Moondawggie
Posts: 403
Joined: 10/18/2003 From: Placer County CA Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake Coolest location for a hospital in San Diego. Naval Hospital near Balboa Park. They used to have a big stucco building painted flamingo pink with terracotta roof tiles. Nothing else like it. I guess they tore it down for earthquake safety. Here are some of the older buidlings. Also, close to home, the USMC Air Station, El Toro is open in the game as I am getting FM-1 squadrons training there. I think the blimp hangars in Tustin are open too. Damn, Mandrake, that's where I did my internship back in 1979-80! We called that Big Old Pink Hospital the "Pink Elephant;" the original hospital had been built in WWI, and not upgraded much for 60+ years (for example, the fire supression plan was lots of buckets full of sand spaced every 20 feet). The view was great, but it was located on the final approach into Lindberg Field, so you had Boeing 727s and 737s roaring in at 250 knots and 50 feet above the hospital every 4 minutes diving towards that short runway serving San Diego---not a quiet place to recover from your heart attack or toxic shock in the medical ICU/CCU, let alone sleep if you were on call. The building you're showing is the old Command Office where the Admiral hung out. I think I saw someone who looked a lot like Fiona drinking Champagne with him once on his balcony at sunset... My favorite memory is when my Medicine Resident Mike Crowley brought his Beagle, Duke, into the ICU to visit one Sunday morning on call. Just then the Admiral walks in with a congresswoman who was on a "fact-finding tour" investigating Naval Expenditures in San Diego and La Jolla. They freaked out about a dog running around the ICU until I told them that Duke was part of an important experiment testing the interaction of Dobutamine and Nitroprusside in the ICU setting. The Admiral, being a psychiatrist, and the congresswoman, being an idiot, bought it hook, line, and sinker...so we (and Duke) escaped unscathed by punishment. They finally did tear down the old pink hospital in the 80's and put in the new one, but the grey bulk of ole' Building 26 is still there in mothballs, waiting for the next group of mass casualities. 4 months after our little escapade with Duke, we were sitting on Okinawa during the Iranian Hostage Crisis as new batallion medical officers with the 3rd MARDIV, learning how to work M-16s instead of Swan-Ganz catheters or endoscopes. Ah, memories...
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"The Yankees got all the smart ones, and look where it got them." General George Pickett, the night before Gettysburg
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