It was March 1, 1932, a balmy day in Princeton, New Jersey. I was seventeen, a high school student preparing to enter the university, where my father was a professor of military science and tactics.
The telephone rang, and it was an administrator at Princeton, informing my father that Col. Charles Lindbergh had just called to say that his infant son had been kidnapped. Lindbergh had said that his house in nearby Hopewell was full of police and many other people and had asked if the university could lend him ten or twelve cots to accommodate some of them. The administrator had turned to my father for help because he thought that the ROTC program might have some extra cots. This was indeed the case, and my father promised to send them over right away.
An earnest Corporal Boyd, a proficient truck driver but otherwise no competition for Albert Einstein (soon to be resident in Princeton), was directed to load all the available cots into a truck to be delivered to the Lindberghs. If the cots were to arrive in Hopewell that evening instead of Atlantic City or Philadelphia, a more astute presence was indicated. So I found myself in charge of Boyd and the truck and the cots.
Although Hopewell was only eight or ten miles from Princeton, I had never been there. After consulting a map, Boyd and I ventured out along a sparsely populated road into the black night. We arrived at our destination with only one wrong turn, which I assured Boyd was a planned shortcut. The sidewalks were already rolled up and the citizenry presumably snug in their beds, but we found a filling station open and got directions to the Lindbergh house, which was on top of a hill.
Coming around the last bend on the long, winding road, we emerged from the dark into a scene of utter confusion. Portable spotlights had been set up around the perimeter of the front yard, illuminating a swarm of men in various costumes: policemen of several descriptions, reporters with snapbrim fedoras and notebooks, and a considerable number of characters who seemed to have no purpose but to stand and gawk. Someone with an air of authority demanded to know what we wanted, and when we told him, he motioned to us to go into the house through the wide-open door.
We were greeted inside by Lindbergh himself. Although he looked haggard and distraught, he was the soul of courtesy, which I found remarkable under the circumstances. At his direction we began to carry the cots one by one up the stairs to the second floor. At the head of the stairs, in direct view from the landing, was the nursery, with toys spread around. What held me transfixed was the crib. A blanket was pulled back, and the depression made by a tiny body was clearly visible. The window was open, and the top of a ladder could be seen through it. Evidently the crime scene had been deliberately left untouched. I could hear Corporal Boyd catch his breath and mutter to himself, “Oh my God.”
We passed on with our first cot and set it up in a large room that seemed to be some sort of recreation area. Mrs. Lindbergh came to the doorway to see what we were doing. She did not speak but managed a tight little smile. Like her husband, she looked distraught. She was obviously making a valiant effort at self-control.
Lindbergh asked me if I wanted him to sign a receipt for the cots. In the haste of getting our expedition under way, no one seemed to have thought of preparing one. I realized that in the peacetime Army receipts in triplicate were necessary for anything and everything, and unless I obtained one, there could be repercussions all the way to Washington. On the other hand, I didn’t have the heart to force this grief-stricken father to wait while I wrote out something for him to sign. So I said that wouldn’t be necessary, and we departed. I must confess it occurred to me that a receipt signed by Lindbergh at such a time could be a valued souvenir, albeit a somewhat gruesome one, but I quickly put this unworthy notion behind me and we headed back to Princeton.
The following day one of the New York newspapers carried a story about a “mysterious visit by a machine gun truck which labored up the long hill to the Lindbergh house.” The only mysterious thing about that was, What is a machine gun truck?
—Thomas A. Parrott, a retired CM official, lives in Washington, D.C.
Miracle Drug
In 1943 I was a second-year medical student in Kansas City, enrolled in an accelerated program designed to finish the four-year course in three years. We had little or no time for recreation, but, thanks to a scheduling quirk, those in my section of the class suddenly found ourselves with two open weeks. I seized the opportunity to gain a bit of practical experience by accompanying some physician mentors on their rounds at a hospital back home in Wichita.
One of these doctors had admitted a patient with subacute bacterial endocarditis (an infection of the inside lining of the heart), who was doing very badly. Back then there was no treatment for this disease, and most hospitals had little to offer except supportive therapy: giving the patient fluids and trying to prevent bedsores.
Penicillin, discovered in England in 1928, had just recently become available in some quantity, but nearly the entire production was reserved for the military. A doctor in Boston controlled any release for civilian use, basing his decision on the drug’s suitability for a given patient’s diagnosis. The physician I was following called Boston and won approval for this treatment.
At that time penicillin remained potent for only a few days. Once a supply was released, a military plane had to fly it to the civilian recipient. As it happened, about the time the plane was landing at the airport, our patient died.
Penicillin had become more available, but nearly all of it was reserved for the military.
Another doctor with whom I was working had admitted a seventeen-year-old with cerebral spinal meningitis (an infection of the membrane covering the brain). He was not responding to treatment, and we expected him to die within a few hours, the usual course for that disease. It was already known, or strongly suspected, that the meningococcus bacterium causing this infection would be sensitive to the penicillin we now had at hand, which would soon be useless. We again called the doctor in Boston, and he agreed that we could use it for the young man.
By that time our patient was moribund, completely unresponsive, and barely breathing. We began to give him the antibiotic. In comparison with the doses used today, the amount administered was minuscule. But within six to eight hours the patient was sitting up in bed, drinking water from a glass, and talking to us. A few days later his physician released him from the hospital in good health. Even a second-year medical student appreciated that he had just witnessed a revolution in medicine.
I went on to practice obstetrics and gynecology for thirty-seven years. In this happy specialty there was not too much need for antibiotics, but the occasional pelvic infection did indicate their use. As the decades went by, the bacteria were less and less responsive to penicillin or to any other antibiotic, and the doses administered had to be greater and greater. If my memory serves, in that first case in 1943 we were administering two thousand units of penicillin every third hour. Now forty million units a day may not be effective.
After penicillin, scores of antibiotics were discovered and added to our pharmacopoeia. It is a catastrophe that my profession and we as a society have so misused these wondrous medicines as to let bacteria develop resistance. Unless research turns up new and more powerful drugs, we may find we are returned to the pre-antibiotic era, our doctors able to offer little more than fluids and narcotics for pain.
—J. G. Kendrick, M.D., is now retired from his medical practice. He lives in Wichita.
Presidential Spinach
Naturally I was excited at the prospect at having lunch at the White House with the President of the United States. Very few eleven-year-olds get to do that. I told my friends at Pelham Day School in New York, and they wanted to hear all about it when I got back.
The President was Herbert Hoover, a long-time associate of my father. It was after the 1932 election but before the inauguration of his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, that I traveled to Washington, along with my father, Perrin Galpin, and my older sister, Penny. At the White House we were ushered in to see President and Mrs. Hoover. My father shook hands, my sister curtsied, and, flustered, so did I.
There were just the five of us for lunch in some private dining room, and the menu had been specially chosen for children: spinach with a poached egg on top. I don’t remember what was talked about, but I suspect it was nothing important.
We returned to Pelham over the weekend, and on Monday I went back to school to tell my friends about my adventure. They were suitably impressed until one asked what we ate and I told them. With that, disaster. It seemed to them so unlikely that the White House would serve anything so lowly as spinach that they refused to believe that’s what we had eaten, or in fact that we had eaten there at all. They ridiculed me. I was crushed. I went home near tears.
My friends thought it unlikely that the White House would have served anything so lowly.
My parents shared my distress, and my father told the President about it. The result was prompt and the remedy complete. Mr. Hoover wrote me the letter opposite, enclosing with it a Washington’s Birthday bicentennial button.
—Stephen K. Galpin is a retired Wall Street Journal reporter and General Electric executive living in Connecticut.
Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history,” for which our regular rates will be paid on publication. Unfortunately, we cannot correspond about or return submissions.
