..inte: Herman W. Lipow ..intr: Evanne Kofman ..da: 1985 ..ca: ..ftxt: An Interview with Herman W. Lipow January 21, 1985 Transcriptionist: Carol Ruttan Interviewer: Evanne Kofman Arizona Jewish Historical Society Log For Herman Lipow Interview Pages 1 Father attempts to start satellite business in Albuquerque 1 Fruit packing plant - family business 1-2 16th Street and Bethany Home, 1945 for land subdivided for houses - one of post-WWII housing developments 2 World War II Zeitlin Family 3-4 Other family members moving to Phoenix Bromberg family Joseph & Lizzy Lidkind 4 Grapefruit, oranges, lemons primary part of their fruit packing business 5 Partnership for two years Dr. Roger White Dr. Richard Creasman 5-6 4950 E. Thomas Road - his own pediatrics office opened (land belonged to his father) in 1958 - was first pediatrician to break away from downtown Phoenix Dr. Jack Kruglick Dr. Mel Cohen 6 His decision to go into a subspecialty in pediatrics - formed (with others) Maricopa County Pediatric Society 7 Amalgamation of different pediatric programs - Dr. Mel Cohen Dr. Lipow initiated this with help of others - Dr. Robert Ganellon amalgamation of St. Joseph's, Good Samaritan, the Indian Hospital and Maricopa County Hospital into one pediatric program called PHAPP (Phoenix Hospital and Affiliated Pediatric Programs) 7 Dr. Lipow mover to San Francisco 8 Polio programs in Phoenix 9 Communitywide immunization (polio) drive Dr. Richard Johns 9 1930's-40's summertimes in Phoenix (memories0 9 Coronado Park Swimming Pool 10 Chasing ice trucks, lemonade stands, etc. 10 Rabbit hunting around 24th St. and Camelback Rd. 11 Boy Scouts week long Christmastime trek into Superstition Mountains 12 Grand Canyon hiking Al Zeitlin 12 Kaibab Forest Larry Cantor 13 V-5 program - Navy 13-15 The Coffee Pot Drive-In; teenage hangout 14 North Phoenix High School Herman Lipow Interview KOFMAN: Did your family do very much traveling throughout Arizona? LIPOW: Not a great deal. Drove around the state at various times, but when I was about eight years of age Dad tried to establish a satellite business in Albuquerque, so we spent one winter in Albuquerque. I went to grammar school there, 3rd or 4th grade. Saw snow for almost the first time in my life. It didn't work out and we returned at the end of the year back to Phoenix. Summers were spent primarily in Ocean Park and Venice to get away from the heat. My mother had severe allergies that she wanted to get out of the Valley. We spent some summers up in Prescott. I just visited up in Prescott last week and saw some of the houses we used to live in up there. KOFMAN: Was the fruit packing plant -- did you ship things basically within the state or was this also out of state? LIPOW: We were shipping things all over the country and later on all over the world; Japan and other places. KOFMAN: But you just had the one plant here in Phoenix? LIPOW: Right. KOFMAN: Were there any other business ventures or developments in the packing plant that your father may have tried? LIPOW: I think there was one interesting thing worth commenting on. They had some land at 16th Street and Bethany Home Road. At the end of World War II, in about 1945, they subdivided that land and with builders built 20 or so houses or more in that area. This was really one of the first real post-World War II subdivisions. I think it came about fortuitously just because if you're in the citrus packing business you have land. I could see that after the time of World War II there was a real need for housing. This was the time John F. Long was just getting started and other builders in the Phoenix area. They were not ever tremendously financially successful ventures as far as the subdivided divisions were concerned, but it was interesting that they got swept along into the development area after World War II. KOFMAN: Basically, I know Phoenix has always been a pretty hospitable town to anyone. Do you remember at any time that you were growing up ever running into any kind of anti-Semitism or feeling different because you were Jewish? LIPOW: Different, sure. I was not aware of any blatant anti-Semitism. That was never a feeling that I had. You have to remember that this time when I was going to grammar school led into World War II and all that happened in Europe, and the Nazis before that time, so that was the No. 1 subject of the day. So whether one was Jewish or not Jewish came up every single day at school, because the subject of Jews and the annihilation of Jews during the Holocaust was the subject of the day, every day, as I recall my later grammar school days. So there was acceptance, there was not anti-Semitism. But we were definitely made to feel very much apart from the rest of the group. KOFMAN: That is one of the things that many interviews have brought out of people that lived in Phoenix is that there was no blatant anti-Semitism; this was a good place for Jews to grow up. After your father and mother came out here, were there any other members of the family that followed them. I mean, the Zeitlins were here and then your father came; were there other members of the family that moved to Phoenix, or anywhere else in Arizona? LIPOW: Yes. I can't really recall when the other members, other than the ones I enumerated for you, because I would have been two, three, four years old whenever they arrived, so I don't know the sequence. I know that Nathan came first, and then Dad and Annie and Harry came about the same time. But when Willy and Sidney and the Brombergs came out - I just don't have any knowledge of that sequence. Later on -- this was years later -- my mother's sister and two brothers were brought out here by my folks, but this would have been clear into the 40's. They were brought out from back East; they were all single people who really needed support. My parents brought them out here and put them in an apartment that my parents had and supported them for many years until they all died. KOFMAN: They were older when they came out or they were younger? LIPOW: They were older. They never really made it back in New Jersey. Of the six or eight brothers and sisters that my father had, Joseph and Lizzie Libkind, L-i-b-k-l-n-d, were another family that came out later on. They must have come out here in the 40's. They lived here the rest of their lives. Joe was in his 90's when he died and Lizzie probably was too. They were really shepherded and helped by the Annie and Harry Zeitlin family all during the time they were here. They actually worked for them, helping them take care of their apartments. They'd had a grocery store back in Newark before they came out here. They came out here for sunshine and an easier life, and did very, very well. KOFMAN: But the fruit packing business basically was the major family industry? LIPOW: Yes. KOFMAN: And the apartments and the development was all outside of that? LIPOW: That's right. It was vine groves, growing the fruit and packing it; that was the major enterprise that ... KOFMAN: Was this all kinds of fruit or -- LIPOW: Citrus. KOFMAN: All citrus. LIPOW: Primarily grapefruit, some oranges, some lemons. KOFMAN: As you recall, did you ever have any difficulties or any special relationships with migrant workers. For example, unions; was there ever any of that of note - difficulties? LIPOW: I really was never involved with -- I worked a few summers and then I went off to school. I'm really not the person to ask. I've been academic all my life, and I was never involved with it. Al Zeitlin has been involved in it all the way along. He's the person to talk to. KOFMAN: When you returned to Phoenix - that was what year? LIPOW: '56. KOFMAN: Where did you live and where did you set up your first practice? LIPOW: I Lived on 1604 West Clarendon and I practiced for the first two years with Roger White and Richard Creasman. Roger White and I had met when we were in San Francisco and he was chief resident in pediatrics at the University of California in San Francisco when I was chief resident in pediatrics at Stanford, which at that time was in San Francisco. Then Roger went to Phoenix to practice, which was not his home and I went to Boston to the Harvard Service at Boston Children's Hospital for a year and then into the Air Force. Then I was stationed in Burtenwood, near Liverpool, for two years and while I was there I corresponded with Roger, who invited me to come back to Phoenix and go into practice. I had no roots or contacts, so I joined Roger White and Richard Creasman for two years. Then I was practicing with them, and my father had a grove out on East Thomas Road, 4950 East Thomas Road, and my father said to me, "Why don't you open a pediatric office out on the grove?" I said, "Gosh, Dad, that's five miles from town. No one would ever come to me out there. That's really not feasible." After another year in practice it occurred to me that that might not be such a bad Idea. So with my father's help I built an office, 1800 square feet, at 4950 East Thomas Road, called the Pediatric Clinic. I left my association with these other two pediatricians and moved in 1958 out to this office. I found that within a year I had twice as many patients as I could handle. It was interesting - I was the first pediatrician to break away from downtown Phoenix. I'd been at 2021 North Central, which is Palm Lane and Central. People like Jack Kruglick, who was an earlier pediatrician than I was there, wanted me to join him in practice, said, "Herman, you're making a big mistake. You'll never have any patients going way out of town." Of course, that was the start of an exodus of all the pediatricians from the downtown area. I know Cohen followed shortly and other pediatricians followed with building pediatric offices in the periphery. Over the next couple years we built a four-man pediatric group and then I was in practice a total of seven years when I made the decision that this was really great for the patients, but it was no life for me. I was never home. I was working well over a hundred hours a week. That's when I decided to go into a sub-specialty area in pediatrics. At that time we first formed the Maricopa County Pediatric Society and I was instrumental in bringing that together, because that was one of my desires, to get the pediatricians -- originally, of course, there hadn't been a critical mass but about the time I got here there were a lot of new pediatricians coming into together. We started having monthly meetings and worked for a pediatric society. The other area that I was particularly interested in this was later on when I came back and started the program was the need to amalgamate the different pediatric programs. That was something that I worked on, actually initiated it and worked with the help of Mel Cohen and Robert Ganellon, and amalgamated St. Joseph's, Good Samaritan, the Indian Hospital and the Maricopa County Hospital into one combined pediatric program called PHAPP, Phoenix Hospital and Affiliated Pediatric Programs. That was completed only a few years before I actually left and went back to San Francisco full time in 1971. KOFMAN: What prompted your decision to leave Phoenix and go to San Francisco? LIPOW: We had gone to school, Betty Ann and I, in the Bay Area. We've always loved the Bay Area. I'd been at Good Sam, and Bill Tooley, who had been my mentor, my teacher, at the University of California in San Francisco in the Cardiovascular Research Institute, when I'd see him at medical meetings he kept saying, "When are you going to come back full time to the University?" I thought he was kidding the first couple of times he asked me that, and then when I realized he wasn't kidding, I said, "Well,'when my last child goes off to college." Betty Ann and I talked about our desire to go back to the Bay Area and so we did that. We made an arrangement with them a couple of years beforehand, and when my last child graduated from high school, we went back full time to the University of California at San Francisco. A whole new era. I miss the Valley. The Valley is a great place, but the Bay Area is a fantastic place. KOFMAN: When I was growing up In Phoenix in the late 40's and early 50's I remember quite a few polio scares. Was your pediatric association ever concerned with any -- well, polio vaccine wasn't developed quite then I don't think -- but were there any programs specifically around polio? LIPOW: Well, we had Sabin oral Sundays (?). Actually, the polio vaccine came into being at the end of my pediatric training. The Salk vaccine was developed in about '54 and then the Sabin vaccine came a couple of years thereafter. I can remember giving Salk shots when I was in the Air Force in '55, '56. When I was in training at Boston Children's, I used to admit two paralytic polios a day during the height of the polio season. So I had a lot of experience in polio, as well as diphtheria and other things they can't see these days. But by the time I got out of the service and started in pediatrics the vaccines were available and we organized community-wide -- and Richard Johns, Dick Johns, who is now retired up in the Payson area and was also a Phoenix boy like myself, Richard Johns was really the prime organizer in organizing a massive, widespread oral polio immunization program. The pediatricians all rallied to that and we got all the population and gave them the sugar cubes and oral Sabin vaccine, and that was the end of the polio. Saw an occasional case over the years when I was in general pediatric practice. I can remember one child came down from Payson that hadn't ever had any polio vaccine and had (unintelligible) polio. Got her through but it was difficult. KOFMAN: As a pediatrician did you ever have many cases of Tay-Sachs? LIPOW: Tay-Sachs is a very, very rare disease. I never had a case of Tay-Sachs. KOFMAN: Can you give me any more of your earlier memories of the life just growing up in Phoenix? LIPOW: I suppose everyone's childhood becomes rosier as time goes on, or at least it strikes me that way. But I have great fondness as I remember my first 10, 12 years in Phoenix. The summer times particularly I enjoyed. We used to go over to Coronado Pool at 12th Street and Coronado, just north of McDowell, Coronado Park. It used to cost us a nickel to swim there in the mornings from 10 to 12 and cost a dime to swim all afternoon. That was really what we did all summer long. I remember that we had ice boxes, not refrigerators, and the ice man came by, Crystal Ice, and we used to chase the ice trucks and try to get the ice man to give us some chips of ice as he chipped the blocks off, and that was the way we tried to stay cool. My dad was in the citrus business by that time and we used to make lemonade stands and try to sell lemonade out in front of the house. KOFMAN: Did you ever do much hiking or anything like that in the general area around Phoenix? LIPOW: Yes. We used to go, as we got older, in our high school days, used to go rabbit hunting. My fried Tod Rosnik's grandfather used to pick us up in his old Ford and take us way, way out in the country. There was a little soft drink stand at the corner of 24th Street and Camelback. He used to leave us off there and then we would march north at 24th Street and Camelback; there was the Biltmore land to the east and we stayed away from that, but to the west that was all open land and we used to hunt rabbits from there up to the Arizona canal. There were a lot of jackrabbits in there and with our 22's we used to have a good time shooting up the countryside there. KOFMAN: Did you ever hit any rabbits? LIPOW: Oh, sure. We used to get rabbits up in through there. That's where we used to go hunting. When I got into junior college days and even in the last part of high school, we were getting interested as we got into Boy Scouts and the outdoors and during the Christmas vacation we used to take a week long trek up into the Superstition Mountains. We used to go both from the north and the south; from the north we'd go through First Water Ranch and hike in for a week and then hike back out again. On a couple of occasions we brought burros; cost $15 for a burro then, a Mexican burro. We used them as pack animals and went into the Superstitions. We did our best to find maps of the area at that time. Hiked all around; always had our 22 rifles with us. Didn't really do any real hunting up there, except one time we got lost and couldn't get back to our base camp. I remember we had to spend a night up in the mountains and we shot some quail silhouetted against the sky with our 22's, and that was what we had to eat for the night. We enjoyed just tramping throughout the Superstitions; they were always interesting mountains and I still find them to be very challenging areas. KOFMAN: You weren't frightened that you were lost, with all the stories of lost souls in the Superstition Mountains? LIPOW: No, I'm afraid being frightened of the mountains was not one of my problems. We used to tramp around the mountains and always were very comfortable. Very uncomfortable on water; uncomfortable in snow, but never uncomfortable in the desert or the mountains. I was raised in them; I'd been tramping around the deserts and mountains ever since I was a small boy. KOFMAN: Did you do much hiking in the Grand Canyon? LIPOW: Not as a young child, because I never really got up there. But later on, when we were in junior college days, Al Zeitlin and Larry Kantor and I -- he's a lawyer here now, I think -- hiked across the Grand Canyon. We took a trip for a month up in northern Arizona and we left the south rim and went down the Kaibab Trail; went to Phantom Ranch; we didn't have enough money to stay at Phantom Ranch so we went up about a mile and a half above that to Ribbon Falls on the north rim. Spent a very cold, uncomfortable night sleeping on the ground; then at dawn scaled the north rim and we got up there at just dusk; 1,700 feet higher on the north rim. I lost the toss so I had to hitchhike about 217 miles back around to get the car. That turned out to be an interesting experience in that by that time I had a beard and a leather jacket, and I looked fairly disreputable and nobody wanted to pick me up. I ended up trying to sleep near the highway. First of all, I got to Flagstaff and a lot of my friends were in the V-5 program there at NAU, that's the Navy V-5 program. They took me about three miles out of town and left me on the road there to hitchhike back towards the Williams cutoff to the Canyon. I couldn't get a ride and finally I tried to sleep by the side of the road. I was shivering and I got up and finally about 5:00 in the morning an Indian in a pickup picked me up and took me to the service station in Williams. Then I got a ride the next morning and got the car. I was so worried about Al and Larry, that they were cold and without any food or anything on the north rim, so I drove without stopping to rest, only to find that the people there at the Union Pacific Lodge had taken them in and were feeding them very, very well. KOFMAN: While you were cold and sleeping by the road, they were doing all right. LIPOW: Right. That was an interesting experience hiking across the Canyon. Years and years later, about '74, we went the full length in rafts with the Sanderson group. KOFMAN: What was the V-5 program that you spoke of? LIPOW: The V-5 program was a program of deferring people that were in college during the war, letting them get their education and then pay back the time in the Navy afterwards. KOFMAN: Your wife was in here not too long ago and said something, "Be sure and tell them about the Coffee Pot." Well, I want to know about the Coffee Pot. LIPOW: The Coffee Pot was a drive-in, a drive-in at 7th Street and McDowell. Unfortunately, they've torn it down. But it was really the focus for teenage activities once we got to -well, even before I was able to drive. I grew up two blocks from there. A hamburger cost 15 cents and that was really a very special treat to be able to go to the Coffee Pot and have a hamburger and a milk shake, which I can't remember whether it cost 15 or 20 cents for the milk shake. But the whole concept of the drive-in was an exciting concept. Later on when we began to drive cars we all ended up at the Coffee Pot at the end of whatever dance there was at high school. I went to North High the second year that it opened. In fact, my family had moved from 751 Willetta to McKinley(?), which was on 13th Street, just north of Van Buren. When North Phoenix High School opened the dividing line on which school you could go to was McDowell Road. I really was responsible for putting a lot of pressure on my family, being that we lived originally on Willetta two blocks south of McDowell to move north of McDowell so I could go to North High. Emerson School was north of McDowell on Palm Lane and almost all of my classmates ended up going to North High. I must have put quite a bit of pressure on them because they ended up moving to North 8th Street, so I got to start high school at North High the second year it opened. KOFMAN: What year would that have been? LIPOW: I'm not sure. Let's see. About '37 I think. I was born in '26; I would have started about 13 years -- '37, '38. KOFMAN: You mentioned that the Coffee Pot was unique in some way. Was this because it was a drive-in or was there something else unique about the building itself? LIPOW: It was actually shaped like a coffee pot. Up above the building it had a model of a coffee pot. But it was unique in my experience in that it was the only drive-in that I knew of. At that time my world was small enough that I didn't know anything about drive-ins. Later on there was a drive- in on Central Avenue, but the Coffee Pot was very early. In my small sphere it was a very exciting concept at that time. KOFMAN: You said it was shaped like a coffee pot. Could you also eat inside or was it strictly a drive-in? LIPOW: You could eat inside. They had booths inside as well. KOFMAN: But it was not very large, I would assume? LIPOW: No, not very large. KOFMAN: I was going to ask you, did you ever go into the desert in terms of groups just to have parties? LIPOW: We used to have lots of parties. When you get up into high school and college age, we used to have parties out in the desert, steak-fries, all that sort of thing. When we got into the junior college days we used to go up to Sahuaro Lake and the viewpoint. I remember we'd go below Stewart Mountain Dam down to Granite Reef Dam. I presume they still do that to this day. That was the favorite thing to go up on the river for the day and to come down to the next dam. KOFMAN: I think it still is a favorite college thing to do. Dr. Lipow, I want to thank you very much for spending this time with me today. I hope we'll see you again soon; that you won't be a stranger to Phoenix, and I appreciate everything you've had to tell us. LIPOW: You're quite welcome. I've enjoyed the whole process. [end of transcript]