The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

by Dawn Raffel

  Hess’s book was the first nationally published American volume in the emerging science of neonatology. It was urgent, he wrote in the preface, because prematurity was on the rise in Chicago, and because, “in the United States the care of premature infants has not received the general attention of the medical profession which it merits.” In the final pages, he listed the names of more than one hundred fifty physicians around the world whose work had influenced him, including Budin, Tarnier, and Credé. But he cited just one man in the preface: “I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. Martin Couney for his many helpful suggestions in the preparation of the material for this book.”

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  That same year, Julius Hess used a donation of $10,000 to open the Premature Infant Station at Sarah Morris Hospital, with an additional $900 a year. Two years later, the Infant Aid Society of Chicago stepped up with what would become an $85,000 endowment, naming the station for the charity’s founder, Hortense Schoen Joseph. In the interim, the Society kicked in another $5,000 a year for operating expenses. It wasn’t enough. But at least it was a start.

  In 1924, he had a dozen Hess beds, and a heat lamp, and a portable ambulance he had designed. And in walked an exceptional nurse named Evelyn Lundeen, who would work with him for the rest of his life.

  A LEGEND IS BORN

  Coney Island, 1922

  Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Every summer, the barkers showed up at Coney Island, most of them dreaming of acting careers. Stumbling around on stilts, squished between sandwich boards, hoarsely exhorting crowds to see the latest, greatest, unforgettable whatever-the-heck wasn’t exactly heaven, but it would have to do until vaudeville or Broadway called.

  Martin Couney’s barkers took a tone decidedly soberer than their fellows’. No sandwich boards for them. But business was business, and he needed them, these sonorous men who wooed you in: “Don’t forget to see the babies!” Inside, character actors also served as lecturers. One barker alum, Don Carney, went on to be “Uncle Don,” a popular children’s radio host. Another was said to have become a diplomat.

  The most delicious story involves a British youth named Archibald Leach. In the summer of ’22, Archie allegedly stood outside the incubators, beckoning the masses while awaiting stardom. A minute later, Archie was Cary Grant.

  The man who really hired him was George C. Tilyou, who handed Archie a green coat with a red braid, a loud green cap, a pair of stilts, and forty bucks a week—not a bad salary then. But in the 1960s, the movie star looked back on this gig with something less than fondness: “Y’see, with the children out of school roaming around looking for something educational, my tall figure presented a tempting target for aspiring Jack the Giant-killers. . . . I could predict the concerted rush, and spot the deceptive saunter resulting in the rear-guard shove; or the playful ring-around-the-rosy, with me as the rosy, beaming daffy down on the little faces of impending disaster. I dreaded the lone ace who came zeroing in out of the sun, flying a small bamboo cane with a curved handle. One good yank as he whizzed past and he’d won the encounter hands down (my hands down), with full honors and an accolade from admiring bystanders.”

  Archie Leach was out of there fast. Did he ever take a pratfall in front of the incubators? Sub in for a friend on a rainy day? Stop by for a wink and a peek? I asked George Tilyou’s grandson George III. He recalled only that “Cary Grant was a stiltwalker. My uncle Edward met him and he said something about going to Hollywood.”

  As for his incubator stint, it’s another beautiful Coney Island tale: If it isn’t true, it should’ve been.

  ALONE IN A CROWD

  Coney Island, the Roaring Twenties

  You would think that Julius Hess’s written thanks would change the conversation, and you would be wrong. No matter how Martin embellished his own credentials, no matter what Julius said in his favor, it didn’t improve his standing to the extent he’d hoped. People seemed to think the Chicago physician had a quirky affection for the showman, and don’t we all have a couple of peccadilloes?

  While Julius was setting up his hospital, Martin competed for quarters with the Alligator Boy. He used no medicine other than whiskey (a drop a day per baby), but he had started giving oxygen to the most underdeveloped infants, as did Julius. And he was equally strict about the wet nurses’ diets. Later, he’d claim he would fire any wet nurse who noshed on a hot dog (who knew what was in those?) or sipped an orange soda (God forbid). But he was on his own.

  If Julius felt discouraged, he nevertheless had colleagues, professional community, a place where he belonged.

  Not Martin.

  Even if physicians bought his story, even if his tony Sea Gate address impressed them, even if they were happy to dine on his tab, even if they sent him patients and saw the babies thrive, in the end, he would never be one of them.

  * * *

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  Then there were the rumors. For years, Samuel Schenkein held shares in the Infant Incubator Company, but finally, he was out. The business was owned solely by the “family”—Martin and Maye, Louise, Isador, and another pair of cousins. The Couneys’ increasingly lavish spending—the new construction improving their home, the frequent trips abroad—and even the lines around the concession, all of it made him a target of suspicion. Some critics persisted in thinking the babies weren’t real. That was harmless nonsense, but others accused him of baby-swapping or baby-stealing, crimes that could make a man rich. The lack of evidence did nothing to deter them. Just as no one demanded he prove his credentials, no one required his accusers to offer any proof. One journalist asked him point-blank about the “rumors” (never saying what they were) and reported he’d laughed them off. “I’m not surprised to hear there are rumors about the babies,” he said, “for the general public is entirely ignorant of what we are trying to do. We don’t tell people who the babies are, naturally, and after they leave here they are so changed, no one could possibly recognize them.” He swore that the board of health and the hospitals knew his record was clean.

  The one public story about an adoption was back in 1916: A woman identified as Mrs. Richard Elkins took home a baby whose father was killed in the trenches in Flanders and whose mother had died after giving birth. Mrs. Elkins gave the child her family name—Lonsdale—rather than that of her son-of-a-senator husband, suggesting some interesting negotiations.

  If Martin did anything else, he buried the evidence so deeply that it has never been found. But even supposing he brokered adoptions for profit, the ethics of it are tricky. The alternative for orphans would have been a foundling institution—where mortality rates were high, especially for a child weighing five or so pounds and still needing special care—as opposed to a loving home. Regardless, for the rest of his life, Martin would deny having done it.

  Occasionally, he said, a couple who’d been married, say, seven or eight months would try to bribe him to take the baby and say it was premature. He refused.

  However, he was open to taking donations from grateful parents. Even those of few means often gave him something. And if a rich family whose baby he’d saved insisted on giving him money, was it so awful to take?

  * * *

  —

  Martin didn’t like taxes any more than he liked death. He’d been filing as a “personal service corporation”—essentially a charity—because, although he charged admission, he didn’t bill his patients. Was this not a personal service? The IRS thought not. Eventually, he took his case to the U.S. Board of Tax Appeals. The board ruled against him, requiring him to pay up.

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  Equally distressing was the Coney Island cop who had it in for him. For forays of more than a couple of miles, Martin relied on his driver. But the locals knew Martin. He was not drunk. His zigs and zags were generally indulged as he drove to his concession.

  On July 23, 1926, Patrolman Thomas Toolan dire
cted Martin to turn his car into a Coney Island parking lot, but he wanted to continue on the road. “You go where I tell you to go,” Toolan said. And then it got ugly.

  In minutes, Martin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. He would later say that the patrolman made him drive to the Coney Island Precinct. Once there, Toolan conferred with a lieutenant, and the two came back, accused him of grazing Toolan’s leg with his car, and set bail at $500.

  Martin called Louise, who went to fetch the cash, but before she could even come back, he was “hurried out of his cell, put into a patrol wagon, and taken to Adams St. Court,” in downtown Brooklyn, he said, adding that they’d handled him roughly, hurting his arm. His hearing was set for August 8.

  For his day in court, Martin took no chances. His fifty character witnesses included Edward Stratton, publisher of the Coney Island Times, and Samuel Gumpertz, former importer of Igorrote tribesmen, past manager of the incinerated Dreamland, and now the respectable president of the Coney Island Board of Trade.

  The charge was dropped.

  The Coney Island showmen and promoters had his back. They respected Martin for his tenacity and class. But no, he wasn’t one of them, either. In a strangest-thing-ever-at-Coney-Island contest, some might have cited the Elephant Hotel, but others wouldn’t blink before picking the incubator guy. He was the thing that didn’t go with the others.

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  Peruse The Brooklyn Eagle on an average day, and you might learn that Dr. and Mrs. Martin Couney had made a donation to the Democratic League, or that Miss Hildegarde Couney, having attended the College of Mount St. Vincent, was now sailing on the President Roosevelt for France. There she would finish her education at the Lycée Victor-Duruy Academy for Young Ladies. You might read that Miss Couney had been awarded the Diploma of Honorable Mention for Languages while in the City of Light.

  But within the lovely, cultured company the Couneys kept, Martin failed, yet again, to qualify as one of them. He was still a showman. And darling, that name and those airs didn’t fool them: He was Jewish.

  SEND THE AMBULANCE

  Atlantic City, the Great Depression

  The stock market crashed. Women’s hemlines plunged. The rate of prematurity shot up. Martin blamed this rise on mothers being overworked and stressed and poorly nourished. And he was growing starchy. He disapproved of a pregnant woman snatching a lettuce sandwich on her noon hour and calling that lunch. Nor did he like her going to a motion picture show instead of resting at night. “Things were different a couple of decades ago,” he told a reporter. “The women stayed at home and cooked three square meals a day, and exercised, and got plenty of fresh air and good food before the birth of each child.” The expectant mother, he added, “wasn’t worried about where the next meal would come from, as young mothers are today.”

  But he couldn’t revert to a time that probably never existed (except in his rosy memory) for most urban women. And he certainly couldn’t subvert the allure of the motion picture shows. They were as Depression-proof as he was. His Luna Park and Steeplechase neighbors stalked the weekly newsreels. The minute a promising misfit flashed on screen—say, a guy who could toot a horn with his ear—the bidding war began.

  Martin just kept working. If a mother was broke, he might hire her while her baby was in the show, sending her home in the fall with a healthy child and a livable nest egg. With both the Coney Island and Atlantic City concessions at capacity, Maye worked hard to find spaces for the babies, and Martin went back and forth.

  In Atlantic City, admission was by donation, a possible end-run around the IRS. At Coney Island, he was still charging a fee. Once in a while, a parent sniped that he should’ve gotten a cut of the gate because Martin was getting rich off his kid, but most were deeply thankful.

  In 1932, Martin began to notice the frequent visits of a Steeplechase electrician. The young man, who’d once been his two-pound patient, was now a regular presence.

  “Such a grateful boy,” said Martin to his night nurse.

  “Isn’t he, though,” she answered.

  But he was also arriving late at night, hoping Martin wouldn’t wake up.

  Finally, the nurse and the electrician informed him they had married. “Scoundrels,” Martin joyously told a reporter.

  But his deepest pride was Hildegarde, working as a nurse in Atlantic City.

  * * *

  —

  Little Miss Couney hadn’t sailed happily into adulthood. Rumor was, she had lost someone she loved in the Great War. Also that she’d drunk moonshine during Prohibition, and suffered temporary blindness.

  Despite being shipped off to Paris, to a school where young ladies were “finished,” Hildegarde Couney would never be dainty or ladylike. People called her “mannish” and “hefty” and “prickly.” Not pretty went unsaid. All her life, whether she liked it or not, she would serve as a sample preemie, and her girth was news: She weighed 135, she weighed 160!

  After Paris, Hildegarde’s next stop was the nursing school at Atlantic City Hospital, not far from the incubator station on the boardwalk. She became an R.N., mastered Aunt Louise’s spoon-to-the-nose technique and the entire repertoire of baby-saving moves.

  Soon enough, she would be at the center of a national drama.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. E. Harrison Nickman was Hildegarde’s professor and a pediatrician at Atlantic City Hospital. He also worked at the incubator concession. “They were absolutely fabulous with these babies,” he told Lawrence Gartner almost forty years later. By the 1930s, few of the “helpers” were novices. “There was this custom to find the top pediatrician in the area and have him take care of these premature charges. Actually, in getting the top pediatrician, to a certain extent, [Martin] was training the top pediatrician. He had innumerable contacts. For example, when the AMA would meet in Atlantic City, this premature station on the boardwalk was a hangout for all of the university professors.”

  Hildegarde would come to run the Atlantic City concession.

  Atlantic City Hospital was among the biggest in South Jersey, yet when it came to preemies, the hospital had no facilities. Instead, someone would send the ambulance driver, Jerome Champion, off to the boardwalk with the newborn and a nurse, or they would send him out to a private home to fetch a patient. Even the family who owned one of the biggest hotels on the beach sent their infant to the concession. No amount of money could’ve bought anything better. “It’s the first time I ever saw oxygen piped into a series of units. He had a pipeline just like we have now,” Dr. Nickman said in 1970.

  “I’ve never seen a hospital as clean as that place,” he added. “Not only was the nursery clean, the place where the people circulated was clean. Anybody that dropped anything, it was picked up right away. Absolutely immaculate.”

  Dr. Gartner had a few additional questions before concluding his interview. No, Dr. Nickman never once saw Dr. Martin Couney examine a baby. Nor did he ever see him pick up a medical journal.

  * * *

  —

  The news was like a fly in Martin’s ointment—a baby in Kansas and another in Michigan weighed a scant pound, the papers said. An Ohio child tipped the scales at fifteen ounces. Impossible, he countered. For backup, he telegraphed Julius, who concurred.

  Then he acquired his own headlining preemie. Born at Long Island College, Baby Arlene weighed between one and a half and two pounds (her doctors didn’t even bother to weigh her the day she was born). Martin came and fetched her in a heated basket, and sat in the back of the car while his chauffeur drove them out to Atlantic City.

  In May of 1932, he mailed her mother a Mother’s Day card and signed it “Arlene.” In June, her parents came to retrieve her, thwarting a frequent visitor who begged to adopt the child. Maye dressed her in a woolly pink jacket and a pink bonnet, and wrapped her in a soft yellow robe. “Feed
her 2½ ounces of milk seven times a day, steel yourself against her crying if she wakes up in the night, come back to us every two weeks so that we can see how she’s getting along, and take good care of her,” she told Arlene’s mother.

  “I think I love her as much as her parents,” Martin told a reporter. “I can’t understand why some people still think these premature babies aren’t worth saving.”

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  At any one time, he didn’t have room for more than fifty newborns, and he was covering all of New York City and Long Island and southern New Jersey. In winter, he didn’t have any facilities at all. In Chicago, Julius Hess was forced to turn patients away. The showman and the physician were getting on in years. There had to be something they could do to make the entire country pay attention.