hat prompted my father to write? Did he develop his desire from hearing stories, like the one about his maternal grandfather, Albert King, who, while a slave, paid an old Irishman 50 cents a week to teach him to read? Or was it from reading the story his father wrote about leaving his father's farm at 17 with a dollar in his pocket, because he desperately wanted an education?

Whatever the motivation, for someone who was not a professional writer, he wrote a lot. He started writing poetry, which he called "verse," when he was 10 years old. When he was a teenager, he and a few other friends anonymously published a gossip sheet, The Black Dispatch. While finishing medical school, he wrote profiles in verse for the yearbook for every member of his 80-person, graduating class at Howard University Medical School.

Presently, this site contains only a small sampling of his writing. I will be adding to it over time, especially if visitors to the site contact me and ask to see more of it.

He wrote hundreds of poems for every kind of occasion, consistently each year for Christmas, family birthdays, Valentine's Day and to my mother for their anniversary. Additionally, he wrote numerous feature articles and letters to the editor for The New Haven Register, New Haven's local newspaper, as well as a number of speeches and stories, both fiction and non-fiction.

I have included a half dozen poems and links to poems in other parts of the site, in the Verse sub section.

There was no conflict between science and religion, as far as my father was concerned. He explains his viewpoint in the speech entitled, "The Christian Doctor," in the Speeches subsection. It provides a brief history of the blending of spirituality and medical science, as well as my father's personal views on being a Christian doctor.

In the sub section, entitled Stories, I have included a short narrative about Hurricane Carol's threat to our home on Long Island Sound in Milford, Connecticut in August 1954.

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