Housing in Indianapolis

After the relief of my passing my boards and draft cancellation, I was in pretty good spirits and looking forward to a fairly normal life of work and family. My wife and I started to look around for a larger house now having 5 children. There were several new sub-divisions being built that were attractive to us. I had always wanted to build a house like my parents had and harbored a secret longing to be an architect, so for years I had clipped and sketched plans for a house of my dreams. At this stage I felt that I needed to put that dream on hold and just buy a larger house.
There were some houses located in a very nice addition and we went to check them out after we decided that one would fit our needs we made an offer to buy and the builder informed us that he didn’t have any more for sale. I was suspicious and asked my friend Tom, who was white, to inquire and indeed he was told there were houses available. This was in 1967 and I decided to file a suit against the developer for housing discrimination, so I called the director of the local Federal Equal Housing Office who I knew. Her response was you have a case but when it’s over you will have wasted a lot of time and money and end up with no house. So as much as I hated to, I didn’t pursue it.
As fate would have it, I got a settlement from an auto accident in St. Louis occurring some years before which provided me with money to buy a lot and that gave me the opportunity to plan to build a house. Luckily, I had a close friendship with a young architect who had recently formed a firm and over the next 3 years we worked on my dream house. You can buy a house that has already been built and you can pick through a builders plans and build what you see or you can hire an architect and pour over your ideas and his designs and build what is basically yours. In a house that you pick out, you are given few choices on what goes into the construction, but in the house you build everything from brick to door knobs flooring to windows is chosen by you and based on your desires and pocketbook. The land I had purchased was an acre on a very busy boulevard and I had him design this special house with no windows fronting the street, instead everything was open to the back with an enclosed swimming pool and the house was so unique that many thought it resembled a church.
It had an area for adults and one for the children and another for guests. If I do say so, it was really a house I loved and I had some good times there, but some dark days lay ahead.
Unfortunately I had undertaken a lot on my plate, I needed to move my office since I was not interested in buying the building the practice was in.
So my friend the architect and I agreed to partner on a building, housing both our offices. During the construction of the building the general contractor developed meningitis and died delaying occupancy which led to my not having an office for 6 months. This necessitated my working out of rented space at the hospital and caused me to lose significant income. When I finally was able to occupy the space I had to borrow money to catch up on my mounting debts. All this happened during the passage of Medicare and their insurance carrier Blue Cross-Blue Shield was always 3-4 months delinquent in reimbursing services. I was being squeezed by debt and slow collections which eventually led to the building partnership dissolving because the architects were also overextended. We loss the building in a foreclosure and I was forced to sell my house because of tax issues. Also on a personal note, I was separating from my wife and a divorce was in the offing so I had to develop a plan to regroup.
One of the hardest things to happen was leaving the kids, but the solitude and peace I was able to get by moving out to a studio apartment was enough to energize me and I reveled in it. I felt some how that I could regain some control of my life even though I was dealing with a contentious divorce.
I had engaged a tax lawyer and his recommendation, which now I would have never followed, was concede to the IRS. That strategy kept me hostage to them for the next 25 years.
With all my financial problems, I decided to give up Obstetrics in my practice because I was having difficulty enjoying that part of my work and the patients were starting to piss me off. The recent trend toward catering to the patients request for care had me getting angry at the patient, so I felt they deserved a doctor that favored delivery care plans, which I did not. So I decided to do strictly office Gynecology and GYN surgery.
If I could practice Obstetrics in a way I thought was practical, I probably would not have given it up. It was my belief that the normal OB should be taken care of by Nurses ( midwives or nurse practioners) and complicated cases by the Obstetrician. In recent years, this paradigm has come to pass.
So like so many practical things in my life, I was ahead of the curve.
Here is a sample of a day in my practicing without the office that was being built. The nurse was hooked into the answering service which received the calls from patients as before; emergencies, deliveries and surgeries were done in the hospital. Office visits were done in rented space in the hospital clinic which I paid a nominal fee to use. I stayed in touch by pager from wherever I was. This arrangement lasted about 6 months and I managed to preserve my practice. I moved into the house and office in 1970 and ended up loosing both in 1973.
During this time, I met a young woman who I later married that was a great help in my gaining my equilibrium. She had recently divorced and it seemed that our lives just kind of came together at the right time. I was trying to take a path that would bring some meaning and happiness to my life.
I was in a loosely structured men’s club that really only did social things, like go to big sporting events and on a trip to a Chicago Bear game, I invited her to the city. Over that weekend, I found I could relate to her and she to me what we wanted in a relationship and from there we began what became a journey that has not always been happy but has been to say the least an interesting love affair. It did produce my 6th child Rebecca, who I named after the heroine in the novel “Tom Sawyer” a favorite of mine. When all is said and done Rebecca has turned out to be the most perceptive and supportive of my children maybe because she has always lived with me. I have no doubt that all my other children love me she and I have a special bond.