I am more grateful than words can easily express for the honor which the American Pediatric Society has seen fit to bestow on me in giving me this Howland Award and Medal. When I examine the list of my distinguished predecessors, 9 of them, stretching from Ned Park, the first recipient in 1952, through an unimaginably eminent list, to Bronson Crothers, only one thought comes to mind: "It can't happen here." I ask the members of the Society to accept my thanks.
It was my great privilege to have met Dr. Howland, and my great loss that I knew him so briefly, so superficially, as I did. Our president, Emmett Holt, and I had been interns together on the medical service at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Then for a time we were pediatric interns together at Babies' Hospital, under his distinguished father, L. Emmett Holt, Sr. After Emmett left