Part 25: What are the Odds?

The Red Cross called and asked if I’d be interested in helping out teaching a CPR class. I’d checked in with the Red Cross when I moved to Baltimore in the spring of 1982 as part of my program to integrate myself into my new hometown. Back in Memphis I’d taught dozens of CPR classes, and was certified as an instructor-trainer, teaching CPR teachers.

Teach a CPR class on a Saturday? Sure, why not. I had nothing better to do.

The Red Cross was holding a massive training session at the Inner Harbor campus of Baltimore City Community College. More than 200 people would be trained in one day. They needed more than a dozen instructors.

That Saturday, I made my way to the Inner Harbor and found the BCCC building on Market Street. The fish market was still operating next to the campus. I looked out over the stalls through the window in the hallway outside an auditorium before the training session began.

The auditorium was packed. I introduced myself to the workshop leader and sat up front with the other instructors. I looked out over a sea of faces, strangers all of them.

The first portion of the training is lecture material. Then the audience was broken up, randomly assigned by the workshop leader into groups of 20.

Each instructor was randomly assigned a group and sent off into a classroom or hallway where a half-dozen CPR manikins had been set up for hands-on practice.

These manikins had something new and different – a thin disposable plastic shield that fit over the manikin’s mouth and nose, to prevent the transmission of germs between students. Previous practice was to swab the manikins with isopropyl alcohol, which everybody knew wasn’t a good antiseptic. Once I learned how the shields worked, the rest of the training was routine.

When the training was completed for the day, a woman in my group named Sandee Lippmann approached me and asked if I were related to a David Goldfarb.

“It isn’t possible,” I said. “I’m not from Baltimore.”

“No,” Sandee said. “Amherst, New York.”

“David is my brother.”

“We worked at a summer camp years ago when we were teenagers,” she said. “I’m from Amherst too.”

It was my first experience with what people call Smalltimore.