But even the rebuttal generated fear. A writer going by C.N. relayed an old story that Stein himself had heard before, even researched: “During the winter of 1918–19 there was a leper at the Walter Reed Hospital, a United States soldier, who had contracted the disease in the Philippines. The nurse, a personal friend of mine, who attended him, was required to put on a robe, rubber gloves, and a mask when entering his room. Everything that came out of the room was sterilized. What does Mr. Zeigler mean when he states that leprosy is ‘remotely communicable?’ Why are there 30,000 lepers in the Philippines, according to his figures, if the disease is not readily communicable?”
Stein’s response, which was verified by a nurse at Carville who knew the patient at Walter Reed: he had smallpox, not leprosy.
Stein shot letters to newspapers, magazines, business groups, advertising agencies, even to television networks that loosely used the word leper, as in “He’s a moral leper.”
“It has been said that, ‘It is a gigantic task to attempt to alter a conception that people have held all over the world for many centuries, and to expect them to change suddenly, figures of speech which have long been part of the vocabulary of associations, toward which the mind turns unconsciously.’ However, with due cognizance of the difficulties involved, all of which can be overcome by the cooperation of your group, we submit the following suggestion. In place of the word ‘leprosy’ use the word ‘plague,’ and replace the word ‘leper’ by the word ‘pariah.’ This rule is to apply to programs not concerned with scientific discussion of the disease but where the word is merely dragged in because it is colorful and connotative.”
When patients at Carville were listening to a baseball game over the radio and heard the announcer say that if the Giants didn’t win, they’d be treated like they had a compound leprosy when they returned to the Polo Grounds, off went a letter from Stanley Stein to Liberty Broadcasting in the Empire State Building.
“We realize the connotation you placed on the word leprosy is deeply imbedded in the language,” he wrote to announcer Gordon McLendon. “However, we feel you would not have made the reference had you known it would offend a group or even one of your listening audience.”
To Lowell Thomas from CBS radio: “The medical world is with us in our battle to outlaw this word. According to manuscript rules of the American Medical Association, the word ‘leper’ can not be used in any of its publications.”
To Morgan Beatty from NBC’s News of the World: “The nearly four hundred patients of this hospital, the Nation’s only Continental Leprosarium, bitterly resent being classed with Russian spies and communists, especially some of us who are veterans of both world wars.”
And almost always, he would include a gift subscription to the Star, or at least a few issues, so the offending party could see the people they’d hurt. More often than not, Stein received thoughtful, genuine responses from those he took to task.
“I humbly apologize to the patients in your hospital for what might seem to be an affront to them,” wrote US representative Karl Mundt, from South Dakota, who had suggested on the House floor that Communists were mental lepers. “While my reference was made in the sense of the Biblical references to leprosy, I want to assure you that I feel nothing but the deepest sympathy for those people who have contracted Hansen’s disease. Please be assured that in the future I shall be more careful in my analogies.”
The third front in Stein’s campaign would be mass education, and on this front he began growing the circulation of his newsletter. A field representative for the American Legion who had taken an interest in Carville suggested Stein print the mimeographed Star like a magazine. The state commander of the Forty and Eight, the American Legion’s fun and honor society, decided to buy the Star a press, type, and all the necessities. The Louisiana delegation of the American Legion convinced the other states at a national meeting to adopt the Star as a national project, and the new subscriptions after that overwhelmed the presses to the point that the Forty and Eight in New York bought Carville a flatbed press, a paper cutter, and a folding machine. Someone else gave them a mechanical stitcher, and someone else secured a linotype machine. The hospital turned over an addressograph and the US government put in place salaries for more staffers. Soon Stein and his cohorts were turning out fourteen thousand copies of the Star every month, sending them to public libraries, doctors’ offices, medical schools, and homes in the United States and sixty-eight foreign countries.
“We may not be a determining factor in changing the archaic attitude of people toward Hansen’s disease,” Stein wrote, “but we have at least been a catalytic agent.”
44
FENCES
After a short stay in her temporary room, Joey moved into a boardinghouse on campus that required a feat of housekeeping to make it livable. She lacked the modern amenities and knickknacks that make a home, but room 200 in house 19-2 would do. The walls were painted pastel green. The floor was tiled with beige linoleum bearing a fern design. Her windowsills were covered by potted houseplants, and two bookshelves were filled with books, as was her bed. At night, she moved the books to the floor. A chest of drawers with a mirror stood against the wall facing her bed, and to the side was a cabinet, which held her two-plate burner. In one corner was a hanging pot with ivy. The walls were decorated with photographs of her many friends, but dominant on the wall was her favorite picture of the Sacred Heart. Her writing desk was pushed near the window, and on it sat a new Underwood portable typewriter, a gift from the Underwood Corporation in New York, which sent along a message with it: “It seemed very appropriate that our message be in the form of an article that would prove useful for many years to come. We would like to present Mrs. Guerrero with an Underwood typewriter with best wishes and appreciation for the great work she has done.”
She put it to good use. It took her weeks to respond to the letters that had piled up, but she worked at it diligently until every piece of correspondence had been dealt with, including letters from both Rene and Cynthia. Cynthia asked for a carriage for her doll, but Joey wasn’t allowed to leave the campus, so she had to find someone who could help her. She missed Cynthia dearly.
“I love that baby of mine,” she wrote to a friend. “I felt like I could give up anything but not her. Then, separation meant something like death.”
She soon fell into a routine. She woke to an alarm before sunrise, before most of the patients had started to stir. She thought of it as the gong sounding to mark the beginning of the battle between flesh and spirit. She hurried to the chapel for early Mass every day, and every day she was glad she did. After Mass she would hustle back to her room to make the bed and tidy up and write a few letters before the breakfast bell rang at 7:30 AM. Some days she made coffee and toast in her room, but most often she joined the rest of the nearly four hundred patients in the cafeteria. School started at 8:30; she was trying to get an American high school diploma. The lunch bell rang at 11:00, then she went back to school until 3:15 PM. In the afternoon, she played badminton or visited with friends or pushed a twenty-three-year-old invalid named Mabel around the campus in her wheelchair, trying to lift the girl’s spirits. She also began reading to the blind patients and those who had never learned how. She preferred nonfiction and loved biographies and books on travel.
Her job at the Star paid a modest salary, and she had begun to save up to buy a radio-phonograph she saw in a catalog priced at $179. The jazz everyone at Carville seemed to enjoy so much was grating. She preferred Mozart over Miles Davis. She liked listening to her music more than anything.
“I love music, although I do not play any instrument, nor can I read even one note,” she wrote to a reporter for the Catholic Digest. “Yet, I can sit for hours listening to the music of the masters. One of my secret ambitions is to be able to go to all the places where I can listen to music: Carnegie Hall, for example, the Metropolitan, Hollywood Bowl.”
She enjoyed styling hair and giving the other patients permanent
s. She also loved making clothes and wrote to a fashion academy in New York, asking if she could take a home-study course. The school asked for references, so Joey sent back a few newspaper clippings.
“I didn’t want to bother anyone with this, so I just sent them a few newspaper clippings about me,” she told a friend. “I thought this would establish my identity.”
The academy wrote back: “Because of your wonderful service to your own government as well as that of the United States, we are extending to you a scholarship in the Home Study Division through the Emil Alvin Hartman foundation. Therefore, we are returning your payment herewith.”
From then on, she worked to design clothing and studied the history of fashion. She read every book she could get her hands on about how to sketch costumes and then carry them out. She started making her own clothes and designing dresses for the other patients. She spent hours bent over her Singer sewing machine, and her efforts were amateurish at first. It took her three weeks to make herself a floral-print dress. But she was getting the hang of it. Her desire was to leave the hospital with an array of practical skills so she could easily find employment once she was on her own. She knew two languages. She was learning how to be a journalist. She could type and practiced the skill by volunteering as secretary for the Patients Federation. Not a day went by without at least one of the other patients approaching her to ask if she would mind filling out a form or answering a letter. “Just tell them I was glad to hear from them and that I’m alright,” they would instruct her.
In the same vein, she spent as much time as she could in the manual arts department of the hospital learning carpentry. She built herself a desk, sanding and staining it until it was handsome. The work wasn’t foreign, for she recalled building coffins for the dead at Tala so they’d be buried in something more respectable than a burlap sack or straw mat.
Beyond that, she seemed to always be hosting visitors to campus, some of them old friends and some of them starstruck strangers who just wanted to meet the little Filipina they had read about.
“Louisiana is overlooking a new source for tax revenue and the state has been most astute in its levying of taxes,” wrote a reporter for the Star. “But if they would just charge toll to each of the visitors who brave the gravel path from Baton Rouge to visit Joey they could promise two chickens for every pot.”
Father Fred Zimmerman, who used to bring Joey chocolate bars at Tala, came with a fellow priest and stayed for two days. Father Walter Debold of Saint Joseph’s Church in Jersey City, who also used to visit Tala when he was stationed in the islands with the 248th Station Hospital, flew two thousand miles to say hello. Father Fred Julien, who remembered the lady in black outside the Ateneo de Manila, drove over from his new parish in Lufkin, Texas, three times to visit with Joey. Elsie Voigt, who was a field auditor for UNRRA in Manila and was introduced to Joey by Frank Gaines, also made time to visit.
“Once upon a time I thought there was no such thing as a true friend,” Joey wrote. “I was mistaken.”
One day she walked into the doctor’s office at the hospital, and there stood Brig. Gen. Howard Smith, assistant surgeon general in charge of public health work for the United States in the Far East. He had served as MacArthur’s medical chief and escaped Bataan with President Manuel Roxas and was among the small delegation that raised the flag at Corregidor when the United States reclaimed the island. He spread his arms and gave Joey a massive hug.
“Let me look at you,” he said. “How are you, child?”
They’d first met through Frank Gaines when Joey was at Tala and she had given the general some spare fishing equipment. They saw each other many times after that, and Smith had vouched for Joey’s war record when she was trying to get her passport. He promised to visit her when he was in the States. She had met several generals, but he was her favorite.
She had a special talent for leading tours of the giant campus with its tennis courts, library, movie house, and some three miles of covered walkways leading from building to building. The Patients Federation and the staff of the Star had convinced the medical officer in charge in 1946 to lift the restriction on visitors. He had admitted it wasn’t because of danger of contact but just to protect patients from the morbidly curious. He agreed to change the rule if the Star staff promised to assume the responsibility of conducting visitors through the hospital. Since then, thousands had come, many to see Joey, and thousands had left with their minds changed about Hansen’s disease. The former mayor of Richmond, Michigan, who toured Carville, promised to help in the educational campaign by giving talks about Hansen’s disease to civic clubs.
“I visited your Marine Hospital last month and Joey’s tour around the place did something for me,” wrote Vince Pizzolato of Plaquemine, Louisiana. “I feel that you should solicit visitors from nearby communities and really educate them on Hansen’s disease. Here’s a few subscriptions from a group of my friends to your paper.”
When her visitors called her a hero, Joey buckled and tried to correct them. “I am just a simple, ordinary person, not a heroine,” she wrote to one admirer. “I did only what you or any other would have done if called upon to do so. I was fortunate, for to me was given that which was not given to those more worthy. God chose a weak and fragile vessel of clay of the poorest quality when He chose me, but such are the ways of God—they are strange to us poor mortals.”
She started a column for the Star called Jottings by Joey, where she kept readers informed about whatever charitable act she was up to. She also kept up the struggle to help the patients at Tala. One of the first improvements Joey had sparked at the colony was a nursery for babies born to patients. Before, the newborns were simply taken by the government and placed in orphanages, never to be seen again by their parents. A group of Franciscan nuns had volunteered to care for the babies at a newly built nursery, and parents could at least see their children through a partition. But after Joey arrived at Carville, she received a letter from one of the nuns saying the government was threatening to shut down the nursery unless money could be raised to expand the facility and provide better clothing and medical equipment. Joey immediately began writing letters to anybody she could think of, friend or stranger, asking for help. She wrote to a steel magnate in Pennsylvania, an heiress in New York, and an oil man in Texas, pleading for donations. The contributions rolled in from all over, from Sister M. Florella’s Xavier High Group in Phoenix, Arizona, and from Bishop Fulton Sheen and from Father Haggerty’s group in Springfield, Illinois. A check for $1,000 came from Mrs. Betty Burdette, national president of the American Legion Auxiliary. Joey didn’t know how much it would take to keep the nursery open, but she did everything she could to help.
Once a friend wrote to her asking, “What can I send you to help you pass the time, something you really need?” In jest, Joey wrote back, “We don’t pass time here at the hospital, time passes us.”
She was convinced she could be cured but had no idea how long that might take.
“The doctors do not know how long I may have to stay, but of course I cannot leave until I am well, or have passed the 12 negative tests—three years, four, five, who knows?” she wrote to a man named Edward Harrigan. “Everything rests with God and science. I cannot speak of the treatments, as I do not know if I am allowed to do that. However, I feel that everything is being done for me: there is a sense of solidarity about this place. The medical staff are competent and highly efficient. The sister nurses are class A; they are always gentle, solicitous, kind, and very human. However, I think the secret lies in cooperation. There must be a coordination and cooperation between doctor and patient. In this way, I believe treatment can be a success. This is true of all things, isn’t it?”
When she was alone, she wrote poetry, her hobby. Much of it was religious, hymnlike exaltations of almighty God or Mother Mary. Some of it revealed the cultured environment in which she had been raised. Some spoke to the yearning she felt to be on the other side of the Carville barbed wi
re, to be able to see and experience the best the world had to offer.
Wunderlust
I went globe-trotting across the hemisphere—
In quest of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
I traveled through many a town and city,
In curious pursuit of art and things of beauty.
I browsed among the masters at the Louvre—
Took in the fashion shows and even the Follies Bergere!
I thrilled to the gory bullfights in gay Spain,
And for a constitutional, a stroll on the Rue de la Paix!
I sat in ecstatic rapture at the Scala in Milan,
Loved and lived a lifetime with Puccini’s Cho-Cho-San.
Paris in the springtime, I had a rendezvous with Mona Lisa,
Her smile mocked at me like the leaning Tower of Pisa.
Curiosity for Farrouk took me to Biarritz and Monte Carlo—
I’ll take a Bergman anytime and the luscious Greta Garbo!
The season found me applauding Sadler Well’s Margot Fonteyn,
For unparalleled delight, give me the Dying Swan again!
I heard the Tower of London’s twelve o’clock chime,
In Paris, I’d be having café au lait for an American dime.
The bitter taste of fog, the cold and mist I could not stand,
Give me warm Manhattan, roller coasters on Coney Island!
Shades of Louisiana lay among derricks of troubled Iran—
And painted deserts in the sky in Sweden’s Midnight Sun!
Restless hearts smoldered in once-happy Yugoslavia,
Even peace got lost at St. Sophia’s in Czechoslovakia.
On a pilgrimage to Portugal, I knelt before a shrine,
The Leper Spy Page 18