St. Thomas Hospital · 1928–1939
In the admitting office at St. Thomas, she decided who got a bed. One of the doctors who stopped at her desk had a slang word for everything, and a secret.
“There’s a doctor, a lovely gentleman. He wants to see about getting on staff here.”
St. Thomas Hospital opened in Akron on September 28, 1928, run by Sister Ignatia’s order, and she was made registration clerk in its admitting office. She was thirty-nine and still recovering, and had traded the gray habit she wore in Cleveland for the white one the sisters wore in the hospital. Apart from some typing and filing at St. John’s, she had never worked in a hospital. A sister who was there from the start remembered her first plea: “Oh, Sister, will you please help me? I don’t know anything about hospital work.”
The job carried more weight than its title. Admissions decided who got a bed and where, and she learned to find room where there seemed to be none. A night supervisor who worked at St. Thomas from 1943 to 1948 put it bluntly: “she controlled all the beds.” Some of the nurses resented it, the supervisor said. “She was a musician! She wasn’t even a nurse!” Darrah uses these memories for the 1930s, but they come from the 1940s, after St. Thomas had begun taking AA patients.
Dr. Bob met her in 1928, on an early visit to St. Thomas. In the account she gave in the 1950s, printed in Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, the meeting meant little at the time, and she knew nothing of his drinking; only that “He brought something with him when he came into a room.” The sister who worked with her remembered it differently in 1985: the two took to each other at once, and that same day Sister Ignatia came to her with the news quoted above. He operated at St. Thomas now and then, joined its courtesy staff in 1934, and seldom came into the building without stopping at her desk. When he needed a bed for a patient, he telephoned: “Sister, may I have a bed?” (The flower room, in I Just Work Here, takes the story on from there.)
There was one kind of patient she was supposed to turn away. Hospitals didn’t usually take alcoholics as such, she told Bill W. in 1954; a drunk got in with an injury or some other illness. She couldn’t see why a man with a bashed-in head got a bed and a man on the edge of the D.T.’s did not, when both were sick; for the second, all she could do was call the police. Once a drunk driver caused a pileup and some of the injured came to St. Thomas. She remembered saying to Dr. Bob, “Isn’t it a pity someone can’t do something for these people before they get into a wreck like this?” He told her he and some others had been trying. Then one day, “to my great surprise, Dr. Bob told me about his own drinking problem.” She had never seen him drunk. (Darrah, writing in 1992, doubted this account; see Two sides of the desk.)
By other accounts she had already been doing something herself. Darrah, from a 1985 interview, says that from 1934 she and a young intern, Thomas Scuderi, hid very sick drunks in a little room opposite the chapel, where he treated them and she prayed. Bill V. remembered being brought in by the police about 1936, laid on a cot in a hallway, and getting to know her a couple of days later. (Scuderi told it differently in 1977; see Two stories from Dr. Scuderi.) Then, in August 1939, Dr. Bob came to her desk so downcast she thought he was sick. Another hospital had told him to take his patients elsewhere, and he needed a bed.
It’s the late 1930s, at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron. Sister Ignatia runs the admitting office. She decides who gets a bed, and where.
One kind of patient she is supposed to turn away: the drunk. A man with a broken head can come in. A man shaking on the edge of the D.T.’s cannot. She can’t see why. Both of them are sick.
A surgeon called Dr. Bob stops at her desk whenever he’s in the building. He has a slang word for everything.
One day there’s a wreck. A drunk driver has caused a pileup, and some of the injured are brought in. She says to Dr. Bob, isn’t it a pity no one can help these people before something like this? He tells her he and some friends have been trying.
Later, he tells her more. He is one of them. She has never once seen him drunk.
Eleven years, side by side
For eleven years before AA came to St. Thomas, Sister Ignatia and Dr. Bob saw each other across the admitting desk. Here is what each was doing, as far as the sources say.
Her side comes from her own recollections, recorded in the 1950s and printed in Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), and from Mary C. Darrah’s biography (1992), which adds interviews from the 1980s. Dr. Bob’s side is told at length in I Just Work Here; the links go there. Quotations are short excerpts.
At the admitting desk
St. Thomas opens in September, and she is put in its admitting office, still recovering, with only a few months of light clerical work at St. John’s Hospital behind her.
Darrah, chapter 1.
Dr. Bob, meanwhile
A surgeon at Akron City Hospital who has been drinking hard for years and hiding it. He meets her on an early visit to St. Thomas.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, chapter IV. His hiding is in The hiding places.
At the admitting desk
As a rule she must turn drunks away unless they are hurt or ill. From 1934, Darrah writes, she and an intern, Thomas Scuderi, hide some of the sickest in a little room opposite the chapel.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, chapter XIV; Darrah, chapters 1 and 3, from Scuderi in 1985 and her 1954 interview.
Dr. Bob, meanwhile
His practice at City Hospital is slipping. He and Anne join the Oxford Group, and he goes on drinking. In 1934 St. Thomas puts him on its courtesy staff.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, chapters IV and V. See Secret drinker.
At the admitting desk
The police bring Bill V. in off skid row, about 1936, to a cot in a hallway. A drunk driver causes a pileup; she says to Dr. Bob, “Isn’t it a pity…” In 1938 or later (his account to her ran through 1938), he tells her about his own drinking.
Bill W. wrote in 1966: “It was not then certain she had ever heard of AA.”
Darrah, chapter 1; Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, chapter XIV; The Language of the Heart.
Dr. Bob, meanwhile
He meets Bill W. in May 1935 and has his last drink that June. He spends the next years working with alcoholics at City Hospital and in his own house.
See The last drink and 855 Ardmore.
At the admitting desk
In August he asks her for a bed for an alcoholic patient, and she finds one. In October her father dies.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, chapter XIV; Darrah, chapter 3.
Dr. Bob, meanwhile
Another hospital has told him to take his shaking patients somewhere else.
Her words, in Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, chapter XIV. The rest is in The flower room.
What did she know?
In her own account, recorded in the 1950s and printed in Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), Dr. Bob’s confession came as a surprise: she had never seen him drunk. Darrah, writing in 1992, treated it as “legendary material.” The two had talked about alcoholism ever since they met in 1928, she wrote; Sister Ignatia had been quietly caring for drunks for five years; and the hospital gossiped about them both. Neither, she thought, could have missed what the other was doing for alcoholics, and Sister Ignatia later played down her own part.
For a closer look
A slang word at the admitting desk, an intern who told two different stories, and the parents who followed her to Akron.
He loved slang, she remembered. After a big dinner he would say they had “put on the nosebag.” Once, with the admitting office full of people, she told him she had put his patient Mrs. Jones in 408, but that there was another patient in the room. He corrected her: “You mean a frail, Sister.” (A frail was slang for a woman.) The next time, she was ready: “Doctor, your Mr. Brown is in 241, and there’s a frail in 218.” He enjoyed it, she said. The three rooms are on the board in the drawing at the top of this page.
He gave nicknames to almost everyone: Bill W. was Willie, and he lumped alcoholics together as U.D.’s, short for “unknown drunks.” Hers is in What people called her.
Thomas Scuderi was an intern at St. Thomas in 1934, and in later years ran the medical side of its alcoholic ward, known by 1980 as Ignatia Hall. He never drank. He told his story twice.
In 1977, for Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, he said he hadn’t known about Dr. Bob’s drinking back then, “because everything was on the Q.T. in those days,” and that Dr. Bob and Sister Ignatia’s example drew him to the problem only after the two of them had set up the ward.
In 1985 he told Darrah something else: that he and Sister Ignatia had been treating drunks in secret since 1934, sedating them heavily at first and later dosing them with black coffee, fruit juice and dark Karo syrup, while she held their hands and prayed. He remembered finding her in tears over how the doctors treated her, and telling her, “You got two men better this week. There’s no need of you crying.” He learned later, through his pastor, that she had quietly had a friend pay his brother’s tuition. “She taught me about loving people.”
The same man, eight years apart, gave two different beginnings. Darrah tells only the second.
She had promised to look after her parents in their old age, and by 1939 she had kept the promise for twenty-five years. They followed her to Akron and lived in a rooming house near the hospital. Her father, Patrick, became the hospital’s gardener. Her mother, Barbara, often ill, did mending for the sisters, sewing hospital sheets and gowns.
1939 was a hard year. Her only nephew, Raymond, died at twenty. Her father died of pneumonia on October 8, about seven weeks after Dr. Bob’s first patient came in, and Darrah writes that Dr. Bob and the AA men helped her through it. Her mother died in January 1944, a few months before the alcoholic ward moved into the space it kept for years. The man you married tells what went on there.