College student "Faye" and Lafayette P. Monson, M.D.
Lafe
My brother Lafe
LaFayette P. Monson
By
Weldon P. Monson
Written Oct. 8, 1973
As I try to write this account I find that I must rely almost
entirely upon memory and going back over many years. Lafe’s records were engraven indelibly upon
the tablets of his life’s experiences in the field of medicine. These records, if open to view, would reveal
a great career, one lacking in ostentation and solidly grounded in achievement
and a humble devotion to serving his fellow-man in his field. He was widely known and respected in this
field rising far beyond mediocrity to a place of eminence. His offices were in San Francisco,
California, and he maintained a home, with his wife, Helen, on Nob Hill. He previously had fine homes in Piedmont and
Berkeley. Those who might supply further
information on Lafe during his many years of practice in California would be
his brothers, Maurice and Keyne, his very close friend Richard W. Young, Jr.,
and, of course, his wife Helen. Blanche
could also furnish certain information, particularly certain comments made by
friends at his funeral, and would supply a good photo, something I am unable to
locate at this point. Also, Helen would
have a good picture suitable for the purpose.
Her address is: Mrs. L. P.
Monson, The Comstock Apartments, Apt. 1440, 1333 Jones Street, San Francisco,
California, 94109.
As a boy in Preston, Idaho, where he was born, Lafe always
played with older boys such as Platte Larson, and Abner Larson. They always looked upon Lysle and I as kid
brothers and let us go our way while they went theirs. He was a good big brother to have, always
seeming to hold out certain values for the younger ones to follow. He was always a dedicated student and with an
eye single to medicine. He wanted to be
the best in his field and, come what may, he would achieve. This kept all of us generally looking in the
direction of some solid achievement in life, even though our interests were not
the same as his. Lysle and I liked
athletics and possibly spent more time than we should with it, and we knew that
education beyond high school because of our financial position was out of the
question unless we were able to make it, somehow, on our own. I am sure that neither Lysle not I would be
interested in medicine in the first place, and in the second place, it would do
us no good if we were, because of financial reasons, much to difficult to
describe here. But Lafe was a leader in
the family in attaining the most through education and I, personally, owe him
my deep debt of gratitude for the leadership and example. Throughout his entire school career he was a
straight “A” student, never going to bed at night until he felt that he had
mastered each day’s assignment, and that meant two or three o’clock in the
morning. Furthermore, he looked like a
student, always serious, trim, and neat.
He had a wonderful sense of humore and this always displayed itself at
the right time. He was never given to
anything rough or crude, and was, always, in essence of a true Christian
gentleman.
In Ogden he went around with the older boys, Mack Shupe, Paul
Williams, etc. while Lysle and I went around with Heber Jacobs, Dough Williams,
Ed Williams, etc., and Walt went with Harold Browning, Ray Bassett, Ernest
Wilkinson, etc. Lafe was still the
studious one even though he did enjoy pranks about as well as anyone, and was
always soft spoken and good natured. He
worked in Dad’s lumber yard (Eccles Lumber Co.) for his spending money, as did
we.
In New York Lafe went to Boys High in Brooklyn after a couple
of years at DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City. He was always a straight “A” student and
would settle for nothing less. Lafe was
always reserved and quiet, and his main association was with William
Knecht. At missionary picnics they had
their fun setting off large fire-crackers around the 4th of July, in
tin cans, etc., and sometimes placed under the seats of the missionaries just
to create a little fun and excitement. I
am sure the missionaries, coming largely from Utah, welcomed this little bit of
relaxation and laughed about it just as we did.
They had their baseball games, but Lafe wasn’t overly interested except
as a spectator. Walt was always the
star, pitching and batting, and Lysle and I, who both played on P.S.#3’s
championship teams, always managed to get into the lineups. For some reason, however, Lafe began to take
an interest in boxing, largely because it had certain scientific aspects which
intrigued him and also because if offered him a good workout and kept him
physically fit. This interest developed
about the time of the Jess Willard – Jack Johnson heavyweight championship
fight, for he could always give you the names and dates of all the champions,
where they fought, details of the fights, and the winners and losers. It was distinctly his own interest and not encouraged
or sponsored by anyone. It is
interesting because in his later years at the U. of Utah he was known as the
“Fighting Medic” and fought all the leading contenders there. He was described by the fight promoter as the
most promising heavyweight in Utah. When
Jack Dempsey was giving an exhibition at the old Pantages Theater Lafe was
selected by this promoter (Mack Dalton) as the best in Utah and went three
rounds with him on the stage. Lysle and
I sat on the front row to take notes.
Lafe started right off with a fast right to Jack’s nose making it bleed
just a little. We saw Jack then bob and
weave, very fast on his feet, duck and come up behind Lafe and give him a
little “rabbit punch” in the back of the neck.
At the same time, we heard him say “Atta boy, Monson, keep it up, keep
it up.” Jack was right at the height of
his career and gave Lafe a real boxing lesson giving Lafe a new respect for a
great heavyweight champion. Later, when
he was studying medicine at Penn he fought Flynn of Colgate for the
intercollegiate heavyweight title. He
lost a close decision but was offered a place as alternate on the United States
team to compete in the 1924 Olympics. He
chose instead to accept an internship at the Letterman General Hospital in San
Francisco. He had also received an
invitation from the Fitzsimmon Army Hospital in Denver.
While he worked his way through Penn Medical School his first
year as a janitor in his medical fraternity house, he was able through a $1000
loan from George Albert Smith, one of Dad’s closest friends and another $1000
from Gov. Simon Bamberger, another very close friend (which he promptly repaid
with full interest – despite their protestations that he accept these monies as
a tribute to his father) and $1000 from the sale of some stock in Big Piney Oil
Co. of Wyoming a missionary friend had given Dad after his release from his
mission (this stock later went out of sight and became worth around $1,000,000.) Lafe and his wife Margaret, made it through
the remaining years. Margaret worked at
the Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia and they had a modest, but comfortable,
apartment on the top floor of a rooming house in the 1600 block on Race
Street.
His wife was the former Margaret Simonds of Murray, Utah, and
was the only girl he ever took out, as far as I know. He had met her at the University of
Utah. He was really not interested in
girls, as such; I believe he thought they interfered with his medicine. And, then again, he didn’t have any money for
dates. He worked hard at the Salt Lake
Pressed Brick, carrying hot bricks from the kilns all day until he was nearly
black with the summer’s sun, and then he had a job digging trenches across the
Nevada desert for an oil line. These
jobs would pay him more than any other – about $5 or $6 a day – and they kept
him physically fit for his studies through the winter months. But he knew he had no money to spare for
anything but his education and he measured what he spent very carefully. He was a dedicated man with a single purpose.
After his internship at Letterman he returned to Salt Lake
City to practice in the general field.
He became first assistant to Dr. Middleton in his clinic but did not
think that Salt Lake had what he wanted, so seeing a want ad in the medical
journal for a doctor in Virginia City, Nevada, he borrowed enough money to buy
a car and his medical instruments, office equipment, etc., etc., and he and
Margaret set out for Virginia City, once a flourishing mining town, but
now pretty much a ghost town. He immediately became known throughout Nevada
and his practice ranged far and wide. He
was the Chief Surgeon of St. Mary’s Hospital in Reno, and the Chief Medical
Examiner for the State Prison in Carson City.
It was he who would pronounce the prisoners as officially dead after
they were executed in the gas chamber. I
visited with him in Carson City in July, 1929 on my return home via the Panama
Canal (aboard the SS President Wilson as an ordinary seaman) and he took me out
to the prison where I met many of the prisoners, some on “death row.” One I recall was sentenced for selling grave
lots in Los Angeles over and over again, the same lots to different
people. As the people began to die and
were about to be buried the relatives would discover that someone was already
in the graves – and so on. When I later
handled some cases in Tonopah and small mining camps like Silver Peak, everyone
seemed to know Dr. Monson and when they learned that I was his brother they
extended every warm hospitality to me.
He was held in great respect throughout the State.
He had no ambition to make his career in Nevada, however, and
secretly looked forward to the day when he and Margaret might return to San
Francisco, a city he had learned to love during his internship there. He wanted, also, to specialize in what was
then the eye, ear, nose and throat field, which later was to be just ear, nose
and throat with the eye as a special field of its own. He saved enough money to go to Vienna,
Austria, the best school in the world in this particular field of medicine,
with its Drs. Neumann and Hirsch. He and
Margaret loved Vienna and the cultural aspects the city afforded them. They were not much for the night clubs but
loved to hear the symphonies and to meet the musicians and the homes of
masters, such as Haydn, etc. Lafe was
considered one of Neumann’s best students, and also dr. Hirsch, as later events
will show.
After finishing in Vienna, Lafe decided on Oakland as a place
to practice. Now he was about to realize
a lifetime dream, a chance to be the finest doctor in his field in the location
he and Margaret wanted most, the San Francisco Bay Area. So he opened up an office in Oakland and
started to practice. He made
appointments at the start with anyone who might call, no matter who they were,
and scheduled these appointments for the same hour so as to create the
impression of having a very busy office.
As people came in they almost always had to wait. It worked and his practice grew and grew.
One day at a medical convention in Oakland the visiting
speaker was Dr. Hirsch of Vienna. During
a question and answer period a member of the Doctors’ Green Hospital in San
Francisco asked him to recommend the outstanding doctor in the ear, nose and
throat field for an opening as head of the hospital – a small Mayo Bros Clinic
type in this particular field of medicine.
He promptly said, “You have the best right here in this audience – Dr.
Monson.” Thus Lafe was interviewed and
hired on the spot as head of the Doctors’ Green Hospital. As the business of the hospital expanded
requiring the addition of new building, with clients coming in from all over
the world, the Doctors Green (two brothers) called Lafe and said, “Dr. Monson,
you know why our business has expanded so greatly over the past year or so,
don’t you?” Lafe said, “Well, I have my
ideas, but I would like to hear yours.”
The Doctors Green said, “It is because of our name.” Lafe said “You know, I have been thinking, it
was just the opposite, and for this reason, I think we should exercise our
ideas separately from now on.” He set up
his own offices on Pine Street in San Francisco and a good part of his own
practice came from Green Hospital referrals the hospital could not handle –
referred by the nurses on the hospital staff.
Lafe’s practice grew by leaps and bounds until he had the finest
practice on the west coast. Now he had
added the fenestration operation on the ear, which he learned from Dr. Julius
Lempert, a Polish refugee, who, while in a concentration camp during the war,
thought up this particular operation – one to restore hearing to those who had
lost their hearing. Lafe has described
this operation to me and I remember it well enough to describe it but I doubt
if it would add anything to this account.
Suffice it to say, it is a very delicate operation working right next to
the brain. Lafe and Dr. Lempert operated
on a woman who had never heard a sound in her life. She was stone deaf. When the operation was over she suddenly found
that she could hear and she rose from the table screaming “I can hear. I can hear” and almost lost her mind. Certain precautions were then taken to
prevent this and then enable the patient to receive sound on a selective basis,
so that all sound would not come upon the person at one time. Lafe was on of the first sixteen doctors in
this field in the United States, and because of his first association with Dr.
Lempert, practically living at his hospital over a period of six months, when
he came from Poland, Lafe would be numbered among the first three or four. Lafe always wanted to be among the first in
his field, in this particular operation; in straightening out the eye muscles
for “cross-eyed” persons; in plastic surgery for the nose, straightening it out
for movie actors and actresses, etc. etc.
Nothing seemed to stop him in his progress and his advance to a position
of leadership in his field. Now the
Stanford Medical School wanted him to teach on its medical faculty and he was
chief surgeon, Chairman of the Medical Staff and a trustee of the Saint Francis
Memorial Hospital, together with other honors too numerous to mention. Lafe had realized his ambition – to be the
finest in his field – before his passing from a rheumatic heart in 1968.
In 1938 his wife, Margaret, passed away and Lafe decided to
take a world trip as he just could not seem to adjust to the loss of his wife,
whom he loved so dearly. He took the
trip and asked me to stay in his home in Berkeley while he was away. His secretary, Helen, whom he later married,
took care of the office while he was away.
She had really been hired by Margaret and this fact may have led to her
marriage with Lafe some time after his return from his world trip. Lafe and Margaret had two children, Elizabeth
and Joanne. Elizabeth, a Stanford
graduate, is married to a very successful San Francisco business man and they
have children, one of whom was a brilliant student at Choate. Joanne is married to a doctor, whose father
was a co-discoverer of Vitamin C. They
have a beautiful home in Maryland where they raise horses and dogs, for show
purposes, as a hobby. They have
children. Lafe and Helen have two
children, Jeff and Steve; the former and executive with Macy’s in San Francisco
and the latter with Del Monte Packing in Portland, Oregon. They are both University of Utah graduates.
On Lafe’s world trip in 1938 he took very few clothes, but
used his allowable weight limit for film.
He took pictures of harbors, cities, plants [?] and other important targets
for the Allied Forces in World War II.
As one shirt became soiled he threw it away and bought another. Everything was in film. In Vienna he visited the places he and his
wife used to frequent, to again renew those happy moments they had spent there
together and acquiring that medical training which was to become so important
in his medical career. As he went around
Vienna he came across a shop with the windows broken in and with white paint
there was written across the front “Jude.”
He was taking pictures of it when the German Gestapo came by and marched
him off to the headquarters. There the
Commandant looked at him from behind his desk and asked “Did you take
pictures?” Lafe replied “Yes. I am an American doctor.” The commandant ordered him taken to
prison. To his great surprise, he was
put in the same cell with Dr. Neumann who had been jailed for the duration for
refusing to operate on Hitler’s throat.
They spent three days and three nights together after which the guard
came and ordered Lafe to leave. Lafe
remonstrated that he wanted to stay, even though he had been sleeping on a
damp, cold, stone floor and with just a little light coming in this dungeon
through a small, barred window high up on the wall. He wanted to stay because, as he told me
later, he had received the most valuable medical training of his life in those
three days and nights at the hands of his former professor, this great Dr.
Neumann reputed to be the best in the world in his field. He wanted to discuss medicine, and new
theories that had been running through his mind, and found a very receptive and
eager student in Lafe, who had been one of his best students at the U. of
Vienna Medical School. He was taken
away, however, but somehow was able to keep is film. When he returned home with his movies of
ports, harbors, plants, etc in Germany and vital points of U. S. Army interests
in Japan, his films were sequestered [?] by the U. S. after he had given a
lecture or two on the west coast and it had come to the attention of the U. S.
Army. No doubt they played an important
part in the planning process of the U. S. Strategic Command Forces. [Kris' Note: Some of his footage is currently housed in the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive and also at Holocaust Museum archives. This clip is the most often referenced and was used in the doumentary Rape of Europa; also used for set design for movies such as Woman In Gold and Monuments Men. Smithsonian Magazine highlighted his and other's film evidence.]
Lafe was a fine lecturer and I marveled at
his home when he showed the pictures and described the scenes in detail to us,
with their historical significance, dates, etc. etc. He was a real student in all aspects.
As for Dr. Hirsch. He
wrote Lafe from Germany and asked if he could come to San Francisco and join
him in his practice. Lafe spoke with me
about this and said that there was no one he would want more but if he were in
his office, he, Lafe, would be working in his shadow. Lafe naturally did not want this and wrote
him a nice letter stating that he thought he ought to be on a medical school
faculty and he would write him further on this.
As I knew the head of the International Jewish Refugee Relief
Organization, Leon Obermayer, a prominent lawyer in the Packard Building in
Philadelphia, with whom I had tried a case, I spoke with him, knowing that
Temple University Medical School was looking for just such a man. Dr. Hirsch was contacted and from what I have
been able to learn was given a prominent place on that medical faculty.
In all respects, Lafe was a beacon of light for all of the
family in (1) excellence in achievement and (2) humility and grace in getting
there. The rest we got from Dad and
Mother which was, perhaps, the most important part of our lives.
Lafe used to say –
1.
If
any one pays you the compliment of coming to your office always give him your
best regardless of his financial circumstances.
Any doctor who refuses treatment to someone in need because he has no
money should be kicked out of the profession.
– and –
2.
If
you are going to be a truck driver, be the best truck driver there is. Always strive for the best, no matter what
you may choose to do.
He was great and I am proud that he was my brother. His wife, Helen, who survives has been a
wonderful wife and mother and deserves great credit for all that was
accomplished in his later years. Lafe
left her well provided for but always counseled her that when he went and she
had to “walk through the storm, hold your head up high” in the words of the
song they used to sing together.
Weldon P. Monson
Stamford, Conn.
October 8, 1973
P. S.
(1) Sometime have
Blanche tell you what the preacher from another church told her at Lafe’s
funeral. He said that some of his
parishioners had told him that they had gone to Lafe when they had no money. He gave them the best he had. When the preacher came to thank him he said
with that gentle smile “You must be mistaken.
It must have been someone else.” And simply walked off, not wanting to
discuss it further.
(2) When Venna died
Lafe took her daughters, Joyce and Sally, into his home. He also, with Maurice, and Keyne’s wife,
Gerry, put Keyne through medical school and started him out in practice, in his
office, in San Francisco. With his name
this was a tremendous start for Keyne, so unlike Lafe’s beginning where he had
no one but himself to rely upon. But
Keyne made it, and that is all that matters.
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