From Joseph Hajdu’s Memoirs written in 1985

(Notes in italics are by John Hajdu Heyer)

This entry is dated April 15, 1985, 2 and ½ months before Dad died.  The first part here refers to about 1923 when he was 12 years old and growing up on a farm near Fayette City in the Monongahela valley south of Pittsburgh.

I must make a confession here about something that bothered me considerably the two years prior to my leaving home.  It had to do with my drinking soda pop. I discovered a man in who built a boxing ring to promote boxing in the area, and I became acquainted with his son when the boxing ring was being built near Fairhope.  When the boxing program started, I would go there sometime and after the event would be over we would be able to obtain a chilled soft drink. I was not on any allowance of any kind and my opportunity to obtain change or money for this purpose was quite scarce, but at one point I discovered some change that was in a purse under Dad's pillow, and every once in a while I would take a quarter or a few dimes and nickels out of it, and this way I got to purchasing some cold soda pop.  But then I discovered that when I would buy this cold soda pop with that money, it would bring on a hemorrhaging, and I would go back home and stay kind of quiet.  I couldn't figure out what happening and that bothered me.

More than once I heard Dad talking to Mother about his money and how it did not seem to balance for him. At one point he would say he had so much and the next time he counted there was some missing, but he never suspected me and I never said anything, but after a while I refrained from doing anything like that and it straightened out without him having to do any detective work. I was fearful of what would happen to me if he discovered that, but I have discovered that this comes in the life of all growing children at some stage or another they become something of an amateur thief or burglar and that was my experience with it and I have applied it on many occasions in my experience with children.

Mother and Dad were probably more concerned about my blood spitting than I was, and they noticed that my development for my age was not right, and I don't blame them for being concerned.  Finally in the spring of 1925 they took me to a Dr. Gemill in Belle Vernon where Dad worked.  He examined me and he figured that I was coming down with tuberculosis, and he thought that I should go away to an institution where they treated such things, so he mentioned the place at Cresson.  After that I had to go on a Thursday one time with Mother or Dad to a place  in New Eagle, Pa. near Monongahela and there they examined me, took my temperature, pulse, tested my sputum and urine and they told me to come back when they had a clinic. I think they had clinic twice a month, so I went there and the second or third visit they asked me if I wanted to go to Cresson for the summer or whether I wanted to go there and stay until I got better. I told them I wanted to get better and I wanted to go there and stay until I did so.  

Then I waited and waited and waited for three months! I waited until they told me I was ready to be admitted and on October 1, 1925 I was admitted to Cresson Sanatorium thinking I had tuberculosis. That was quite a trip from home.  I carried a suitcase, my sisters gave me some chewing gum to take along, and I also took a little box camera and all the clothes I needed.  Dad took me on a little trolley to Charleroi where we caught an interurban car and went to Pittsburgh to meet the Pennsylvania Railroad train that came to Cresson. It was quite a ride – for 100 miles it seemed to me (It is about 85 miles from Pittsburgh to Cresson).  Dad, however, did not go with me all the way to Cresson - he found a family in Pittsburgh who had taken their daughter to Cresson as well.  How he located them I do not know. I suppose he looked for another sickly youngster, and found a couple from Elwood City taking their daughter Mary Carlina, who had TB, to Cresson. She went directly to the sick ward.  There were 30 admitted that day and I recall that mission very vividly. A man named Harry McGraw met us at the little station in Cresson.  Harry met all the trains that brought patients to the Sanatorium and we were herded into a panel truck or bus and taken up to the hospital and left off in what we later learned was the East Wing.  We walked the length of the hospital to the West Wing down to a gymnasium where they had plans to examine all our luggage and take it up to our lockers and assign our beds to us.

The only thing that was confiscated out of my suitcase was the chewing gum that my sisters had given to me, and I felt very bad about that, but it was one of the rules of the place that there was no chewing gum in the hospital. This was the head nurse's rule. Any money we had was recorded and taken from us and put in the office bank, and that was then doled out to us whenever we had need of it.

I was assigned to a ward designated by alphabet L.  All the wards of the hospital were paired with two letters of the alphabet. A and B, C and D, E and F, and so on. The west wing of the hospital contained children at the time, and the east wing, adults. The corridors in between also had two wards of children and two wards of adults.  I recall parading through those wards on that dreary foggy day of October 1, 1925. It seemed like we would never get to our destination.  I stayed as a patient in L Ward for about a month. 

It was customary on Saturday evenings for the children who were not bedfast and were able to go swimming.  I was never a swimmer and I had never been exposed much to water but, of course, they said I had to go and the ward master was adamant. I went, got chilled and I got pneumonia.  Then I went to a side room where they treated me for the pneumonia.  My fever went so high that they were concerned.

(Entry Dated May 10, 1985)

After my pneumonia I never got back to my L Ward again and I didn’t get out of that side room for a month or two. I was put into A Ward where the bedfast tubercular patients were kept and it took me three years to get out of there.  It was quite an experience. The ward master was named Pat Myers; the nurse in charge of all the children was named Vesta Bates.  She became a very good friend of mine later.  The dental nurse was named Bertha Groff; the schoolteacher was Mary Mackreth.  A ward master from another section had a room across from our wash room was James Cox and we really had to toe the line when he was around. He was an asthmatic and had tuberculosis also at one time -- he had been there for a long while. The elevator operator adjacent to our ward was named Fred Porter.

It took me awhile to get wise as to how to get better and get out of the sick ward.  For about a year I just did what other children did there, and it was more or less on a misbehaving pattern that changed me. I would run a little fever every afternoon.  In the morning it would be down.  I kept to this pattern off and on for a year, but then one day I accidentally fell asleep after lunch and I slept half the afternoon.  When my temperature was taken that time it was normal, so I said to myself, if I want to get out of this bed, I have got to keep my temperature normal, so after that I started to do the best I could to sleep. If I did not sleep, I just laid still.  Then my temperature stayed down and the doctor let me get up and go to the dining room. When I was permitted to go to the dining room in the ward it was a great adventure for me, but within a week or so my fever would start going up again.

Back in bed I would go.  I had this occur to me for several months and there just didn't seem to be any way out of it. But the doctors were thinking about me, and one of them suggested that I get my tonsils out.  So about the second summer I was there (1927), there was a patient doctor who had become ill with tuberculosis was well enough to do some of his practice at the hospital and he would take anyone who needed a tonsillectomy and do them. I do not know the arrangement for his payment, but it did not cost me anything to me to get mine out.  He took them out locally and after the summer following the extraction I gained enough weight to outgrow a new suit within three months.  My fever came down and stayed down and I was able to get out of that ward into another area and do odd jobs for the nurse on the floor.

A big change came one spring (1928) when I attended the 8th grade graduation exercises for children who were able to go to school.  They would have an operetta, and diplomas were given to the graduates.  I thought to myself, well, here I am, and I don't even have an 8th grade certificate, so I vowed that the following year I would be in there getting a diploma, if possible. So I asked about going to school that fall and they said I would.  I did and I enjoyed it and I was willing to learn and had no difficulty. I was about 17 years old then. It was the spring of 1929 when I graduated from the 8th grade.

Getting back to the admission date of my trip to the san:  The effect of my leaving home on me didn't strike me until I had gone to bed that night in the ward and I was lying there thinking about my folks at home and I got a wave of homesickness over me that just made me whimper for awhile.  This occurred a couple times but it passed as I got absorbed in the activities in the institution.  My connection to home was just by correspondence after that. I didn't get back home for 10 months, when I was allowed to visit for a week in the summer of 1926.

I retraced the steps I had taken with Dad on October 1st but I got off at Allenport, however, and walked the distance from there up to home through Fayette City, crossing the ferry and walking up Johnson's Hollow to home.

At this point Dad resumes a detailed account of his homeland near Fayette City.  He resumes the account of his Sanatorium days below:

I was ready for the 8th grade when I left home October 1, 1925, four years later I graduated from 8th grade at the Cresson State Sanatorium. My grades for the first 7 years in school were not spectacular; my reading skill was mediocre and therefore history and geography were very difficult for me. My vocabulary was also poor. I had a good interest in arithmetic and spelling. I also enjoyed grammar, studying how to speak and write sentences, especially. There were three individuals who came into my life at the facility where I went to live and to get well on leaving home at the age of 14. They were Vesta Bates, R.N., Melvin E. Cowen, M.D. and Mary Mackreth. They all left the institution before I did. Miss Bates and Dr. Cowen left in 1935, never to return, when the Democrats won an election after 25 years of Republican rule. Miss Bates lived only a few years and Dr. Cowen 29 years. Mary Mackreth retired in 1964. All three of them, my seniors from 13 to 22 years, each of them were very kind to me and helped me toward my career. It was Miss Bates who told me one time that Dr. Cowen thought I could learn to help him in the taking of X-rays along with developing them and keeping the records. I guess my friendship with Miss Bates stemmed from my willingness to do errands for her and help with the younger children in cleaning their lockers and making beds and overseeing the smaller ones to do their chores. I am speaking now of the period of two years after I had had a tonsillectomy and my pre 8th grade graduation.

My first job at the sanatorium was at the age of 17, a paying one for Miss Bates, as a substitute ward master for the L Ward, which had about 20 boys, they not much my junior in age. It lasted about a month, but it taught me something important in keeping the job. Don't worry the boss with problems. I also learned that it is important to keep your temper down when others try to rouse it for their enjoyment. My next job came a few months later as lab assistant to where I with three other patients tested routinely the sputum and urine of patients in the institution. This I did two years - 1929 to 1931 during which time gradually Dr. Cowen started to call me when someone had hurt themselves and bones were thought to be broken. He first showed me how to take X-rays and little by little he would leave and let me finish up the washing and drying at first and then the development and fixing of the X-ray films. Later chest X-rays were shown to me how they were done and when was needed I was called to do it. This method of learning I guess would be called apprenticeship. I myself was not X-rayed for two yearsafter admission, in  1927,  and the department then consisted of one room 12 x 12 feet and the closed 3 x 12 for a darkroom.

Dr. Cowen's original plan for me was to learn both laboratory and X-ray work and perhaps I could find some work elsewhere if I became well enough and became proficient enough in my work. The Lab part never came about, which is another story, but the X-ray work did, though I never moved to another facility.

The X-ray equipment I was first introduced to was an early U. S.  Army model with only 30M capacity, limited to a low voltage and short time of exposure, hardly enough for a good chest X-ray. There was practically no protection from X-ray exposure and electrical shock very possible from circuit wires through the tube from the transformer. It was fortunate that more protection was present in the next equipment purchase and incorporated in the new suite of rooms. The corridor and dark room separated the office and the dressing room from the control room and the X-ray room. This was the first of six new x-ray department loactions built and relocated in the 37 years of my career with the Commonwealth at Cresson. The equipment changed there often for improvements were so rapid in the X-ray equipment manufacturing industry that it was necessary to change to offer the high quality care the hospital had started to provide, especially during the years between 1940 through 1960. One piece of equipment was manufactured in Germany on which a patient could be rotated to a reverse standing position secured to the table for certain effects needed at times. Besides the army manual we followed, and Dr. Cowen showing me his routine,  he also gave me two books of recent publication at the time for Christmas that first year in the new department. These were for the layman and the professional, and I with my 8th grade education had great difficulty understanding medical and technical terms. I saw my mentor’s medical dictionary one day and it was a 1917 edition - it didn't take me long to induce him to purchase a new edition and sell me the old one. What I didn't understand I would reread or look up in the dictionaries and try to understand.

My new books were more illustrated with photographs and drawings, especially in positioning parts of the body accurately. It was from these books that I learned operator's safe limits and patient's safe limits for X-raying people without harming them. What I didn't learn from those two books and from Dr. Cowen I learned from salesmen or service technicians who would call. At first they were the same people, but later salesmen could not handle the complexity of the equipment they sold, so they brought their servicemen with them if there was a complaint in his territory. Later, servicemen would be specified for breakdowns and there would be no delay. The first X-ray department was built in the East Wing of the Second floor where women patients were hospitalized. The laboratory was on the first floor. Those who were X-rayed had to be brought to the X-ray room, and many children in carts or wheelchairs from the West wing had to be taken to the east wing as needed. The elevator was just across the hall from the X-ray room. This suite of rooms was used for about 5 years after which a new suite was laid and used with new equipment in the west wing second floor of the children's area. It did not work out so well because of increased use of X-ray follow up on surgical cases that developed. The next room was a larger, with a more efficient patient flow pattern suite of rooms in the basement directly below the west wing. There patients could be brought from all areas without the need of moving them to any patient rest area, even from surgery, which was just off the west wing connected by an underground corridor. A mobile X-ray machine was available at the time and used for bedside work and in the operating room. A problem came with the mobile machine, which never left me. Certain areas of the basement had to be fed low steam or water pipes and a five foot test column that the 200 pound plus machine was mounted on was not very mobile when it had to be moved to get past a pipe or maneuvered around a low mounted pressure valve. Otherwise it was a life saving machine, for at times it was necessary to determine quickly what was making a patient suddenly gasp for air. A collapsed lung, as could happen spontaneously, or too much air accidentally injected in pneumothorax cases causing a sudden shift to the heart -- such patients were unable to be moved to the X-ray department for examination. In later years, a mobile machine was purchased for each area remote from the department, when only a phone call and a hurried trip by foot or car with the necessary data and film were more satisfactory.

Tuberculosis was not really conquered to a very great extent until the 1960s, but in the 50s signs were beginning to appear by the closure of private TB hospitals and their conversion to other health facilities.  Before the 50s and during the 2^nd World War years great strides were made in surgery of the chest diseases.  At Cresson the gymnasium building was converted into a surgical facility. Dr. Albert Dematteis, who first came to Cresson as a medical student, was from Altoona, but acquired TB while in medical school.  He was treated elsewhere with pneumo-thorax, and then required periodic treatments for which he came to Cresson for convenience.  I often x-rayed him prior to treatment, or arranged the fluoroscope for use.   He would ask for a mirror so he and Dr. O’Leary could study the fluoroscopic screen (to do this was a normally a no-no for regular patients).  Upon graduation and completion of his internship, he opened his practice in Altoona and came to Cresson to do surgery as needed, usually twice a week. 

The West Wing basement x-ray unit was the most efficient for the flow of traffic and work pattern.  The dark room had a maze as opposed to a light lock 2-door system.  The fluoroscopy and x-ray room had a double maze so that the door system would separate patients coming in and moving out.   All patients receiving pneumo-thorax were fluoroscoped before the air injection to determine the need.  The office reading room was accessible through a door to the darkroom for a quick study of films if required.  This department unit was used until it became necessary to concentrate medical services in one are for better hospital care, so a medical service unit was built and the x-ray department made its last move to it.  New equipment was purchased.  We were located in the new Medical Service Unit just at the corridor from the East Wing to the Kitchen and Administrative areas.  Our department’s floor space grew, but the layout was not as good as the old West Wing facility.  A separate cardiograph room was provided, which required the processing of recordings in the x-ray unit and we took on that responsibility.

To do all the work of the radiology department at this time about 7-8 people were on the payroll of the department.  I had a patient-assistant or a rehabilitated assistant (patient taken off the hospital census), and others helping in the dark room and office.  My assistant was chosen to be someone who might learn the skill of x-raying people so he or she could find a job elsewhere when discharged from our hospital.  Several did just that.  One, Ray Apryasz, who had been operating the water purge station of the hospital, was transferred to x-ray and learned.  When Ray left 2 years later, he has a job ready for him at the Torrance State Hospital and worked there until retirement.   Another patient-assistant, Dorothy [?], went on to work at the Shadyside Hospital in Pittsburgh until she relapsed and returned to Cresson for treatment.  She later recovered, but then joined an obscure order of nuns and she never pursued x-ray after that. 

Another assistant graduate of my department went to the Mercy Hospital in Johnstown and worked until retirement.  This assistant made me feel very good about being able to convey knowledge to others.  I never turned a willing “student” away.  After all, someone had been kind enough to teach me, and we former “TB cases” were quite low on the totem pole of welcome in any school, and even among our family. A secretary of mine for many years said her sisters insisted she stay at a hotel when she went home to visit, and her twin sisters never came to visit here from Vandergrift Pa.  They were fearful of contracting TB. This fear, of course, was built up through many generations, but was not justified at the time my secretary Emma was shunned, for much was learned by then.  I heard it said that the lowest incidence of contracting TP was in the TB institution itself.  We did have a few.  I recall a healthy woman from our hospital kitchen that required treatment for a while, and a few who worked in the lab culturing TB germs needed treatment.  After 37 years myself working there it could have been me too were something amiss in my immunity system. 

Following the decade to improve patients’ TB with surgical procedures, antibiotics slowly replaced it, and for patients so treated a wonderfully happy feeling of well-being would come to them even before symptoms were shown to disappear.  Where x-rays showed cavities in the lung, suddenly we found that they, amazingly, largely disappeared without any radical surgery if the disease was discovered early, or given enough time.  That was quite a contrast to a decade earlier when a patient per day was the statistic for the morgue.

The name of our institution was changed from Cresson TB Sanatorium to Lawrence F. Flick State Hospital [1956], and other types of chest disorders were admitted, particularly from lower income citizens. 

Here Dad’s memoirs end.  Shortly after dictating this part, he caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia.  His 74 years of battling lung disease were soon to end.  He died of complications from pneumonia on July 1, 1985 at the Johnstown Mercy Hospital.