| Ray has a breadth of life experiences and here are his own words to describe his interests and adventures up to this point-
"I'm an old man on an old woman's bike. I swerve and get out of the way or I drive sixty-five in a fifty- mile zone.
I'm passed on the left and the right. The first is better, more personal, but essentially the same thing, age. My life was shaped by my taste for books, peanut brittle and liverwurst,
but I was not to understand that until many years later. From Central I went to antioch for three years, then transfered to Penn when my mother had worked there for five years and
I could go tuition -free, which was not to be turned down. One of my uncomfortable memories of Penn is of a Central classmate
asking me to join a sit-in when his scholarship, and those of other black athletes, was reduced.
I apologize; I was afraid to join that or any other demonstration while there. From Penn I returned to Antioch for a teaching degree,
and the draft deferment I could get as a public school teacher. Teaching was to be my work for many of the next forty years. On one of my breaks from teaching, I was living in California and
became interested in vitamins.
I read 'Prevention' and Adelle Davis and became familiar with the basics of nutrition. This was to take on a more scientific basis when, in the Spring of
1978, I read of Carl C. Pfeiffer, who had a clinic in New Jersey specializing in metal toxicity. Pfeiffer's work began to explain what had been going wrong in me, which takes us back to books and peanut brittle and liverwurst. Hair analysis had shown that I was high in cadmium, mercury and lead. I didn't think that second-hand smoke explained my high cadmium. When, however,I read that pig's liver is high in cadmium, I knew
that my liking liverwurst sandwiches could well explain the elevated cadmium level. Cadmium "adversely affects" higher thought, the part played by peanut brittle was that, as a sneaky treat,I
bought peanut brittle on my way home from the neighborhood library. Peanut brittle is not a bad thing, but it did cause cavities, which
the family dentist filled with amalgam which explains my elevated mercury level. Mercury destroys all kinds of things. So, for those of you who thought me "mad as a hatter," you were right, only it was the "silver" in my mouth as the source of mercury, not the curing of felt. And now, some years after the amagam was finally removed, my head
functions a bit better, but there are still some residual odd effects.
The "benefit" has been that, in trying to understand the complexities of metal toxicity, I became familiar with much of the research in the
field. My interest in nutritional therapy now extends to nutritional ways to reduce the toxicity of some common
pharmaceuticals. As a volunteer, I am on the board of a West Philadelphia volunteer group teaching middle school student bicycle maintenence and safety. I also write occasional articles for the Germantown Courier. From time to time I taught in the English Department of Central as a substitute".
Raymond Tumarkin
September, 2008
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