The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  At five o’clock, Nurse Leroux arrived at the Callander bus station. Dr. Dafoe explained the case as he drove her up the road to the Dionne farm. “Dr says Quintuplets—I had never dreamed of such a word,” she marveled to her diary.

  “Do whatever you can,” Dafoe advised her; “keep them warm and keep them quiet. Feed them sterilized water drop by drop from an eyedropper. Try to keep them alive. Do your best and I’ll be with you as much as I can.”

  “To this day I don’t recall a thing about the drive to the Dionne farm. I must have been in a daze,” Nurse Leroux wrote later. “I will never forget the picture that met my eyes in that farmhouse—five incredibly tiny creatures in a butcher’s basket, covered with a white blanket that smelled of moth balls.” They had no names yet, only the labels A, B, C, D, and E on their diapers, wrappings, and the pads of cotton batting they slept upon.

  The conditions were daunting, supplies almost nonexistent. No telephone, water, heat, or electricity. More than once, Nurse Leroux made note of the dingy farmhouse—“no decent dishes, no screens, doors, or cleanliness”—perhaps unaware that Elzire Dionne had been too gravely unwell for the past two weeks to keep up with her chores. A scrawled daybook entry from Nurse Leroux’s first twenty-four hours on the Dionne case gives a sense of the overwhelming task before her:

  What have I here—

  Quintuplets (and a mother)—

  premature—7 mon

  Rickety—

  Hungry—about 3 drops fill them to the top—

  Mosquitos—dirt—flies—and neighbors—

  Nothing except above

  oh-oh

  Yvonne Leroux sat up all night long, feeding, warming, and reminding the babies to breathe. They were acutely sensitive to temperature. Too cold and they went blue around the nostrils, their breaths speeding to a fearful rate, while too much heat made them flush and struggle for air. Nurse Leroux had brought her own hot-water bottle, which had to be rotated among the five babies and constantly refilled from a pot on the wood stove. “The largest seems to have difficulty holding her own—was anxious several times—turns blue,” she recorded. “The littlest one seems all right. She breathes, looks good, and seems satisfied to just live. 2nd largest holds her own splendidly, two next were very hungry—cried more than others.” Their voices were so small and weak, Nurse Leroux could hardly distinguish between the babies’ cries and the whine of the mosquitoes circling her legs.

  Dr. Dafoe’s telephone woke him at 5:30 a.m. Considering that it was his fifty-first birthday, he might have indulged himself and rolled over, but he did not. He had given instructions to be notified if “one or two” of the Dionne babies died.

  Instead, it was long-distance—Chicago. Harry Reutlinger, assistant city editor of the Chicago American newspaper, was on the line with a torrent of questions: Were the babies still alive? What chances did they have of surviving? How was the mother? And the father?

  The moment that conversation ended, another ring rattled the telephone. Now it was the New York Journal with the same barrage of questions. Dafoe had just gotten back to bed when the phone rang once more. Chicago again, a Dr. Bundesen this time, wanting to know if the babies were alive. When Dafoe answered yes, as far as he knew the babies were still living, Bundesen said he didn’t believe it. Dafoe’s temper sparked. He told Bundesen he could go to hell and hung up.

  Dr. Dafoe didn’t make it up the stairs before the ringing started all over. Bundesen had called back. This time he introduced himself properly: Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, commissioner of the Board of Health of Chicago, expert in premature babies. How could he help with “these marvelous Quintuplets”? What did Dafoe need?

  Need? Dafoe said he needed everything. “There was nothing in the house to work with—except babies.”

  For the next thirty minutes, Dr. Dafoe stood barefoot in his nightshirt while Bundesen told him what the Dionne babies would require to survive. Breast milk, for starters. Dafoe informed him that Elzire Dionne had never been able to nurse her children for more than a few days; even if she had, she hardly stood a chance of nourishing five babies single-handedly. The health commissioner cleared that hurdle instantly—if Dafoe couldn’t get any mother’s milk, Bundesen would have some flown in.

  The other critical factor, Bundesen counseled, was warmth. The temperature in that house must not drop below 85 degrees. What they needed was an incubator. Dafoe agreed, but the problem was bigger than simply shipping one in. An incubator wasn’t any good without electricity, and the Dionne farm was two miles from the nearest electrical current.

  Dr. Bundesen had no immediate solution to that quandary. Maybe, he suggested, they could make do with hot-water bottles. “And good luck, and God bless ’em all,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Nurse Leroux met Dr. Dafoe at the door when he arrived at the Dionne farm a little after seven that morning.

  “How they doin’?” Dafoe asked. The young woman was “hollow-eyed and worn from her long night’s vigil, but there was a look of triumph on her face.”

  “They’re still alive,” she said. “I thought some of them wouldn’t make it—but they have.” The news defied every bit of medical history Dafoe knew.

  The doctor went into the bedroom and peeked under the wool blanket covering the basket-crib. All of them were breathing, just as Yvonne Leroux had promised. “Bien, très bien,” he said to Elzire. Good. Very good. It was almost all the French he knew.

  Elzire spoke rapidly to him. Nurse Leroux translated. Would they live? Would they be all right? Wasn’t it a miracle of the Blessed Virgin herself?

  Dafoe didn’t promise much as he examined her. For Elzire he ordered nothing more than rest, and plenty of it. As for the babies, if they were going to insist on living, it was time to give them something to eat. They could not be made to wait for Dr. Bundesen’s promised breast milk. Dafoe improvised a formula of seven ounces of cow’s milk, twenty ounces of sterilized water, and two spoonfuls of corn syrup. His instructions to Nurse Leroux consisted mostly of his specialty: common sense. “Give them this from the eyedropper every two hours. Keep the babies warm at all costs.” They were not to be handled more than once a day, and must be left in a position so they could breathe easily.

  What about the sinking spells, Nurse Leroux wanted to know, when they seemed to forget to breathe? Dafoe didn’t have a ready answer, but he wasn’t stumped for long. Rum was the thing, he decided—one or two drops mixed with ten drops of water. Whenever one of the little mites turned blue around the mouth and nose, he ordered, give her a drop or two of this “cocktail.”

  Feeding them proved a tedious, painstaking process. Their mouths were too tiny and weak to suck from anything bigger than an eyedropper. Swallowing seemed to exhaust them. Two droppersful constituted a meal, but squeezing out more than a droplet at a time risked smothering them. By the time the fifth baby had finished her ration, the first was mewling for her turn again.

  And then of course they must be changed and bathed. “Well, these tiny little bits of humanity must be cleaned,” Nurse Leroux mused. “Kitchen stove best place, I guess. Paraphernalia: a saucer of olive oil, some soft rags, larger pieces of the cleanest and warmest cloths I can find, boracic acid, and a prayer.”

  Nurse Leroux shooed everyone from the kitchen and placed the basket full of newborns in front of the open oven door. The temperature in the room, she guessed, was 100 degrees. Balancing each baby on her knee, she daubed their nearly transparent skin with warm olive oil rather than soap. “Babes fought against the exposure—wouldn’t be surprised if they did live,” she wrote that night.

  From the beginning, Nurse Leroux was adamant that the little girls possessed the mettle to survive in spite of their almost terrifying appearance. One early observer called them “scrawny, spider-legged, horrible, yellow, pot-bellied specks of half-humanity.” Dr. Dafoe
was more succinct. Asked what the newborns looked like, he replied, “Like rats.”

  * * *

  —

  No one except Yvonne Leroux expected the babies to live, but Oliva Dionne could think of nothing else during those first stupefying hours. If they did make it, how would he support ten children, feed them, clothe them? You did not have to be a doctor to see that these newest five were going to need a great deal of costly medical care. He had been getting by without government relief payments, but just barely. And there was still $3,000 to pay off on the farm. All Oliva could do was pray for guidance.

  The babies were just over twenty-four hours old when a potential answer to those prayers arrived. “Green the Greek,” a Callander shopkeeper, pulled up to the Dionne farm in Georges Leroux’s taxicab at around eleven o’clock on the morning of May 29. A long-distance telephone call had come to his store for Oliva, Green explained, all the way from Chicago. Oliva listened as Green relayed a bewildering message; then he went inside to speak to his wife.

  “Green’s come out here from Callander with a message from a Chicago promoter by the name of Spear,” Oliva began. According to Green the Greek, Ivan Spear had proposed that Oliva bring their quintuplets to Chicago, to display them at the World’s Fair, seven hundred miles away. In exchange for letting the public view the babies, Spear was promising fabulous sums of money, as well as expert medical care.

  Elzire shuddered at the idea. Yet she realized the bind Oliva was in. He was “frantic with worry,” she could see. “The thought of exhibiting the babies was abhorrent to Oliva. On the other hand, the realization that he was unable to give them the expensive care we both knew they would require was maddening.”

  Oliva Dionne got into his car and followed Green the Greek down to Callander to hear for himself what Spear had to say.

  * * *

  —

  Oliva was still in town when the first newsreel cameramen found their way to the Dionne farm. Crews from two different companies arrived almost simultaneously—one by way of Michigan, the other from Montreal. Ross Beesley of Associated Screen News was among them.

  “We knocked on the door but Miss Leroux, the nurse, told us that Mr. Dionne wasn’t at home,” he remembered. “So we sorta stood around in the front yard and then this car drove up and it was Dr. Dafoe—roly-poly little fella—and he said, ‘Oh, you want to see the children? Come on in.’ And there were the five little rascals crosswise in a basket.” Dafoe was just telling the cameramen he didn’t expect the babies to last until the next day when the door flew open.

  It was Oliva, back from Father Routhier’s house, where he’d gone to seek his priest’s advice about the Chicago proposal. “He says, ‘Get out, Get out, Get out!’ ” Beesley recalled. “And he started bawling out Dr. Dafoe for letting us in. So we got out.”

  Oliva panicked and bolted from the farmhouse. The eager newsreel crews all piled into one car and followed him back to town, setting up their tripods on Routhier’s lawn. “We thought we had him nailed down for sure,” Beesley said.

  “Will you fellas please go away and leave Mr. Dionne alone?” Father Routhier implored. The men wouldn’t budge. It was a public street, they retorted.

  The standoff lasted another thirty minutes while the cameramen watched Oliva through a window, tripods at the ready. Finally, Oliva made a dash for his car. “He couldn’t get the car started—looked very excited, and we were cranking away by the side door there when he finally backed away,” Beesley said of his triumphant moment.

  When Beesley’s footage played in theaters, it was edited to fool moviegoers into believing that the close-up of Oliva’s startled face had been captured just after his five daughters were born. When Mr. Dionne heard the news, the movie said, this was his reaction.

  It would not be the first, nor the last, joke at Oliva Dionne’s expense.

  * * *

  —

  The newsreels were not the only ones scrambling to get in on the story from Callander. When Charlie Blake of the Chicago American walked into his editor’s office around ten o’clock that same morning, his boss told him, “Dig up an old-fashioned baby incubator somewhere, Charlie. It’s for those five kids up in Ontario, and it’s got to be run by something besides electricity.”

  The assignment wasn’t exactly Charlie Blake’s style. Word was that he had dined with Chicago’s most notorious criminal, Al Capone, and carried a wallet pulled from the corpse of a gangster. Nevertheless, Blake realized that those Canadian babies had the potential to shape up into a human-interest story the likes of which had never been told before. As long as all five survived, that is. If even one of them gave out, there would be no quintuplet story, and without an incubator it was almost certain that the smallest of the quintet didn’t have a chance. Searches for an old-fashioned incubator in New York, Detroit, Montreal, and Toronto had already come up dry, and the last train to Canada left at seven p.m.

  Charlie Blake dove in headlong. He called the World’s Fair. Plenty of incubators there, but all electric. He called hospitals. Nothing. He called the health commissioner, Dr. Bundesen, who “gave him all the leads he could think of.” Blake hung up and started dialing medical supply houses. “Sure you haven’t got one tucked away in the back end of a storeroom or attic?” he asked the skeptical president at Sharp & Smith. The fellow didn’t think so but promised to look anyway, and told Blake to call back. Blake continued working his way down his list until nearly five o’clock, then dialed Sharp & Smith again. Jackpot. It was full of dust and cobwebs, but the Sharp & Smith man had come across “an old-timer” shoved into a far corner. It was an 1895 model.

  “Get it downstairs and clean it up as soon as you can,” Blake told him. “I’ll be over in ten minutes for it.”

  By seven that night, Charlie Blake and his incubator were on the train to Toronto.

  Nurse Leroux was exhausted, but like the babies themselves, she was holding her own. Her forty-eight-hour vigil over the butcher basket had taught her to look for “the telltale white lines along the nose” that signaled a sinking spell. Before the tiny face turned blue, she was fighting back with rum and hot-water bottles.

  She had more than one to wield now. A basket had arrived from the Women’s Institute of Callander, filled with flannelette, diapers, absorbent cotton, and more hot-water bottles. With the absorbent cotton, Nurse Leroux fashioned little sleeveless, buttonless “Red Riding Hood dresses” for the babies to wear.

  Two days old, and they’d still had almost no proper food. Every two hours, like clockwork, Nurse Leroux squeezed a few drops of Dr. Dafoe’s corn syrup concoction into their wide-open birdlike mouths. The three smallest, she noted, had to be “coaxed along.” “Very thin,” she wrote. Late the previous afternoon, the Red Cross nurse from Bonfield had brought two precious ounces of mother’s milk to the Dionne farm. Her patients had donated all they could spare. A grateful Nurse Leroux divided it among the three smallest babies. Yesterday they’d been known only as C, D, and E. Now, though, all five had names. From biggest to smallest they were Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. All were named after nuns the family was fond of, except Marie. Fearing for her survival most of all, Elzire had dedicated her tiniest daughter to the Blessed Mother.

  The Dionnes’ house was beginning to bulge at its seams. Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline were often underfoot, since they had been forbidden to play in the yard for fear of kicking up dust that would harm their fragile sisters. Oliva’s sister Alma had come to lend a hand with the housekeeping. Aunt Laurence Clusiaux cooked and did laundry. One uncle, Leon Demers, chopped wood all day long, while another, Lias Legros, “efficiently, punctually, and quietly” hauled load after load into the house to keep the big stove fueled day and night.

  That stove was vital to the babies’ survival. Not only was it the sole source of heat in the house, but water also had to be kept boiling all day lo
ng, to sterilize the eyedropper, sanitize diapers—dozens upon dozens of diapers—and keep the hot-water bottles up to temperature. The stove was also a hazard. The night before, it had overheated the plaster ceiling, nearly causing a fire. But the babies could not make do with less heat, any more than they could stretch the meager ration of mother’s milk.

  Warmth and food. That was what Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie needed most for a chance to survive. If they could only hold out for the incubator and breast milk from Chicago, they might continue to defy the incredible odds against them. Marie in particular desperately needed that incubator. Simply keeping warm was a bigger task than her two-pound body could manage. “Well, will just have to keep up,” Nurse Leroux told her diary.

  * * *

  —

  At the train station in Toronto, Charlie Blake was hung up in the Canadian customs office. His incubator, a hulking old thing three feet long and two feet high, had the customs officers flummoxed. Should they allow such a contraption into the country? How much duty should they charge? Every minute they hemmed and hawed put Marie Dionne’s life at greater risk. Finally, they agreed to let Blake pass with a duty payment of $3.75. Blake rented a car, strapped the incubator to the trunk, and sped north. He still had two hundred miles to go.

  * * *

  —

  Every hour his daughters survived, the more urgently Oliva considered the Chicago proposal. Help was rushing in by plane and by train, by car and by mail, with no indication of how long it would last, or what it might cost. Dr. Dafoe was coming two and three times a day. Nurse Leroux had been on duty close to forty-eight hours straight. Where was the money going to come from? No one but Ivan Spear had suggested a viable solution. The Chicago deal promised everything the babies would need—expert nurses, modern equipment—and all of it paid for with cash to spare.