Blood on Their Hands

By Fred Couzens

From the day she was born in January 1883, and every day thereafter, Reno, Nev. native Emily Ann Cox was as straight as an arrow; she was as trustworthy as the sun coming up in the east over Sparks.
She, after all, graduated from the top of her class in high school and was salutatorian, with a degree in English, from the State University of Nevada in Reno. Her work and her character were impeccable; it was no wonder she left her friend and student newspaper colleague Brad Porter behind and enthusiastically went to work at Mission Dolores, the California mission in San Francisco, the summer of her graduation.
So how was it a prim and proper young woman and intelligent, to boot who doesnt have a problem in the world one day and then within a few short weeks ends up being a resident a high-grade (less insane) inmate by definition of the state mental asylum in Yountville?
Due to situations beyond her control namely her mother and her snoopiness and rush to judgment Emily became defenseless in the practices of the Superior Court. She believed her explanations of what really happened inside the church at Mission Dolores that fateful day, and not her mothers assumptions, would be heard and believed and then shed be acquitted in short order. After all, the truth was the truth in Emilys book. That, of course, wasnt the case.
Emilys mother bought the verdict she was looking for; a buy that wasnt all that too uncommon with the judges in the San Francisco Superior Court system as it was later learned. Emily was railroaded and little did she know or suspect anything was working against her.
Despite harboring resentment against her mother for the womans unbelievable act her reason for getting Emily committed was taken supposedly to prevent Emily from assuming and accepting a promiscuous life style she accepted her fate and tried to fit in among the Yountville population as best she could. She even made friends quickly with some of the residents in her residence building Stoneman Hall.
Like everyone else at Yountville. Emily had to go to school an asylum requirement even though she was a college graduate. She also had to work in two of the institutions industries and chose the Sewing Room and the Farm. She especially liked the farm; not so much the chickens, but the hogs. No matter who her supervisors were Lefty on the farm, Miss Rose in the Sewing Room, or Sarah in the superintendents office she took to them quickly as they did to her. Emily was, after all, completely sane and was quite capable of relating to her supervisors just like any intelligent woman would.
The shifty medical superintendent Dr. Josey Anselmo was sharp in his own way. He knew all the details that worked against Emily to make her a resident at Yountville so he took advantage of her outstanding clerical skills and made her his assistant secretary, a position seriously questioned by Anselmos wife, Mona, who was also the hospitals nursing director. Never before had an inmate been tapped for work in the Administration Building, much less the superintendents office, but Dr. Anselmo persuaded everyone, including Mona, that he had the situation, as well as Emily, under his control. In the end, nothing could have been farther from the truth.
Little did the superintendent know that Emily vowed to retrieve and record as much dirt on the institution as she could find, this following the botched sterilization of her close friend, Katie Brewster, who ended up in the asylums cemetery instead of her residence hall.
Emily saw the horror of the nurses dragging Katie off to the hospital one night in April 1909 and, being the curious one she was, overheard all of Katies pleadings, moaning, and cries, prior to being anesthetized and then butchered in the hospitals operating room, an experiment Superintendent Anselmo called her a guinea pig so doctors and nurses could learn how to perform and what to expect fro

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493163298

Fred Couzens

Fred Couzens, a San Diego State graduate, has worked as a journalist his entire life. First, as a TV news writer and show producer for KGTV (formerly KOGO) in San Diego, then a news assignment editor and cameraman for KTNV (formerly KSHO) in Las Vegas, Nevada. After some travel writing for the Las Vegas News Bureau, he was a newspaper reporter in San Marcos, Escondido, and Tehachapi, California and Las Vegas, Nevada (the Boulder City View). He also has a background in economic development management and administration at the local and state (Nevada) level and in extensive journalistic free-lance work.

Book preview

ONE

Yountville State Hospital, Yountville, California

It was a little after 4:00 p.m. on the afternoon of April 9, 1909, when the telephone at the far—east end of the administration building’s third floor shattered the day-long silence at Yountville’s Home for the Insane and Feeble-Minded, also known as Yountville State Hospital (technically it was a mental asylum), in Yountville, California.

Hello, this is Sarah Evans, secretary to Dr. Anselmo. May I help you? she asked clearly and crisply of the unknown caller at the other end of the line.

Hello, this is Governor Todd. May I speak to Josey, please? the chief executive said referring to his longtime friend, Dr. Josey Anselmo, the physician he had appointed in 1904 to become superintendent of the Yountville asylum. Yountville had as its mission the care and training of the insane, feebleminded, and epileptics. It was located just up the road less than ten miles from the rural city of Napa, where another state asylum opened its doors in 1876. He’s not expecting my call, but I have something important to tell him.

Sarah sprang up off her chair like a scared cat and twisted the knob to the door that connected her office to her boss’s. She bolted through the doorway and hurriedly told Dr. Anselmo that the governor was on the line.

Dr. Anselmo, considered locally to be a fairly good shore angler for starry flounder so long as he had enough grass shrimp and pileworms in his creel, was hoping to get out of the office early so he could start a weekend fishing trip on the Petaluma River about seventeen miles to the southwest. In a rush (Fridays always turned out to be busy days for him), Dr. Anselmo hurriedly put away his work. The case books he had been reviewing were full of personal information about each inmate, a spasm book that recorded the daily tremors of each inmate (one patient was reported as having eighty one spasms every ten or fifteen minutes over an eleven-hour period), and some unanswered letters requesting admittance to Yountville for their loved ones that came in that week. He had just put the last one away when Sarah burst into the room with her message.

Tell Ralph I’ll be with him in a moment, the medical superintendent grumbled as he rose from his massive oak desk and headed off to store his doings in the workroom that adjoined his office and doubled as the vacant assistant secretary’s office.

A minute or so later, Dr. Anselmo returned to his desk and lifted the handset out of the cradle of his Eiffel Tower telephone.

Hello, Ralph? How you doin’, old man? I’m just getting ready to head out the door to do some flounder fishing. What can I do for you? Dr. Anselmo asked as he puffed away on his bourbon-soaked cheroot sporting a one-inch ash ready to tumble onto his desk.

Without asking, the medical superintendent had a hunch it was about a piece of legislation that had been sailing through the state legislature, a bill that would aid the state hospitals and prisons by allowing for the removal of a person’s reproductive organs in the case of a woman and neutering in the case of males. It had passed almost unopposed, a 21-1 vote in the Senate on March 16 and a 41-0 vote in the Assembly on March 22 indicating the widespread support it had gained from California’s elected officials.

Well, I wanted you to know that the sterilization bill you and I have been fighting for since 1906 is about to become law. Our eugenics founder, Charlie Davenport… you remember Charlie, don’t you, from the Carnegie Institute’s Cold Springs Harbor Lab in New York? Well, he came out to Sacramento along with his eugenics pal from Pasadena, Paul Popenoe, and they buttonholed as many legislators as they could get their hands on in two weeks of lobbying. I was kind of surprised, but it worked. We got a unanimous vote in the Assembly and ended up being one vote shy of unanimity in the Senate. Wouldn’t you know it, there’s always one jerk to muddy up things, but that’s nothing new. I’ll sign it the minute it hits my desk in a couple of weeks. The printer’s ink will still be wet when I put my Ralph Todd on it, the two-term Republican governor said with exuberance.

Hey, that’s good news, damn good news, the superintendent bellowed into the phone. Dr. Anselmo was a longtime supporter of the Eugenics Movement conceived by Charles Davenport, whose efforts created the laboratory on New York’s Long Island in 1898. Its stated purpose was to perpetuate, enhance, and expand the social experiment of producing a more normal population through the sterilization of the insane, imbeciles, feebleminded, criminals, and just about anybody else that didn’t fit the perfect mold so propagation of the unfit wouldn’t occur. In simple terms, eugenics was based on the belief that all traits, including insanity, imbecility, drunkenness, and immorality were hereditary and would be passed on from one generation to the next.

With the Commission in Lunacy already in place, we can get our sterilization program up and running in no time. You’re doing a great service for California, Ralph. Without a doubt, you deserve to be reelected next year. You know you’ve got my support. I’ll do whatever I can to make sure that happens. The commission Dr. Anselmo spoke about was created in 1897 to help assure uniform governance and management practices within the five state hospitals—Stockton, Napa, and Agnews in Santa Clara County, Mendocino and Southern California in San Bernardino County—whereas till then each hospital developed and administered their own programs and budgets.

Despite the political backslapping over the phone, Dr. Anselmo, being the impatient man he was, had already set the wheels in motion. He needed a test case to make sure the necessary policies and procedures were in place when Todd signed the bill into law.

As he walked toward the door and an escape to the flounder fishing that awaited him, Dr. Anselmo had already created a scheme, a devious and menacing scheme, not to mention an illegal scheme.

He knew jumping the gun and performing a sterilization surgery on an inmate prior to Todd’s signing, and without the required Lunacy Commission approvals, was against the law, but being the medical professional he was, he needed to make sure that everything would go smoothly and without a hitch when it did become legal. The procedure, although medically sound, was particularly gruesome when considering that in the woman, salpingectomy, the medical term used when referring to the operation for sterilization, requires opening up a woman’s abdomen, cutting the ovarian or fallopian tubes and tying them off so none of the patient’s eggs can pass through the oviduct and reach the uterus, where they can be fertilized. In a man, a vasectomy, the tying off the vas deferens to prevent the flow of sperm, was performed. As he reached for the shiny brass doorknob to leave his office, the cunning medical superintendent, in his own devious mind, had already picked his first guinea pig.

Yountville’s first female to be sterilized, the one he had single-handedly chosen and euphemistically called his experiment, possessed the innocent enough name of Katie Brewster. Katie was sixteen years old, a rather plain girl with shoulder-length brunette hair knotted in a ponytail. She came from a small farm in the wine-producing region between Madera and Fresno some 200 miles to the southeast. An average student in school, Katie came from anything but an average family.

Her Case Book entry showed she was admitted to Yountville on March 29, 1906, when she was still twelve years old as Female-Number 1334 and showed both her mother and father were alcoholics, which meant the cause of her deficiency, and reason for admittance to Yountville, was congenital, or hereditary. All of the other seventy-one—odd personal information entries indicated she was normal in every other way. Even the spaces for answers about her menstruation were left blank because at twelve she hadn’t started her monthly cycle yet.

For Katie, April 12, 1909, was just like any other Monday;—school and working in the laundry. Little did she suspect what had been planned for her later that day and the next.

The day before, April 11, Dr. Anselmo returned from his reclusive, solitary weekend on the river late in the evening and walked into his state-provided quarters on the grounds at Yountville well after 9:00 p.m. Without wrapping them, he tossed both of his flounders into the ice box to keep them chilled and then, not wanting to disturb his sleeping wife, Mona, whom he had married eleven years earlier, waited until the next morning to divulge his thinking about the experiment, a course of action he had fine-tuned while sitting on the banks of the Petaluma.

We’ve got to make sure we know how and what to do now that this sterilization authorization bill will become law in a couple of weeks, he explained to Mona who also happened to be his director of nursing. We have to do one of these procedures immediately so we can write the necessary protocols. I’ve decided we’ll do the first experimental sterilization on Katie Brewster. I know she doesn’t come close to the customary minimal age of twenty for this kind of obstetrical surgery, but trying it out on a person in their teens will yield critical information that we can use in the future.

Mona, being the dutiful wife and the person in charge of the hospital’s nurses, never questioned her husband’s decisions when it came to medicine. Never. That was because he was a graduate of the University of California’s prestigious Cooper Medical College in San Francisco and, she had graduated from Mimi’s Nurses Training School. Mimi’s was a six-month course in nursing held in the back room of a Napa bakery. Surprisingly, though, Mona’s education included more training than what most nurses currently working in California had received prior to their hiring.

When do you want to put Katie under the knife? Mona asked her husband without the slightest quiver in her voice.

The quicker, the better, he responded. Let’s do it tonight at midnight. Can you get the nurses together that soon? They need to watch and participate, you know.

Sure. And what about Butch and Emile? she asked. Butch was Dr. Butch Jones, Yountville’s medical director and Emile was Dr. Emile Soucher, the facility’s chief of physicians and surgeons—both hired by Dr. Anselmo.

That won’t be a problem. In fact, Butch can do the anesthesia, I’ll do the incisions and abdomen work, and Emile can assist. We can let that internist… What’s his name? Breedlove? He can do the closing. I’m sure that’s something he learned to do in his veterinary studies at the University Farm. University Farm was the name of the institution founded in 1905 in Davisville, California, about fifteen miles west of Sacramento, as an agricultural extension college of the University of California, Berkeley.

Besides, it’ll be good practice for him to work on an actual human body this time, Dr. Anselmo added.

As the day proceeded, Mona lined up the nurses, and the superintendent got an okay from Dr. Soucher and, with some difficulty, persuaded Butch to join in even though it meant he would be required to give up his weekly smoke-filled, cigars-and-bourbon poker game at Yountville’s Lucky Ducky tavern.

The day seemed to drag on and on, but every minute was filled with tremendous anticipation, a feeling that pulsated rhythmically, like a pounding heart, through each of the participant’s veins. The lone exception, of course, was Dr. Anselmo, the stoic superintendent, who stayed as cool as a cucumber the whole day. Finally, sunset arrived.

A couple of hours from now, medical history would be made at Yountville in the bloody, exposed lower abdomen, just above the pubic area, of Katie Brewster.

At 11:45 p.m., Mona assembled the three nurses in the hospital’s break room, briefly discussed—in generalities of course—what was about to happen, and then they walked out the squeaky front door for the short walk to Stoneman Hall.

When they got to Stoneman at two minutes before midnight, the four of them quietly walked inside where it was like a cave—dark and silent, but reeking with the musty odor of uncleanliness. Mona, carrying a hand-drawn hall map, quickly located Katie’s bed. She was sleeping peacefully, her head facing the wall to the bathroom away from the entrance. Katie never saw the obedient nurses in their full-length white apron-like dresses, white cuffs, and broad-faced nurse’s caps quietly tiptoeing closer and closer, ready to follow Mona’s orders to kidnap the helpless girl for a night of horror in Yountville’s hospital.

All of sudden, the nurses threw back the covers, grabbed Katie’s arms and feet, and yanked her out of bed. Startled, a still half-asleep Katie didn’t know what to do when she saw the director of nursing choreographing what appeared to be an attack on her. Katie remained quiet for a few seconds as she tried to wake up, but when she started feeling the hot friction and intense pain from her heels being dragged toward the doorway, she began to scream.

What are you doing? Where am I going? What’s happening? Why are you taking me? she shouted loudly, but Katie didn’t get one word in return from Mona or her dutiful nurses.

That’s when Emily woke up.

Recognizing the voice, Emily quickly rubbed her eyes with both fists so she could wipe away the sleepy cobwebs and said, Katie, where are you?

Hearing nothing, she looked toward the door from where the screams had come. The last she saw of her roommate was the teenager’s legs flailing about, kicking wildly, her bony shins slamming against the doorjamb, her blood dripping down to her ankles and then onto the dusty floor.

By then, the other twenty-eight roommates that had been awakened by the frantic commotion started chattering. The on-duty attendant, who had been sleeping soundly while Mona and her crew sneaked inside, turned on the lights and quickly got the girls quiet, but then, even with the lights out, there still was an audible buzz in the hall.

Out on the lawn, near the entrance to the hospital, Katie broke free momentarily from the nurse’s holds, but Mona, like a star rugby player at Stanford, tackled the fleeing adolescent around her legs, which sent the two tumbling to the ground.

You’re not getting away from me, Missy, Mona said. We’ve got plans for you.

Plans? What kind of plans? What’s going on? Katie asked in a scared tone, shaking uncontrollably as she got up off the grass, brushing the damp lawn clippings off her nightgown. Not a peep was heard. Each nurse grabbed an arm and led her up the stairs to the outside porch that was attached to the hospital on three sides, the hospital’s entrance, the recovery ward, and the operating room.

Once inside, the nurses took Katie to an examination room just around the corner from the operating room. There, they removed her nightgown and underwear until the frightened girl was completely naked.

Why are you undressing me? Please, tell me something. I’m scared. Please! a weeping Katie begged.

Quit asking so many questions, Mona said tersely. This is for your own good. Just cooperate and everything will be fine.

By this time, Emily, who always had free access to Yountville’s grounds, had crept onto the hospital’s porch, where she squatted below the windows like a Chinese woman giving birth in a rice paddy, and could hear everything that was going on inside the building.

Totally undressed, except for a threadbare sheet draped around Katie’s shoulders like a torero’s cape, the trembling girl was led by the nurses into the operating room where she saw Dr. Anselmo, Dr. Jones, Dr. Soucher, and Breedlove whom she didn’t recognize, standing there in cone-shaped cotton cloth surgical masks and off-white hospital aprons, off-white in the sense that they hadn’t been bleached enough to fully remove all the previous bloodstains.

Needless to say, it was a terrifying scene. It frightened the sixteen year old out of her wits because she had never needed to be or had been in a hospital operating room before now.

Please, have a seat on this board, Dr. Anselmo said in a soft, even tone as if he knew he had to calm her innermost fears. He gestured to a dingy white sheet that covered a wooden plank that looked to be about six inches wide lying horizontally under the dim lights overhead. Next to it was a tray of surgical instruments that had been meticulously lined up, evenly spaced on a rag cloth spotted randomly with what resembled motor oil and dry blood.

She didn’t want to sit, but Katie knew that she needed, never to do what she was told to do. That’s because in her first year at Yountville she learned that you never, talk back to the medical superintendent, never.

That’s fine, Dr. Anselmo said in a mellow, almost sleep-inducing, voice. We’ll get underway here in just a moment. Relax. This won’t take long.

What do you mean get underway? What’s going on? said a hysterical, but otherwise healthy, Katie who still didn’t have the slightest clue as to what was about to take place to, and in, her body. A river of tears had already started streaming down her cheeks to her ears, dripping onto the soiled sheet.

By then, Dr. Jones had begun injecting Katie with chloral hydrate, a recently reintroduced method of intravenous anesthesia meant to sedate to a point of unconsciousness. Simultaneously, Dr. Jones pointed to one of the nurses, telling her to monitor Katie’s blood pressure constantly so he wouldn’t inject too much anesthesia during the surgery.

Is she out? Dr. Anselmo asked Dr. Jones, seeing the motionless Katie laying there with her eyelids fluttering.

Give it another minute, and then she’ll be out for sure, the medical director replied as he turned to the internist. You should know about chloral hydrate, Mr. Breedlove. It’s an anesthetic they commonly use in veterinary medicine.

Uh… um… oh yeah, I remember now. Good stuff. It knocks ‘em right out, Breedlove responded, trying not to sound like a young boy expressing his stupidity and lack of knowledge, which was exactly the case of course.

While waiting for the anesthesia to take its full effect, Dr. Anselmo looked at each person in the room individually to make sure he had made eye contact with everyone.

Is everybody okay with what we’re doing here? asked the medical superintendent who had experienced extensive surgical training while in medical school. Performing this sterilization is not legal… . yet. But, nevertheless the procedure we’re introducing tonight is being done in the interests of science and medicine. If you’re uncomfortable or don’t want to go through with this, now’s the time to walk out that door.

Of course, everybody, fearing the loss of their jobs if they crossed Dr. Anselmo and walked away from his history-making surgery, nodded up and down affirmatively, signaling to the man in charge that he was good to go.

Katie, can you hear me? Katie, are you awake? he asked the motionless girl. No response, not even a twitch.

It was then that Dr. Anselmo picked up a scalpel that had some sort of dried stain on it and paused before cutting open the inguinal area of Katie’s transtubercular abdominal plane in preparation for altering her ova—producing organs and making her unable to bear a child for the rest of her life.

Outside, as the sterilization began, Emily remained totally motionless, squatting on the wood-planked porch floor and leaning against the freshly painted hospital wall next to the operating room. As the night,—and the sterilization,—went on, Emily was in complete astonishment as she heard what was happening to her good friend, Katie, inside.

What we’re doing here, Dr. Anselmo bluffed with confidence to an astonished surgery team, is sort of revolutionary in our circles, but it’s a procedure that has been perfected by Dr. Margaret Smyth at Stockton State Hospital following her appointment there as surgeon and physician nine years ago.

Although he barely got by in medical college to graduate and receive his certificate, Dr. Anselmo always talked with self-assurance, like an expert in whatever field of medicine he was addressing—even the secretly performed illegal practice of sterilizing female mental patients—despite never performing a surgery like this in his lengthy medical career.

These unsuspecting women, generally of post-teen age, who were forced to undergo the questionable procedure of sterilization were being judged by a panel of three men as being incapable of producing a more perfect child to help perpetuate a superior American race. That was because they had some genetic or hereditary defect and, therefore, should not be allowed to conceive an unfit child who’d be mentally deficient, epileptic, feebleminded or a midget at birth, or end up being insane, a degenerate, a criminal, prostitute, or some other abnormal adult, all of whom who’d end up being dependent and, ultimately, a financial drain on the government and society in general.

But Emily’s friend was different. Compared to the others who were sure to come after her, Katie was too young and had barely started her menstrual cycle. She was an experiment no doubt, nothing more than a guinea pig to Dr. Anselmo. It made no difference to him; a new medical procedure needed to be perfected, and this young girl from a farm outside Fresno became, at least in Dr. Anselmo’s estimation, the chosen one.

After the medical superintendent shared his opening remarks with his medical staff, the sterilization—a simple operation that normally doesn’t take more than thirty minutes—began.

In medical terms, Katie’s vivisection—a median incision through the fatty tissue of the abdominal wall no more than two inches in length above the pubic bone—exposed a mass of red bloody tissue, the ovarian artery, the ovaries, and Katie’s ovarian tubes.

Gosh, it looks just like that in the textbooks, Internist Breedlove, the graduate student with a specialization in animal genetics, said as he witnessed the separation of the fatty tissue. Of course what I saw were a sheep’s innards, but it’s almost the same, though.

Dr. Anselmo, wanting to educate as he operated, lengthened the abdominal incision by two inches, reached inside Katie’s lifeless cavity and lifted the right Fallopian tube out of her body into plain view of everybody in the room.

What we’re going to do here is cut a small wedge off the tube here near the uterus and then sew it up nice and tight so the man’s fluid can’t reach her eggs for fertilization, thereby preventing conception and implantation in the uterine wall. This has all been written up in medical terms by Dr. James P. Warbasse while he served as chief surgeon of the German Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. He also studied under… . . ."

Just then, while Dr. Anselmo was expounding on the virtues of the good doctor Warbasse and holding up Katie’s internal organs, the lights started flickering on and off, on and off, then went out altogether, leaving the doctors and nurses standing in the dark above Katie with her insides exposed to the world.

Damn, this certainly is not a good time for this to happen, Dr. Anselmo groused to everyone in the room. Trying to rationalize the situation, the medical superintendent said angrily, We’ve been having problems with the generator for some time now, but the Board of Examiners won’t free up any money to fix it. They say the state’s in trouble financially so we have to go with some rundown system until things get better. I guess tonight we’ll just have to wait it out until maintenance fixes the problem. Who knows how long that will take, though?

Nurse Doris Knight, the one who was keeping a check on the blood pressure, sheepishly spoke up and told Dr. Anselmo that they had some candles in the break room. He looked at his nursing director, and without speaking a word, Mona reacted automatically and headed through the hallway to the break room where she rounded up as many candles and white phosphorus matches as she could find.

The seventeen homemade tapered candles Mona found were placed all around the operating room and on carts and moved into position closer to the operating table. By then, more than five minutes had passed increasing exponentially the chance of serious medical complications that could originate in Katie’s gut.

Okay, are we all ready to start again? Dr. Anselmo asked somewhat rhetorically. Dr. Soucher, would you please use those retractors to hold the incisions open. I need to get to the tubes.

Dr. Soucher reached for a retractor, but discovered a problem.

Uh, Dr. Anselmo, these retractors probably won’t work properly, Dr. Soucher said almost apologetically as if he was too embarrassed to admit to the sad state of affairs in the hospital.

Why not? Dr. Anselmo growled.

The hinge pin is wobbly and about to break, but it’s the best we’ve got, Dr. Soucher explained rather halfheartedly. It’s like everything else. We need replacements. I know you’ve tried to get more money—it’s not your fault. You’re right. It’s those damn state examiners who think they know what’s best for everybody. Well, they don’t.

I know what you mean, Dr. Soucher, Dr. Anselmo replied in an agreeing tone. In the meantime, how about using your hands? You may want to put a pair of gloves on, though.

Uh, gloves? What gloves? We haven’t received any new gloves for nearly six months now. We have a few pairs hidden away somewhere. Nurse Blatchford, do you know where they are? If she finds them, do you still want me to wear them, Dr. Anselmo? Dr. Soucher asked almost shamefully.

That’s up to you. You’re the one who has to work here day in and day out. You’re the one who has to make the supplies last until we get some sort of emergency appropriation, Dr. Anselmo replied haughtily.

Nurse Blatchford looked in all the cupboards and cabinets but couldn’t find any gloves.

Okay, I’ll use my bare hands to spread open the incision for you, doctor, Dr. Soucher told the medical superintendent as he got a hold of the skin and fatty tissue, right hand on the bottom and left hand on the top.

Dr. Anselmo then reached into Katie’s insides and separated the right ovarian artery from the right ovary, exposing the right ovarian tube over the ovary.

We’re just about there, Dr. Anselmo declared in an authoritative voice.

He lifted the scalpel to cut the egg-carrying tube, but as he went to sever it, Nurse Knight, while checking Katie’s blood pressure reading, accidentally bumped Dr. Anselmo’s arm.

Oh my God, Dr. Anselmo screamed. I’ve nicked the artery pretty good. My God, we’ve got to do something about all this blood. Dr. Soucher, grab two of those forceps and clamp off both ends of the artery. Quickly now, before we lose her.

Before Dr. Soucher could apply the forceps, blood spewed over everything like two gushing fountains, saturating Dr. Anselmo’s hands, flooding Katie’s exposed abdomen and groin, then pooling on the operating table with the excess fluid of life dripping to the floor.

Nurse Knight, who couldn’t quite regain her composure after her accident, somehow managed to notice that Katie’s blood pressure was falling rapidly. Shaken, she relayed the information to Dr. Anselmo.

Quickly, Emile. The blood pressure is nearing the critical point. If you don’t get those arteries clamped soon, we’re going to have brain damage here and then she’s really going to need a mental hospital.

Dr. Soucher had the artery ends clamped in short order, which stopped the profusion of blood from flowing any more. The nurses grabbed sheets and just about anything else that could soak up all of Katie’s blood that had squirted around the operating area and coated the floor like a pool of varnish. For the moment, the Yountville hospital operating room became one huge wipe-down session.

Okay, before we go any farther, we’re going to have to reattach the artery. Looking over his shoulder at his wife, Mona, he asked her, Get me the surgical thread, please.

Mona headed for the cabinet labeled surgical supplies, but before she reached it, Nurse Norma Rasmussen blurted out that the operating room was out of surgical thread.

What do you mean you’re out of surgical thread? That’s a basic item in the operating room. Don’t tell me—

We’ve got some sewing thread in the other room, Rasmussen butted in.

No money? Dr. Anselmo asked sarcastically. It’s not the best choice, but I guess it’s our only option. Go get it.

Nurse Rasmussen returned with the thread, a fairly heavy gauge thread which seemed like it would do the trick. Dr. Anselmo, without delay, threaded the curved surgical needle—surprisingly the operating room had plenty of needles—and sewed up the artery nice and tight.

Let’s see. Where were we? he asked half-jokingly.

Dr. Anselmo put his chubby fingers back into Katie’s right side, once again separating the ovary, artery, and tube, and went to cut the part of the tube nearest the ovary. All the nurses stood absolutely still, like statues, not wanting to cause another emergency situation for the medical superintendent.

There, the right one is severed. Now I’ll tie the tube off, Dr. Anselmo announced as if he was lecturing a group back at his alma mater. He then switched over to the left side for an identical cut and tie.

As he went from one tube to the other, the nurses, except for Mona, stood motionless with their mouths wide open in astonishment. They had never seen such an operation before, especially on a woman’s reproductive system. None of Yountville’s three nurses had any lengthy medical training. They knew how to set a broken bone, bandage a wound or lance a boil, but certainly they had no training in obstetrics. This was a whole new world for them; one they needed to know before the sterilization law went into effect because sterilizations were about to become commonplace around Yountville as long as Dr. Anselmo was in charge. That was a fact since he had said so in a memo that had gone out that day meant to inform and update the staff about new practices and procedures.

While she’s open, shouldn’t we do an appendectomy too? Dr. Jones asked. You know, just in case someone asks why we opened her up. We can always say she woke up in the middle of the night and complained of stomach pain, and we diagnosed it as appendicitis.

Good idea, Dr. Jones, the medical superintendent replied with gusto. We can even use that excuse in the future when we want to sterilize anybody, even if they don’t need it. Who’s to question our judgment? We can always convince the Lunacy Commission that an appendectomy is necessary when our real intention is to do a sterilization. Great thinking, Butch.

With that said, the surgical team moved over to Katie’s right side again. Dr. Anselmo opened the incision wider and deeper, reached over her transverse colon and found the ascending colon, worked his fingers down so he could feel the pouch, or the cecum, at the bottom, then located the spindly appendix and within seconds it was snipped and gone.

All right. Are we ready to close, Dr. Jones? Dr. Soucher? Mr. Breedlove, would you like to do the honors since you have more than an inkling about what to do here? Dr. Anselmo asked as if he was inviting someone to mend a tear in his pants. After all, you were in the top of your class in sewing up goats, weren’t you?

At Katie’s expense, the group, after a long and tense 120-minute surgery, lightened up by snickering at Dr. Anselmo’s remark.

Meanwhile, Katie lay there, a victim of a bilateral salpingectomy, not knowing she would never be able to conceive and have children in the future. Since her medical records from Yountville would show appendectomy instead of salpingectomy, she would have no reason to suspect she had been sterilized.

By then, Emily was gulping air, crying and angry, all at once, as she ran back to her bed in Stoneman Hall. For hours, she lay there thinking about what she heard. She couldn’t get the sounds and voices out of her mind.

My friend Katie, sterilized, Emily thought to herself amidst her never-ending sobs. These people are a bunch of monsters!

After Breedlove sloppily completed a series of lock-stitch sutures on Katie’s abdomen, Nurse Rasmussen wheeled Katie into the recovery room, a twenty-bed ward adjacent to the operating room. She was rolled into a spot nearest one of two doors located on the north end of the ward. She was closest to the chapel entry, a quiet place, which would have a soothing effect on Katie.

Nobody wanted to be on the other side of the room since the other door led to the morgue. It was a place where cadavers from unsuccessful surgeries and those who didn’t make it out of the recovery room were temporarily stored. Usually, that meant being shipped off to a family burial plot, or if there was no family plot, being carted off to Yountville’s own hidden cemetery situated among some diseased trees in a dirt depression behind a hill to the rear of the administration building.

After spending a quiet night and a restful morning on April 13, Katie suddenly called for the nurse in the mid-afternoon.

I’m not feeling good, Nurse Rasmussen. I feel sick to my stomach, I’m shaking, my head is spinning, and my heart is beating funny, Katie moaned, her body trembling from the unknown condition.

Oh, don’t worry. That’s the side effects of an appendectomy, the nurse said.

Oh, so, that’s what I had, an appendectomy? They took my appendec out, Katie said with a sigh of relief. Katie, not a very learned person, knew tomy meant surgery, so she naturally thought they had surgically removed her appendec, not knowing it was called an appendix.

Yes, that’s all they did, Rasmussen reaffirmed.

The untrained Rasmussen, not knowing what Katie was going through, left the ward and went directly to Dr. Soucher who was still on duty that afternoon. She told him about Katie’s complaint.

Did she say anything about her breathing? the doctor asked.

No, but she seemed to be breathing very slowly, Rasmussen added.

Oh, my goodness, Dr. Soucher gasped. It sounds like she’s got thrombophilia. That’s when the anesthesia acts up and affects coagulation of the blood. She’s probably got a blood clot in her system. It probably has something to do with that delay we had when the lights went out. If we’re not careful, the clot can end up in her lungs as a fatal pulmonary embolism.

Standing there nodding her head affirmatively as if she understood everything the doctor was saying, Nurse Rasmussen avoided showing her ignorance. That’s because she didn’t know the term embolism or that she didn’t know the first thing about thrombophilia. To Rasmussen, who had worked at Yountville for almost four years, the word abrasion was about as far as she got in trying to understand terms and words in her alphabetized medical handbook.

Even so, Dr. Soucher and the nurse scurried off to the ward to check on Katie.

Doctor, Katie said, trembling in panic, I’ve got this shortness of breath and a big pain in my chest. What’s happening?

Relax, dear, the doctor consoled her. We’ll take care of you.

Both Dr. Soucher and Rasmussen sped back to the doctor’s office that doubled as a medical library. Dr. Soucher took a thick leather-bound medical dictionary down from a rich mahogany bookcase so he could double-check the symptoms of thrombophilia. Meanwhile, he sent Rasmussen over to the administration building where Dr. Jones’s office was located to tell him what was going on and that he should come over to the hospital right away.

Let’s see… thigh, thorax, throat, thrombin, thrombophilia… here it is, the doctor said quietly. Then, after a few seconds of reading, reality set in.

Damn, I was right, an enraged Dr. Soucher muttered to himself, slamming the book closed and tossing it haphazardly on the desk.

The doctor, without wasting any time, quickly hustled back to the recovery room to check on Katie. When he got there, he noticed Katie’s condition had taken a turn for the worse, even in such a short time. His bedside diagnosis was she had suffered an embolism and was now going through cardiac arrest, a potential side effect of embolisms and thrombophilia.

C’mon, Katie, keep your eyes open! Look at me! Look at me, darlin’, Dr. Soucher kept repeating sorrowfully while he clutched her hand, his other hand stroking her forehead and hair. C’mon! C’mon! . . . Katie! Katie! . . .

Katie never opened her eyes, or took another breath, again.

Like so many before her, and presumably there were more in the future, Female-Number 1334 was another lifeless body headed for the morgue and Yountville’s cemetery where hundreds of others were buried; most from natural causes, but surely some had died at the hands of Yountville’s doctors as a result of experimentation.

As it turned out, Katie, too, was a fatal victim of medical experimentation; a type of experimentation Dr. Anselmo insisted on doing before he had a right to do so.

Nobody said anything, not even a whisper, about what happened that night; nobody dared to say anything that would tarnish Dr. Anselmo’s reputation or shed a bad light on the authoritarian who possessed complete power at Yountville. When you can hire and fire and control employees’ lives as if there’s an economic noose around their necks, Dr. Anselmo thought, lips will always remain sealed indefinitely.

Katie’s fate was forever a secret, a secret never to be uttered by anyone at Yountville who actually knew what really went on, appropriately enough, that night of the waning moon. Nobody knew, except for one person, that is.

Soon, Katie would be forgotten since others would replace her on that hard wooden plank in the operating room undergoing similar appendectomies with old, unsterile, useless or broken instruments, and equipment and supplies in insufficient numbers.

Emily wouldn’t forget, though; she couldn’t forget.

Emily would remember the night’s events—as if they occurred last night—for a lifetime. She simply couldn’t erase the picture of her friend Katie getting sliced open and having a part of her body cut and made permanently useless without her knowledge or consent.

Emily thought they might as well have ripped open Katie’s chest and feasted on her heart, too, while they were at it. But why stop there? Harvest her brain along with everything else since they seemed to enjoy committing such atrocities.

Monsters now, monsters always, she said to herself.

Katie’s last day was April 13; she was barely sixteen. Less than two weeks later, on April 26, Governor Ralph Todd signed legislation that had passed the Assembly and Senate with but one opposing vote: a measure that made sterilizations legal throughout the California state hospital system as well as its state prisons for practically any reason.

In the end, though, the legality of it all made no difference to Katie. Any way you look at it, she was the victim of a wrong. She was just another inmate at Yountville who conveniently served a selfish purpose.

Katie was simply the price of admission for Dr. Anselmo’s ticket to carry out the tenets of the Eugenics Movement.

TWO

St. Mary’s Hospital, Reno, Nevada

Although Reno was in the midst of an unusual heat wave during the winter of 1882-1883, Tuesday, January 9, 1883, was like any other day in the Nevada city formerly known as Lake’s Crossing, except for one fact.

That day, in a sweltering delivery room at the newly opened St. Mary’s Hospital, Beulah Cox gave birth to Emily Ann Cox. It was a normal delivery with mother and her newborn daughter back home, three blocks immediately west of downtown Reno, within the week.

Emily grew up just like any other child of that day and time; she went to school, played with friends, and later on, in her pre-teen and teenage years, helped the family with household chores.

Emily spent the first fourteen years of her life as an only child, but that was about to change in her fifteenth year. Beulah became pregnant in January 1898, but Emily’s hopes of having a brother were snuffed out in mid-September when the embryonic Rocky Cox, Jr. ended up being stillborn. Even with the loss, Emily made school her focus, never wanting to look back at that day her soon-to-be brother, a brother she had longed for, failed to come into this world.

Emily amazed her teachers in elementary school with her ability to learn and grasp concepts and then, when she went to nearby Reno High School at Fourth and Arlington Street, she graduated in May 1900 at the top of her class of forty-one seniors. Without a doubt, Reno High’s valedictorian who graduated magna cum laude was destined to join the freshman class of 1900 at the State University of Nevada in Reno.

Although Emily enjoyed and exceeded all expectations in every class she took in high school, her first love was English. So it was no coincidence she became a SUNR freshman English major. She took only five classes her first semester; three of them in the English department. Then she took five more in the spring.

She took a real shine to the writing excellence class that was offered both semesters because it gave her the opportunity to satisfy her desire to express herself in words.

The fall semester passed by uneventfully as did the spring semester. Before she knew it, her first year was over, and she was already on her way to becoming a standout college student by earning five A grades each semester in all her classes.

Then came summer and time to relax at home, but her mother, Beulah Cox, had other ideas for her exceptionally academic college student daughter.

Emily wasn’t home a week, before her mother had her mending and sewing clothes for the family, practically from sunup to sundown. Beulah had no time for making and repairing clothes as part of her domestic duties; besides, it was the one thing she hated to do.

Beulah had had an unpleasant experience with a sewing needle when she was young. While attaching buttons to her father’s shirt, the young Beulah had shoved the sharp-pointed needle all the way through her left index finger, which had entered near the first joint to just beyond the tip of the nail. Ever since that painful childhood event some forty years earlier, Beulah avoided needles every chance she could.

As if sewing wasn’t enough, Emily was forced to wash and wax the pine-slatted floors of the Cox’s 900 square-foot three-bedroom house on West First Street, which was just a stone’s throw from the Truckee River.

If it wasn’t one thing, it was something else for Emily to do; her mother saw to it that Emily was kept busy during the summer, Monday through Saturday.

On Sundays, after the family attended services at the First Lutheran Church of Reno, Beulah would head for the kitchen to prepare the traditional big Sunday meal while Emily and her father, Rocky Cox, would take long walks together along the river.

Emily’s father worked for the Reno Fire Department, so he always had a lot of stories to tell his only child. Their talks were about the past as much as they were about the future. Emily cherished the time she spent together with her dad. She became very close to him, but remained somewhat distant from her mom because of the way she was treated. Sometimes she felt that her mom only thought of her as domestic help, a maid with live-in benefits.

Emily managed to survive the summer by looking forward to her sophomore year at SUNR. After all, more English studies meant more fun, certainly more fun than sewing patches on sleeves or putting a shine on the living room floor. Compared to housework, walking fourteen blocks to the university was a simple and easy task, she thought.

Her second year, Emily took literature classes as well as language and linguistics classes, which seemed different and intriguing for the girl with the inquisitive mind.

Again, the first semester, she earned straight As, an accomplishment that caught the eye of the English department chairman.

You know, Emily, since you do so well in English, you should think about writing for the university’s newspaper next semester, advised Loretta Green, the department chairman for the past twelve years and former editor of Ballou’s Monthly Magazine that was published by Maturin Murray Ballou, owner of the Boston Daily Globe newspaper. I think you have quite a talent that can be developed further by working on a weekly project such as the newspaper.

Emily was so flattered by the suggestion that she ran down to the admissions office and signed up for spring enrollment in Writing 202, the course listing number for the journalism class that published the paper.

Her first semester at The Student Record, she served under Editor George Springmeyer, but not for long.

During the semester, Springmeyer wrote a scathing editorial of the university president, an opinion piece that ultimately cost Springmeyer his job.

President J. E. Stubbs had issued a semi-quarantine of the Wolf Pack campus because of a smallpox scare that rippled through Reno. Stubbs had ordered that anyone living on campus had to stay on campus, but those who lived off-campus, like Emily, were free to come and go.

Springmeyer, who was short-tempered, assembled students in Lincoln Hall, where he was living and marched in protest. Stubbs objected to this kind of display of public expression and made Springmeyer pay for it.

Emily witnessed all that went on, but stayed clear of the controversy. Instead, she kept writing news, and arts and entertainment pieces for the paper’s Tuesday editions.

When the fall semester of 1902 began, Emily found a calmer Bernard O’Hara at the helm. The second semester of her junior year, J. V. Comerford took over the editorship reins, knowing fully well what capabilities Emily possessed as a journalist.

Then, in April 1903, Emily got her big chance to shine in the publishing world.

Governor Pardee will be visiting the campus in a couple of weeks, and I want you to interview him, Comerford told Emily. He’ll be here sewing up loose ends in preparation for his commencement address next month, but I want you to nail him on the San Francisco plague fiasco that Lieutenant Governor Henry Gage still refuses to acknowledge. You’d think that after more than two years, the executive director of the State Board of Health would know whether there was a plague or not. That will make Pardee’s lack of action until recently interesting reading, especially in light of our little smallpox issue last year. And while you’re at it, pepper him with questions about what his strategies and plans are for his re-election in November.

Emily was confident she could do a good job for the newspaper, but was flabbergasted at the opportunity nonetheless.

I want you to work with this other guy… You know Brad Porter don’t you? her editor asked. He does a lot sports stories, but it’s time for him to get his feet wet doing some real news stories. You guys collaborate on the research and questions, but I want you to be the lead reporter with the top byline. Don’t let me down. This is going to be a huge story on the front page. I’m sure you’ll do a great job. You can do it.

The next day, Emily and Brad met to discuss what they needed to do to get ready for the Pardee interview. Brad took the re-election angle while Emily looked forward to boning up on the plague and what had happened in San Francisco.

Other than the love of journalism, Emily and Brad were as different as night and day.

Emily came from a blue-collar family; Brad’s father, Ned Porter, was a professional architect who had designed and engineered the front entry to the San Francisco Ferry Terminal.

Emily’s mother stayed at home, cooking and cleaning; Brad’s mother, Rebecca Porter, had a live-in maid, which gave her time to socialize with the San Francisco Women’s Club and re-pot petunias with her neighborhood horticultural group.

Emily’s house was a small, common wooden-sided structure on a 2,000 square-foot lot; Brad and his parents lived in a three-story Victorian-style home designed by Brad’s father that was located on a sliver of land in San Francisco’s ritzy Nob Hill area.

Emily had no choice but to stay at home over the summer and do chores; Brad, on the other hand, worked in his father’s San Francisco office every June, July, and August as an architect’s assistant. A fancy title for someone who barely had time to learn the profession since he was constantly filing drawings, sharpening pencils, and shaving the rough corners off the used gum erasers. At the end of every summer when it came time to pack up and return to SUNR, Brad would say to himself, This isn’t for me.

The day before Pardee’s visit, Emily and Brad spent two hours going over notes and developing questions meant to provoke some meaty answers and not the typical mumbo-jumbo politicians are known for spewing out in hopes their words make some sort of sense.

I think we have some great stuff here, Emily, Brad said enthusiastically as the session came to a close.

You’re right, Brad, she responded. I just hope I don’t tense up when I see the man.

You won’t, he said, adding in an optimistic tone. You’ll do great.

The next day, April 23, Emily walked into the university president’s office at 10:30 a.m. sharp, and there was Stubbs and the governor of California. Standing beside Pardee was another man she thought she recognized, but couldn’t put a name to until Pardee spoke up.

Hey, John, I hear they’re going to rename the adjacent town Sparks in honor of you, Pardee said to John Sparks, the current governor of Nevada. That’s not going to make the Harmon family happy, I bet. They just get the Coastal Express switchyard put in and name the town after old F. B. and then you come along. I think I’d stay clear of that place for a while. The F. B. mentioned by the governor was none other than F. B. Harmon of New York, director and chairman of the Omaha, Sacramento & Benicia Railroad executive committee and president of the Coastal Express Railroad that ran through downtown Reno.

While Stubbs stood silently, both Sparks and Pardee shared a laugh before Sparks excused himself and left the room.

Turning around, You must be Emily Cox from the student newspaper, correct? Pardee inquired with an infectiously attractive smile, a smile that made her comfortable in the presence of such a political VIP.

Ye… Ye… Yes, Emily stuttered at first and then curtsied, Nice to make your acquaintance, governor.

Please, call me George, the former state assemblyman, mayor of Oakland, and eye doctor said, noting that, over the years nearly everybody else has called me names I don’t dare repeat in public today, especially in front of a beautiful young woman like yourself.

From then on, Emily got in the groove, making the interview proceed smoothly without skipping a beat. Emily got all her questions answered with honest, factual, and plausible statements that made her take a liking to the man to the point she almost forgot he was the governor of California.

I couldn’t believe it, Emily said to Brad in astonishment later that afternoon following the interview. He answered everything. He didn’t try to dodge any of the questions. From what I know about politics, this guy was refreshing.

The next day, Emily went to the newspaper office and started writing the story with Brad peeking over her shoulder, almost drooling on her typewriter. She turned it in to Comerford not-quite four hours later.

This is great stuff, the jubilant editor said. I knew you could do it.

The following Tuesday, April 28, The Student Record appeared on campus with a big, blaring front-page headline:

Gov. Pardee Blasts Gage over Plague with the byline by Emily Cox set prominently below the headline. Porter got second billing with an assisted by Brad Porter just under Emily’s name.

Emily had set her mark on journalism, and with Brad. She wondered if it would be the last time she’d make an impression with Brad’s help; she hoped not.

Then came the end of their junior year, which meant going their separate ways—Emily back to daily domestic duties and Brad returning to his father’s office to make sure all his dad’s erasers were properly trimmed and useable.

Surprisingly, the three university-free months passed swiftly and then in September it was back to SUNR and their senior year at the campus newspaper.

After exchanging hellos and summertime stories at the paper, Brad invited Emily to go get a strawberry malt, her favorite, at a nearby off-campus ice cream and confectionary shop. As their conversation progressed, Brad noticed that Emily was not quite herself.

What’s bothering you, Emily? he asked as if he really cared for how she was feeling.

Uh, I don’t necessarily want to talk about religion, but I think I’m losing faith in mine, she confessed. It seems the Lutheran Church is getting more and more… I don’t want to say immoral, but they don’t honor and respect certain aspects of the religion like they used to. I’m not sure I want to be a Lutheran anymore. Mom and Dad would be very upset if they knew about this conversation and the way I feel, so I hope you don’t mind me telling you all of this.

Not in the least, Brad said reassuringly. I might have a solution for you, though. You know I’m Catholic and I belong to this group here at SUNR, the Young Catholics on Campus Association, that meets twice a month just to get together and have fun. It’s not preaching or confessing. It’s just a friendly group of students who have a common religious interest. Maybe you’d like to come to a meeting with me so you can see if it’s something you like. No demands, no pressure. Just let me know what you think of it.

Okay, that sounds good, she replied. When’s the next meeting?

In about two weeks, Brad responded. There’s no special day or date. When some of us want to have a meeting, we just get in touch with everybody. I’ll let you know when it is.

Emily’s dissatisfaction with the only religion she’d known from birth was rooted in changing values. She had always believed it was wrong for women to be priests or pastors and priests should not be married. Her thinking, as it turned out, was more in line with the Catholic Church than the Lutheran Church.

She went to her first YCCA meeting with Brad in early October and discovered how comfortable it was being around people that more or less mirrored her beliefs. After that, she attended all the YCCA meetings she could. Of course, her mother and father knew nothing of this; Emily made sure they didn’t. Nevertheless, Emily felt refreshed and reformed, but stopped short of converting to and being baptized into a stricter Catholic Church that felt more like the kind of religion she wanted to embrace.

Just like her first three years at SUNR, the holidays came and went in a flash. It left the graduating senior about five months to decide what she wanted to do after she received her diploma.

Jobs in Reno were scarce because the state’s economy had taken a nosedive a few years earlier when the Storey County mines in nearby Virginia City, which were made famous by the Comstock Lode and newspaperman Mark Twain, fizzled out, leaving hundreds unemployed, penniless, and homeless. Hundreds of Reno jobs, which supported those booming mining operations, evaporated as well as making employment difficult to find. Some would say a better description of the situation was that available jobs were nonexistent.

Emily, who already had her fill of housework and didn’t want to get trapped into that dead-end occupation as she called it, kept her eyes and ears open hoping to learn of any possible employment opportunity. Weeks went by; nothing surfaced.

Then, in February, the outlook for Emily changed.

At the February 9 YCCA meeting, Association Secretary Amanda Black made a surprising announcement that caught Emily’s attention.

I don’t know why we got this job announcement, but the mission in San Francisco, . . . it’s called Mission Dolores, . . . is looking to hire an assistant secretary this summer, the SUNR junior mining engineering student reported. I suppose we got it because of the Catholic connection. If anybody’s interested you’ve got to reply to Monsignor Sean O’Brien by the end of the month. Does anybody want this?

In the split of a second, Emily’s hand shot up,—the only hand to shoot up. Black walked over to the English major and handed her a single page of paper that outlined the job and its requirements.

Emily took the paper home to think about it overnight, but didn’t say a word to her mother or father. They had always believed Emily would stay in Reno, stay close to her family. Little did they know Emily was thinking about embarking on a new life out on her own, something considered rather roguish for a young woman in the early 1900s.

The next day, with a one-cent stamped envelope containing a letter of application stuffed between the pages of her English composition notebook, she met up with Brad and told him of her plans.

I’m applying for that position at the mission in San Francisco, she said in a relaxed tone as if a huge weight had been taken off her fragile shoulders. "I don’t know what kind of chance I might have, but it’s worth a try. There’s nothing here, so why not move on to where something is available?"

Good for you, Brad replied. I have every reason to believe you’ll get it.

The fact Emily excelled as SUNR’s Class of 1904 salutatorian with a straight A record certainly wouldn’t hurt her chances. Being an English major and having experience writing for the student newspaper also would seem to be ample proof she could handle the assistant secretary’s job.

That afternoon, on the way home from the campus, Emily stopped at the post office and dropped her letter off with the clerk behind the cage. Not only was her application written to perfection in an optimistic tone, but her hopes for a chance to escape Reno and a lifestyle she had grown to dislike was the wax that sealed the letter.

She didn’t expect to hear any news in February, but when March and April passed without any word, Emily became disheartened. She thought her chance had slipped away like an elusive black cat in the dead of night. She thought she’d have to live at home, unemployed and still under her mother’s strict control and domestic demands. She thought she’d spend the rest of her miserable life in Reno. Emily was down in the dumps mentally, but never let on like she was, so no one ever suspected she was depressed.

Then, on May 11, things turned around for