Tuberculosis

 

Montefiore Hospital's Country Home Sanitarium,
early twentieth century

A father and son, both stricken with tuberculosis, died 30 years apart.

Their cases were ruinous, and little could be done to save either man.

Sure, there were advances in treatment between 1905, when Jacob Olechowsky died, and 1935, when Bernard Olcott died. Yet the most reliable treatment remained rest and fresh air until the introduction of the antibiotic streptomycin after World War II.

In Bedford, N.Y., where Jacob convalesced at the Montefiore Country Home Sanitarium, and in Asheville, N.C., where Bernard was a patient at the Oteen V.A. Hospital, both men carried sputum jars and submitted daily to temperature and weight checks. 

Jacob lived to be 39 and Bernard, 38.

When Sarah—widow and mother—rode a bus south to visit her son at the V.A. hospital, passengers scolded her for offering her seat to a pregnant Black woman.

That was the story Sarah told upon returning home to her daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law. It was the early 1930s, the bottom of the Depression, as they sat at the kitchen table in their small apartment in New York City.  

I doubt that Sarah reported on her son. Her heart was a lock box, and she shared little. One of her secrets may have been that Bernard was not Jacob’s son. Jacob had left Russia and sailed on the ship Dania, from Hamburg to Ellis Island in 1895. Bernard was born two years later.

However, many immigrants fibbed about their ages on passenger manifests and naturalization papers.

When so much is obscured, how can one know the truth?

We know that Jews who fled the Pale of Settlement were not permitted to travel through Germany unless they had booked passage on a German ship from a German port.

In 1902 Sarah and her two children made the arduous trip through Austria and Switzerland and into Belgium to reach Rotterdam, where they boarded the Statendam.

Arriving in New York, they were met by Jacob and went to live at the farm in Queens where he worked. He already showed signs of TB and transmitted the disease to his seven-year-old daughter, Rose, as well as five-year old Bernard.*

After two or three years, Jacob became so sick that Sarah could not manage. She made her way through the complicated city, seeking social services.

She must have been quite desperate although certainly not alone in her plight. Public health was in crisis and tuberculosis the deadliest disease among Eastern European immigrants, exacerbated by small, crowded tenements and sweatshops.

Bedford Hills, N.Y. train station, 1900s.
Tuberculosis patients disembarked here and rode in a carriage
up a hill to the sanitarium. 

By the late nineteenth century, wealthy German Jews had established hospitals in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities. Now, Sarah hustled to get Jacob to Montefiore Hospital’s Country Home Sanitarium in Bedford, N.Y.

First, he was examined and diagnosed. He returned for various tests and a review of his “civic merits.” Finally, he boarded a train to Bedford where he was met at the station and driven to the sanitarium. Fed and bathed, he met with caseworkers to figure out a plan. I’m sure they all spoke in Yiddish.

Forty miles north of the city, the sanitarium had opened in 1897. Perched on a hill, it accommodated 170 early-stage patients who could look out the big windows at trees, sky, and sunlight. Many would become well enough to return home.

Recent picture of the Bedford, N.Y. train station

There also was room for 50 men with advanced tuberculosis, known as “incurables.” Jacob counted among them, I believe, because he appears to have died within a year after he arrived.  

With help from charities, Sarah placed her children in an orphans’ asylum until she could get back on her feet. A fine seamstress, she carried her sewing machine on her back and worked in the garment district.

By 1915, Sarah had retrieved her children, and they lived in Brooklyn. Rose, a high school graduate, was a bookkeeper and Sarah an operator in a coat factory. This data, typical of the time and place, repeats itself row by row in the urban census.

Unsurprisingly, Bernard enlisted in the army. It was a way out. He traveled to the Mexican border where General Pershing was in fruitless pursuit of the revolutionary, Pancho Villa.

I like to imagine Bernard leaving New York and going west by train. Desperate to assimilate, he had changed the family name to Olcoff. Now he could smoke and joke and become a man, having been reared in a household churning with female anxiety. 

During World War I, Bernard served in the Aisne-Marne, Saint-Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne campaigns in western France. He worked in the engineer corps, building and blowing up roads and bridges. He didn’t see combat but was gassed and came home to the U.S. without a future.

It was 1920. 

The Army sent him to Tuscon where a sanitarium had grown from three to 86 buildings. The men lived in open-air cottages, hoping to recuperate. 

Bernard Olcott, Arizona, 1920s

In the early 1930s, betting on mountain air, the doctors moved Bernard to Asheville, N.C. He died there at Oteen, the government’s largest hospital devoted to treatment of TB.

Bernard smoked a pipe and liked to catch butterflies and mount them under glass.

I believe he was fixated on acculturation. He made sure that Olechowsky eventually became Olcott. 

 

Oteen Veterans Hospital, 1920s
(National Library of Medicine)

 

*It is possible that Jacob acquired TB on the farm, drinking unpasteurized milk or working with infected cows.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/10/tuberculosis.html?m=1

Understanding Herma

 

Herma Wager around 1919

Herma was the fourteenth of fifteen children born to Robert and Harriet Wager of Ohio.

Just after the American Civil War ended, Rob, as he was called, left his childhood home in Parham, Canada. He traveled 500 miles along lakes Ontario and Erie to reach Toledo, Ohio. Then he pushed forty miles farther west to Stryker, a railroad town incorporated in 1855.  

Within a few years he met Harriet Justus of Defiance, Ohio, and they wed in 1869 when she was sixteen and he twenty-three. His older sister, Jen, who stayed in Canada, seems to have never recovered from Rob’s departure nor those of anyone she knew—whether to the blur of America or to heaven. 

In a series of small, black-edged letters, which arrived in black-edged envelopes addressed in her spidery script, Jen grieved for twenty years. The worst was Ma, in 1881:

 

I miss her every place I look, I can see something to remind me of her something that she has made or fixed and it seems almost more than I can bear, I am alone so much, too, Pa and Hiram are in at mealtimes and evenings and the rest of the time I am alone. I think if I had someone to talk to and keep me from thinking it would not be so hard. 

One year later Pa, his eyes streaming with tears, took to his bed and never got out. Next to go were the pretty, young schoolmarm and the neighbors’ children. 

Thus there was always bad news from Jen except when she went overnight to Kingston and bought new trimmings to fix up an old dress.

It’s not that death didn’t follow Rob to Ohio.

Herma came along in 1896, more than a decade after her sisters Estella, Florence, and Luella, her brother Charles, and a baby boy who didn’t live long enough to be named, had passed.

By now the family had moved to Wauseon, where Rob no longer worked as a farm laborer but as a section foreman for a manufacturer of plumbing equipment.

In Wauseon the houses marched up and down the street, close together with picket fences between them and front porches where friends gathered. The turn of the century approached and the family felt happy. In 1900, when Harriet was forty-seven years old, she gave birth to her last child, George.

The Wager family in Wauseon, early twentieth century.
Herma sits to her mother's right and Bob stands, far left.

But the happiness fled. Rob died in 1901 and George died in 1902. He caught typhoid fever from his brother Clyde but Clyde recovered and George—dear baby, he was just starting to talk.

“Oh we miss him so much,” Harriet wrote to Jen, still brooding in Canada. She put on her own black costume and wore it for the rest of her life.   

Herma had never been a smiling kind of person but now, when the camera captured her out in the yard in a white voile dress, she looked distant and sad. Only the sight of her brother Robert, whom she adored, could cheer her.

Bob Wager dressed as a cowboy

Bob, as they called him, was Herma’s favorite among the Wager brothers: Warren, Sheldon, Foster, Clyde, Elwood, and Floyd. Three years older than Herma, Bob was her protector and comforter, her imp who became a handsome, responsible young man.

He left home in his late teens, moved to Cleveland and worked for the Willard Storage Battery Company, an early manufacturer of automobile ignition batteries. Around 1912, amid skyrocketing demand from car companies, Willard opened plants in Atlanta and Huntsville. Bob was assigned to the latter.

The U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, and three months later Bob enlisted in the Naval Aero Service. He trained at Pensacola, the nation’s sole naval air station, as a flier and mechanic.

R-6 Seaplane, Pensacola, 1917
(National Museum of the American Navy)

Aviation was still primitive. In the U.S., military officers planned to use planes for observational purposes rather than in combat. Of course, this view changed quickly when the generals got to Europe. Still, the U.S. never kept up with the allies’ aviation capabilities.

Bob arrived at the newly established U.S. Naval Air Station in Moutchic, France in December, and within six weeks he died of cerebrospinal meningitis. Many enlisted men were struck down by tuberculosis, pneumonia, and meningitis even before the influenza became a pandemic. Bob’s story is not unusual, perhaps only to the extent that he was the first Wauseon boy to die in the Great War. He is buried in France. 

In 1920 Herma married William Carroll Keenan, a veteran who went by “Cal” during that particular heyday of nicknames. They had two sons, Bill and Bob, both of whom recalled an impersonal, detached mother. They couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

When Bill and Bob grew up and married, their wives disliked Herma, too. The grandchildren found her visits uncomfortable. 

So what of Herma? No one has spoken of her for a half-century or more. There is little reason to tell her story to each new generation, to make sure her name and face are imprinted in the minds of her descendants.

Still she demands some understanding, my husband’s disagreeable grandmother. 

I think that Herma may have suffered from untreated post-partum depression. And she never recovered, even partway, from her brother Bob’s death nor that of little George who toddled around the farmhouse and probably was her charge.

Perhaps she saw Bob and George in the faces of her own sons but could not summon for them the same depth of feeling. It may be that everything that lived and laughed for Herma was back, way back before the twentieth century inflicted its blows.

 

Harriet Justus Wager died in 1918.
As Herma grew older, she came to resemble her mother.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2023/02/understanding-herma.html?m=1

Nellie Hickey & Her Father

Nellie Hickey stands at right outside Chicago's Medinah Temple, 1915;
image is backwards (Chicago Historical Society)

Mount Vernon lies just north of the New York City, a twenty-nine minute train ride from Grand Central Station. It was Nellie’s hometown.  

Across the railroad tracks on Second Avenue, the public library endowed by Andrew Carnegie houses a local history room established in 1976 with bicentennial money. It is rarely open because the library can’t afford to staff it. The tables are piled with files and boxes spilling over with papers.

Lying on a dusty desk is a photograph of two women delegates at a 1915 peace convention in Chicago’s Medinah Temple. The caption states that one of the women is Nellie J. Hickey of Mount Vernon, N.Y.  

Who was she? Perhaps a peace activist or suffragist who worked with Jane Addams? She could have been prominent in local political circles or even on the national scene.  There ought to be information about her in the cabinets arranged like a maze through the dark room, creaky wooden drawers crammed so tight that nothing breathes.

But it turns out that Nellie doesn’t occupy even one folder.  Instead there is much about her father, Daniel C. Hickey, a 19th-century Democratic Party operator, borne out in headlines.      

The Democratic Town Convention.

A LIVELY SCRAP AMONG HEELERS.

Throw Down Sheriff Duffy

To PLEASE HICKEY

 Keen Competition for the Churches

And the RACETRACK.

It was all about political battles. Nellie’s father had a long reach. He probably kept his shady dealings out of the house or at least on the front porch. But the children surely were introduced to a few important visitors; for example, the power-broker William Bourke Cockran, a brilliant orator and congressman who championed Irish home rule.

Further down the road, Cockran would align himself with German-American opposition to U.S. entry into World War I. That made sense because the Germans and the Irish shared a furious loathing of England. 

Thus, although he died years before his daughter went out to the Chicago peace convention – which was, in fact, a pro-Germany rally – at home in Mount Vernon, Nellie’s father had made associations that would shape her future.  

***

Back in time, when Nell’s father schemed and triumphed all over New York State, he had to pinch himself to remember that he came penniless from Ireland in 1840. From his office at 48 Dey Street in downtown Manhattan (right near the site of the World Trade Center), Hickey built a fortune as a railroad contractor. 

Hickey met equal success in politics. With astonishing whitewash, the author of a 1913 history of the county wrote:

Hickey engaged in politics as a pastime, a recreation from the cares of business, an enjoyment that cost him large sums of money, as he was not an office seeker for himself nor did he expect other pecuniary reward.

It was the polite language of the day, but of course Hickey’s pastime had many rewards. After all, he played politics inside the most notorious big city machine in American history: the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall.

Tammany’s origins lay in late 18^th century New York where its first leader, Aaron Burr, transformed it from a society of speech-makers to a political machine. Through the mid-19^th century the Irish came to dominate the organization.

After the Civil War, William Marcy Tweed became Tammany’s first boss, presiding over the ward system through graft, fraud, and plunder. Everything was corruptible. Although the repulsive Tweed was indicted and died in prison, Tammany arose again under the bosses John Kelly and Richard Croker, both good friends of Mr. Hickey.

THE KELLYITES TRIUMPHANT!

Hickey the Master of the Situation!

However, by 1894 when he died from a cold he caught while overseeing railroad construction in the Lehigh Valley, Hickey no longer was master of the situation. Tellingly, the governor had recently ignored several of his patronage requests.

You can bet that the Tammany politicians jostled each other on the steps of the Church of the Sacred Heart in the flat light of that funeral morning. The men put their heads together to figure out the next play while the widow Ellen Elizabeth Bird Hickey and her six children sat shocked in the chapel.

The family did not need to worry about money, however. Within a few weeks, the papers reported that Daniel Hickey left no will but his estate included $93,000 in personal property and $75,000 in real estate.

 Church of the Sacred Heart,
Mount Vernon, N.Y.

See also January 20 + 28 posts, 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/nellie-her-father.html?m=1

“Well, world, what have you for me today?”

Cumberland Street in Marshall, Illinois, circa 1900;
boyhood home of Ignatius Donnelly Taubeneck

Leaving the farm, heading out – in search of education and the rest of the world. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, these departures accelerated among young Americans. The trend concerned President Theodore Roosevelt, who hoped to persuade young men and women to stick with the agricultural life.

In 1908, TR appointed the Country Life Commission, chaired by a brilliant Cornell University botanist with the inimitable name of Liberty Hyde Bailey. Bailey’s report contained three basic recommendations. 

First, make an exhaustive study of “the conditions that surround the business of farming and the people who live in the country.” 

Next, organize and expand agricultural extension work by colleges and universities. 

Finally, initiate a campaign to rebuild country life and spur “rural progress.” These ambitious plans launched the country life movement, which persisted with limited success through the New Deal.

Of course the children of farmers continued to get away. A large number became educators in urban areas, an essential development considering the exponential rise in public school enrollment. Many were fine teachers with interesting stories to tell.

Among them, a man named Ignatius Donnelly Taubeneck taught history and public speaking in Westchester County, N.Y., between 1930 and 1952. He had the habit of grandly opening a newspaper at the start of each class and demanding, “Well, world, what have you for me today?”

Born in 1892 in Clark County, Illinois, a region that contains the most fertile soil in the United States, Taubeneck grew up on a farm. His uncle, Herman, became national chair of the Populist Party and worked closely with a quirky Minnesota politician, Ignatius Donnelly, who made the fateful decision to endorse William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896. 

By throwing in the Populists’ lot with the Democratic Party, Donnelly ensured the demise of the People’s Party, as the Populists also were known.

Ignatius Donnelly served in the U.S. House and Minnesota legislature, as lieutenant governor, and as a state lecturer with the Minnesota Farmers Alliance. He championed the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War and was a brilliant orator. He also wrote futuristic novels.

His namesake, “I.D.” Taubeneck, graduated from Illinois State Normal University in 1917, having participated in oratory, nature study, and theater clubs. For his senior essay, Taubeneck wrote about “Our Social Delinquent.”

Right after graduation, Taubeneck became a high school principal in a nearby town. He requested exemption from the draft, citing “internal strain.” 

But in 1918 he changed his mind, shipping off to France with hundreds of other young men from southern Illinois. He served as a first class private in the machine gun company, 58^th Infantry, Fourth Division. “He was on his way to the front, and within the sound of the firing when the armistice was signed,” the Illinois State alumni magazine reported.

Instead of returning home, however, Taubeneck joined the faculty of a university that the American Expeditionary Forces organized during demobilization.

This will surely sound remarkable because nothing like it could happen today.

During World War I, the YMCA led an overseas educational program through which more than 300,000 American officers and soldiers studied French language, European geography and history, and other subjects “to gain an intelligent appreciation of the achievements and ideals of our allies and the great aims for which the allies were fighting.”

After the war, the YMCA handed off the program to the Army, and a special commission oversaw the creation of a campus and curriculum at Beaune, France. Nearly 10,000 soldiers – the sole requirement was a high school degree – attended classes there between March and June, 1919. The faculty of 300 included Taubeneck.

Eventually, he went home to Illinois and taught at his alma mater until a school superintendent in the New York City suburbs hired him as a high school teacher.  

Ignatius Taubeneck, 1920

Among the many things I.D. contributed to the community was his habit of prophecy. He would predict the results of presidential elections and major national and international events. Each prediction would be sealed and placed in a safe deposit box. 

By 1942, when The New Yorker wrote him up in “Talk of the Town,” Taubeneck had aced 57 major predictions and 83 minor ones.

He never bought a house, having grown up amidst farm foreclosures. Nearly every summer, Taubeneck told a reporter, he would travel around the country with his family, “trying to find out what people think, if anything.”

That sounds just about right for today.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/well-world-what-have-you-for-me-today.html?m=1