(Photograph courtesy of Fred P. Wurlitzer, M.D., F.A.C.S.)

Frederick Papst Wurlitzer, M.D., F.A.C.S., the author, circa 2020. Trained as a physician, he still loved music. At the impressionable age of 18, while attending Stanford University, he had told others he might become a composer. That never happened. After becoming trained as a cancer surgeon, he practiced general, thoracic, and vascular surgery for about twenty years before volunteering to work in Africa. At the age of 79 he became baptized, and started writing religious poetry that can be found on Amazon.com. Now he sits contemplating the mystery of the Resurrection this Easter in 2020. Celestial music plays in his mind. It is Bach's Chaconne played on a red Stradivarius.

EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 12, 2020

To my wife my abiding love.
She’s also my tiny turtle dove.

When she sits on my lap,
She never gives me crap.

Blossoms with new life,
Fall at the feet of my wife.

This Spring is special for us.
She’s promised me no fuss.

It’s time to renew romance.
I’ll take her out for a dance.

Oops, I forgot she has a cane.
No dancing, unless I want pain.

We promise to love and cherish each other.
To me she is unmistakably the Queen Mother.

Our marriage is very important to me.
She’s imply always my tiny honey bee.

With much love,
From her Teddy Bear

XxxxxX Freddy

(Photograph courtesy of Fred P. Wurlitzer, M.D., F.A.C.S.)

Raimund Billing Wurlitzer (1896 - 1986), estimated circa 1918 - 1920: My father, Raimund, was a lost sheep that stayed with Wurlitzer to be with his father. He had no knowledge of musical instruments, but he knew business. Like his father, Howard, he had a fine memory recalling past incidents in detail. After leaving Wurlitzer in 1928 he became a stock broker. He married a wealthy heiress of a beer company, Pauline Pabst, who provided most of the funds for my education. My father was rather cold and easily aroused to irritation. These may have been traits he learned from his father, Howard Wurlitzer.

(Photograph courtesy of Fred P. Wurlitzer, M.D., F.A.C.S.)

Howard Eugene Wurlitzer (1871 - 1928), estimated circa 1900: I never met my grandfather, Howard. He died in 1928 before I was born in 1937, but I certainly recall many stories about him that I heard from my father, Raimund. A particularly interesting story I heard several times was how Howard put Raimund through his own version of a spy school. Howard would take Raimund into a pub and leave after a minute. Then he would ask Raimund what was in the pub? What pictures, how many glasses on the bar, how many people and what they were wearing? He did this often.

My father said Howard had a true photographic, that is, eidetic memory. He could read several pages of a book and quote them back perfectly. His memory for detail was frightening. Howard could be irascible according to my father, and so could my father. After Howard died of complications lasting about 13 years from a ruptured appendix, my father left Wurlitzer to move to San Francisco, where I was born.