Letter from Margaret Baumeister to Minnie, April 20, 1953 — sheet 1
Book 2, Page 219 ·1953
Transcription
[Printed letterhead, centred:]
MRS. THEODORE BAUMEISTER 4711 ISELIN AVENUE NEW YORK 71
[Upper margin shows faint inverted bleed-through from the verso of a preceding album sheet; rotated 180° it reads:]
Wed. 29th Dear Mother […] said to send this on to you so that you and Mary Ann could see it. Ask Mandy to send it on to Dick for me. My love — Aunt Amy
[The “Memorial” hospital referenced through this letter cluster (pp. 219–225) is Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases in Manhattan — the cancer specialty hospital that in 1980 merged with the Sloan-Kettering Institute to form Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In 1953, a generation before chemotherapy regimens or limb-sparing surgery were available for pediatric bone cancer, amputation followed by deep X-ray treatment was the standard of care; nine-month survival after metastasis to the lungs (as the doctor here predicts) was the typical outcome.]
April 20, 1953
Dear Minnie,
I have been down town today with that wonderful niece of yours, Dee Corbelle. Oh Minnie, she renews your faith in human beings, she is so fine, so noble, so brave. I came away overpowered with admiration for her. With her simple sincerity, her confiding goodness, she has found friends everywhere. She told me the taxi drivers, the hotel people, the clerks in the shops, elevator operators, as well as the hospital employees had all
AI Notes
First sheet of a four-sheet letter (pp. 219-222) written on Apr. 20, 1953 by Margaret Baumeister (Mrs. Theodore Baumeister) of 4711 Iselin Avenue, New York 71, to a correspondent she addresses only as ‘Minnie’. The letter concerns Margaret’s afternoon in New York with Emma Dee Walker Corbell, whose nine-year-old son Pickens Walker ‘Puck’ Corbell was hospitalised in the city awaiting the amputation of a leg (he died later in 1953). Printed letterhead at top centre. Written in blue fountain-pen ink in a flowing cursive. The upper margin shows faint inverted bleed-through from the verso of a preceding sheet (now mounted facing the letterhead in the album): rotated 180°, the verso text reads ‘Wed. 29th / Dear Mother / […] said to send this / on to you so that you and Mary Ann could see it. Ask / Mandy to send it on to Dick for me. My love — / Aunt Amy.’ This identifies the album’s compiler Amy FitzSimons Walker as having received and circulated this letter among her family (her daughter Mary Ann Walker McEwan, nicknamed ‘Mandy’, and others).