by Dawn Raffel
Chicago’s citywide initiative was to become a model for the entire country.
Propaganda for preemies, indeed.
“MY LITTLE BROTHER”
A Sanfilippo family was listed in Hammonton, New Jersey. Almost eighty years earlier, the papers had spelled the baby’s name “Sanfilipo,” with one p. Contacting the family I’d found was like calling a number that was off by a digit and hoping the right person answered. I did it anyway. It worked.
Emanuel Sanfilippo, born in 1937, was named for his brother who’d died at the fair. “My parents never spoke about him, being very poor Italian immigrants,” he wrote to me. But they kept the newspaper clippings, and the tiny knit hat, and the beaded necklace with his name on it. Emanuel sent me a photo with a handwritten note: “This hat belongs to Baby Emanuel born Aug. 7, 1934, was 19 oz. Born to Mary & Biagio Sanfilippo. My little brother.” Those three words—my little brother—suffused with a quiet longing for a sibling never met; older, yet forever little.
He also sent copies of handwritten letters sent to the family by the Couneys. On August 23, 1934, Hildegarde wrote from the boardwalk to let Mary Sanfilippo know her son was doing well, encouraging her to keep her breast milk flowing. She closed with “Emanuel sends you all his love as well as big kisses.” On August 30, she reported that the baby had gained thirty-five grams since her last letter. “He is a darling and I could just eat him up. He is very good, sleeps a lot & cries very little. He would like you to come & see him sometime.” On September 6, she sent three dollars, round-trip bus fare for the Sanfilippos to come and see their baby. “He is getting cuter every day—sucks his thumb sometimes,” she wrote.
The next communication was dated October 30, from Chicago. This time Hildegarde wrote that the baby had lost ground during the night. “The doctor has just been here to see him but he does not give up hope for him yet. There is still a chance even tho’ it is only a small one.”
A letter dated November 6 from the Right Reverend Monsignor William M. Foley of St. Ambrose Church certified that the baby was given a Christian burial according to the rites of the Catholic Church.
The final letter, dated November 8, was written by Maye:
My Dear Mrs. and Mr. Sanfilippo,
I wish to thank you for your prompt return of the consent. It came on Sunday and we called the undertaker at once and he arranged everything for us—and so very sweetly and nicely. Our little one was laid away on Tuesday morning, Nov. 6. Madame Recht, Hildegarde Couney and myself were present at the ceremony performed by the priest. I was wishing you might see it too. He had such a lovely white velvet casket with silver trimmings and a lovely crucifix. I’m sure you would have been more than satisfied. I’m sending you the papers and the note from the priest, also the necklace and his medal. And the first time we are in Atlantic City we will call on you.
With very best wishes for your [unclear] and your nice family believe me most sincerely.
Your friend,
Maye Couney
SORROW IN SEA GATE
New York, 1936
The Century of Progress should have marked the start of a golden passage in the Couneys’ lives. But in February of ’36, Maye was feeling ill. Isador was dying and wouldn’t last through spring; he had a private nurse to tend to him. But Maye’s condition was sudden, and urgent.
Martin, alarmed, must have put his connections to work. With his vast network, especially after Chicago, and his substantial wealth, he could have reached the best in any specialty with just a few calls.
On February 22, Maye was undergoing a craniotomy at the Neurological Institute in Manhattan. The surgeon cut open her skull. Somewhere in her brain was the story of her life. Thirty-five years with Martin. The day she first met him and the morning not long after, when a president was shot. The boardwalks and the nurseries. The salt and the blood. Whatever choices she regretted. The babies, always. Any secrets she would take to her grave.
Maye died on the table.
“LEAVE AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS”
The letter that came from Uncle Martin was blunt: Get out, immediately. Included were tickets and money and instructions. Pick up the baby and go. Don’t stop to say good-bye. Don’t pack. Get on the boat to New York, and I will take care of you.
* * *
—
Decades later, Martin’s niece, Ilsa, and her husband, Dr. Alfred Ephraim, told the Gartners about leaving Berlin in 1937, and living in Sea Gate with their baby daughter until they could get their own place.
With Maye dead and Isador gone to his grave not three months later, Martin was grieving not only for them but also for his homeland. Better than most, he understood what was about to happen, and he intended to rescue as many Jews as he could. The U.S. government wasn’t making it easy. The leaders of the American eugenics movement were persuasive with the State Department: No flood of Jews. Not here. To arrange for even one person required onerous paperwork, an affidavit swearing to accept financial responsibility, and proof of the means to do it. Which was still no guarantee of getting a visa.
Suddenly, Martin was everyone’s “uncle” or “cousin,” whether or not he knew them at all. He would meet them at the boat, and show them around New York in his chauffeured car, telling them where to shop, and what to do, and how to live in this country. Come Thanksgiving, the refugees were invited for dinner at his house. Most were soon able to fend for themselves, but he gave them money anyway, and plenty of it.
In the United States, no one kept records of affidavits signed. Ship manifests show at least eight people coming to Martin; Ilsa, who was there at the time, swore that the number was fifteen.
* * *
—
Why do you want to know about my grand-uncle?” Ruth Freudenthal asked me. Her parents, Ilsa and Alfred, had died, but during the Day of Couney, it occurred to me that their baby, Ruth, was probably alive. She sounded not the least surprised that I’d found her, yet wondered why I wanted to write a book. Did I understand he was “more of a showman than a doctor”? After we talked for a while about her grand-uncle Martin, and Aunt Louise, and Aunt Hildegarde, she invited me to her home. “I’m the only one still alive who remembers them,” she said wistfully.
It must feel odd to encounter a stranger who has been poking around your family, replaying your mother’s voice on tape, visiting your relatives’ graves, digging up records you hadn’t thought to look for.
Ruth said that her mother was known as the family elephant; she remembered everything. “Whatever she said is true,” Ruth told me emphatically. She was sorry her memory wasn’t as good. But in fact, she recalled a lot, from getting caught standing on a table reaching for the crystal apples and pears in the chandelier at Sea Gate to playing with the midgets in Luna Park while visiting Uncle’s concession. She was canny and smart (and her home was immaculate) in a way that made me perceive a family resemblance to the ghost who haunted me.
I showed her the picture I’d snapped of the house at the Couneys’ address after I’d sweet-talked my way past the guard at the Sea Gate entrance. She wasn’t sure it was the same. “It wasn’t pink back then. I think it was gray,” she said. “In the dining room, they had a huge glass table, which could probably seat sixteen to twenty people. Later, when he came to eat at our house, it had to be very special. Of course it had to be special anyway because he was my grand-uncle, but he was a gourmet.”
Oddly, Martin wasn’t in town during the first few months the Ephraims lived in his house; instead, he was off in Europe doing who knew what.* When he came back, he used his connections to help Ruth’s father establish his dermatology practice. “Martin Couney was very wealthy,” Ruth said several times. “He must have been very wealthy.” That is, until the New York World’s Fair. She showed me the Chinese cabinet he’d bought there while he was going broke; it sat in her living room now.
* * *
—
&nbs
p; As a child, Ruth would go to the Metropolitan Opera with Aunt Hildegarde; this was her birthday present every year, and she had to dress up and sit still. But the seats really belonged to a Sea Gate neighbor who had season tickets, and who went away each winter.
Hildegarde grew poorer as her health declined, and her body wasted away. “If I have a photograph of her in my wedding album, you’ll see how thin she was,” Ruth said, flipping through pages. “Everyone in all of these pictures is dead. It’s really awful.” And then there was Hildegarde, no longer husky but hauntingly gaunt, and close to death.
“She was buried in one of my dresses,” Ruth said.
THE ONES WHO GOT AWAY
Norma Johnson and her twin brother, George, were born in July of 1937, weighing, respectively, two and a half and three pounds. When I called Norma, she didn’t remember the name of the hospital, but she’d never forgotten the story about the patient next to her mother. The woman had given birth to premature twin boys. “The doctor said, ‘The boys won’t make it unless they are in an incubator. There’s only one in the hospital, and we have a baby in it.’ This mother said, ‘I’m not putting them in Coney Island, no way,’” Norma told me. “The doctor said the same thing to my mother, and she said, ‘Certainly.’ The two boys died. It was very sad.”
When we spoke, Norma (now Coe) and her brother were seventy-eight years old, with nine kids and thirteen grandchildren between them.
PLAYING WITH MATCHES
New York City, 1939
As the rain fell and the crowds stood shifting on their feet, Albert Einstein had a few words to say. It was April 30, 1939, opening day at the World of Tomorrow, New York City’s world’s fair. Its planners expected this fair to easily exceed Chicago’s, in the rinky-dink middle of the country. Chicago was the Second City. New York was first, by far. Sixty different nations had pavilions. Germany fell out—but never mind. We had their wild-maned genius. In his thick German accent, Einstein said, “If Science, like Art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning, into the consciousness of people.”
* * *
—
People were standing for hours on line at General Motors’ Futurama. Inside, they rode in gliding chairs, witnessing a better world to come. Skyscrapers and highways, fourteen lanes across. On exiting, they proudly wore the button stating “I Have Seen the Future.”
Chrysler presented automobile assembly, and Borden its milking machines, but RCA one-upped them with the television, magic in a box. In the pavilions, visitors sampled the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Japan, the smorgasbord of Sweden. Gussied up with Lifebuoy soap and hair pomade, they strained to see King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, making their maiden visit to the States. They gazed upon the Trylon and the Perisphere, the fair’s iconic structures, and the sculptures on the walkways.
And having sopped up culture, having seen and heard and tasted the future and its commerce, they went where they really wanted to go: the Amusement Zone.
* * *
—
Built atop a swampy patch at the edge of the former garbage dump, the Amusement Zone was the place for naughty, bawdy fun. Futurama’s designer, Norman Bel Geddes, contributed his Crystal Lassies, fronted by a buxom statue. A sign declared “Inside She’s Real”—and for fifteen cents, you could see for yourself. Yes, there were wholesome aquatic shows and rides, but they were sprinkled in among Arctic Girls frozen naked in ice, and numerous other jiggle and strip joints—the occasional raid by the city’s vice squad only a minor annoyance.
Then there was Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus. The Surrealist’s water show, in a building “bristling with appendages and cast in crepuscular light,” was an erotic sore spot. The backers didn’t care that the swimmers were topless. That was fine by them. They minded that that idiot Dalí envisioned some of the women with hideous fish heads, while anyone with an ounce of brains knew that you had to have pretty gals with mermaid tails. When the show opened (replete with bare-breasted women, warped clocks, lobsters, and inverted umbrellas—but nary a fish-headed swimmer), the artist allegedly air-dropped angry tracts over Manhattan before leaving the country in a fit of indignation.
Bizarre as the whole thing was, it wasn’t as strange as sticking a pay-per-view NICU in back of the Parachute Jump, in a city that still lacked any kind of consistent, comprehensive care for preemies. But that’s where Martin found himself. Despite the embrace of Julius Hess and Morris Fishbein, despite the well-known physicians now endorsing him in New York, despite the fact that the American Medical Association had honored him with a platinum watch, he was still an amusement.
* * *
—
Back at the Century of Progress, the planners had gone out of their way to accommodate him. But in New York, relations with the concessions committee were fraying before the show opened. Martin had started early, writing in January of 1937 to express his interest in exhibiting, citing his enormous success in Chicago. He followed up with eight references, including Hess, Bundesen, and Fishbein. He sweetened his résumé, including not only Berlin and Paris but also Rio and Buenos Aires. Sometimes his list also included Mexico City, Montreal, and Moscow.
With permission, he dropped the names of Dr. Frederick Freed, from Bellevue’s obstetrics department, and Dr. Thurman Givan, chief pediatrician at Cumberland Street Hospital and assistant chief of pediatrics at Long Island College Medical School. (Many years later, Thurman Givan would write that although Martin Couney was licensed in France, he didn’t have the paperwork here, which is why he needed backup.) Both doctors asserted their willingness to take over in the event that Martin died during the course of the fair. By the time it started, he’d be seventy.
Hurdle number one was the committee member who objected to the exhibit because he’d conflated it with the two-headed dead-embryo show at the Century of Progress. Easily surmounted. The higher hurdle was money. Martin wanted this show to be grander than any he’d held before. And he planned to finance it entirely by himself, despite the fact that he’d never understood anything about money, aside from how to spend it generously. After the fair, he intended to give the building and all of its equipment to the City of New York—a permanent hospital, in memory of Maye.
At first, he estimated initial expenses at $80,000. By February of 1938, that had already jumped to $100,000, and the committee wondered where the money was coming from. Martin ignored a request for a financial report.
The committee inquired around town. First National Bank & Trust Company of Coney Island said of Martin, “He enjoys a very fine reputation. . . . As he does not borrow from us we have no knowledge of his financial condition but from hearsay consider him in a position to undertake any obligation he may desire.”
Dun & Bradstreet reported being unable to contact Dr. Couney. But two other banks responded favorably, and the committee surmised, based on what they’d cobbled together, that somehow or other, in various bank accounts, he had enough liquid assets.
He didn’t. The marshy ground was a rat-infested mess, and everything was running over budget. He’d hired pricey Skidmore & Owings* to design the building. In addition to the nursery, the extravagant U-shaped structure included nine rooms of living quarters for himself, his nurses, wet nurses, chauffeur, and housekeeper; a courtyard with a garden; a glass-bricked area where babies who’d gained enough weight could bask in the sunlight; a room for presentations on baby care; and a special visiting room for doctors. By March of ’39, it was clear it wouldn’t be ready on time. An internal memo noted six carpenters “on a job that could easily stand twenty men.” Martin, who’d hoped to pay in cash, was forced to sell critical stocks in a bad market.
Soon he was bickering about everything from smidgens of inches allowed for his outdoor sign to the officious insistence that he install an electric dishwasher. The nerve of these petty bureaucrats, telling him ho
w to run a nursery! As a matter of principle, he refused. (One paper quipped that he’d told them to “lay an egg.”)
Then he became strangely upset by the requirement for a fire alarm. He, if anyone, knew the threat. Later that summer, Steeplechase Park would burn; the only reason his babies weren’t there when it happened was that he had closed his other shows for the world’s fair.
But the burden of having to manage without Maye was getting to him, and he couldn’t afford to bleed another dime. He typed up a two-page letter arguing that a fire alarm was “absolutely unnecessary.” The building was semi-fireproof; he had six extinguishers and a hose-reel connection inside. Three or four nurses were always awake, equipped with a telephone with four extensions. They had nightly fire drills. They set up baskets with hot-water bottles and blankets in case they needed to evacuate. His special ambulance was parked nearby, and he himself slept on the premises.
In conclusion, he wrote, “my nurses are strictly prohibited to smoke in the building and my babies do not play with matches. I hope you will see the justice of my claim and relieve me of the unnecessary expense.” And then he went and did it. For the first time, he signed his name with an “M.D.” at the end of it.
* * *
—
A couple of weeks past opening day, visitors were streaming into the finally ready concession. A thousand-pound reproduction of Andrea della Robbia’s late-fifteenth-century bas-relief of a swaddled infant sat on the roof, and a sign declared that more than five million people had seen this show. Above the door: “All the World Loves a Baby.”