Passport to Adventure: Memoirs of a 20th Century News Correspondent and Science Writer

As you leaf through this book you will discover that the author truly is a survivor. The last of his mother’s 10 children, he was only the fourth to survive infancy. He went on to survive the Great Depression, even though his father died at an early age and a sudden attack of appendicitis in the pre-penicillin era came within 20 minutes of ending his life. He also survived World War II, which he credits to President Truman’s decision to drop the atom bomb even as the aircraft carrier on which he served as a combat correspondent was steaming off the Japanese shore in preparation for what would have been history’s bloodiest invasion. And as a medical reporter he survived every symptom he wrote about – “from brain tumors to gangrene of the toenail” – to do such an outstanding job that his peers elected him president of the National Association of Science Writers. Here you’ll find him reliving his journalistic adventures: an ambush during a strike in the Pennsylvania coal fields, the Donora “death smog”, the bizarre death legendary of football coach Jock Sutherland, the “brain burglar” who volunteered for a lobotomy to sever his thieving tendencies, the first patient to survive total removal of a cancerous lung, the launching of the first atomic submarine, the building of the first commercial nuclear-power plant, tailing Communists and helping to preserve a trap for a suspected spy, chronicling the step-by-step development of the Salk polio vaccine, witnessing the birth of America’s space program from a grandstand seat, recording an insider’s account of how Franklin D. Roosevelt settled on Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon B. Johnson for running mates, and much more.