CHAPTER 17

Living in the hospital over a long period of years gives one a chance to pick up bits of knowledge that should enable the patient to rate himself as a first class quack, but a little previous learning is vital. In those good old days when the doctors still believed in being humane and saw nothing wrong in treating pain with narcotics, one of the boys was trying to hit the doctor up for a larger dose. This curious debate took place in the latrine as he was taking an enema. He insisted to the doctor that an increment was necessary. The doctor familiar with the patient’s background didn’t argue, but said that he couldn’t make up his mind about the dosage, which was given as either one thirty-second or one sixty-fourth of a grain. Pretending to give in with reluctance, he acceded to the patient’s demands that he give him the one sixty-fourth dose. When he was certain that he had placated my friend, the doctor walked past me, and whispered as he shook his fist at my face, “I’ll kill you if you ever teach him any mathematics.”
Sometimes the boys grew tired of fighting their disgust with cussing and throwing objects, and found that sarcasm was a fairly good form of a weapon. We had an orderly who was none too happy with his job or the people about him, so every time that he would be asked for something, he would reply, “Bug you.” If you threatened to raise hell he would counter with his own threat to “mash the button on ya”. The boys finally found that throwing pennies at him was the solution. He eagerly picked them up as he complied with their orders.
He wasn’t as bad as one of the other aides who didn’t object to work, but who had found out as he was about to give an enema to a new patient that the patient had a venereal disease. When we tried to convince him that it was not that easy to catch since the case was arrested he insisted that he didn’t care and that all he knew was that, if he had to catch the damned stuff he wanted to get it in the right way; even if it were from only giving her an enema.
We had our problems with the doctors, too, and they could come up with lulus. One evening as the boys were shooting craps on the pool table our resident, who incidentally also was in training as a missionary doctor, went up to the game, and asked the shooter who was hot and about to make his point if he had change for ten. Realizing the it was the doctor who was asking, and that he could very well be reporting the game and confiscating the dice, he stopped his roll to reach into his wallet for ten singles. The doctor in all sincerity said, “No, I need two nickels; I want to buy a coke,” and put a dime on the felt. The shooter wanted oh so terribly to curse him out, but he held back not so much that he was up against a doctor, but because he was facing a man of the cloth.
There were other games in our dayroom besides dice and pool, and one of them was shuffleboard of the sort found in any neighborhood pub. The boys in the chairs didn’t play it too frequently, but we always had overflow ambulatory patients from the other wards who enjoyed it. It was quite the fad until one evening when they were all of the common opinion that it was making them nervous and giving them diarrhea. It didn’t seem consistent with past records, but they felt that perhaps they were overdoing it, and it was catching up with them. They stopped the game, and decided that it was time to call it a night. The next day it was discovered that the entire hospital had enjoyed diarrhea. It seems that it was a case of bad food, and not bad playing.
We never had any complaints of that sort when movies were shown on the ward though it was not always possible to have them because of the shortage of personnel. We had been whittled down to one professional projectionist, and pretty hard up for entertainment when to our good fortune along came a volunteer photographer to form a photo club for the paraplegics. Since we already had an equipped dark room his job was not too difficult except that he didn’t receive the response from the boys that he had hoped for. He thought that if he brought a live model in to pose for us we would awaken, and find our club meetings most interesting. The following session he arrived with a tall, slender blonde. The news about what was going on at the photo club that day quickly spread throughout the paraplegic service. We soon had to move our lighting from the dark room to the dayroom, so that all the wheelchairs that had suddenly shown up with cameras could be accommodated. Some of us then managed to corner the model after the show for a few autographed pictures. I tried to make off with a color transparency of hers, but she put her foot down and said “No”.
Some of the boys held out tenaciously, and didn’t take any pictures or interest in her insisting that one of our nurses had her beaten for looks plus the other pleasant attributes that are so necessary to make up a female cadaver. It didn’t take long for them to retreat from their stands, for it was not too many months later that she started appearing on television under the name of “Roxanne”. The nurses were more than a bit on the catty side that afternoon, and didn’t approve of the stupid way that all the men crowded around that “alien blonde”.
Regardless of how those girls felt toward other members of their sex, we could not and would not share their opinions, and acting in this vein kept a constant eye out for anything in skirts or otherwise that might break the monotony or cause a little trouble. Those were the days when Veterans’ Administration still had a heart, and it showed it when it undertook to experiment and see if there were any way the boys who were suffering from paraplegia could procreate. They even held secret sessions in the latrine during which the boys with lower lesions tried their hands at masturbation using photographs of nude females from anatomy textbooks as a stimu1us.
There were also biopsies of the testicles taken to see if the sperm cells were still alive and kicking. The thought behind all this was heart-warming, for it struck where paraplegia hurt the most. A paraplegic is to be doomed to a lonely solitary existence, not so much because he can’t please a woman sexually, but because he cannot father her children. This is not redundant, but a bitter wrong. A woman’s greatest natural desire is to become a mother, not a sexual plaything, and if a means were ever devised that could overcome this barrier for the male paraplegic he could look forward not only to a long life as the doctors and modern antibiotics promise, but to a happy useful coexistence. Like all the other things that built up our hopes in the past this, too, died on the vine, and was never heard of again.
While we were trying to find a means to bring new life into the world we found ourselves occupied with a joker who believed that money was more important. About a year earlier this character had been an overflow patient on our ward, and then discharged with a clean bill of health. He didn’t accept his maximum hospital benefits’ discharge before he had taken in a complete picture of all the rights that service connected veterans were entitled to. He had arrived for the second time late one evening by ambulance claiming that he had become one of us. He came up with the story that he had backed into a lathe at work, and had aggravated an old spinal injury, which he had received in the service. There was only the Officer of the Day on duty that night to give him an examination. Before leaving, the doctor inserted a catheter into the patient’s bladder as he had complained of difficulty in voiding.
Anyone sitting on the sidelines for the next few days as the doctors made their rounds could hear their muffled curses as they grew determined to prove that he was faking. It was a stupid stunt, and only an ignorant person would have dared to try it, but he was determined to see what he could get away with not realizing that he had been discovered at practically the moment the doctors put two and two together to make zero, for that was his score.
He was tolerated for about a week when the news reached back to him that the only thing that he was going to receive from the government was a stiff jail sentence. The next morning the doctor found a letter on his desk that started “Dear Doc, to whom it may concern: Got a call from home, my baby is sick. Please excuse me.” He forgot to include the date of his return, which was just as well, for he never did.
Speaking of morons reminds me of the picture “The Men”, for it was about that time that it was released. It was supposed to be a story of a typical wartime paraplegic with Marlon Brando playing the hero. Right then and there he lost a fan, for I felt that he did our cause no good. He spoke like a simpleton, and most likely gave the susceptible public the impression that we all were. Not everyone agreed with me, but I do know that the picture played to near empty houses. The producers can never be accused of being moronic, for they released it in nineteen fifty-seven under the name of “Battle Stripe”. That show was a good lesson to the motion picture industry, for the public doesn’t want its dreams to be disturbed by stories about illnesses and disabilities. It goes to the theatre to be entertained; not to be reminded of the bitter facts of life. Why pay to see someone else’s miseries when you have your own cross to bear?
Movies being what they are can never include in their stories the little sometimes gruesome, sometimes humorous details that go into everyday hospital life. I could imagine what a stench would be raised by the public if it saw a picture that showed one of the boys wrapping a trombone around the neck of another. The popular public conception of paraplegics is that such a thing happening couldn’t be true, for we all were supposed to be in the same boat, and for survival had to stick together. Certainly we stuck together just like a knife does to someone’s back after it has been wildly inserted while the recipient wasn’t looking. You can beat a person back, but it doesn’t change his character or IQ no matter what the psychiatrists say.
The trombone incident was a friendly and mild one especially when compared to the shooting that took place down at Kennedy Hospital. Two boys got into an argument with a third. One of the paraplegics pulled the trigger of a war souvenir pistol as he pointed it at the third, but it didn’t go off. To save the day and possible embarrassment, his partner rolled over and showed him how to release the safety. He then properly re-aimed his gun, and hit the target right in the leg. It was a fortunate thing that the shot landed where it did, but the troubles it caused were almost heard around the world. Judge and jury are the things that the Hippocratic oath didn’t prepare doctors for, and they had quite a time meting out the proper punishment to those two invalids.
Comparing the hell we raised at Halloran with the stories that wandered into us about other paraplegic centers began to give me the feeling that Halloran was more like a rest home. Even our assistant charge nurse would back me up to that. She said that she had never been forced to kick a girl out of one of our patients’ beds as she did when she had worked at the tuberculosis ward at Van Nuys Hospital, California. I’m still a little mixed up as to whether that was a compliment to our TBs, or an insult. Of course, that couldn’t have been anywhere as insulting as when personnel put a male secretary into our doctor’s office.
There was a paradox that really hurt. Ours was a ward whose patients were mainly 1ove-hungry ex-dogfaces, and in the office was a cute male secretary. We were more tolerant of our male charge nurse, for paraplegia is a rough service, and calls for an iron hand. As an illustration though of how badly things could become, we would roll up behind him; run a hand up one of his legs, and say, “Oh, pardon me, wrong nurse.” The first few times we tried that stunt on him he became quite angry, but after a while he hardened to it; deciding that the best answer for us was to completely ignore our actions. What gimmick could be used on the sexy one in the sports jacket became more than a baffling problem. After awhile, though, we grew so accustomed to having this secretary around, it seemed to us as if he were part of the furniture. All relaxed and reconciled themselves to the “pretty one” save one of the boys who had been making time with one of the cuter nurses. He soon found that his true love was being purloined away by a healthy secretary. Many a time he could be heard saying to the guys who teased him about it that if he were up against a man he might be worried, but a secretary who was wearing trousers he could lick anytime.
We took time out from watching this love triangle to be entertained by Eddie Cantor and his troupe. I even took a few Kodachromes of his show. They would always come in handy during visiting hours when I’d say to my guests in an effort to keep the conversation from dragging in its usual manner, “Guess whom we had here last week?” Out came the pictures and another visitor was saved from lack of interesting things to talk about
When that didn’t work I always tried to recite the story of the latest death, which at that time was that of an e1derly patient who had gone home on leave only to be found dead on a side road by the New York State Police. The theories about how it had happened were plentiful, but with the use of pictorial gestures this tale could easily be worked into a dramatic production. Someone’s death is always treated as dull and routine event by the patients, but to the visitors from the outside it’s a horrible thing regardless if the patient died in the hospital or at Timbuktu.
During one of those visits one of my friends, who was aware of my difficulty in swallowing, brought in an article, which he had clipped out of Time magazine that described a surgical procedure for replacing a diseased esophagus with a plastic tube. I pinned the damn thing into my scrapbook where it remained for quite a few years until I was again to become desperate enough to want something radical done about my throat. The next time this same buddy came to see me he brought another clipping, only this time it was about another shooting. The scene has shifted from Memphis to Richmond, Virginia. The boys there were a little more deadly with their aim, and found themselves facing the police authorities, not the doctors. The question arose about how to imprison a wheelchair, but that was quickly settled when some bright soul remembered that prisons have hospital wards. Justice was swift and complete.
If that didn’t provide the diversion from dull conversation, which I had hoped it would, I could always recant the tale of the day that I went to the main building for an X-ray examination. We arrived there with at least a half hour to spare, so the ambulance driver decided to give me my appointment slip, and let me find my own way to the X-ray laboratory. And we had unloaded at the basement entrance my roll to the elevator naturally took me past the main kitchen. It was a hot summery day, and in a futile attempt to rid themselves of some of the heat, the kitchen crew had left the door slightly ajar.
That was all that was needed to permit the food odors to fill the corridor. Following the aroma I soon found myself gazing intently through the open doorway at the beehive of activity within. I hadn’t been but a few moments when a chef who was standing not too far inside and busily dicing some meat said, “How are you?” “Fine,” I replied, knowing all along there was not a thing he could have done if I had said the opposite. Physically, I had no pains, but my curiosity was killing me, and so I added, “What are you making today?” Turning his head half way towards me, and looking very proud he responded, “Chicken salad.” That was the last reply I ever expected to hear, so quickly I shot back at him, “That’s the biggest chicken I’ve ever seen in my life.” He had an answer to that, but he wasn’t as proud as before when he said as he pointed to the meat that he had been so systematically chopping up. “That ain’t chicken; it’s pork.” With that bit of culinary wisdom bouncing in my brain I decided that the time had arrived for me to go and have my X-ray completed.
The coming of spring gave our minds a respite from crime and cooks until they were replaced in a new form, namely the Korean War, which started shortly after that. For awhile there things had looked pretty dim; there had been no war for five years, and the number of service-connected paraplegics with maximum rights was rapidly diminishing. In the true spirit of the Communist Party, a new factory to produce paraplegics had been opened, and all our fears were allayed. It wasn’t too long before the first shipment of broken backs and necks was to arrive.
Actually, before the human carnage could be sent on its homeward journey, someone had to pick up the pieces and put them into a condition that would permit them to stay alive long enough for them to complete the trip. This called for nurses, and a pretty one of ours who also happened to be a redhead became patriotic and decided to enlist. There is an old quotation that states “Boys will be boys,” but it fails to mention how old the boys are. Where there are boys naturally there are girls, some of whom can be quite attractive as was this young redhead. On the evening before her resignation was to be turned in she was working shift (evening tour of duty), and found herself alone in our isolated building with fifty men in wheelchairs. It was not only her last tour of duty with us; it was her last day as a civilian nurse.
One of the boys suddenly hit upon a brilliant thought and shouted, “Let’s buy her uniform from her. She won’t need it anymore, it’s mufti.” Twenty dollars was quickly raised by a collection, and she was told to take the uniform off so that we could give her the money. The idea so appealed to everyone that nobody’s arm had to be broken to force him to make a donation. She answered our offer with a silly idea about bringing the uniform to us the next day, and then collecting the money. The majority of the boys felt that this was poor businessmanship and were adamant about closing the deal. One thing that we had learned from the great leaders of our age was that if you want something from someone and he won’t give it to you, then you must take it. That is the true path to greatness.
Keeping up the standards of these fine men who put us in our wheelchairs, we went after the uniform without bothering to make any further formal announcements. You won’t believe it, but that girl started to run like hell! It took the fifty of us in our slowly moving wheelchairs almost a half hour to corner her. I couldn’t tell whether or not she blushed, for redheads can be confusing, especially at night. The uniform came off despite her heart-rending pleas. She was a heavenly creature standing there in her civilian pink, and a little too exciting for one of the boys to resist.
Ironically, he too, was a redhead, and as he made a ferocious lunge for her he shouted, “Come on gang; let’s finish the job.” During the short interlude she backed herself up into a prefabricated linen closet. It was a makeshift affair that had been set up by the Army during the big war and consisted of nothing but fence work and a wooden gate with a lock. Though not too many of us could enter into the closet at the same time, we could all see into it. We tried to convince our hotheaded redhead that we had seen enough for one night, and that discretion was the better part of valor. The simple creature unfortunately didn’t know what the word meant. Perhaps the truth of it was that the rest of us were just plain yellow, for we stood by, leaving the two of them to enjoy each other’s company.
Male red went after female red as we all sat back to watch the performance. Our boy should have known better than to pick on a redhead, for she quickly sent him to his doom in a most embarrassing fashion. Spotting a gallon ceramic pitcher that happened to be standing on a linen shelf, our young heroine exerted herself, and bashed it down upon his head. To the floor he went taking his hot blood and moment of glory with him. Though quite possibly our hero might nave been hurt by the blow, we couldn’t stop rolling with laughter. The odds were all female that night, for there was an escape window in the corner of the closet. Since ours was a ground-floor building, she faced no problem in opening the window and jumping out to safety, but not without first locking the closet door.
During the confusion, we had forgotten that we did not know where the key to the gate was kept, and since the nurse was no longer inside the building with us, we could not ask her even if we thought she would tell us. We were left with no alternative but to roll away and leave our fallen redheaded idol yelling in the middle of his pile of rubble and ruin. A short time later our sweet young thing returned to the ward replete with a new uniform and a fresh coat of war paint. She was even prettier with clothes on, but no matter how many sweet nothings we tried to whisper into her ears, she just couldn’t remember where the key to the gate had been left. She convinced us that if the matter were to be dropped and considered in the spirit of good clean fun, it would be best for all of us to go promptly to bed. It’s hell taking orders from females, but since it was her last night we obeyed.
The Korean conflict brought other changes with it, including the closing of the paraplegic section of the Saint Albans Naval Hospital to veterans. The Defense Department had to make room for the new carnage from the Korean battlefields. Most of the exiles from Saint Albans found their way to Halloran Hospital, and soon became an integral part of the scenery. These patients from Saint Albans didn’t know it, but they had been preceded sometime before by a boy who, ironically, had been refused admittance to their hospital.
He was sick as a dog, as the trite expression goes, though he was only twenty years old. He had been first refused admittance to Saint Albans Hospital right after his discharge from the Navy because the doctors there couldn’t find anything physical wrong with him despite his complaints in having difficulty in walking. It wasn’t much later that he came into Halloran completely unable to walk because his chest and back were full of tumorous cancers. Everybody is nice to a dying man and more so to a dying youngster. I soon found myself making two or three trips a week to town with his dad in my car to purchase a supply of Chinese egg rolls with which to keep him happy. We made the proprietor of the restaurant quite happy too.
All fathers like Bobby’s father want the best for their children, and have upon more than one occasion gone to the poorhouse in so doing, so that their dying offspring might remain a little longer in this sadistic world, or spend their dying days with a little happiness. Bobby’s last days were brightened by the fact that he knew that his dad had bought for him a new hand-control Oldsmobile complete with all the trimmings. It was more than a pretty picture to Bobby as he gazed at it from his bedroom window; it was to him as it sat there on the parking lot his symbol of hope, recovery, and eventual return to life. The thought that the elements on our oceanfront island were slowly and day by day destroying his dream never entered his pain-tortured mind.
Bob’s dad may have gone a little further than most parents in expending his financial reserves to keep his dying child happy, but he was not faced with the God-awful financial problem that the parent of a civilian paraplegic must. This dilemma also presents itself to the parent of any veteran paraplegic who has not been able to have his child admitted to one of the Veterans’ Administration’s Paraplegic Centers immediately after his being injured.
A few of us were sitting in the nurse’s office one afternoon when the father of a newly admitted patient walked in, and said to everyone’s surprise as he put his hand into his pocket to reach for his wallet, “Is this where you pay for the patient’s rubbing alcohol and other supplies?” His words quickly knocked a hole in our festive conversation, and everyone in his chair tried to beat the nurse in telling the poor man that the financial burden which his son’s illness had brought was at an end by shouting, “Mister, nobody ever pays for any kind of supplies in a Veterans’ hospital.” As he slowly withdrew his hand from his pocket a slight smile started to break out all over his worry-marked face. That emblem of joy lasted but a minute when his hand reached into another pocket for his handkerchief. He quickly did an awkward about-face, and slowly walked from the room, as he wiped his nose. He was crying for joy, and was too bashful to permit anybody to see it. At last he could go to bed at night without being haunted by the awful thought that his boy would be neglected because his father was not a rich man.
The summers in New York are as a rule fairly beautiful, but to a paraplegic cruel, for they leave too quickly. I had to do more than just make hay as the sun shined, for in those few decent months of nineteen fifty, I was determined to locate a building lot in Yonkers, New York on which I could erect a Public Law 702 home. This was my first experience with small town politicians, and I was what they were looking for. A Gold Star father friend of mine had gone to the Yonkers Common Council, and convinced it to give paraplegics its surplus land at twenty percent of assessed valuation instead of at the forty percent at which it was offered to the general public. I had to wait but a short while when I was ready to present my selection before the real estate liquidation officer.
During my interview with him in his office at Yonkers City Hall, he asked me how was it that I could possibly afford to build a decent home? I foolishly let down my guard, told him the truth, and took him into my confidence. My future visits to Yonkers suddenly were bitterly disappointing when, for some strange and unexplained reason, he had run out of choice building sites. When I protested that it just didn’t make sense for all that land to go so quickly, he took me under his fatherly wing and said that I wasn’t to worry, for he knew of a fellow who could give me a bargain on a lot for about four or five thousand dollars. He was doing this as a favor to me only because I was one of the boys, and nothing was too good for the boys. Ironically, but fortunately I became ill, and never obligated myself. Many months were to pass before I was again able to resume my fruitless search.
Speaking of homes brings us to the tale of the paraplegic who had been shacking up with a broad in a beachfront house on Staten Island. He had been living it up, and having a good time on beer, hot dogs, hamburgers, and her body when apparently he became seriously ill. This complication put a serious damper on the festivities, so when his lady friend discovered that his illness was more than she could handle she decided that it would be wisest from her point of view to abandon him to the elements.
The elements, fortunately for him, were on his side, for shortly thereafter the area in which he was living was inundated by a hurricane. As a matter of routine police and fire units inspected all the homes in the disaster area. It was then that he was found in his rundown shack unshaven and unkempt lying in a bed that was almost mattress deep in water. He was quickly brought to the hospital, and placed on the critically ill list. As God that day was not taking care of the drunks and little children it was up to the nurses and aides. They managed to scrub the dirt and grime from his foul-smelling body, but no matter how sincerely they pleaded, he would not accede to their demands that he permit them to shave him.
It was right about that time that a new nurse reported for duty on the ward, and upon seeing him lying there with his fully bearded face approached the aide whom we had come to call Big Stoop, and said as she pointed at the emaciated figure, “Is he Amish?” Big Stoop stopped in his tracks, scratched his head, and replied, “Gee, I don’t know, I always thought he was a regular type of paraplegic. With that gem of wisdom resonating in her ears there was no getting any real work out of her for the rest of the day.
The summer months didn’t go to waste at the hospital either, and many recreational activities were scheduled for both personnel and patients though of course professional protocol was never violated by integrating the two. Unfortunately ours was an outdoor swimming pool limiting its use to the summer months, but the weather held in our favor with a full season being enjoyed by all. Time was even found to put on a few aqua shows, which is common practice in all Veterans’ Hospitals, equipped with pools. It was to our advantage to have the pool directly along side of our building, and though I had to be dragged on my Stryker frame over the grass to the pool fence that surrounded it I could while away many happy hours basking in the sun as I watched our flat-chested nurses perform aquatically.
During the war years Bing Crosby had been instrumental in raising the money that was needed to build the pool, but he didn’t stay around long enough to see what sizes and shapes were going to occupy it. Upon thinking it over no one could possibly blame him, for he had made enough of a sacrifice.
When we became tired of the pool there was always the patio in back of our building to lie in for the boys didn’t play ball every day. Halloran, being the beautiful piece of hospital engineering that it was, was built with doors that were wide enough to permit a bed to roll through them without any effort or jockeying. There was no excuse for spending the summers indoors, and sooner or later everyone developed a healthy suntan.
For those of the personnel who didn’t care for frolicking in the water there was also the patio to which they were welcome, and which they too could use as a source of amusement or rest. To make the picture even more complete they were provided with chaise lounges; making it an unusual thing to see a nurse go directly home at quitting time. Life was pleasant and carefree, giving no one an excuse to think of the world outside or its troubles. To top off these salubrious afternoons the female aide whom the boys frequently referred to as “Mom” saw to it that all were well supplied with lemonade or iced tea according to their likings.
To be certain that war in Korea was still on, but we like the rest of the nation save for a few parents were too busy enjoying ourselves to be concerned with what the “police” were doing. Our joy naturally couldn’t last forever, but it wasn’t the war that upset it. Some one started a rumor going around that the hospital was to be closed with all our remaining buildings finally reverting back to New York State control. It may at that time have been only fictitious, but it was also the handwriting on the wall. With the summer almost gone we ignored the stormy petrel, and crawled back into our snug holes to prepare for the change of seasons with the holidays that were to follow.
In previous years at Christmas time the New York Journal American sponsored a drive to raise funds to enable it to present each of the boys at the hospital during the holidays a brand new ten-dollar bill. It was always given in an envelope that was beautifully decorated with an engraved picture of the Purple Heart medal. These Purple Heart Gifts as they were called were presented with a great deal of fanfare and publicity. One year the paper even had Santa Claus deliver the envelopes by helicopter directly to the hospital. All of the letters of course were registered and had to be delivered directly to the patients by the mail clerk.
A picture of a mail clerk handing out an envelope to a hospitalized patient is by no means news, and so that year our chaplains went along to make the deliveries personally. I don’t know how I was dragged into it, but the next day’s newspaper carried a picture of me between two chaplains in their long black robes with me shaking hands with one of them as he handed me that beautiful envelope with his left hand. My mother heard about that from the entire neighborhood. The full story of how the gifts were presented went a little further than that, for the ten dollar bills that year were reserved for the boys who had actually been wounded in service. The patients who were non-service connected received five-dollar bills with much less notoriety.
Not all the gifts brought into the Veterans’ Hospitals during those post-war Yuletide seasons were in the form of money, or as useful as money. Quite often well-meaning people still remembering the war and its wartime shortages as had been advertised on billboards sent in candy and cakes. It wouldn’t have been too bad if this type of gift had been restricted to a few well wishers, but during that particular year it seemed to be the vogue. Not to be outdone by the healthy world outside, every year we made up our own collections, the proceeds of which were used to buy clothing for the children at the Tuberculosis Hospital on Staten Island. That year an innovation was added, and a huge box was passed around to the patients into which they tossed all the candies and goodies that they didn’t want. I can proudly say that ninety-five percent of everything received went into the box, for it was delivered to the Children’s Hospital completely filled.
The employees of the local Westinghouse Electric plant didn’t forget us either that year, and presented us each with a beautifully boxed pipe and lighter. It prompted one of the boys to remark, “Gee, look a gift just as good as the ones they used to give out during the real war; ain’t that a pleasant surprise?” That wasn’t the only surprise, for at the end of the Yuletide season and with the coming of nineteen fifty-one came our biggest; a genuine bombshell.
I had been planning many occupational therapy projects for the New Year, and storing up supplies for them at my own expense to be certain that I wouldn’t be caught in any G.I. red tape. The day that my largest shipment arrived (a load of aluminum rods for turning on a lathe) we received the real surprise package for nothing.
None other than Doctor Arthur Abrahamson who is known around the country for his work in physical medicine, and because he was also a paraplegic brought us the glad tidings. The Veterans’ Administration had decided that Halloran Hospital had outlasted its usefulness, and the time to foreclose on the dear old homestead had definitely arrived. Abe (as I always called him) being the showman he always has been gathered us all into the large ward with our manager Doctor Upshur. Pushing himself into the center of the ward he then called for attention, and began his carefully prepared speech. (We called it “sentence”.)
Frankly I didn’t hear too much of what he said, for I was too disheartened to listen. He told a story about the Air Force needing Sampson Base, which New York State was then using as a hospital for its mentally retarded children, and how the state in order to continue caring for its charges was forced to ask the Federal Government to return the remainder of its buildings here at Halloran.
To this news nobody said very much, but Doctor Abrahamson invited us all to ask him questions. The big question naturally was “Where do we go from here?” He gave us a rhetorical answer, which never held completely true. The service-connected patients were, according to the law, supposed to have the highest priority and could be transferred to any paraplegic center in the nation at Government expense. The non-service connected patients would have to take their choice of either the McGuire Hospital at Richmond, Virginia, or the now defunct Cushing Hospital at Framingham, Mass.
I don’t think the Government meant to be sarcastic, but only the service connected could be admitted to disreputable Bronx Veterans’ Administration hospital. The choice was plain enough leaving only the service connected the opportunity to remain in the metropolitan area near their loved ones. The non-service connected gave us all Bronx cheers to which they added “Top Priority to a
Pigpen”. They didn’t have to say anymore as we were with our backs to the wall, and we knew it. Some brave soul then foolishly said, “Let’s fight it!”, and fight we did. Letters to representatives, senators, and all sorts of abortive attempts to reach the local newspapers with our plight were made. The Hearst Publications had racked up a fairly impressive but unsuccessful record in their attempt to keep the Van Nuys Veterans’ Hospital open in California making them the logical ones to go to. It was no secret to us that Hearst’s policy of anti-vivisection was detrimental to us, but we also knew that he was anti-democratic party and Harry Truman was running the big show that year. We unhappily overlooked the fact that those newspapers had a more sincere interest in dogs than in human beings or paraplegics, and decided that the ends would justify the means. They took a slight interest in our case, but somehow we just didn’t measure up to the dogs and rats.
Whenever a Veterans’ Administration facility closes it is customary to take some of its employees away from their norma1 duties, and organize them into a temporary police force. This was done in the closing days of Halloran in a futi1e attempt to stop the pillaging and looting that accompany the news of a shutdown such as ours. It would have been stupid to uniform these pseudo guards for a few months’ duty, so they were provided with armbands as a means of identification. The efforts of these makeshift policemen might have been more effective save for the fact that these guards took their roles as seriously as would have Keystone cops. The whole thing soon turned into a complete farce when many of the patrolman themselves were discovered amongst the looters by their superiors.
As the only way our guards could be identified was by the white arm bands that they were wearing on their left arms a quick loosening of the knots that held them left these so-called cops with no problem in disappearing, and melting into a crowd of visitors. The simplicity with which the arm bands could be discarded was a great boon, for when a guard would discover a patient with a bottle of “firewater,” he would slyly slip the band into his pocket and quietly sit down to help the guilty culprit orally destroy the evidence. It was no secret that even in those closing days booze was verboten on Government reservations, but they always managed to sit closely enough to a window to observe the passing traffic in order to have ample warning in case someone came along who didn’t approve of their method of keeping warm during those bitter cold January days. Our fight to survive was even carried to Albany where Thomas Dewey, the famous crime buster and presidential candidate, was our governor. The word eventually came down to us that he wasn’t too sympathetic to veterans, and it would be best to take our troubles elsewhere.
While we were losing our fight to keep “Dear Old Halloran” over our heads Bobby O’Rourke was losing his battle to remain in this demented world. He no longer requested that I make those treks into town with his dad for egg rolls. The only things he could think of were hypodermic injections, and with good reason. The cancer had eaten into his lungs and chest, and was finally crushing his vital organs. He didn’t have to endure the torture for too many weeks as the mercies of death soon overtook him, and he gave up the ghost.
He left this so-called world just in time, for the tremendous doses of narcotics that he had been receiving had lost their euphoric effect; besides, he could always boast to the paraplegic angels in heaven that he had gone out like a fighting “Irishman.” No one could ever say that the Government had forced him to move from Halloran, for truly he left of his own volition.
Every hospital has its mortuary department, and Halloran Veterans’ hospital was no exception. The only difference was when our undertaker came to pick up Bobby’s body he frightened everyone who saw hlm. His working outfit consisted of a light tan gown, and a pair of rubber gloves. Without any formal introduction or description each one who spotted him made some sort of a remark to the effect as to how he looked as if he had just walked into the ward out of a Boris Karloff movie. One character remarked as he rolled over to the charge nurse to tell him of this man’s presence, “There’s a real ghoul in your office, and I think he’s come for Bobby’s corpse though I wouldn’t trust a dead kid with anybody who looked like him.”
I was always fond of the lad, and though I had been invited to many a wake, for I’ve seen many a paraplegic die, his was the only funeral that I have ever been to. There was a pretty creature at the wake who in those last few torturous months had nursed Bobby, and who was always after him to pay more attention to his grooming. It was more of a diversion than a criticism, for she understood that the hell that he had gone through had destroyed any sense of pride which he may have had in cleanliness or personal decor. The first remark that she made as she entered the funeral parlor and spotted Bobby lying there in his open coffin with his best suit on was, “My, doesn’t he look handsome.” I then thought to myself; “These damn undertakers do a damn sight better job than the doctors.” I had to agree with her; Bobby truly looked better in death than he did in life.
Occasionally a piece of brass breaks off and manages to wander away from the Veterans’ Administration Main Office in Washington, D. C. to stroll around the country to see what its little molecules are doing. On one such a happy day a “Miss Wheeler” who was then the Chief Nurse of the entire Veterans’ Administration Hospital System, decided to make such a sortie, and included Halloran in her tour of inspection. My building was also on her itinerary, and when she arrived I managed to pull one of the nurses aside to make her tell me why everybody, including the manager and our own Chief Nurse, was so nice to the un-uniformed stranger who was so casually strolling through our building.
When my informant told me what I had suspected a thought hit me. This woman must surely know Doctor Saruit the former manager of Kennedy Hospital in Memphis who had been transferred to Washington while I was still a patient there. Waiting for the opportune moment when the protective line, which had formed about her by our “little wheels”, thinned out a bit I rolled over, and to her said, “Pardon me, but I understand that you are from Washington. Do you know a Doctor Spruit?” With that I thought the manager, our Chief Nurse, and all the other assembled apple polishers present would most certainly keel over dead, for she immediately turned to me and said, “You mean Uncle Charlie?”, and ran her fingers through my hair.
I spent the next few minutes explaining to her about the pleasant hours Doctor Spruit had spent with the paraplegics in Memphis when he had been at Kennedy, and before she left she promised to give him my best. I felt a little sorry for our local personnel as they had been quite shaken up by what she had said and done. Brass is made of flesh and bone the same as you and I. The only difference between myself and the brass was that I pulled a boner. It had never occurred to me to speak to her about enlisting her to aid in our effort to keep Halloran open, which was something we all wanted to do so dearly.
An army that intends to advance into new territory always sends out scouts to feel out the situation and reconnoiter the terrain as the expression in the infantry school goes, and we were no exception. There was a woman from New Jersey who did volunteer work in the hospital, and of whom we were all fond despite her being twenty years the senior of any of us. She made a trip to Kingsbridge Hospital on her own, but came back with horrid tales of how stuck-up its personnel were, and how she had been instructed that during cigarette distribution she was not to stop or converse with any of the patients. This naturally helped our hearts drop a little lower, but decided that as good strategists we couldn’t let a woman’s opinion sway us. We held a tete-a-tete, and decided that it would be best if one of our own examined our new home personally, so we chose one of our more able-bodied members to be the second scout.
His favorite expression during the course of most of his conversations was “well”, but when he returned to Halloran after making his reconnaissance he could only mutter “Hell” as we crowded around and questioned him. We tried to have the nurse give him a hypodermic or some other form of sedation to bring him back to life, but she was in no mood to cooperate. After awhile the fresh Staten Island air snapped him out of it, and he related his sorry tale. “It’s too small there; how can those people live in such tiny quarters?”
Though Staten Island is a part of New York City it never appeared to us in that manner, for it was very rare that a building which was more than three stories in height could be seen on the Island, and we became accustomed to the sight of green grass along with the feeling of freedom that accompanies the aroma of chlorophyll. We knew that once we had allowed ourselves to be transferred to “Base Eighty-One,” our country club days were over. It was round-up time, and the Veterans’ Administration was gathering up its last strays to ship off to the market of reality. There was nothing in the world that we could do about it.