August, 1961
N.W. PAGE DEAD...
"Norvell Wordsworth Page, Chief of the Reports and Industrial News Section of the Atomic Energy Commission's, Public Information Division, died Monday after a heart attack. He was 57.
"Mr. Page had been visiting his property near Darnestown, MD., where he and his wife were planning to build a house, to stake out an access road. His wife, Gean, said she went to look for him when he failed to return for dinner and found him dead there...
"Mr. Page was in charge of preparing the commissions' annual report to Congress and it's other nontechnical publications.
"He gained considerable reputation as a specialist in Government reports," an AEC official said.
"Before joining the AEC permanently in 1954, he worked there earlier from 1949 to '51. From the time he came to Washington in 1943, he had been on the staffs of several Government agencies and presidential commissions.
"During WWII he was with the Office of War Information and immediately afterward with the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.
"In 1947 and 48, Mr. Page was absent from the Government briefly while he worked as a free-lance writer
"The latter year he returned to work for the first Hoover Commission. He also worked for the second Hoover Commission in 1953." (*Another obit mentions my serving on another Hoover Commission from 1954-57)
Mr. Page also prepared reports for the President's Scientific Reseach Board in 1947, Ten Year Health Program in 1948 and Materials Policy Commission in 1951-52. (Another obit. states that he woked on the Presidents' Commission on Higher Education in 47 as well).
"In 1952 and 53 he was in charge of preparing and directing the Midcentury Conference on Resources for the Future..."
He joined the AEC permenantly in 1954, remaining with them until his death.
Norvell and Audrey's son, Mac, battles brain cancer.
From the "Beacon Hill News/South District Journal", 12/2/81
by John Lustig
McAllister Page is a big, husky bear of a man who seems to have the strength to match. When the 53 year old Southeast Seattle construction engineer shakes hands it's with a convincingly slid grip, almost as if he were trying to hold a jack hammer in place.
But as the day wears on, "Mac" often tires rapidly. His strength falters. Talking beocomes more of an effort, frustrating him to no end because he sometimes has to stop and search for words which float just beyond his grasp.
These are the times when Mac's battle against brain cancer becomes teh most obvious, the most difficult - and the most important for him to win.
And Mac - as his wife, Jean, notes - is determined to win:
"He showed me how to turn real disaster into triumph" she wrote in a letter. "He refuses to aid and abet "The Killer" by accepting any disasterous prognosis. He is actively fighting back.
"Every day, Mac asks God to help him call...his immunity system into action to destroy the cancer cells. He pictures himself rolling the vicious tissue into a ball and hurling it into the stratosphere. He arrogantly fights for survivl...
"Without this disaster, Mac wouldn't have found his inner strength. Without faith in God and himself, the picture would have been grim...My husband has taught me how to be valliant and joyous and free from fear-and that is a wnoderfully good way to be."
But Mac's outlook on life wasn't exactly 'wonderfully good' on July 31 when doctors at Swedish Hospital operated and removed a silver dollar sized chunk of cancer from his brain. Unable to get it all, his surgeon told Mac he would probably have only a year to live.
That was when Mac "pulled his Camille act" and started wallowing in self pity, said Jean. "Here was this big man, but all you could hear was this tiny voice cmoing out of him as if he were a little old lady."
"Literally, I was emotionally down on my ass," agreed Mac.
Jean waited a few days for the shock to wear off and then told him, "Hey, you've got two choices. You can die or you can get out of this bed."
Mac got out of bed. But he still remembers the way he was "shaking like a leaf" as he was being wheeled out of the hospital.
Shortly after returning home, however, Mac read Norman Cousins' book, "Anatomy of an Illness" in which the author described how he overcame a painful, supposedly terminal illness.
Cousins' struggle for hs life was also briefly described in the September 1981 issue of "Omni Magazine" which Mac read a couple of days later: "Cousins took an active, aggressive role in his fight, often ignoring the dictates of conventional medicine. He left the hospital earlier than he was supposed to, took charge of his own therapy, an watched Marx Brothers movis, hoping that humor would ease his pain."
The article stated that a number of studies are beginning to indicate that a patients' outlok on life can play a dramatic role in his chances for recovery.
The idea seems to be that if you subconsciously want or expect to die, then your body may be cooperating. On the other hand, if you deliberately want to live then your brain may be stimulated to produce more of the body's natural defenses against cancer cells.
Mac, who was about to go a series of experimental radiation treatments at University Hospital , decided that he was going to attempt a sort of biofeedback program on his own. Embarrassed even to tell Jean what he was doing, he turned to another source for help - God.
His attempts at biofeedbck were made in the form of prayer as he asked God to help him add strength to his immunity systems. During the long periods of radiation treatment, he would imagine the neutron bombardment as if it were "a projector light in a veyr dark room" and he would see God's hands directing the rays- guiding them to destroy the cancerous cells and keeping them away from the healthy cells of his brain.
In one of the image prayers he uses most often, he envisions an enlargement of his blood stream in which his mmunity system is "spearheaded by a blast of white corpuscles" which are shaped like white cards with teeth on one side as if they were hungry animals.
He then sees teh white corpuscles and the rest of his immunity system racing through his body until it reaches the cancerous"fifth" and devours it completely.
Although they've been members of the Mt. Baker United Presbyterian Church for about 15 years, Mac's relationship with God has at best been just "respectful." said Jean. That has changed, they both say.
Mac now considers God a "partner" in his recovery program.
"I do not ask Him to do the whole bloody job because I do not believe that is the way it ought to be," said Mac. "He's my partner. He's not someone I plead with. I ask for His help.
"I used to pray in a very formal language - but you don't talk to your partner as someone far away taht you have to be on your knees with...I couldn't talk that way anymore. It's too tight and too impersonal...
"I simply got to the point that I wasn't interested in holding him off any more with Thee's and Thou's/"
Bouyed with new hope, Mac was at first extremely critical of other cancer patietns he would see who seemed to have given up and had a "take me now attitude."
Since then, Mac said he's come to realize that it's partially jsut a defense mechanism to block out the total fear these people feel.
"And I feel very humble about it really because they simply don't have anything they can depend on," said Mac, "And I do."
It's only been lately, however, that Mac says it has begun to sink through that he really might die.
"I'll have to admit that in the last few weeks there have been times when my emotions have taken a big nose dive," he said.
"I'm beginning to understand that cancer is an emotional disease too. I really think there is a natural up and down that goes with the disaster."
One of the worst downs came recently after Mac had a seizure.
"It had emotional overtones that knocked the hell out of me for quite awhile. Quite frankly, my chin is just now coming off the floor."
A recent scan of Mac's brain shows that, for now at least, the cancer seems to have stopped growing. But that can quickly change, as Mac knows.
His current doctors have not made any predictions about his life expectancy. But if they did, Mac says he would try to beat those predications - even if only by a week.
"I guess the only thing I can say is that I'm too damn arrogant to accept someone else's opinion about when I'm going to die."
