Old Hollywood Children Doctors Told Parents to Hide HT

William is able to read, but in spite of daily practice, he has great difficulty in controlling a pencil. He is trying to write his name, William. >> In mid-century hospitals, even famous parents were told to send the child away. These are real old Hollywood era stories of children doctors said should be hidden, institutionalized, or forgotten, and the parents [music] who refused.

This ordinary chair has been adapted by the school carpenter so that Janet can sit correctly. Her work is protected by a transparent cover and held in position by a frame which fits snugly into the table. >> Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Robin Elizabeth Rogers. Robin Elizabeth Rogers was born on August 26th, 1950. Dale Evans later recalled that the nurses noticed immediately that the baby was blue.

The umbilical cord had been wrapped around her neck and Robin was placed in an oxygen box while doctors and nurses gathered around her whispering and running tests. Three weeks later, another blow came. A doctor found a heart murmur and told Dale that it was another complication often linked to Down syndrome.

Then came the advice Evans never forgot. In cases like this, he said babies should be placed in an institution as early as possible before the child became too deeply rooted in the parents hearts. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans refused. They brought Robin home to the Hollywood Hills where her brothers and sisters crowded around to see her.

But caring for her was not simple. Dale described Robin turning blue during feedings because she struggled to suck hard enough from a bottle. As Robin grew, her care became more structured. Dale wrote about a devoted caregiver [music] called Cowcow. When the family later moved near Enino, they built a small, separate house so Robin and her nurse could live there comfortably, [music] but still at home, still with the family because Dale did not want her daughter hidden away.

Robin was taken outside in a small cart to see the animals, and Dale remembered a dog named Lana staying close to her. Then in 1952, disaster struck. The other children came down with mumps, and Robin caught it, too. What began with swelling quickly turned into something far worse. Dale wrote that the fever climbed with terrifying speed.

Two doctors worked over the child as Roy and Dale paced outside, waiting for news. One doctor warned them Robin could die in seconds. She did. Dale Evans later wrote that Robin died shortly after 8:00 p.m. on August 24th, [music] 1952, just 2 days before her second birthday. The next year, Evans published Angel Unaware, turning Robin’s brief life into one of the most famous memoirs ever written by an old Hollywood mother about a disabled child.

Spencer Tracy and Louise Tracy. John Tracy. John 10. Brooke Tracy was born on June 26th, 1924 in Milwaukee. Before he was a year old, his mother Louise began to notice something was wrong. Loud noises did not startle him. She called his name again and again. He never turned.

Doctors diagnosed him with deafness, what they called at the time nerve deafness. There was no treatment to offer and Louise was essentially told to wait until the boy was old enough for formal schooling. She refused to wait. Instead, she began working with him at home every day, [music] speaking directly in front of his face, repeating sounds and words, teaching him to watch lips and follow expressions.

In 1927, when Jon was just three, [music] she enrolled him in the right oral school in New York, where deaf children were taught to speak and lipre. Then another crisis came. John contracted polio, adding physical disability to everything the family was already facing. [music] But Louise kept going.

Years later, in July 1942, she spoke publicly about what it meant to raise a deaf child. That talk helped launch a parent training program in Los Angeles that eventually became the John Tracy Clinic, an institution built so other families would not have to face the same fear and confusion alone. Dorothy Dandridge and Harold Nicholas.

Harilyn Suzanne Lynn Nicholas. Harilyn Suzanne Nicholas was born on September 2nd, 1943. Dorothy Dandridge later said she went into labor while her husband Harold Nicholas was out playing golf. He had the car. She waited for him to return. And according to Dorothy, that delay haunted her for the rest of her life.

A friend later recalled the scene in brutal terms. Dorothy had to be rushed out because she was close to delivering right there. And what followed became a difficult forceps birth in which the baby was deprived of oxygen. At first, Harilyn, known as Lynn, looked physically normal. But month after month, her development did not follow a normal path.

Dorothy carried her from one doctor to another. The final diagnosis did not come until Lynn was already 3 years old. Severe brain damage. Doctors advised institutionalization. Dorothy refused. Instead, she arranged private care. One biographical account says Lynn was placed with Eloise Matthews, Auntie Mama, in Dorothy’s circle.

And Matthews cared for her for nearly 20 years while Dorothy paid the bills and tried to keep the entire situation away from the press. But the cost never ended. Lynn needed constant supervision. Dorothy’s life became a cycle of work payments and emotional strain. The marriage collapsed. The divorce was finalized in 1951. By the early 1960s, Dorothy’s finances were falling apart.

After bankruptcy and failed investments, she could no longer afford Lynn’s caretaker. Lynn came back to Dorothy just as Dorothy herself was losing the house in the Los Angeles Hills. During the move, Lynn sat at a piano and played the same simple pattern over and over while movers carried furniture and boxes out the door.

The men stopped to listen. Then they applauded. Dorothy, standing in a house that was being emptied around her, served them hamburgers and coffee, and when the money finally ran out, Dorothy was forced to do what she had resisted for years. She [music] placed Lynn in a California state institution. Anna Magnani. Luca Magnani.

Luca Magnani was born in Rome in October 1942. His mother was already becoming one of Italy’s great screen stars, but she raised him as a single parent and guarded her private life fiercely. Then polio entered the story. In 1944, when Luca was still a toddler, he caught the disease. The paralysis [music] remained.

Years passed and the improvement never came. By the time he was seven, he still could not use his legs and spent much of his time in a sanitarium for treatment. Those who saw him remembered a handsome, dark-haired boy who seemed healthy in every visible way except for the paralysis that had taken his legs from him.

Magnani poured money into treatment, doctors, clinics, specialists, promises. At last, she was told the truth. The damage was permanent. Luca would not walk again. The actress pushed for better contracts and higher fees in an effort to secure her son’s financial future. At one point, she saw a legless war veteran dragging himself along a sidewalk, and the [music] site stayed with her.

Afterward, she said something bleak and unforgettable. She realized it would be worse when children like Luca grew up. Charlotte Ray and John Strauss. Andrew Andy Strauss. When Andy Strauss was still very young, Charlotte Ray felt that something was wrong, but she could not name it.

While pregnant with her younger son, she took Andy for evaluation. The doctor examined him and told her to come back after the baby was born. When she returned, the verdict was blunt. Her son, the doctor said, was autistic. Ry later recalled that she misheard the word and answered, “He’s autistic.

” The doctor corrected her, “No, autistic.” Then came the next blow. Wait another year, he said. And if Andy had not improved by six, institutionalize him. Charlotte Ray refused. She and her husband looked for schools, programs, anything that might help. A minister found a school for Andy near 12th Street [music] and Fifth Avenue.

The tuition was $2,000 a year, a major burden at the time. Even getting him there became its own crisis. Ry eventually stopped working so she could focus on Andy and his brother, then began organizing and protesting for [music] transportation so disabled children could get to school. Later in life, she described Andy’s condition in severe terms [music] and spoke openly about how hard those years became.

At 16, she said he ended up in the juvenile ward at Belleview because he was considered unstable and dangerous. Leonard Golden and Isabelle Golden Janice Cookie Golden. Janice Golden, called Cookie by her family, was born in 1943 with cerebral palsy. [music] Her younger sister later said Cookie’s condition was severe and that the entire household revolved around it.

Leonard and Isabelle Golden quickly discovered what countless parents of disabled children were learning in those years. There were few specialists, little guidance, and almost no system built to help families. So, they began building one. In 1948, the Goldens joined with Jack and Ethel Houseman, another couple raising a child with cerebral pausy.

Together, they placed an advertisement in the New York Herald Tribune, asking other parents to write in if they were facing the same struggle. The answer was overwhelming. Hundreds of families responded. By August 12th, 1949, a national cerebral pausy organization had been chartered, bringing scattered local efforts under one umbrella.

Soon, television was being used to raise money and public awareness. In 1950, United Cerebral Poly launched an early teleathon, pushing the issue into millions of American homes. Cookie herself never outgrew the diagnosis. She died in 1973, still young. Gene Tierney and Oleg Cassini, Antuinette Daria Cassini.

In 1943, Tierney was pregnant with her first daughter when she made a brief appearance at the Hollywood canteen. Not long afterward, she came down with German measles, Reubella. Their daughter, Antoanet Daria Cassini, was born on October 15th, 1943. [music] The consequences were devastating. Daria was born with congenital reubella syndrome, a condition linked to deafness, cataracts, and profound developmental impairment.

About a year after the birth, a former Marine approached her and reminded her that they had met at the Hollywood canteen. Then the woman asked a chilling question. Had Tyranny happened to get German measles after that meeting? She had broken quarantine to come. Tyranny never forgot it. Daria lived much of her life in institutional care.

Even after Gene Tierney and Oleg Cassini separated, her care remained a permanent responsibility written into the legal and financial arrangements that followed the marriage. She lived into old age, dying on September [music] 11th, 2010, just short of her 67th birthday. Patricia Neil and Rald Doll, Theod Doll. On December 5th, 1960, four-month-old Theo Dah was out in his pram in New York with the family nanny when a taxi struck the carriage.

The baby suffered severe head trauma, including multiple skull fractures and brain injury. For about 2 weeks, he was kept in an oxygen tent while doctors fought to save him. He survived the first crisis. Then came the second. [music] The injury led to hydrophilis, a dangerous buildup of pressure and fluid on the brain. Surgeons implanted a shunt to drain it, but the device repeatedly failed.

Over the following months, Theo underwent revision after revision as blockages returned and the pressure [music] kept swinging. At times, those pressure changes even caused temporary blindness. When the family returned to Britain in early 1961, Theo’s treatment continued under pediatric neurosurgeon Kenneth [music] Till at Great Orman Street Hospital.

Rald Dah desperate to help brought in Stanley Wade an engineer and toy maker known for his precision work. Together Wade Dah and Till studied where the existing system was failing. Out of that crisis came the Wade Doll Till valve introduced in 1962 and later used in thousands of children. The bitter irony was that Theo himself never needed the new device.

By then his condition had stabilized. But the accident that almost killed him ended up helping other families for years afterward. Tex Ritter and Dorothy Fay, Tom Ritter. Tom Ritter was born with cerebral palsy. Years later, his mother, Dorothy Feay Ritter, described the birth as catastrophic. [music] She said she had suffered a serious traffic accident, that her back was broken, and that Tom had to be delivered by Cesarian section.

She described the moment in extreme terms, saying that both she and the baby had effectively been gone for 11 minutes. Whatever exactly happened in that delivery room, the consequences stayed for life. As the boys grew up, Tom’s disability became part of daily family life. His brother, John Ritter, later remembered that he often thought Tom was stronger than their parents believed.

When Tom fell down, Jon would tell [music] him to get up. He also taught him to play whiffle ball. Dorothy Fay later spoke of Tom not as a tragedy, but as proof that cerebral pausy did not erase a future. He grew into adulthood, studied at several universities, and in the early 1970s even spent a summer in Washington working for the Senate Select Committee investigating Watergate.

Lewis Armstrong and Daisy Parker, Clarence Armstrong. During a heavy rain in New Orleans, little Clarence, a child Armstrong was raising, wandered onto the wet rear gallery of their second floor apartment. The wood was old and slick. Armstrong later said he and Daisy were in the front room listening to records when they suddenly heard crying.

He ran to the back and saw the child climbing up the steps, hurt and terrified, holding his head. Armstrong brought in the best doctors he could afford. >> [music] >> They told him the fall had caused permanent damage. Clarence, he was told, would remain years behind other children mentally.

Armstrong tried school after school. One Catholic school kept him for a while, then sent him home. At that point, Armstrong stopped chasing miracle answers and focused on the child in front of him. He created routines. He tried to teach basic reading, writing, and spelling. Whenever work took him away, he made sure someone was there to look after Clarence.

When Armstrong moved north to Chicago, Clarence went too. There [music] he attended a special school and according to Armstrong became known as one of the best athletes in the group, baseball, basketball, football, and around the neighborhood as little Lewis Armstrong, but stability remained fragile.

Armstrong later described Clarence as nervous and easily frightened, especially in tense households where adults yelled around him. Eventually, he moved Clarence into another home where the boy felt safer, and Armstrong did not hide him. In 1949, he even brought Clarence onto live television, letting him say a few words on the Eddie Condan Floor Show.

William Christopher and Barbara Christopher, Ned Christopher. Ned Christopher was only a small child when his father, William Christopher, was beginning the role that would make him famous on MASH TV show. Even in toddlerhood, Ned showed signs that something was different. [music] He wanted to dress himself, and if his underwear did not feel right, he could erupt in rage.

He hated being held and went stiff [music] when people tried to cuddle him. He developed intense fixations and could recite names that startled adults around him. But despite all that, he still could not say his own [music] name. As the years passed, he fell further behind other children. The family went from one specialist to another and got wildly different conclusions. One said he was hopeless.

Another said he was only a little slow and would catch up. It took years before doctors finally identified autism. One specialist gave advice that William Christopher never forgot. Since the boy was adopted, the doctor said, “Why not give him back?” Christopher later repeated the exact comparison.

You reached into a barrel and pulled out a bad apple. Why not put [music] the apple back? William and Barbara Christopher refused. Instead, they raised Ned and eventually wrote Mixed Blessings, a book about life with their son and the choices they had