Walter Angel

This painting hangs in our garage, and I'm going to tell you why.  The story is not about sailing ships, really, but it is a story.

In September 2009, someone named Chris posted a query on a website for Detroit locals.  He wrote, "I travel a short distance on the Lodge, between I-94 and Davidson.  Just south of the Clairmont exit is what looks like a campus of rather large buildings.  I can't tell whether they're still occupied, but I see an occasional light on the inside during the night."

"The buildings are five or six stories tall and massive...I pulled off the freeway once to try and get a better look, but the neighborhood surrounding them is pretty awful...I just didn't feel safe."

Chris had looked at Detroit maps and still couldn't identify the buildings.  "Can any one here help?"

Soon, a helpful reply.  The huge, derelict buildings are the old Herman Keifer Hospital.  They're now used to store vital records.

In its heyday, the complex was a "special hospital devoted to treatment of communicable diseases, tuberculosis, and indigent maternity cases."  The communicable disease unit consisted of 525 beds - five buildings in all.  According to a 1931 government study, "the maternity unit is a single building of 65 beds and 65 bassinets, completely occupied."

In the 1950's, the Spouse's grandfather, Walter Angel, contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to Herman Keifer Hospital.  The Spouse remembers Mr. Angel as a kindly, affectionate grandpa, who liked to wake up mornings and tell his wife, "Bea, pour me some gravel and rocks."  (He ate Grape Nuts for breakfast.)

Walter Angel was the son of a copper miner from northern Michigan.  He lost his mother at age sixteen.  As an adult, he worked in a paint factory to support his wife and two daughters.  When he got TB, his best option was to leave his family and check into Herman Keifer for 18 months of bedrest, medications and lung surgeries, six in all.  My mother-in-law was 10 when he went away, and 12 when he came home.

Inside the hospital, the patients did what they could to fill their time.  They took leatherworking classes; Mr. Angel made little antique cars from metal scraps.  He got a postcard in the mail - a ship sailing on rough sea - and asked a fellow invalid to paint it in his art class.  So the friend painted him the ship and he kept the painting, and it's now on our garage wall.

By the time my mother-in-law was in nursing school, living in dormitories and prevented by school rules even from dating (my how times have changed), she completed six weeks of contagious disease study at Herman Keifer Hospital.  As she tended one particular patient, something about the room bothered her.  She finally concluded that it was the number on the door.  A decade previous, her mother had repeated that number over and over again.  It was her father's room.

So now I imagine Walter Angel, stuck in that room alone, holding a little postcard of a boat battered by water and wind, wanting to be on the boat, or outside, or anywhere else, or at least wanting the picture to be larger than a postcard.

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sails shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

"Sea Fever" - John Masefield