East to the Dawn (17 page)

Amelia had left for summer vacation with serious reservations about returning to Ogontz, viewing herself as too grown up, but she returned in the fall of 1917 because Abby Sutherland was promising to change Ogontz from a finishing school to a combined school and junior college. In her first letter home to Amy that fall, she sought to assure her she had not made a mistake. “The general age of the school is older perhaps because the young girls are over at another house, but whatever it is, I am much more satisfied.”

Over the summer Abby Sutherland had moved the school to greatly enlarged facilities in Abington Township, in the Rydal hills near Philadelphia. So Amelia returned to a different campus and a changed institution: the girls were split up into a lower and upper school, and all the rules had been changed. The junior college was in the works but not yet in place. The swimming pool was still an empty hole, the hockey field unfinished. The first few weeks were slow and painful.

Amelia wrote approvingly about the cultural revolution that had
taken place, particularly the abolition of the secret societies. “It is a sweeping blow and only one who has seen them in action knows how tremendous it is. She [Miss Sutherland] has instituted in the same breathless iconoclastic measure the honor system which will I imagine stop all surreptitious student activities.” In her effort to raise the level of the student body, Abby Sutherland also changed the student mix, adding seventy-six new girls to the thirty-nine returning students.

The abolition of the sororities evidently did not take place without a great deal of resistance. Standing up for what she believed in, fighting in the thick of things, Amelia blossomed. Her natural tendency, which she had honed to a fine art during her years with her grandmother, to suppress knowledge of any possible problems she might be encountering, was now applied to Amy. “I was a little worried when I wrote you last and want now to correct any impression of unhappiness I may have given you.” Her leadership qualities had come to the fore: some of the girls tried to go back on their promise to Abby Sutherland to dissolve their societies, a course of action Amelia viewed as unethical, so she “landed into some of them for their conduct.” Her own society, Alpha Phi, was evidently the only one that kept its word to dissolve. It made her momentarily very unpopular, but she stuck to her guns even though, as she admitted in a letter to her mother, “very few people understand what I mean when I go at length into the subtleties of moral codes.”

As a result of her actions, Amelia became even more popular and within a short time was practically running Ogontz. She was one of five students elected to the new student honor board, in which capacity she had the temerity to stand up against the headmistress's demand for faculty representation. She was elected vice-president of her class, and in a nod to her musical talent, she was chosen to write the senior song. Then she became secretary and treasurer of something called Christian Endeavor, commenting to her mother, “It has been rather an institution of torture heretofore, and not well liked but we are trying to put something into it that will make it stand for something.”

In a close-up picture of Amelia, wearing her cap and gown, her level gray eyes stare composedly out; one curl of her blond hair shows. There is a glint in her eye. The tall beanpole had become an attractive young woman.

5

A Life of Purpose and Action

• • • • In April 1917 the United States entered World War I. In mid-June the first U.S. troops landed on European soil. Ogontz, like the rest of the United States, was drawn into the war effort. Scarcely had school started than Amelia's roommate Eleanor was elected chairman and Amelia secretary of the Ogontz Red Cross. The student body resolved to set aside one class period of forty-five minutes each day for the purpose of knitting sweaters for Allied troops, and to eliminate an article of food from each meal, the money thus saved to be donated to the Red Cross.

Although Amelia stayed at Ogontz for Thanksgiving, for Christmas it was arranged that she would travel to Toronto, as would Amy, to rendezvous with Muriel, who had become a student at St. Margaret's there in the fall.

The war was much closer to the Canadians than to the Americans. Canadians had won the reputation of being the finest soldiers on the Western Front, but they had paid dearly in casualties. Now, as the year drew to a close, Canadian soldiers, many of them wounded, filled the streets of Toronto. Amelia—fresh from the States, fresh from the sequestered existence of a school where the burning issues of the day were secret sororities, the outer limits of student government, and knitting sweaters—was
stunned by the sight of so many wounded soldiers—men without arms, without legs, some blind, some on crutches. “Returning to school was impossible, if there was work that I could do.”

The work she had in mind was nursing.

Amy, happy to be reunited with her girls for Christmas vacation, suddenly found herself faced with Amelia's decision to withdraw from school. Clearly, given the devotion to nursing shown by Amy's grandmother Maria Harres and by her sister Margaret's lifelong interest in medicine, Amy could not object to Amelia's choice of career. As for the timing, there was very little she could do about that either. In fact, there was very little she had been able to do with Amelia for years.

It must be noted that Amelia's decision was audacious as well as sudden—very few American girls volunteered for the Canadian war effort. Amelia wrote Abby Sutherland of her decision and asked her to send on her things. She and Muriel moved into a small apartment hotel at the St. Regis, a hotel that catered to gentlewomen.

Amelia promptly enrolled in the first aid course given by the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, at the end of which, certified to administer first aid, she became a VAD, as the graduates were called. Between the nurses' course and her newfound freedom to date boys, she was so busy she almost forgot to look after Muriel, she admitted in a letter to her mother. She was thoroughly enjoying herself, she assured Amy, and had a very full social life. She had a beau named Reg who had asked her to go to the most exciting professional hockey game of the season. She had friends with whom she went to concerts. She had plenty to read, having procured a library card. She was making new friends, she assured her mother, and that very night she was meeting an American girl whose primary attraction was a good-looking brother, a Cornell graduate who was in the coast guard. She was carrying on a voluminous correspondence with her friends, male and female, fretting if they didn't write back promptly. She passed along photos and letters from family and friends for Amy to read. “Muriel and I sent Miss Macdonald a box of violets and she was very pleased, Muriel said. She said it was just like you which is the greatest compliment she can give—and we can receive.... I am sending you a funny letter from Ginny Park. Its nice to feel there are more deluded people who have confidence in one.” The letter, written over several days, concludes, “Oh, and I
did
hear from Ken,” and is signed, “ ‘Zever (as Harry says) Amelia.”

A short while later Amelia enrolled in the home nursing course given by the St. John Ambulance Brigade and was quite pleased with all her activities:

Clothed in a white cap and the gray and white VAD uniform, Amelia went to work as a nurse's aid in the children's wing at Victoria Memorial Hospital. There she watched her first tonsillectomy, fearful she would be put off by the sight of what was then a bloody operation. Instead she found it “interesting.”

Shortly thereafter she transferred to Spadina Military Hospital, where on her first day, while she was in the shell-shock ward, someone turned on the fire alarm, traumatizing the sick patients. Unfazed, she helped put the patients back to bed. Most of the days, however, were more humdrum: she made beds, carried trays, and tried to bring a little “merry sunshine” to the wounded men. Among her jobs were “backs to be rubbed—some lovely ones!” as she noted, not letting the monotony of the work dull her appreciation for the male body. But it was a strenuous regimen; the day began at seven and ended at seven, with two hours off in the afternoon.

After a while she began working in the laboratory at the hospital, staining germs and doing other tests. Her days there began at nine and continued until about four forty-five, after which she went to the diet kitchen and helped with the evening meal.

When Amelia had spare time, she headed for the stables, and it was through her riding that she got her first exposure to airplanes. She was riding a horse named Dynamite, whom she had “gentled” with a combination of horsemanship and apples, when she was joined by three air force officers. They were so impressed by how well she controlled her mount—famous for bucking off a colonel—that they asked her to go out to Armour Heights, an airfield at the edge of the city, to watch how they controlled their planes.

Amelia had seen planes before. She saw her first at a fair in Des Moines when she was ten, but “it was a thing of rusty wire and wood and looked not at all interesting.” The chances are, it was the same first plane that Clarence Chamberlin, who also grew up to be a crack pilot, saw in his home town of Denison, Iowa, at about the same time—an old-style pusher, with the pilot sitting out front “on a sort of birdcage seat,” and the
propeller and engine in the rear. He too had been “frankly unimpressed ... quite willing to let anyone take such fool chances who would.”

But ten years had passed. These planes were a different generation; now they were beautiful: “They were full sized birds that slid on the hard-packed snow and rose into the air with an extra roar that echoed from the evergreens that banked the edge of the field.” She stood close to them -so close that the propellers threw snow in her face, and “I felt a first urge to dy.” She tried to get permission to go up, but failed—“not even a general's wife could do so—apparently the only thing she couldn't do.” So she did “the next best thing” and got to know the fliers.

One day she had a chance to test her faith in planes, not by flying but by standing in the path of one. It was at a Toronto fair, and the pilots, war aces, were giving exhibitions of stunt flying. She and a girlfriend were standing in the middle of a clearing off by themselves in order to see better. The pilot began diving at the crowd. She would never forget what happened next.

“He was bored. He had looped and rolled and spun and finished his little bag of tricks, and there was nothing left to do but watch the people on the ground running as he swooped close to them.” Then he started diving at the two girls off in the clearing. “I remember the mingled fear and pleasure which surged over me as I watched that small plane at the top of its earthward swoop. Commonsense told me if something went wrong with the mechanism, or if the pilot lost control, he, the airplane and I would be rolled up in a ball together. I did not understand it at the time but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.” Her friend ran off. Amelia didn't; she was fascinated.

That summer a deadly influenza epidemic hit North America, brought from Europe by the troops returning home after the war was over. The first shipload of infected soldiers reached Canada in June. The spread of the disease was so quick that young men who had seemed perfectly well at night, who had even been on guard duty, would be found dead in the morning. The contagious disease spread quickly, fanning out from the soldiers to their families and to the health workers caring for them, then into the general population. By fall the disease, first thought a minor illness, was an epidemic. Many of those who survived the flu were felled by the pneumonia that often followed. Before it had run its course in Canada, it would kill somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people, almost as many Canadians as had died fighting.

All over Canada, hospitals, already shorthanded because of the war, were overwhelmed as the numbers of patients mounted. In Toronto, which was enduring the coldest, wettest September in a century, the death toll
mounted, and by October the flu was killing seventeen people a day. Masked figures could be seen making their way through the deserted Toronto streets; black crepe sashes hung from the doorways.

As the epidemic continued, many of the hospitals became even more shorthanded as their staff members fell ill. Amelia, as an American, could have done the prudent thing and left—but she didn't. She stayed. She went on the night shift in the pneumonia ward, where she helped dispense care and medicine. But the medicines were not effective against flu and pneumonia. Sulfa drugs, penicillin and other antibiotics had not yet been discovered. It must have been then that Amelia first thought of becoming a doctor herself.

Amelia was tough, but finally she too, fell ill. She was hit with a pneumonococcal bacterial infection in her frontal antrum, where the pressure so builds up in the sinuses that severe, chronic pain results. Without antibiotics, the only treatment was to surgically open the cavity, drain the infection, and keep it open and draining until all traces of the infection completely disappeared. Amelia was operated upon. It was a long, debilitating course of treatment, lasting months, and it so seriously weakened Amelia that it took the rest of the winter for her to recover her strength. Even then it turned out that the infection had not been totally eradicated; it would remain a serious problem for years.