Posted on Mon, Nov. 22, 2010
It was the winter of 1955 in rural Towanda, north of Wilkes-Barre,
and 17-year-old Chuck Felton was primed for life. He was senior class president and looking forward to baseball season. In
his spare time, he built model airplanes, and he was preparing to study engineering at Penn State in the fall.
In late February, though, Felton developed a cough and started feeling weak. His parents took him to the doctor, who found
that he had tuberculosis.
At that point, everything stopped for Felton, and he was shipped off to Cresson, then a state sanatorium for TB patients.
"It all happened so quickly. It was quite abrupt. But my life changed, as it had for so many others back then," said Felton,
who spent 16 months in Cresson, not far from Altoona in Western Pennsylvania. "It seems like another era, but that is how
things were."
Long since cured of TB, which because of antibiotics is virtually nonexistent now in the United States, Felton, 72, a retired
Boeing engineer in Texas, created a website to remember the sanatorium.
Within months, other people who had been at Cresson or had had relatives there contacted him, and now Felton has organized
a reunion to be held in August near the old hospital, with dozens of former patients or relatives planning to come, most of
whom have not been back since their patient days.
"It was something my mother wanted me to play down after my discharge," said Thomas Domin, 70, now retired in Kelayres,
near Hazleton. Domin spent more than a year at Cresson after being diagnosed with TB in 1946. "There was so much mystery surrounding
TB, like AIDS today. She thought it would be better if I said nothing, if I put it all behind me.
"But now I would like to see what other people thought. I can't wait to go to the reunion," Domin said. "It is a long time
ago and there is no need to hold onto the mystery."
Cynthia Connolly, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, has written about children during the
era Cresson was active in her book, Saving Sickly Children: The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970.
She said that fear of the spread of TB, a bacterial disease whose origins were unclear, brought about the state-run institutions
- the other two in Pennsylvania were in Hamburg and Mount Alto - and their idea of a fresh-air cure.
Cresson was built in 1913 on 500 acres of land donated to the state by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who had originally
wanted to build a country house there. The bucolic site housed TB patients from 1913 to 1964.
"It was its own little world. Usually these sanatoriums were in the middle of nowhere," Connolly said. "What was believed
is that what helped you live through it was complete rest in a fresh-air environment."
The famed Adirondack Chair, she said, was probably developed at a TB sanatorium in Upstate New York. Doctors thought its
angled seat would get fresh air into patients' lungs more efficiently.
Domin and Felton corroborated Connolly's research, saying that for at least their first few months there, they were mostly
in bed or in chairs, with the windows open even in winter.
"There was little to do, but everyone would treat you well," said Felton. He said that every day an aide would come through
with a library cart to give out new reading. He had a radio by his bed and, as he got better, he became a deejay for the inhouse
Cresson radio station WSAN (for "sanatorium").
Domin said that when he got to Cresson's children's ward, it was occupied only by him and a black teenager near his own
age whom he recalls only as Bill. They became friends. Days droned on, though, he said, and he doesn't remember exactly how
long he was there, believing it was about 12 to 15 months. During that time, his parents divorced, and for a long time he
blamed himself for it.
"It surely was going to make you tough in life or weaken you considerably. I would have to say it was the former for me,"
said Domin, who spent time in the Air Force, built and ran a mobile home park, and, finally, worked at the White Haven Center,
a state-run mental hospital near his home.
Esther Linker's husband, Ralph, was a young minister in Michigan when he discovered, through a routine physical at 31,
that he had TB. State law at the time gave someone with the disease 72 hours to find a hospital or facility to go to. Esther's
parents lived near Cresson and quickly made arrangements for him to be admitted. The couple packed up their three children,
all younger than 6, and made the 11-hour drive two days after the exam.
Treatments up until then were crude, consisting partly of enforced rest and surgery that collapsed part of the lung to
make breathing easier.
Ralph Linker proved to be one of the last patients at Cresson, spending much of 1963 there before being discharged in December
and going on to a new ministry in Ohio, cured of the dread disease.
By that time, scientists had discovered several antibiotic regimens, particularly the drug streptomycin, that became magic
bullets, curing what had at one time seemed an unstoppable and contagious disease.
Connolly said that even doctors and nurses at facilities like Cresson were often TB survivors, that they were sometimes
shunned even by other medical professionals who were unsure of their contagiousness.
Cresson became a mental health facility in 1964, having treated more than 40,000 patients, and is today a part of the state
correctional system. That will make the reunion a little more difficult, Felton said, since those returning won't actually
get to see the buildings up close, housing, as they do, prisoners.
Still, he is hoping the corrections system will let them at least go to a chapel on campus - where Domin made his First
Communion. They will lay a wreath at Union Cemetery, where some who died from TB at Cresson were buried.
"My wife asked me the purpose of all this, from so long ago and with mostly people I have never met," Felton said. "The
purpose is just that, to celebrate that we are alive and that we experienced something like this but have never met. We all
know we have now had a lot of years that we never thought we would have had, and wouldn't have but for Cresson."
For more on the Cresson Sanatorium and reunion, go to http://go.philly.com/cress
Contact Robert Strauss at rsstrauss@comcast.net 
