She wrote in her autobiography, Office Hours: Day and Night, published in 1968, that they “fell in love on the dance floor that night” and have “danced through life together ever since” ( Fig. “Jack” Powell, a Southern gentleman, Wall Street banker, and talented college athlete-at a white-tie ball in February 1927 at the Hotel Astor. My parents were married less than a year later, in June 1929.īobby Travell had been introduced to her future husband-the dashing John W.G. The front stoop was removed and an elevator was added shortly before my grandmother died of a myocardial infarction in the fall of 1928. My grandmother, Janet Davidson Travell, supervised the remodeling of the family's new home. The Travells moved from 11th Street to 40 Fifth Avenue, and then on to 9 West 16th Street, a 5-story brownstone situated conveniently catty-corner across from the old New York Hospital, where my mother was house physician for the last 6 months of her internship. 1 Then, from January 1927 through December 1928, she interned at the Cornell Medical Division of the New York Hospital, where she was “the only woman doctor on its staff.” 2 That summer and fall, Janet took an extensive tour of Europe “to attain some perspective” on herself. In 1926, she received her MD degree from the Cornell University Medical College in New York City, where she graduated at the head of her class.
She was also the winner of several college singles tennis championships and of many doubles titles with Ginny. In her junior year, she was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society and, at her graduation in 1922, she was named a Durant Scholar. 1 Janet's sister, Virginia, and their father, Willard Travell, admire the tall hollyhocks at the family's Merryfield Farm, Sheffield, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1936.Īfter graduating from the Brearley School, my mother attended Wellesley College, the alma mater of her mother and sister, where she majored in inorganic chemistry.
The summer home remains in the family to this day.įig. These were animals that the Travells had brought back to Manhattan from their summer home, 120 acres of farmland with an old Colonial house and outbuildings in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts ( Fig. The back yard was home to a great-horned hoot owl, a partridge, an eel, baby chickens, and a snapping turtle.
My mother was nicknamed “Bobby” because her sister couldn't say “baby.” She was a tomboy who climbed trees and hit tennis balls against a fence in the back yard at 27 East 11th Street.
Weeks, MD, a respected pediatrician who practiced most of her life in Brooklyn Heights. My mother's older sister, Ginny, also studied medicine. She played the piano, sang lullabies to her 2 daughters, and entertained artists, writers, and musicians in her evenings-at-home. 1 Janet Travell's mother, Janet Davidson Travell, was beautiful and talented. Willard Travell soon became interested in the relief of pain through physical medicine and x-ray therapy, fields in which he is recognized as an early pioneer. She decided to study medicine at an early age in this she was inspired by her father, Willard Travell, MD, who was at first a general practitioner. Travell, my mother, was born on 17 December 1901, in her parents' home in a fashionable section of lower New York City.