In the summer of 1949, I reported for duty at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Annapolis, Maryland. For the previous two years I had been stationed at the U.S. Naval Hospital, Aiea Heights, and the Tripler Army Hospital, both in Hawaii. As an obstetrician, I had been kept very busy in these hospitals, and it seemed to me that everybody coming there wanted to have a new baby. There were many deliveries all day and all night. So it was a surprise to me upon my arrival at Annapolis that there were only about 30 babies born each month.
Hanging on the wall in the waiting-room section of the obstetrics department was a picture of the superintendent, Rear Admiral James L. Holloway, presenting a new mother with a big bouquet of flowers and congratulating her for being the mother of "Baby Number One Thousand" at the U.S. Naval Hospital, Annapolis. It then occurred to me that it would be interesting to find "Baby Number One."
This did not seem to present a formidable problem because all births were registered in the state archives, and there were records kept in the hospital log books. I enlisted the aid of our secretary, Miss Cook, who was both a Navy dependent and a native Annapolitan. Of course, she did most of the work. She went through the hospital log books and files that she found in the dusty fourth-floor storeroom of the hospital, and she checked the birth certificate files in the nearby state archives. The job was somewhat more difficult than it appeared at first, and it was complicated by the fact that Navy doctors had been delivering babies for Navy families at Emergency Hospital (now Anne Arundel Medical Center) for years before the new services were added to the Naval Hospital. There were no computers, and there was a lot of pencil and leg work.
Suddenly, the search was over; we had found the answer. Miss Cook came into my office somewhat hesitantly as she presented me with a copy of the birth certificate. Baby Number One was Miss Cook.