March 13, 1959
NIH Hearing Office
THRU: Chief, Laboratory of Clinical Science, NIMH
Administrative Officer, NIMH-NINDB
Chief, Section on Cerebral Metabolism, NIMH
Parking Suspension
Is reference to your notification of my parking privilege suspension, this is to inform you that I do not intend to appeal your decision at the present time. It is obvious that any such action would be useless in view of the apparent inability or disinclination of the parking authorities either to consider or to comprehend the nature of laboratory research and the unique problems of the bench scientist. I shall not review these here, since they have already been adequately described by my immediate supervisor, the Chief of the Laboratory of Clinical Science, in several memoranda which, like the problems described in them, have been largely ignored by the parking authorities.
On the other hand, I regret that I am also unable to accept the terms of the suspension. The nature of my current research program is such as to necessitate my working until approximately midnight several nights a week while at the same time also requiring my arrival between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m. to perform special medical procedures on patients or normal control volunteers. I daresay that this work schedule represents a greater contribution of free, uncompensated time and effort to the service of NIH than is devoted by any or all of the Gray Ladies for whom the parking authorities recognize the justice of a reserved parking area. The idea of including in such long working hours the additional physical affront of a prolonged overland hike to "Outer Mongolia" in the pitch blackness of a cold winter midnight is completely intolerable to me, and it is unreasonable of anyone to expect it of me.
Therefore, in order to abide by the terms stated in your directive, I shall find it necessary to suspend the research activities of my section and to take annual leave for the duration of my parking suspension. I do so reluctantly, not because of the loss of an amount of annual leave which I voluntarily lose by default every year anyway, but because of the enforced interruption of an active research program by administrative short-sightedness.
Louis Sokoloff, M.D.