The Leper Spy (24 page)

But even the rebuttal generated fear. A writer going by C.N. relayed an old story that Stein himself had heard before, even researched: “During the winter of 1918–19 there was a leper at the Walter Reed Hospital, a United States soldier, who had contracted the disease in the Philippines. The nurse, a personal friend of mine, who attended him, was required to put on a robe, rubber gloves, and a mask when entering his room. Everything that came out of the room was sterilized. What does Mr. Zeigler mean when he states that leprosy is ‘remotely communicable?' Why are there 30,000 lepers in the Philippines, according to his figures, if the disease is not readily communicable?”

Stein's response, which was verified by a nurse at Carville who knew the patient at Walter Reed: he had smallpox, not leprosy.

Stein shot letters to newspapers, magazines, business groups, advertising agencies, even to television networks that loosely used the word
leper,
as in “He's a moral leper.”

“It has been said that, ‘It is a gigantic task to attempt to alter a conception that people have held all over the world for many centuries, and to expect them to change suddenly, figures of speech which have long been part of the vocabulary of associations, toward which the mind turns unconsciously.' However, with due cognizance of the difficulties involved, all of which can be overcome by the cooperation of your group, we submit the following suggestion. In place of the word ‘leprosy' use the word ‘plague,' and replace the word ‘leper' by the word ‘pariah.' This rule is to apply to programs not concerned with scientific discussion of the disease but where the word is merely dragged in because it is colorful and connotative.”

When patients at Carville were listening to a baseball game over the radio and heard the announcer say that if the Giants didn't win, they'd be treated like they had a compound leprosy when they returned to the Polo Grounds, off went a letter from Stanley Stein to Liberty Broadcasting in the Empire State Building.

“We realize the connotation you placed on the word leprosy is deeply imbedded in the language,” he wrote to announcer Gordon McLendon. “However, we feel you would not have made the reference had you known it would offend a group or even one of your listening audience.”

To Lowell Thomas from CBS radio: “The medical world is with us in our battle to outlaw this word. According to manuscript rules of the American Medical Association, the word ‘leper' can not be used in any of its publications.”

To Morgan Beatty from NBC's
News of the World:
“The nearly four hundred patients of this hospital, the Nation's only Continental Leprosarium, bitterly resent being classed with Russian spies and communists, especially some of us who are veterans of both world wars.”

And almost always, he would include a gift subscription to the
Star,
or at least a few issues, so the offending party could see the people they'd hurt. More often than not, Stein received thoughtful, genuine responses from those he took to task.

“I humbly apologize to the patients in your hospital for what might seem to be an affront to them,” wrote US representative Karl Mundt, from South Dakota, who had suggested on the House floor that Communists were mental lepers. “While my reference was made in the sense of the Biblical references to leprosy, I want to assure you that I feel nothing but the deepest sympathy for those people who have contracted Hansen's disease. Please be assured that in the future I shall be more careful in my analogies.”

The third front in Stein's campaign would be mass education, and on this front he began growing the circulation of his newsletter. A field representative for the American Legion who had taken an
interest in Carville suggested Stein print the mimeographed
Star
like a magazine. The state commander of the Forty and Eight, the American Legion's fun and honor society, decided to buy the
Star
a press, type, and all the necessities. The Louisiana delegation of the American Legion convinced the other states at a national meeting to adopt the
Star
as a national project, and the new subscriptions after that overwhelmed the presses to the point that the Forty and Eight in New York bought Carville a flatbed press, a paper cutter, and a folding machine. Someone else gave them a mechanical stitcher, and someone else secured a linotype machine. The hospital turned over an addressograph and the US government put in place salaries for more staffers. Soon Stein and his cohorts were turning out fourteen thousand copies of the
Star
every month, sending them to public libraries, doctors' offices, medical schools, and homes in the United States and sixty-eight foreign countries.

“We may not be a determining factor in changing the archaic attitude of people toward Hansen's disease,” Stein wrote, “but we have at least been a catalytic agent.”

A
fter a short stay in her temporary room, Joey moved into a boardinghouse on campus that required a feat of housekeeping to make it livable. She lacked the modern amenities and knickknacks that make a home, but room 200 in house 19-2 would do. The walls were painted pastel green. The floor was tiled with beige linoleum bearing a fern design. Her windowsills were covered by potted houseplants, and two bookshelves were filled with books, as was her bed. At night, she moved the books to the floor. A chest of drawers with a mirror stood against the wall facing her bed, and to the side was a cabinet, which held her two-plate burner. In one corner was a hanging pot with ivy. The walls were decorated with photographs of her many friends, but dominant on the wall was her favorite picture of the Sacred Heart. Her writing desk was pushed near the window, and on it sat a new Underwood portable typewriter, a gift from the Underwood Corporation in New York, which sent along a message with it: “It seemed very appropriate that our message be in the form of an article that would prove useful for many years to come. We would like to present Mrs. Guerrero with an Underwood typewriter with best wishes and appreciation for the great work she has done.”

She put it to good use. It took her weeks to respond to the letters that had piled up, but she worked at it diligently until every
piece of correspondence had been dealt with, including letters from both Rene and Cynthia. Cynthia asked for a carriage for her doll, but Joey wasn't allowed to leave the campus, so she had to find someone who could help her. She missed Cynthia dearly.

“I love that baby of mine,” she wrote to a friend. “I felt like I could give up anything but not her. Then, separation meant something like death.”

She soon fell into a routine. She woke to an alarm before sunrise, before most of the patients had started to stir. She thought of it as the gong sounding to mark the beginning of the battle between flesh and spirit. She hurried to the chapel for early Mass every day, and every day she was glad she did. After Mass she would hustle back to her room to make the bed and tidy up and write a few letters before the breakfast bell rang at 7:30
AM
. Some days she made coffee and toast in her room, but most often she joined the rest of the nearly four hundred patients in the cafeteria. School started at 8:30; she was trying to get an American high school diploma. The lunch bell rang at 11:00, then she went back to school until 3:15
PM
. In the afternoon, she played badminton or visited with friends or pushed a twenty-three-year-old invalid named Mabel around the campus in her wheelchair, trying to lift the girl's spirits. She also began reading to the blind patients and those who had never learned how. She preferred nonfiction and loved biographies and books on travel.

Her job at the
Star
paid a modest salary, and she had begun to save up to buy a radio-phonograph she saw in a catalog priced at $179. The jazz everyone at Carville seemed to enjoy so much was grating. She preferred Mozart over Miles Davis. She liked listening to her music more than anything.

“I love music, although I do not play any instrument, nor can I read even one note,” she wrote to a reporter for the
Catholic Digest.
“Yet, I can sit for hours listening to the music of the masters. One of my secret ambitions is to be able to go to all the places where I can listen to music: Carnegie Hall, for example, the Metropolitan, Hollywood Bowl.”

She enjoyed styling hair and giving the other patients permanents. She also loved making clothes and wrote to a fashion academy in New York, asking if she could take a home-study course. The school asked for references, so Joey sent back a few newspaper clippings.

“I didn't want to bother anyone with this, so I just sent them a few newspaper clippings about me,” she told a friend. “I thought this would establish my identity.”

The academy wrote back: “Because of your wonderful service to your own government as well as that of the United States, we are extending to you a scholarship in the Home Study Division through the Emil Alvin Hartman foundation. Therefore, we are returning your payment herewith.”

From then on, she worked to design clothing and studied the history of fashion. She read every book she could get her hands on about how to sketch costumes and then carry them out. She started making her own clothes and designing dresses for the other patients. She spent hours bent over her Singer sewing machine, and her efforts were amateurish at first. It took her three weeks to make herself a floral-print dress. But she was getting the hang of it. Her desire was to leave the hospital with an array of practical skills so she could easily find employment once she was on her own. She knew two languages. She was learning how to be a journalist. She could type and practiced the skill by volunteering as secretary for the Patients Federation. Not a day went by without at least one of the other patients approaching her to ask if she would mind filling out a form or answering a letter. “Just tell them I was glad to hear from them and that I'm alright,” they would instruct her.

In the same vein, she spent as much time as she could in the manual arts department of the hospital learning carpentry. She built herself a desk, sanding and staining it until it was handsome. The work wasn't foreign, for she recalled building coffins for the dead at Tala so they'd be buried in something more respectable than a burlap sack or straw mat.

Beyond that, she seemed to always be hosting visitors to campus, some of them old friends and some of them starstruck strangers who just wanted to meet the little Filipina they had read about.

“Louisiana is overlooking a new source for tax revenue and the state has been most astute in its levying of taxes,” wrote a reporter for the
Star.
“But if they would just charge toll to each of the visitors who brave the gravel path from Baton Rouge to visit Joey they could promise two chickens for every pot.”

Father Fred Zimmerman, who used to bring Joey chocolate bars at Tala, came with a fellow priest and stayed for two days. Father Walter Debold of Saint Joseph's Church in Jersey City, who also used to visit Tala when he was stationed in the islands with the 248th Station Hospital, flew two thousand miles to say hello. Father Fred Julien, who remembered the lady in black outside the Ateneo de Manila, drove over from his new parish in Lufkin, Texas, three times to visit with Joey. Elsie Voigt, who was a field auditor for UNRRA in Manila and was introduced to Joey by Frank Gaines, also made time to visit.

“Once upon a time I thought there was no such thing as a true friend,” Joey wrote. “I was mistaken.”

One day she walked into the doctor's office at the hospital, and there stood Brig. Gen. Howard Smith, assistant surgeon general in charge of public health work for the United States in the Far East. He had served as MacArthur's medical chief and escaped Bataan with President Manuel Roxas and was among the small delegation that raised the flag at Corregidor when the United States reclaimed the island. He spread his arms and gave Joey a massive hug.

“Let me look at you,” he said. “How are you, child?”

They'd first met through Frank Gaines when Joey was at Tala and she had given the general some spare fishing equipment. They saw each other many times after that, and Smith had vouched for Joey's war record when she was trying to get her passport. He promised to visit her when he was in the States. She had met several generals, but he was her favorite.

She had a special talent for leading tours of the giant campus with its tennis courts, library, movie house, and some three miles of covered walkways leading from building to building. The Patients Federation and the staff of the
Star
had convinced the medical officer in charge in 1946 to lift the restriction on visitors. He had admitted it wasn't because of danger of contact but just to protect patients from the morbidly curious. He agreed to change the rule if the
Star
staff promised to assume the responsibility of conducting visitors through the hospital. Since then, thousands had come, many to see Joey, and thousands had left with their minds changed about Hansen's disease. The former mayor of Richmond, Michigan, who toured Carville, promised to help in the educational campaign by giving talks about Hansen's disease to civic clubs.

“I visited your Marine Hospital last month and Joey's tour around the place did something for me,” wrote Vince Pizzolato of Plaquemine, Louisiana. “I feel that you should solicit visitors from nearby communities and really educate them on Hansen's disease. Here's a few subscriptions from a group of my friends to your paper.”

When her visitors called her a hero, Joey buckled and tried to correct them. “I am just a simple, ordinary person, not a heroine,” she wrote to one admirer. “I did only what you or any other would have done if called upon to do so. I was fortunate, for to me was given that which was not given to those more worthy. God chose a weak and fragile vessel of clay of the poorest quality when He chose me, but such are the ways of God—they are strange to us poor mortals.”