicide exclusions. I decided to buy a boat and spend every Sunday fishing on the Willamette River. If everyone knew I went fishing, rain or shine, then if that time ever came, I could capsize the boat on a stormy day and the insurance companies would have a hell of a time proving it wasn’t just an accident.

People say that the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Although my grandfather had been a Methodist minister, I had never really thought much about religion. I never questioned my faith. I always knew there was a God, but I had very little use for organized churches. I could always feel closer to my maker in the solitude of the woods or in the power of the sea or the fury of a storm.

Churches always seemed to sterile, their rituals so automatic and lifeless and so many of the people who went to them every Sunday seemed to be such hypocrites. But one day when I was driving around in town after my vision had cleared enough to drive safely again, I saw a large stone church covered in ivy. It just seemed to be the place I should go. I’m not even sure what denomination the church was.

It was the middle of the wee and the church was cold and dark. There was just the light coming in through the stained glass windows to see by. I sat down in one of the pews and closed my eyes and just let my thoughts wander. I was there for an hour or so, I guess. Finally I left. I didn’t really feel anything, but the next day I found myself back again.

The third or fourth time I was there, one of the clergymen of the church came down and asked if he could be of service to me. Other than that I was left alone with my thoughts. Over a couple of weeks of visits to that church, in my own mind, it became quite clear that I was going to find a way to beat the odds and overcome this thing. I somehow knew I couldn’t look to medicine to find a “magic pill” for myself, but rather that I’d have to figure out a way to do it on my own. I had no grand revelation about how it would happen or even when – just the sure knowledge that it would. That feeling has never left me.

Several events occurred about this time that had a great influence on my future. My union, National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET), was to have their convention and election of international officers in Chicago. My local sent me as an uncommitted delegate and voted to give me a couple of hundred dollars expense money.

The election was being contested between the union’s Old Guard officers, who were all from the big East Coast broadcast stations and networks and a challenge by the west coast organizer of the union, whom I had met and liked.

Even though I now had confidence that I would eventually overcome the MS, I had no way of knowing how far down I would go before I would be able to accomplish it. I was still having problems that came and went. My employer would keep me on no matter how bad I got, I’m sure, but I didn’t want to stay if I couldn’t pull my own weight. This was my situation when I found out that a seventy-five year-old uncle of mine by marriage, who owned a health food store in Florida wanted to retire.

I had seen the store once years before and began thinking seriously about trying to get back to Florida for another look. My problem was financial. With all the things going on in my life, I didn’t have the price of a ticket to Florida.

When I arrived at the convention hotel in Chicago, I found myself in the check-in line behind the election challenger. We chatted and I told him I was uncommitted. Before he had a chance to politic and try and change my mind, he reached the head of the line.

The clerk told him that there was some kind of a mix up. That he had no reservation and the hotel was completely booked. The clerk apologized and said that they could get him into a very nice hotel across town. Now, if you have ever been in an election campaign, you know that the best way to blunt the opposition is to get them way from the action. This smelled like a political move by the Old Guard to me. And the clout with the hotel was that it would either get the next year’s convention or not, depending on the challenger’s reservation being “lost”.

As he left the reservation desk, I caught him by his coattail and stopped him. In the press of people trying to check in, it wasn’t noticed. I presented my reservation slip and told the clerk that my plans had changed and that instead of a single, I would like a two-room suite. The clerk was very helpful and he found an unreserved suite that I could have.

Right at that moment, I became a committed delegate and it had nothing to do with the merit of the candidate – only with what I considered to be fair play. My—our—suite became the opposition headquarters. The expense money went for a liquor-and-cigar setup in a hospitality room for delegates in our suite. He long and short of it is that my candidate won the election and became the new international president of the union.

During the heat of the campaign we really didn’t have much of a chance to talk, but I did tell him about the MS and he had a chance to see for himself how devastating it could be. When I was making a very impassioned plea for his candidacy in front of a group of delegates, I lost control of my bladder for the first time. That is an indignity that should never happen to anyone.

When the dust had settled and he had been moved to the presidential suite of rooms, he called me in and asked what he could do to help repay me. Besides letting him pay for his half of the suite, I told him about the health food store in Florida. He appointed me as a special representative of the union to go to the Tampa-St. Petersburg area and find out if we could organize the stations in that right-to-work state. I had first class accommodations and tickets and was to report back to him in Chicago on the last day of his stay there.

I did stop in at all the stations and did make a survey of the situation. But basically I made a deal for the health food store. My union report said that Florida was very anti organized labor and that it would take a major effort to gain a foothold. I don’t think the union ever did even try, but a personal debt had been paid and I never saw our new president again. Two months later, I was out of the TV station completely as well as out of the union. I was back in Florida starting to take over the store that would become my own business.