Hotelkeeper’s Son: Atlanta & Beyond

Hotelkeeper’s Son is a memoir from a man with a vivid memory and lots of tales to tell. Hotelkeeper’s Son is set in the 1930s to well into the twenty first century about a white youngster growing up in a segregated South, unaware of the racial problems until he visits Atlanta’s segregated hospital in 1938 or 1939 with his father to take a sick Black handyman. As a five year old child he sees racial segregation for the first time, but doesn’t understand it. He grows up in a segregated Atlanta, feels the discrimination of the African Americans as he progresses in his medical education at the same hospital that he visited as a child. He participates in the racial integration of that city and that hospital. The book also shadows his entire childhood, adulthood, his military experiences, his surgery practice, his epiphany after heart surgery, his change of life style, until after retirement when he returns to the Atlanta area when Hurricane Katrina drives him from retirement in Louisiana.