The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

by Dawn Raffel

  A. J. Liebling came to write a profile for The New Yorker. “Everything I do is strict ethical,” Martin stressed, still bothered by the rumors. And then he regaled Liebling with his stories: the beer hall songsters in Berlin; the hatbox baby in Omaha; the preemie who came to him wearing a necklace of garlic for strength; the Swedish grandma pulling a preemie through the leg of its father’s trousers for luck; the Catholic babies wearing medals; the Jewish babies with a red thread to protect them against the evil eye. He also told Liebling that for Omaha, he’d taken the babies from Chicago (a feat that seems unlikely), while for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, he’d carried French orphans across the Channel (in wash baskets!), with the blessing of his mentor. (For Family Circle, he gilded the lily further, claiming that developing the incubator under Dr. Pierre Budin wasn’t “intricate” work and “came from the heart, perhaps, as well as the head.”)

  In the Amusement Zone, men and women still dizzy from the thrill of their choice came through to ooh and aah and ask the usual loopy questions: “Are these the same babies from Chicago?” “How do they live in the gas stoves?”

  Louise and Hildegarde were busy slipping diamond rings over wrists and smiling for the cameras. (Science entering the consciousness of the people, Dr. Einstein.) Hildegarde told a reporter, “I’d rather be helping my father with this work than doing anything else in the world.” But Maye’s absence must have been felt as a physical, daily ache.

  Julius Hess paid a visit and left a letter for the guest book:

  My Dear Martin,

  Now that I cannot be with you in person may I be allowed to thank my “great teacher” in this wholly unsatisfactory way for your great contribution to me and the medical profession. Yours has not only been one of scientific leadership but equally important to progress a most ethical one in every respect, and you can look back on a life well spent.

  May I add a word of deep and heartfelt remembrance for the years thru which I knew your Dear Wife and helpmate who for so many years was at your side. For Madame and Hildegarde my sentiments are those of deepest respect for them and their attainments as they so well know.

  Again Martin may you live long and happily so that you may continue your great work on behalf of those so needing your help.

  Your friend,

  Julius H. Hess

  But paper and ink are no substitute for having a friend in town who will see that you are treated with respect. In Chicago, he was a valued guest from the East, but here he was just the old man from Coney Island, past his prime. His posture was stooped, and he walked with a crook-handled cane, badly aged.

  Martin had been confident that as soon as the show opened, he would recoup his investment. Soon it was obvious he was losing even more. Almost every concession was suffering, with the splashy exception of Billy Rose’s Aquacade. The entire fair was sinking into debt. Admission was seventy-five cents—fifty percent more than the general admission in Chicago—and that was just to get in, before you spent a penny on the midway. People were still out of work. Yes, the crowds were thick—but nowhere near the planners’ expectations. Worse for Martin, New Yorkers could have seen the incubators only the summer before at Coney Island, where the price had dropped to twenty cents. Why pay a quarter here?

  * * *

  —

  One day a young woman strode up, eager to see the doctor. Her name was Lucille, and she was a nursing student at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Brooklyn. Martin was easy to find. She walked over and told him, “I’m a baby of yours.”

  Visits like this were occurring with some frequency this summer. Sometimes it felt like the only recognition he was getting at this fair. He asked Lucille’s last name and year of birth, then consulted a thick black book. There she was. Lucille Conlin. 1920. Father had brought her to Coney Island in a towel. Written off by a hospital. And look at her now, this healthy young lady, all of nineteen. “Yes, you are one of ours,” he said, and hugged her, showed her around and showed her off.

  A tall young man stood staring into an incubator as if he was willing the baby to live. Martin tapped him on the shoulder. “Is that your baby in there?”

  “Yes.” The familiar fear in the voice.

  “You see this young lady?” Martin said. “She’s one of our babies.” The father regarded Lucille and then looked at his child and back at Lucille again. “She really is?” His daughter was so little—the size of his hand, perhaps. He must have been thinking that she would never grow up.

  Before Lucille left, Martin made a note of where she went to school. The following year, he would send her a corsage when she earned her nurse’s cap.

  * * *

  —

  You don’t know how much the help of the incubators meant to poor people like us,” a twenty-three-year-old former telephone operator said to a reporter. “Dr. Couney even sent for our baby in his own ambulance with an incubator in it.”

  As always, a physician was tucked in behind the scenes. Moe Goldstein was young. He had gone to medical school with Morris Fishbein’s son-in-law, then finished a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, returning home to open a pediatric practice in Queens. But business was slow. And here was a fascinating job, suggested to him by the powerful editor of the country’s most prestigious medical journal. Who would turn that down? As far as Moe could tell, his boss was a doctor, but somehow lacked a license in New York—or something like that. He could never get a straight answer. And it didn’t really matter.

  Every evening, Moe would come and examine the babies, and stay and eat a good meal and have a good drink and pass the time with Martin. He thoroughly enjoyed his host. And he was in awe of Madame. She knew how to do things, like nasal feeding, that no one had taught him in medical school or at the Mayo Clinic. He was learning skills that would put him ahead in his fledgling practice. Plus, these babies would need a pediatrician after the fair, and he was the logical choice.

  While he was at it, he helped the gals from the jiggle joint next door. Most of them were mothers with new babies. That’s who had big breasts. They simply needed money. They brought him their babies when they were sick, and he took care of them.

  Moe was aware that the concession was doing something exceptional. Babies under three pounds should have had something like a 90 percent mortality rate, yet almost all of them were being saved. Martin had put him in charge of keeping records. The tiniest went in Hess beds, with oxygen lids, while the rest went in Martin’s sleeping-beauty machines. Some of those babies got a little oxygen too. But not much.

  Late in his life, Moe would say, “Dr. Hess copied a good deal of Dr. Couney’s system” from the Chicago fair. He also remembered the chauffeured ambulance that far preceded New York City’s premature transport system.

  The only thing not to Moe’s liking that summer was Hildegarde. He was certain the boss’s daughter had a crush on him, and he found her unappealing.

  Dr. Moe Goldstein.

  * * *

  —

  All that summer and the next, a team of doctors came from Yale to study the “fetal infants.” Drs. Arnold Gesell and Catherine Amatruda were trying to understand the beginnings of visual and auditory awareness, manual grasp, a response to a smile—the ignition of the human mind. Martin and Louise (“Madame” to them) went out of their way to accommodate them. Quietly, out of view of the crowd, Gesell and Amatruda measured, observed, and, with a cameraman, took photos, and shot grainy, silent film.

  The Embryology of Behavior, considered a medical classic, was published in 1945. In some of the photos the infants are nude. Without their prince and princess swaddling, their ribbons, their blankets, their baby-doll caps, they are big-headed and frog-legged, almost amphibian.

  * * *

  —

  Martin was ever jolly in public, but behind the scenes, his relations with the administration were increasingly testy. He griped about the “sketchil
y dressed” women outside the Enchanted Forest and the Kootch Show in the Canine Capers building. They hit back with a medical complaint. Why had someone named Moe Goldstein signed a death certificate? Who was this person, anyway? Might they remind the doctor that he was obliged to comply with the laws, statutes, ordinances, rules, and regulations of the government of the City and State of New York and of the United States? The letter further enjoined him to permit an inspection by the fair’s Dr. John Grimley—the dishwasher enthusiast, with whom he’d clashed before—and to report to him rather than directly to his health department contact. This particular dust-up settled down after Martin assured them that his assistant, Moe Goldstein, had a license.

  But the money problems worsened. By July, Martin was threatening to quit, unless the Comptroller’s Office could ease the terms of a loan it had made. He couldn’t, and wouldn’t, reduce personnel or skimp on care. The fair agreed to cut him a break. But by the season’s end, around the time Germany invaded Poland, Martin’s accounts were running bloody red.

  VISION AND HINDSIGHT

  Katherine Ashe Meyer e-mailed to tell me she’d seen my post on a 1939 New York World’s Fair forum: “I would love to talk to you and I am also interested if you have heard from any of the other ‘babies.’” She’d kept her autographed glossy of Martin Couney, and a photo of Moe Goldstein holding her, and her parents’ free-admission passes.

  Kathy was born on July 19, around the time Martin was threatening to close up shop. “My mother was skinny as a rail, and when my parents got to the hospital, they said, ‘What are you here for?’ She said, ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ and they said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’” Born two months early, Kathy weighed three pounds, four ounces.

  New York Hospital was among the city’s most advanced, and it had an incubator for her—at a cost that was out of reach. “My father went to them and said, ‘This is going to cost me a fortune. I’m not working, I just bought a house in Queens, and I’ve got a three-year-old. What do I do?’ They said, ‘We’ll put you on a payment plan.’ My father said, ‘I really can’t do that.’ And then the pediatrician said, ‘You know, one of my friends has a preemie show at the World’s Fair, why don’t we see if we can get her in?’”

  The visitor passes for Katherine Meyer’s parents were labeled “concessionaire.” The couple also kept souvenir photos of the King and Queen of England.

  Kathy’s parents—unlike most of the women I spoke with—were happy to talk to her about the show. “They were so proud of it,” she said. “My mother expressed her milk and my father took it over every day. They thought it was the best thing in the world.”

  Nine years later, her parents got a call from New York Hospital, asking them to bring her for an exam. “They said to my father, ‘There is something we don’t understand. All the babies that were in our incubators are going blind—but your baby’s eyes are good.’”

  WHO WILL SAVE YOU NOW?

  New York City, 1940

  The incubator concession had burned through more than $100,000 in operating expenses during the fair’s first season—$3,000 in laundry alone, plus thirty people on salary (nurses, wet nurses, lecturers, ticket takers, kitchen help). Moe was never paid—he was given a watch instead, not that he minded. But receipts, minus the fair’s cut, were nowhere near enough to break even.

  The administration weighed its options. Privately, they discussed what it would cost to move the concession to the Science and Education Wing of the Medical and Public Health Building—but decided not to do it. At the same time, an official wrote to the Smith Incubator Corporation in Ohio, asking if they wanted the show for 1940. Not a chance.

  With his contract not renewed by March, Martin’s debt to the fair corporation was almost $10,000. In order to open again, he would need to mortgage his house, borrow from friends, ask contractors to wait to be paid, and defer his space rental charges. He’d mistaken a previous “deferred” debt for one that was waived, and he pleaded to have it forgiven. Also, he asked, as a courtesy, could they please turn the water back on?

  Behind closed doors, the reaction was exasperation. Patronizing. “As you perhaps know, Dr. Couney is well into his 80s [sic], rather feeble and prone to misunderstanding,” read one internal note. “What he actually needs is a business manager to take care of all financial affairs. His late wife was very successful in handling such matters, but since her death, he is lost when it comes to money matters. His operation last year was not at all successful and his statement is a jumble of figures. . . . There is no degree of certainty as to their exactness without some sort of an examination of his books which would be an unnecessary expense.”

  In the end, they agreed on a plan where his debt would be paid through his weekly receipts, and he opened up again.

  * * *

  —

  No matter what he lost, he wouldn’t pass up a chance to make propaganda. The previous fall, when Julius was in town, he’d hosted a gala dinner. Each week, the nurse whose babies gained the most weight won a prize, such as nylon hosiery. Come June, he threw a reunion for the class of ’39, and once again handed out silver cups. In July, he entertained Morris Fishbein’s son, Justin, visiting from out of town. And as the season came to end, he invited a tableful of prominent pediatricians to eat and drink and smoke cigars and listen to Moe Goldstein present the concession’s results: proof they had saved more than 90 percent of their patients.

  On November 9, 1940, a single paragraph about Martin Couney’s incubators appeared in Morris Fishbein’s Journal of the American Medical Association—the first and only time Couney’s name would appear in those pages.

  * * *

  —

  Away from the crowds and the parents and the feted special guests, Moe saw Martin crying. A pall had fallen over the fair, and no one could ignore it, no matter how they tried. Ten of the foreign nations hadn’t come back, including the Soviet Union. Poland’s pavilion was draped in black; Finland’s closed mid-season. The night that Germany invaded France, Moe was with his boss, who was inconsolable.

  Martin was also losing every dollar he and Maye had ever earned, forced to keep begging the fair’s administration. Unless they reduced the cut they had taken toward his debt, he wouldn’t be able to pay the nurses’ salaries. The moneymen relented and gave him an allowance. But he was almost seventy-one, and he knew he was in a position from which he could never recover. At night, with the babies of 1940 baking in their ovens—to inherit what kind of a world?—he would go to his private garden to weep.

  * * *

  —

  The World of Tomorrow closed on October 27, 1940, a financial disaster for almost everyone involved. As for Martin’s state-of-the art lifesaving equipment, the city didn’t want it.

  WINTER

  Martin and Louise could not afford to retire. Back in Luna Park, with Coney Island’s luster faded and rubbed away, admission was down to fifteen cents. In Atlantic City, entrance was still by donation. This was no way to regain a lost fortune. Still, there were babies to save.

  Carol Boyce was born at Atlantic City Hospital on June 19, 1942, weighing just over four pounds. Not so tiny, really, for a preemie, but upon hearing the news, her grandmother bought a white dress for her “just in case.”

  * * *

  —

  Carol Boyce Heinisch was living in Absecon, New Jersey, when I reached her. At seventy-three, she worked part-time as a legal assistant. With her keen interest in local history, she knew about the plaque that Lawrence Gartner put up in 1971. Originally affixed to the Holiday Inn that stood on the former site of the show, it went to Atlantic City’s historical museum when the hotel came down, and now it was sitting tarnished. Carol had newspaper clippings and photos for me. And I had her mother’s voice, recorded forty-five years earlier. In the recording, the late Betty Boyce fondly remembered “Aunt Louise” and Hildegarde. She met Martin only once. “He h
ad the ability to put you at ease right away,” she said. “It was like, maybe your child was half-dead, but no problem. Everything will turn out fine.”

  * * *

  —

  Come winter, with the boardwalk desolate and snow falling over the ocean, with all the young men gone to war, Martin, Louise, and Hildegarde retreated to a lonely life. Sea Gate was quiet. The wealthy neighbors spent the frozen months in warmer places. For company, Martin had his poodles. Louise kept a little Pekingese so mean you couldn’t touch it.

  A visitor was a treat. Dr. Frederick Freed, disappointed at being rejected by the army, joined the Couneys for Christmas in 1942. Years later, Moe Goldstein, home from the war, stopped by Sea Gate to chat. “When they first discovered retrolental fibroplasia, Dr. Couney and I used to sit and talk,” he would tell Lawrence Gartner. “He used to say, ‘I don’t know. I never saw any in mine. I took care of thousands of them, and none of my babies were ever blind.’” The answer was that his machines never had enough oxygen to do that kind of damage, especially because the nurses kept taking the babies out. But Martin wouldn’t live to know it.

  Sometimes, toward the end of his life, when he got his mail, he would find a check—a gift from Julius Hess or Thurman Givan, or another of his medical friends. It pained him to accept it, but he had to. Already, the deed to the house had passed to Hildegarde; she would need to sell it the minute he died.