Dear Mr. Morgan:—
For years my brother Fred and I have had a standing family joke. When either of us started on a trip we would say to the other, “If J. P. Morgan calls up before I’m back, tell him I won’t sell under fifty.” I’m afraid you’ve turned the tables on us....
Such meetings, even if they were only by proxy, made bright passages in the doctor’s notebook.
One of life’s greatest moments for me was Richard Crooks’s concert in Suva, given for the benefit of our School’s athletic fund. I cherish this program among my fondest possessions, for on the cover it says: “Recital: Richard Crooks.... Impresario: Dr. S. M. Lambert.” I wasn’t chosen for my musical genius; somebody argued that as it was for the School, and as I had wangled Mr. Crooks into the generous gift of his voice, I ought to furnish the American ballyhoo for an American singer. For a day I knew how Gatti-Casazza must have felt all the time.
Suva had a right to be music-hungry, for Crooks was only the second opera star who had stayed there long enough to sing, and instrumental performers had fought shy of us. Our single connection with the musical great was our former Government printer, Johann Sebastian Bach, inheritor of an illustrious name. When Paderewski came to Suva he didn’t play his piano; in fact he just got off the boat and got on again. In Suva royal visitors have ceased to be a novelty. But Richard Crooks was of the Metropolitan Opera!
When the job of taking care of him fell to me I rather dreaded it, fearing that I had to deal with some sort of seraph. However, he turned out to be much more human than many grocers I have known. Lunching with us, he said he never ate much before concerts; but when Eloisa’s special crab casserole came on he helped himself twice and sighed, “That’s the best crab I ever ate.” Watching him eat, I was afraid that his voice would suddenly go back on him. When I brought him to my home from his hotel my Buick had had a puncture—and singers are highly sensitized. It didn’t seem to faze him. Then we were off for the concert hall—and the Buick had another puncture. I think about that time he was telling me that the Firestone Tire people were paying him $3,000 a broadcast. Apropos of punctures, perhaps.
The seraph sang; Handel, Haydn, Stradella, Moszkowski—I remember the composers, for I still keep that program. While Suva sat spellbound he topped the performance with Lehar’s “Yours Is My Heart Alone,” and the impresario was too emotionally touched to count the profits, which turned out to be something over £100. Many have been generous to our School, but his generosity came in the form of beauty, which made it doubly precious. He sang for me again in 1939, on his way to Sydney. When he repeated “Yours Is My Heart Alone” I was glad that my eyes were hidden behind tinted spectacles. That was my swan song in Fiji; I was going away in a few weeks.
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A misunderstanding prevented my visiting Tahiti, which would have fascinated me as a study of what not to do with a native people. The French are notoriously poor health administrators, and Tahiti has long been a model example of disease breeding among a dwindling population. I know nothing about it at first hand, but from what I have been told there is little hope for the remaining Polynesians there.
Perhaps this sounds pessimistic. The public health worker has often been called the Cinderella of the medical profession; he must get used to adversity, and his story too often ends before Prince Charming comes along. I have no complaint to make on that score. The work has never been drudgery, and the long waits for results have been rewarded according to my personal merits—and demerits. In medicine there is no such thing as the Perfect Result. We leave that to the Pelmanites.