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