I came of age during the JFK years. The grief is personal.

How do I tell my grown-ass children about the life and times of JFK? How I was nine when he was elected and 13 when he was assassinated? That I was the oldest son in an Irish-Catholic family in Middle America who idolized the man? That his killing tore a hole in my heart that remains. That all of the stuff that’s come out about Kennedy’s affairs and bad judgement has not dimmed my memories?

I’m a grouchy old man. I am a writer who takes a jaundiced view of most things. I was none of those things during JFK’s presidential run. My parents seemed entranced by the news reports on our black-and-white TV. So handsome, my mother said. So Catholic, my father said. I love Jackie’s hair, Grandma said. All the adults in my life were on board with Kennedy, saint and war hero.

I yearn for those days. How I want them back. As a family, we listened over and over to Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family” records on Dad’s stereo. My father made his first hi-fi as those things were called back in the day. It’s no surprise as he built crystal radio sets as a boy in his basement and served four years as a radioman with the U.S. Signals Corps during the war. He also admired JFK’s war record; Nixon’s paled in comparison. Little did we know, we hadn’t heard the last of Tricky Dick.

Kennedy was central to my coming-of-age years, 9-13. I read “Profiles in Courage.” I knew the PT-109 story by heart, the public one. Our family was on the verge of being cut adrift by the aerospace age, influenced by the Cold War and The Race to the Moon.  At 9, we lived in a new house in a Southwest Denver suburb not far from the Fort Logan Induction Center my father signed on to fight the Nazis in 1942. At 10, I attended the second half of fourth grade near a missile base in Washington State. I went to fifth grade in Moses Lake, sixth grade at College Hill Elementary in Wichita. We moved closer to Wichita’s Air Force base for the first half of St. Francis seventh grade and was there when Kennedy was shot. I was 14 when we returned to Denver and I went to the first half of seventh grade at a public junior high in Denver crowded with Boomer kids. And then we landed in Florida with a mission: send men to the moon because JFK said so. I was in Our Lady of Lourdes Grade School in Daytona Beach. I didn’t know it then, couldn’t even have guessed, that last Sunday I was back at OLL in Daytona attending mass at a spacious new church presided over by a justice warrior priest. I was a white-haired senior, disabled, pushing a walker. Still looking for answers.

And today I contemplate JFK because my daughter wants to know. She reads this blog. Read on, Annie. And keep reading.

How the Great TB Sanatorium Craze came to the Rocky Mountain West

Part 2 of my review of John Green's "Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection." Read Part 1 here.

There was a rush in the early part of the 20^th century to isolate humans with TB, an incredibly virulent bacterium. Call it the TB Sanatorium Craze. Colorado jumped on the bandwagon early. So did New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

While I am a Colorado native, I spent 33 years living and working north of the border in Wyoming. The Wyoming State Legislature approved a TB hospital in Basin and it opened in 1927 . This probably was due to the Legislature’s tendency to parcel out important government functions: Cheyenne gets the capitol, Laramie gets the university, Basin gets the patients of a worldwide plague. It was only fair. As the years progressed, TB patients sought out famous hot springs in Saratoga and Thermopolis. The steam, heat, and sunlight were viewed as crucial TB treatments.

The Wyoming Legislature discussed a TB sanatorium as far back as 1909. During that same time, the National Tuberculosis Association sponsored a well-attended “Tuberculosis Exhibit” in Cheyenne and Laramie. The NTA traces its roots to 1904 when concerned citizens formed the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. This was their advice during the Wyoming tour, as outlined in the 1910 edition of The Journal of the Outdoor Life from the University of Michigan:

“The cure consists of plenty of good, simple food, constant fresh air during the night as well as during the day, constant rest in the fresh air until there is no fever , and then carefully and gradually increased short walks, proper care and washing of your body, and proper clothing  and, finally, a determination to get well and to be cheerful in spite of everything, and only to look on the bright side of things, however hard your circumstances may be.”

Sanatoria offered all of these things with the predictable results: The Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne shows that in 1910-1912, when most counties in Wyoming had between one and 20 cases of TB per year. Albany, Park, and Carbon counties were on the low end with one to three cases per year (Converse County had zero!) and Sheridan, Sweetwater, and Laramie counties were on the high side with Laramie County showing 18 cases in 1911.

At the beginning of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in September 1930, patient census at the Basin Sanatorium in September 1930 showed 15 women and 37 men. When effective TB treatments such as streptomycin emerged in the 1940s, the heady days of sanatoria came to a close. Old Archives photos show the building in Basin where patients struggled to breathe. Sad, isn’t it, that some settlers came West for breathing room but died for lack of breath?

Why is Green’s book important to us in the 21^st century? The U.S. has a 99-percent TB cure rate and about 10,000 patients yearly although that’s going up. Green takes pains to tell the story of Americans with TB and the tough time they had before modern meds. The Rocky Mountain West, especially, was home to a number of sanatoria for TB patients. The Wyoming State Archives has documents tracing the origins of the lone state TB sanitorium in Basin.

Construction began in Basin in 1926 and the Sanitarium was opened in May of 1927. By 1969 all references to tuberculosis were removed at the Wyoming Sanatorium due to the significant decrease in the incidence of tuberculosis in the state. It was replaced by the Wyoming Retirement Center which provides nursing care to residents with mental health, dementia and other medical needs.

Colorado boasted plenty of facilities. Green writes that some cities in the West were founded by TB. Colorado Springs is one of them. National Jewish Hospital in Denver had a treatment center for consumptives. It’s still known as one of the best pulmonary hospitals in the country. Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora opened in 1918 at the tail end of World War One and its specialty was treating men with TB and those whose lungs were damaged by gas attacks.

The U.S. Army sent my unhorsed cavalry officer grandfather to Fitzsimons as he struggled with a bad case of pneumonia aggravated by chemical weapons used in the war. My grandmother, an army nurse and veteran of a M.A.S.H-style unit in France, treated him there. They married in 1922. Their eldest was my U.S. Army Signals Corps veteran father who in 1950 married a U.S. Navy-trained nurse and here I am.

Lung ailments have figured heavily in my family. My brothers, sisters, and I struggled with asthma in our youth. I almost died after a bad reaction to horses at a Weld County ranch. This pretty much demolished my dreams of replacing The Lone Ranger.  

Movie westerns have featured tubercular characters. In “Tombstone,” Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday gambles, drinks, shoots people, coughs and sweats, not necessarily in that order. A gambler calls him a “dirty lunger” and pays the price. Gunfighter Johnny Ringo calls him a “lunger” and also pays the price. The message is clear. ”I’m your huckleberry,” Doc says, before or after shooting someone. Not bad for a lunger or consumptive patient. Doc succumbed to consumption in 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colo. He went there in 1886 when told that the hot springs had curative powers. He apparently was misinformed. Visit his grave at the Doc Holliday Grave and Hiking Trail. Flatlanders beware: it’s located more than a mile high and it’s all uphill. Healthy lungs required.

One of our U.S. presidents, sought out the West’s fresh air and healthy lifestyle in North Dakota. Theodore Roosevelt thrived, returned to politics, declared Wyoming’s Yellowstone a national park and Devils Tower a national monument, and the rest is history and myth-making.

North Dakota’s San Haven Sanatorium in the Turtle Mountains treated TB patients from 1909 until the 1940s. As final plans were made for a 1911 opening, Superintendent of Public Health Dr. J.L. Grassick referred to TB as “The Great White Plague” because physicians marked TB-infected lungs with white arrows and healthy ones with black arrows. and assessed the illness as more a lifestyle choice than a microscopic rod-shaped bacillus with plans of its own.

“Wherever man builds his habitation, depresses his vitality by overwork or by debilitating excesses, lowers his powers of life by using insufficient or improper food, surrounds himself with the expectoration of his fellows and deprives himself of the blessings of God’s free air, there you will find it.”

Sanatoriums such as San Haven offered a higher altitude than the surrounding prairie, plenty of God’s free air, proper food, and all the available treatments. One of the more gruesome ones was puncturing and deflating one sick lung to nurture the other. During its time, more than 50 percent of the patients died.

And then came bacteria-battling antibiotics. San Haven closed. The abandoned building is billed on N.D. tourism sites as a good place for ghost-hunting. No mention of how the ghosts of The Great White Plague feel about this.

To John Green’s credit, the book includes blasts at the healthcare industry (especially – surprise! -- major drugmakers) and global policymakers. He does this surprisingly quickly in 208 pages (hardcover) and 256 in paperback. I read it on my Kindle. He requires more pages to describe faulty stars and why those turtles go all the way down, but fiction is one thing and non-fiction is another.

The story that holds “Everything is Tuberculosis” together is one 13-year-old’s journey. Green is a fine storyteller and the one he tells about Henry keeps the reader hanging on to the end.

Postscript: A big thank you to my son Kevin, a writer and tech guy in Cheyenne, for hands-on research at the Wyoming State Archives. As always, the Archives staff went out of their way to help a researcher.

Finding a home for Grant’s tome

I’m having a hard time deciding which books to keep and which ones to give away. Why this comprehensive shelf-cleaning now? Is it time for the retirement home and everything must go because the young ones are not interested in any of our treasures? Not exactly. Chris and I are moving and selling our house. It is filled with 18 years of accumulating. I have bought and traded for many books in this time. I would put the count in the hundreds but Chris puts it in the thousands because that’s what it seems like to her.

Some might say I have book clutter. Chris is a reader (she just finished the second Abraham Verghese novel which is even longer than the first). So books are not the problem but their arrangement in the household is up for debate. I have swept clean three bookshelves, keeping only those volumes dear to me. We have moved out most of the bookshelves so the books have nowhere to go except out. Hey, I’m doing my best..

The other day, I filled a plastic bin with the section of the presidential library my father willed me in 2002. In the bin behind me, I see titles about JFK (“One Brief Shining Moment” by William Manchester, FDR (“Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants & Their War” by Eric Larrabee, and USG (“Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: Volume 1”) with Ulysses S. Grant holding the 1885 copyright and published by the Press of J.J. Little & Co., NY, NY. I also have the trade paperback on Grant’s memoirs (volumes 1 and 2) printed in 1952 by Da Capo Press. 

Buried among these was my slim paperback “JFK: Boyhood to the White House” (Crest Publishing, 50 cents). JFK and this book meant a lot to me. I was 10 at his inauguration and 12 almost 13 when he was assassinated. I had a tween crush on JFK and the whole Kennedy clan. It’s still sad to remember those times.

I am taking the presidents with me. It’s a darn heavy bin because nobody writes a slim biography of a U.S. president. Most are hardcovers which weigh in heavier than paperbacks. It will take a strong back or someone with a hand truck to carry this to our moving trailer. I estimate I will have ten of these monsters to take with me cross-country. My son will drive and I will be on one of those flying machines, you know, the ones with the extremely comfortable and spacious seats. 

I love to fly.

In Florida, I will reveal my presidential cache to family members with the hope they will put them on their shelves because I won’t have room in my new place. They are a legacy, after all, and deserve a place of honor and it will be up to my siblings’ children or grandchildren to decide where they go next. That’s the plan anyway.