Texas Surgeon: an Autobiography Page: 40
xii, 180 p. ; 21 cm.View a full description of this book.
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appeared from my consciousness with the bath that Aunt Lavinia
so kindly prepared for me. To this day it seems quite unrelated
to the flow of my land-bound existence.
In a few days the pavement ceased to rock under me, and I
had found another job, through an ad in the Boston Globe. The
ad called for a "capable young man who understands horses, to
be trained as a family coachman." In Little Shemogue my father
had owned one horse, Old Tom, who served both to plow the
land and haul the family off to church. This hardly qualified me
as a neophyte coachman. But I was not deterred. After the galley
of the Queen Bess, I welcomed a landlubber challenge.
The next day I took a train out to Newtonville, a Boston
suburb just beyond Brighton, to be interviewed by a Mr. A. J.
Boren. At this time the trolley-car system, and the common and
intercepting water and sewer lines, which soon would net the
Greater Boston area, were then in brisk process of construction.
Gangs of Irish and Italian laborers dotted the streets, as trenches
and track beds were dug for miles on end. But Newtonville, as
yet, was accessible only by railroad.
The Borens lived in a large white frame house of stark New
England aspect, reached by a graveled drive, and with a carriage
house-stable behind. Over the carriage house were quarters for
the coachman and the groom, finished off in darkly varnished
matched boards.
It was my first contact with a well-to-do home, one with a
great deal of oaken wainscoating, a Baltimore heater in the black
marble fireplace, and Japanese silk screens showing richly em-
broidered birds with tail feathers. Into this relatively sumptuous
interior, over oriental rugs in red and green, I tiptoed rever-
entially to be interviewed by Mr. Boren in his library. He was
skeptical of one so young, but of course I would hardly expect
much salary and I was, after all, big for my age. And so he had
me go to a Newton physician for an examination, presumably
to make sure I was not introducing social diseases into his house-
hold. This precaution was quite understandable. Sexual maladies
4o
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Atkinson, Donald Taylor. Texas Surgeon: an Autobiography, book, 1958; New York. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth143566/m1/52/?rotate=270: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting University of Texas Health Science Center Libraries.