Town Topics

Ari Post • November 3, 2011

Nassau Valley Vineyards

Producing a wide variety of wines, Nassau Valley is Delaware’s first and only farm winery. The winery is open for free tours and tastings year-round. The self-guided tour includes a chronicle of wine’s 8,000 year history, up to the process and production of modern day vineyards. Picnickers ?are welcome, and specialty tastings and wine and food pairings are available on site or off. Theater and musical groups perform during the summer months. This is an ideal stop on a rainy beach day or a midweek break from the pulsing July sun.

Chincoteague and Assateague Islands

Chincoteague Island, just a 30-minute drive from Bethany down Route 1, is Virginia’s only resort island, and one of the more beautiful islands that salt and pepper Virginia’s eastern shore. This bucolic beach is famous for its wealth of breathtaking and accessible wildlife, oyster beds and clam shoals, migratory birds, and wild horses (often grazing casually around the parking area).

Throughout the summer, crowded beaches give way to stretches of secluded shoreline, marshes and forests, if you’re willing to walk beyond the crowded entrance. As a Natural Wildlife Preserve, the Chincoteague and Assateague islands harbor plenty of inspiration for the adventurous, Thoreauvian journeyman.

Cottage Café

Set in what looks like an over-sized bungalow, with warm yellow lights strung across the frame, the Cottage Café is, has a comfortable atmosphere and quality, unpretentious seafood.

A wide bar sits in the center of the restaurant, with dining on either side. Among the many choice menu options and a solid brunch buffet, a notable item is a generous plate of “dune fries,” a deliciously fun seafood spin on chili-cheese fries.

Dogfish Head Brewery and Brewpub

No one does beer like Dogfish Head. What started as the smallest commercial brewery in America in 1995 single-handedly brought the culture of craft brewed ales back from near extinction.

Whether looking for a finely balanced, classic ale, or a beer based on the chemical analysis of pottery fragments that revealed the earliest known alcoholic beverage, Dogfish Head brewery is a good time with some great beer. Tour the brewery, sample fresh brews, and talk with the casual, friendly staff. Their brewpub, on the Rehobeth Beach boardwalk, pairs their ample beer offerings with classic American cuisine, and features house-made vodkas from a small distillery operation in the back. Live music plays throughout the summer.

Dickey’s Frozen Custard

Well before the days that Bethany Beach became the Delmarva tourist haven it is today, Dickie’s Frozen Custard was serving the local in-crowd from their modest corner store, just off the main boardwalk drag.

This is quintessential beachside custard. The employees are often found without shoes. Young customers, five or 10 at the most, commonly sit against the wall in the shade of Dickie’s awning, licking and slurping at their over-sized cones with sprinkles as they drip down their knuckles, chins, and shirts. Yeah, it’s cheesy. Yeah, it’s nostalgic and silly. Yeah, it’s just custard. But I’m willing to bet it’s the best you’ll ever have.

Coastal Kayak

Offering sail-boat rentals, guided kayak and bicycle eco-tours, Coastal Kayak allows guests to experience the bay-side marshlands and wildlife from a completely new perspective.

The salt marsh tour is a brilliantly fun addendum to any list of activities. Paddle through the salt marshes around a state wildlife refuge, the feeding grounds for many animals, some of which include herons, osprey, horseshoe crabs and skimmers. One of the premier offerings is the exploration of a small sandbar where you get out of your kayak and comb the beach for a variety of beach dwellers such as fiddler crabs, starfish, and clams.

Grotto Pizza

If you’ve been anywhere near the Delaware Beaches, you have doubtless fallen prey to the wafting, tantalizing scent of Grotto’s pizza in the salty air. Synonymous with Bethany and Rehobeth beach culture, there is hardly another pizza joint in town — not that you would ever want one. It is awfully, awfully good.

The local restaurant behemoth and area staple, with its signature “bull’s eye” pizzas, is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a summer-long celebration. Whatever time you’re there this summer, keep an eye out for special deals and promotions.

Dewey

A one-street town sandwiched between its larger siblings, Bethany and Rehobeth, Dewey Beach is undeniably the college crowd’s scene. With a slew of bars, crab shacks, and motels, Dewey makes for a pretty fun night if you’re looking to get away from quiet evenings in Bethany and knock back a beer and a basket of fried shrimp with your friends.

Stop by The Starboard, voted one of the top 25 bars in America by Men’s Journal magazine, and concoct one of their build-your-own Bloody Marys, with over 700 ingredients and 18 brands of vodka. Or check out the Bottle and Cork, an outdoor bar and music venue.

Caitlin White •

Metro rail and bus riders can expect to see changes in terms of pricing for SmarTrip cards and paper fare cards over the next few months.

The transit agency plans to decrease the price of the SmarTrip card and increase the cost of a rail trip for users of paper fare cards in order to encourage riders to use the reusable plastic cards, the Washington Examiner reports.

SmarTrip cards will drop in price from $5 to $2.50 on Aug. 29, but Metro riders may want to consider all their fare options before purchasing one. Other changes to SmarTrip are expected in the fall.

Metro decided to reduce the SmarTrip card cost to decrease the burden on riders caused by the new fare increases, the Examiner said.

Metro initiated the first phase of fare hikes on June 27 and plans to further increase them later this summer. One such increase will be an extra 25-cent charge per rail trip for users of paper fare cards, beginning Aug. 1.

Bus riders who use cash instead of a SmarTrip card already pay a 20-cent differential. They also lose the transfer discount when switching from train to bus or bus to bus.

The transit agency will lose 90 cents on each SmarTrip card sale after the cost drops to $2.50, since it costs Metro $3.40 to make each card.

Donna Evers •

As you leave the Dupont Circle Metro station’s north exit, you will see words carved into the granite walls — lines from a poem by Walt Whitman, called “The Wound Dresser.” Since it’s hard to get the whole inscription when you are riding the escalator, here it is:

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand;
I sit by the restless all the dark night — some are so young,
Some suffer so much — I recall the experience sweet and sad.

This was a subject Walt Whitman knew a lot about, since he served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. Already known as a journalist and poet, he first got involved after the bloody Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, where he went to take care of his brother who had been wounded in battle. There he met another impressive volunteer nurse, Clara Barton, with whom he would cross paths again in Washington. When Whitman arrived in the District to help out as a medical volunteer, the city’s public buildings were turned into crowded way stations for wounded soldiers. There were not enough doctors, and no formal nursing profession, so the military had to rely on recruits and volunteers. Even with that, doctors could not deal with the types of wounds inflicted by the advanced bullets and weapons of the war. The quickest solution to treat an infected limb — and save the soldier’s life — was to amputate. Meanwhile, the wounded were crowded into any shelters available, waiting for the meager medical help to arrive.

One of the most haunting passages in Whitman’s journal about his experiences during the war was his account of the makeshift hospital at the Old Patent Office in Washington. This building, recently restored to its original grandeur and serving as the National Portrait Gallery and Museum of American Art, made for a bizarre hospital ward. The maze of long narrow galleries was originally created to hold glass display cases, which held wood and metal models of inventions submitted for patents. Wounded soldiers, sometimes as many as 800, were laid on cots arranged alongside the glass cases, creating a path so inspectors and inventors could still get through the maze to view and judge the models, stepping over the soldiers as they moved along. This was one of many hospitals where Whitman volunteered during the war, bringing food, paper and pens for the men and sometimes just staying on so a wounded soldier would not have to die alone.

Out of these terrible experiences came some good. The war encouraged many advances in medical science. Volunteer nurse Clara Barton went on to found the American Red Cross, an organization that we rely in times of national emergencies and disasters. Meanwhile, Walt Whitman, who continued to write poetry, supported himself with a job at the Department of the Interior. Ironically, when Secretary of the Interior James Harlan discovered that Whitman was the author of “Leaves of Grass,” he fired him, citing the poems as “damaging to the morals of men.” By that time, though, Whitman was revered as a poet and supporters rallied to his cause, soon securing him another government job.
Whitman’s war experiences earned him the title “the good gray poet,” and his poems about the Civil War are forever burned into our collective memory. There are many, among them “O Captain! My Captain!”, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and, of course, “The Wound Dresser.” And while his words carved on the subway’s wall describe the horrors of war, they also tell about human compassion, which will always be our saving grace.
[gallery ids="99165,102989,102992" nav="thumbs"]

John Blee •

The greatest antiques in Georgetown are the amazing townhouses and homes that climb the hill. A New Yorker once said to me that Georgetown is more beautiful than Greenwich Village, and indeed it is. The caretaking of Georgetown’s homes that are mostly built in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries is best left to architects who respect the building, and without violating them, give them new life. Christian Zapatka, winner of the Rome Prize, is the architect today who makes the most out of re-inventing the Georgetown townhouse.

One of Zapatka’s newest re-inventions is for sale on Q and 30th Streets. This is a part of Cooke’s Row, made up of four pairs of semi-detached houses built in 1868.

Cooke’s Row has Italianate and Second Empire features, including mansard roofs. D.C.’s first governor, Henry D. Cooke, commissioned these houses. Cooke had been appointed by President Grant and belonged to the Republican political machine during the post-Civil War era.

This house had been neglected for a good while and was in need of drastic repair. What is interesting is what Zapatka left intact and what he created out of the traditional maze of bedrooms and few bathrooms. The single most amazing thing about the interior is the circular staircase that goes all the way to the third floor. It has been reinforced using its original balustrade, but with a newly invented round skylight at the top. Some of the original flooring has been retained and doors, including pocket doors, have been refinished and reused. All windows were removed and reinstalled, faking some of the original glazing when pieces were missing. An unusual feature is the slate fireplaces that were found under several layers of paint. They are polished to a dark luster.

With Zapatka in charge of the renovation everything flows; the traditional features ebb into the modern. There is never a disjunction. Because Zapatka works closely with contractors on site, he adjusts the design details on the spot. Therefore they attain certain perfection. He also employs one of the rarest of artisans: a great plasterer. Bathrooms and the kitchen are modern, created with a mastery of refined understatement.

Studying architecture with Michael Graves at Princeton and later working for him formed Zapatka’s vision. Zapatka says that Graves frequently referred to a building as a piece of furniture, or furniture as a building. Recently he attended a symposium where Graves spoke on the antiques in his house. Perhaps this is why Christian Zapatka can cull the best of an old house, at the same time renewing it.

GEORGETOWN’S ANTIQUES:

Christian Zapatka: Reinventing the Georgetown Townhouse
Frank Randolph: Interior Designer Extraordinaire
John Rosselli: Georgetown’s Antique Aficionado
Marston Luce: In Search of Elegance
Scandinavian Antiques & Living: International Accents
Susquehanna Antique Company: Redefining Tradition
Sixteen Fifty Nine: A Mid-Century Renaissance

John Blee •

Walking into Frank Randolph’s house makes you aware of what a great interior designer can do. Randolph lives in a house once occupied by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. What he managed to do with it (not to it) is to create marvelous spaces with impeccably designed interiors. This is the hallmark of his work. All is classical, spare without being minimal and luminous.

Frank Randolph’s living room is one of the most beautiful spaces in Georgetown. It is high ceilinged, and during remodeling Randolph dropped the windows to the floor, creating real French windows. They look out onto a lovely garden below. Graced by arches, the living room contains some of the furniture Randolph has designed himself as well as a pair of 18th-century painted French screens. Small porcelain Chinese bowls and other objects are placed on tables and the mantle. He describes them all as inexpensive pieces. Randolph likes to change the arrangement every few months.

A real Washingtonian who grew up near Georgetown and attended Western High (now Duke Ellington), Randolph is the rarest of decorators, a self-taught man. The antiques that Randolph works with are mostly Swedish and Danish pieces from the 18th and 19th century. “People want to walk into a house with less of the darkness associated with antiques,” Randolph says. “They want a home to have lightness and happiness.” In his own home you can see he practices and lives with what he preaches.

“Clients don’t come to me for a strictly contemporary or modern look,” he says. “My passions are evenly divided. As an interior designer one must include things that are practical but still wonderful and beautiful. You cannot sell 19th-century chairs anymore because they break.” Randolph’s own dining room chairs are modeled on antique pieces, but in light wood and are extremely sturdy. He says that if you cannot find a piece, you can often have it reproduced.

Instinctively generous, Randolph even has a few good words to say about Martha Stewart: “I admire her way of getting the general public involved in presentation of food and of things you have in your home.”

It is rare for an architect to speak of lessons learned from a decorator. However, Georgetown architect Christian Zapatka speaks of learning from Frank Randolph and how sometimes covering a window rather than merely exposing it can create more. It is a lesson Zapatka is carrying out in his own newly designed home.

“Making people happy is rewarding,” Randolph says. “But you have to get the architecture right. Thomas Jefferson was the first American interior designer, he went to bed thinking about it and he woke up and rearranged the furniture!”

GEORGETOWN’S ANTIQUES:

Christian Zapatka: Reinventing the Georgetown Townhouse
Frank Randolph: Interior Designer Extraordinaire
John Rosselli: Georgetown’s Antique Aficionado
Marston Luce: In Search of Elegance
Scandinavian Antiques & Living: International Accents
Susquehanna Antique Company: Redefining Tradition
Sixteen Fifty Nine: A Mid-Century Renaissance

Gary Tischler •

As February comes to a cold, long end, with it ends the annual celebration, commemoration and acknowledgement that we call Black History Month, celebrated and noted in an especially strong and defining way in Washington, D.C.

Events throughout the month noted one aspect of black history or another — Frederick Douglass’ birthday and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, because the two leaders are intertwined and wrapped up in the times of their time, the agony of the Civil War, the triumph of Emancipation. At Mount Vernon, there were commemorative services and wreath-layings for the slaves at the first president’s Virginia plantation.

The Smithsonian Black History Month Family Day Celebration will be held Feb. 27, rescheduled from an earlier day in the month and featuring the theme “Tapestry of Cultural Rhythms.” The idea of a black history month, first begun as far back as 1926 by historian Carter G. Woodson as “Negro History Week” before becoming what we know as Black History Month, remains strangely controversial. Some of this is, of course, due to the lingering feeling that the very existence of a black history month forces people to think about, and often actually talk about, race in America. In Washington, the longer you live here, the more the idea of Black History Month seems hardly novel at all, as natural as breathing. This city, in function, culture, politics, economics, identity and social structure, is so Sybil-like, schizoid, diverse, multi-faceted and multi-tasked that it resists a wholesale identity. It is the capital of the United States, politically and governmentally, but that doesn’t necessarily amount to an identity. The White House, Capitol Hill and Congress are hard-core presences of the city’s function. They are not its heart and soul.
That honor belongs to us: we the people that live here. If the city has a defining identity, in terms of history, the idea of black history has played itself out here from the beginning. How black and white residents have built, lived, worked, created a social and cultural environment here tells you an enormous amount about the history of race in America.

In this city, you don’t ask the question of whether there is a black history here, because you’re living it every day, and confront it, embrace it, see it in every neighborhood and ward of the city. One of the things you find, past the historic homes and buildings, past the large number of churches, many of them built from the ground up after emancipation by black pastors and ministers, is that black history is everybody’s history in this city, it is, as a young essay contest winner wrote, “American history.”

This is the city where in all the time of Jim Crow, local blacks, their number swollen by the great migration to northern cities in the first decades of the 20th century, created a thriving black community apart from all the places in the city where they could not shop, eat , hear music or go to school. Thus a large section of Washington, spurred by Howard University, had its own lawyers and doctors, its shops and shopkeepers and businesses, its culture.

While lots of major urban centers in America have large black populations, Washington is different because of its politics and structure. Until the 1970s, it had no self-rule of any sort, and even now has no voting rights in Congress. Its history of home rule is brief, only some 40 years or so.

Every street, and maybe every street corner, and certainly every neighborhood large and small, is a part of black history. Three of the major churches in Georgetown on or near P Street are reminders of a large black population that existed early in the century and thrived for decades before dispersing into the suburbs.

Walk the African Heritage Trail, a guide to the entire city’s heritage of black history, and you’ll discovery all of our history here, along with the rich contributions of African American civil rights leaders, educators, teachers, politicians, political leaders, athletes and artists. Memories of segregation and Jim Crow live in memory here.

In almost every ward and neighborhood of this city, you’ll find the strong presence of African American men and women who made history, who helped create institutions, movements and ideas that live on, who lived here, day in and day out, who created or were leaders in their communities.

Black history resounds in the homes, buildings, institutions and churches of Washington: at Howard University, at the Lincoln Theater and the True Reformer Building in Greater U Street, where Duke Ellington lived early in his life, at the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum at the old Howard Theater, the Black Fashion Museum and the Whitelaw Hotel, at the Supreme Court where Thurgood Marshall became a towering figure.

You can find it at the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, the first headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women, which Bethune founded, and which is still led by the indomitable civil rights leader Dorothy Height, who in turned founded the Black Family Reunions held annually on the Mall and across the country. It lives in the Shiloh Baptist Church in Shaw, in the slave cemeteries in Georgetown, at the DAR Constitution Hall, where Marian Anderson was not allowed to sing by the DAR, and at the Lincoln Memorial. It’s in the Frederick Douglass National Historic City at 14th and W Streets SE, at Fort Stevens in Brightwood and at the Summer School Museum and Archives.

And all along the Heritage Trail, you’ll find the names and homes of familiar historic figures: Willis Richardson, Paul Dunbar, Anna Julia Cooper, Christian Fleetwood, Ernest Everett Just, Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace, Alain Locke, Mary Jane Patterson Carter G. Woodson, Anthony Bowen, Benjamin Banneker, Howard Woodson, Lois Mailou Jones and many others.

The National Mall is where the Revered Martin Luther King gave his resounding “I Have a Dream” speech, which energized the entire country and fired up the imagination of generations to come. His assassination in 1968 sparked a full-scale war and deadly, destructive riots — known simply as “the riots” — the effects of which devastated the local economy for years to come. That too is black history.

All the changes — downtown development, the decline of black population, the rise of condoland, our loyalties to schools and sports — make up the common knowledge of living here. We all see this all of the time, yet, it’s fair to say, we — black and white — don’t know as much about each other and interact as much as we should, and certainly could. Race is an integral, if not integrated, part of this city, and black history is also a history of race in America. This is a city where, in one mayoral election consisting entirely of black candidates, one of them was designated by others as the “white candidate.” Major political, emotional and cultural discussions about crime and education inevitably have components of class and race to them.

But our city’s history is a shared one. It exists for all of us in memory, if we access it. It snows on everyone, on all the neighborhoods, even though some might fare better than others when it comes to snow removal. We are a string of connected neighborhoods, with a history that we all own and share. Whatever you might say about our transit system, it moves on tracks that criss-cross every part of the city and outside of it too.

All of us lead daily lives, and in this way, we are more closely connected to each other, like a family, than to any temporary residents in the White House, in Congress and on K Street.
[gallery ids="102590,99062,99063,99064,99065" nav="thumbs"]

Donna Evers •

Washingtonians may be surprised to know that the first computers were invented right here in Georgetown, and if you go to 1054 31st Street (now Canal Square), you will find a plaque marking the place where Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company was located at the turn of the last century.

It all started when the federal government ran into problems taking the national census in 1880. The process took too long and was full of mistakes. So in 1886, the U.S. Census Office decided to hold a contest to see who could come up with a better system.

Herman Hollerith would have seemed an unlikely winner of such a contest when he was in grade school in Buffalo, NY. He had such a hard time in school that he used to hide from his teacher. His German immigrant parents took him out of school and got him a tutor, and this helped him realize his amazing potential. He entered college at the age of 15 and got a degree in mining engineering at the age of 19. Eventually, he got a doctorate from Columbia University, where he wrote his thesis about a very special invention of his, an electric tabulating machine. He got the idea from his girlfriend’s father, who told him about the French jacquard weaving machines which were set up with punch cards to automatically weave intricate repetitive patterns. Hollerith created his own punch card system of tabulation, and got a patent for the invention in 1889. When he entered the census office contest, his sample census took a fraction of the time of his nearest competitor. So instead of seven and a half years to do the U.S. census, Hollerith finished the initial count in six weeks, with the final tabulations completed in two and a half years. Better yet, he saved the government $5,000,000, which was a huge sum at that time.

In 1896, Hollerith started the Tabulating Machine Company. The first factory employed mostly women, who worked on their individual tabulators in a large open room. These women were called “computers,” because that was their job description. Hollerith’s business thrived, and his machines were sold to countries around the world for census taking. His fortunes grew, too, and he built a grand mansion in Georgetown at 1617 29th Street, overlooking the Potomac River. By the way, the home, which stayed in the family for 80 years, was on the market recently for $22,000,000.

While his magical machine was a big success, other innovators came up with similar inventions. He merged his company to diversify and broaden its hold on a diminishing market. When Herman retired in 1921, his successor, who happened to be a marketing ace, merged the company again and changed its name to International Business Machines. Yes, that’s IBM, otherwise known as Big Blue. And so, our own Herman Hollerith, the child who couldn’t spell in elementary school, went on to become the father of the modern computer, an invention that has made a revolutionary impact on the way we live and work.

Veena Trehan • August 8, 2011

Dr. Richard Goldberg is a 21st Century Renaissance Man. The Georgetown University Hospital President explores next-generation technology and psychiatry by day, rides motorbikes on his vacations, and reads the classics for fun. At RIS last week, he shared insights that he has gained during 42 years at Georgetown.

From Psychiatrist to President

When asked about his career path, going from mind doctor to hospital president, he gave a sigh of appreciation. “It’s an interesting journey because psychiatry is frequently at the bottom of the food chain,” he said.

His choice of a psychosomatic specialty brought him to other hospital physicians and their patients, aiding a progression from resident to faculty member to department chair. And in the financially challenging times of late 1990s he became (simultaneously and for the same salary) dean of clinical affairs, dean of graduate medical education, chair of psychiatry, and president of the 450-doctor faculty practice group, the last that lay the groundwork for promotion.

His practice area may not have the reputation as a hospital power broker, but it often confers leadership ability. “As a psychiatrist—as long as you don’t behave like a psychiatrist—you have a certain degree of emotional intelligence about people and how they best work together…It’s very helpful in managing a hospital, managing a physician, managing people.”

In 2000, Medstar bought the Georgetown University Hospital and faculty practice, and Goldberg began overseeing hospital quality and safety as vice president of medical affairs, a position he jokingly compares with serving as an assistant principal in a high school with wayward physicians. He’s held the hospital presidency for two years.

Over the last decade the hospital has changed deficits into surpluses, gained leverage with equipment suppliers through Medstar, and earned the number 3 ranking among the 57 DC Metropolitan hospitals, as well as the only “Magnet” status (for nursing excellence).

Goldberg’s DC life is a far cry from his childhood along the New York shore. The Long Beach resident played basketball and baseball with Billy Crystal (who showed Oscar promise even as high school variety show MC) and frolicked by the bay, but according to him the island life was insular. “I thought everyone was from Brooklyn. It turns out that’s not the case.”

Along with his worldview, this city and hospital have transformed over several decades. Visiting DC in the 1950s, he admits being shocked by the Washington Monument’s separate restrooms and water fountains for blacks and whites. Georgetown Medical School in the late 1960s was likewise wholly different from today: 98 men were paired with two women per class, there were no CAT scans and head scans, doctors mixed their own IVs, and psychiatry focused on psychotherapy. He relishes many of the changes, describing 50/50 student ratio as “humanizing” and new technology and drugs as “outstanding” in their potential impact.

The Future of Health Care

Goldberg believes computers will shape our future through nanotechnology, robotics and genetics, trends emerging in medicine. In a new era of personalized medicine, he explains, doctors will use genetics to identify the likelihood of developing a disease and the best medications for an individual. It will be possible to inject patients with nanorobot sensors, which will float around the blood system and organs, giving feedback to detection devices to indicate if an illness has occurred or tell about a treatment’s progression.

Robots like the da Vinci Surgical System will allow doctors to operate easily and intuitively for prostrate and thoracic cancer, and other ailments treated at the Lombardi Cancer Center.

Viruses packed with chemotherapy will use receptors to find and join cancer cells and release the chemotherapy while sparing normal tissue, increasing the survivability for a broad range of cancer disorders.

Yet there is a huge paradox in health care. The underserved population and Jesuit traditions contrast with a depersonalized and potentially costly high-tech future.

The hospital relies on its heritage for guidance. While Jesuits, a Catholic order that stresses lifelong education, are less visible than in the past, they guided the mission adopted in 2007. “Cura personalis” (meaning care of the whole person) is a reminder that pills and technology must serve the broader goal of satisfying emotional, spiritual and physical needs.

The giving nature of the order also prompts charity care for the poor. A children’s van goes out to the most underserved areas of Washington DC, treating kids who wouldn’t ordinarily get medical care, and the hospital offers free cancer screenings to adults.

Goldberg sees many gaps in the health care system but says he is optimistic that a country as great as ours can meet them.

“We need to have more accessible care for individuals,” he says. “We need to cover more individuals. We need to have more emphasis on wellness than sickness.

“We need to be more aware of care as not just a single episode, but a continuity of care. We need to be safer and higher quality in terms of or care.”

But as with most things, he understands that progress will be incremental. “I don’t think can be created de novo out of somebody’s head. It has to, like any good system, evolve.”

From Motorcycles to Mahatma Gandhi

One way he deals with work pressure is to exit his element. For 25 years—starting with a Harley Sportster, now on a BMW 3 Touring Bike—he has cycled the country. His fascination with human narrative is given broader play, meeting people like those recently out of prison that would otherwise be unlikely confidantes. He also enjoys communing with the environment, whether the national parks of the Southwest or the seascape of Key West.

“There’s something about being on a motorcycle that is relaxed concentration,” he says. “You have to concentrate all the time, but you’re in this zone, you’re participating with the road and nature rather than observing it.”

If motorcycling is a social and spiritual quest, his literary projects are an intellectual journey. His free time is not occupied by friends, restaurants and movies. Rather, he has taken on a sort of literary project. He reads classics and listens to biographies (currently Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography) while he exercises on his Octane seated elliptical machine. The biographies have provided personal instruction, including two major life lessons.

“Every person no matter how successful or how much we idealize them has incredible unevenness. They can have great contributions in some areas and weaknesses in other areas,” he says.

“And they have been down and out at various times in their life,” he adds. “The path to greatness is not a straight line. Its really enduring and learning how to get out of those troughs in your life, whatever they are.”

“Aging well is about being adaptable, learning how to find meaning in activities that you might not have been interested in before, but that you can now do.”

He summarizes with a common phrase given deeper resonance by his inspiring example in psychiatry, literature, and leadership. “That’s what life is about – meaning.”

To Listen to interview, click here