Former patient at Cambria County sanatorium organizes reunion

Published: Sunday, June 27, 2010, 7:34 PM 

DAVID WENNER, The Patriot-News 0

0

Not long ago, the Cresson Sanatorium for tuberculosis patients existed mostly as a faded memory among a scattered group of people.

Now, it’s possible survivors, relatives and former employees will gather for the 100th anniversary of the facility in 2013.

About two years ago, former patient Chuck Felton created a website devoted to Cresson, located in Cambria County.

Since then, he’s heard from about 125 people with ties to the facility.

With the 100th anniversary approaching, the Cresson Area Historical Society has asked him to float the idea of a reunion among the people who have contacted him.

“Right now, I have 57 people who said they would definitely come to the reunion,” said Felton, 72.

The Cresson Sanatorium operated from 1913 to 1964. It cared for people with tuberculosis, a highly contagious and often fatal lung disease known as the “Great Killer” and “White Plague.”

Cresson was one of three sanatoriums run by the state; the others were in Mount Alto and Hamburg. Development of a vaccine virtually wiped out tuberculosis in the United States by the early 1960s, eliminating the need for the sanatoriums.

While there may be survivors of the Mount Alto and Hamburg facilities, those facilities apparently haven’t sparked any websites comparable to Felton’s.

Cresson, about 140 miles west of Harrisburg, later was a state hospital for the mentally ill and now is a state prison.

It occupied a picturesque mountaintop setting on 500 acres donated by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. An estimated 40,000 men, women and children were sent there over the years.

The bodies of some who died there were never claimed, and they are buried in a nearby cemetery.

Felton, who lives in Texas, is eager to visit the cemetery.

In 1955, he was president of his senior class in Towanda, Bradford County, when he was stricken with tuberculosis and sent to Cresson.

He sat in the back seat and wore a face mask during a five-hour drive to Cresson
with his parents. Along the way, he realized his parents didn’t expect him to return home.

At Cresson, he befriended a man who was about a decade older. They played chess regularly.

Felton recovered and was left after 18 months. His chess partner was sicker and had to remain.

Felton, who became an aerospace engineer, always wondered what happened to him.

Recently, he was shocked to find a website listing the people who died at Cresson. He saw his friend had died there and is buried in the nearby cemetery.

“I would love to go there and lay a wreath, and I will, one way or another,” he said.

Harvey Docchio of New Brighton in western Pennsylvania was sent to Cresson for preventive purposes in the early 1940s, along with his brothers. Their grandfather had tuberculosis, and their mother died of it at 36.

Docchio, who became a college administrator, stopped at Cresson during the 1970s.

It was then a state hospital, but Docchio was allowed inside, where he was jarred by the sight of bars on windows that used to stand wide open because of the belief fresh mountain air would heal the lungs.

He visited again recently and asked about being allowed inside the prison gates. He wasn’t allowed in, and the employee he spoke to didn’t know the site had once been a tuberculosis sanatorium, he said.

“I don’t know if they’d let us in but, sure, I’d consider going,” Docchio, 78, said of the possible reunion.

While being sent to the sanatorium was a difficult period in their lives, Felton and Docchio remember it as a well-run facility with a skilled and caring staff.

There was a closed-circuit radio station in the basement. Children attended classes and were offered music lessons. Docchio said he studied college algebra at 12.

There was vocational training for older patients and qualified younger patients, including Felton, could attend Penn State University after his discharge with the state footing the bill.

“We looked at it as a blessing, because where else could the average person afford to get that type of treatment?” Felton said.

Still, the facility was also a source of dark memories.

Felton slept in a ward with about 15 other men. Sometimes during the night, someone would begin coughing uncontrollably because of the lung bleeding caused by tuberculosis.

Staff members would rush into the ward, and wheel away both bed and patient. Felton has likened their speed and proficiency to that of an Indianapolis Speedway pit crew.

They would often later see an empty bed with fresh sheets, and know their ward mate had died, Felton said.

In his research, Felton learned that a painful treatment given to many patients, involving injections of air into the lungs, had no benefit and involved a chemical now known to cause breast cancer in women.