The hospital stay cost $125, wiping out Susie’s emergency reserve. And all of them were still sick. A friend at the Mandarin Center whose sister was a nurse came to Susie’s aid. The nurse recommended antibiotics and the proper amounts to take. Susie bought them and she and the boys went to bed and stayed there for a week.
Their illnesses cost Susie ten days of classes, and she was hopelessly behind when she returned. She struggled to keep up but couldn’t, and she decided she’d have to switch to a slower class. She was incredulous when, in applying for the transfer, an administrator ruled her absence unexcused. “You know the rules,” she remembered him telling her. “You must notify us in advance if you are going to be ill.”
She received the transfer anyway, and soon afterward a new opportunity opened for her. An English teacher at the Language Training and Testing Center lost his job because of political statements, and Susie was asked to fill in. She accepted to replenish her emergency fund.
Her life became even more hectic. She was up before 6 A.M. every day, getting the boys ready for day care. Once she got them off, she rushed to the bus stop for the long trip to the Language Center on the packed buses she so hated. She taught from 9 to 11, and barely had time to catch a snack on her way to her studies at the Mandarin Center. “I always wondered what it would be like to come to class prepared, but I never found out,” she later wrote. After class, she had to run to make the bus home so that she would be there when the boys arrived. The bus stop was five blocks from her apartment, and she stopped to pick up groceries and other necessities as she made her way home. “As I shopped my way up the street, it was not always easy to keep smiling. I was really beginning to hate being ‘the American.’”
With luck, she arrived home in time to change clothes and prepare snacks for the boys before they got there. “On the good days, there were letters from the States to read while I waited,” she wrote. “I loved to see the little school bus arrive with the boys. It came to signal the victory over one more day.”
Yet the day was far from done. She still had to cook dinner, bathe the boys, and put them to bed with a story, before she cleaned up the day’s mess, got her own bath and tried to find a little quiet time for study. The schedule had one advantage: it left little time for thinking about Tom.
Near the end of March, five days before Jim’s fourth birthday, a call from home brought news of Paw-Paw’s death, sending Susie into depression. By the next month, she was even more distressed. Even in the slower class she was not able to keep up her studies. And Jim developed pneumonia again.
She later wrote about her thoughts at the time. “I had to make a major decision: how long should we stay? How dangerous was his condition? What was causing it? I was told that he suffered from a pollution allergy but that was a vague diagnosis. The only thing I was sure of was that Jim was either on antibiotics or he was sick. He had always been cooperative and uncomplaining, but I was shredding emotionally. At this point, our landlady came to announce that she was allowing a Chinese couple to move into her room for the next three months. The thoughts of sharing our apartment and what little privacy we had were just too much. I knew that we had to move or leave. Our current situation had become intolerable.”
Not only was the situation intolerable, she could see no hope of improvement. Completely frazzled, she decided she had but one recourse: to return home. That night, she put the boys to bed, read them a story, and lay down with them until they dropped off to sleep. She later remembered the night clearly.
“As we lay there, I looked at them closely, so beautiful and brave, learning a language, making new friends, succeeding in an alien environment with only one parent to provide all their security. I got up and made myself a cup of coffee and began to list all the things I had to do before we left. I decided to leave by the end of June and forget the language classes. I would concentrate all of my efforts on finishing my research. My second priority was to have enough time left to visit friends, take John and Jim to all of the major tourist sights.”
Her visa was expiring, and she would have to get it extended to stay through June. When she ran into red tape, she called home in disgust. Her mother called Aunt Su-Su, who called her friend Jesse Helms, North Carolina’s right-wing Republican senator, a strong supporter of the Taiwan government, and the problem soon was eradicated.
In May, Susie moved out of her apartment and in with Henry and Marie Ju. With the pressures of teaching and studying gone, she was able to relax some. She spent most of her time gathering information about Taiwan’s history and economy for future graduate school papers, shopping for gifts to carry home, and taking the boys to museums and temples.
As the end of her stay neared, Susie began calling home with strange stories. She didn’t think the government was going to allow her to leave, she said. She was being watched constantly. Two agents followed her wherever she went. The government even moved an agent into her apartment, prompting her move out.
“It was like an unfolding drama,” recalled Annette Hunt, who was kept informed of daily developments by Susie’s mother. “Susie said the government couldn’t believe an American woman would come over there with two small children just to study. She said they thought she was a spy.”
Frantic with worry, Florence called her sister Susie, who again called Jesse Helms and asked him to intercede.
“After that,” Susie Sharp said later, “she came on home.”
Later, Susie’s friends in Taiwan were surprised to hear about this, for they knew of no such things happening, and Susie made no complaint about it while she was there. Neither did Susie mention it when she later wrote extensively about her stay in Taiwan for an advice book she wanted to publish for business women traveling in Third World countries. But the story seemed plausible to her family at the time, and only years later would anybody realize that this could have been the first clear indication that Susie was becoming emotionally unhinged.
Bie returned to Taiwan from Greensboro before Susie and the boys left, and they spent their last week with her, visiting friends and having a good time. On June 25, Susie and the boys got on a plane for home, with stops in Tokyo and Chicago. As the jetliner climbed into the sky, the pilot banked and Susie looked back on the place, with all its pollution, filth, and germs, she was so gladly leaving.
“A haze of reddish brown smog encircled the mountains and tarnished the clouds,” Susie wrote. “As we flew higher the clear blue of the Pacific sky rose to meet us and I excitedly pushed the boys toward the window. ‘Look! Blue sky!’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said John, ‘just like in America.’”
On the flight, Susie had time to contemplate the past six months. “We were not the same people who had left. We were a family unit; no longer three without a fourth. We had learned to rely on each other and on ourselves. But most important of all we had learned compassion for others and we had learned the most valuable lesson of all: that others do not think and believe as we do, that other people in other cultures do not have our goals, share our needs, or share our god. We met good people and bad. We found out what it means to be a minority, to be followed by the curious, to have little privacy, to live in a tiny apartment with little hope of a house with grass or trees. We had been lonely, tired and sick. We had been pushed to our limits emotionally but the three of us had held. The long road ahead to acquire those magic credentials so necessary for a job seemed shorter and conquerable.”
When their plane arrived at O’Hare International in Chicago, where they were to make connections for Greensboro, Susie and the boys were met by her mother-in-law, who had driven from Louisville with Helen Stewart to see them during their brief layover. Susie, Helen later recalled, seemed almost happy to see Delores, and even Delores said it was the only time she thought Susie was glad to see her. Delores bought lunch for Susie and the boys in an airport restaurant, then saw them off with hugs and waves on the last leg of their journey.
“We were exhausted on our arrival in North Carolina,” Susie later wrote, “but
this time—when it didn’t matter—all of our luggage arrived.”
The preceding year had been the most draining and unforgettable of Susie’s life. Soon after her return, she wrote, “There is a wonderful Chinese proverb that applies to a woman on her own: ‘Success is like a turtle climbing a mountain. Failure is water running downhill.’ Someday, when I have time, I’m going to do it in needlepoint. For the past year, I have known what it’s like to be a turtle clinging to the side of a mountain, and I’m too high up to let go.”
When Susie Sharp came to see Susie and the boys, the first thing Jim said was, “Su-Su, I don’t ever want to go to Taiwan again.”
Su-Su was concerned about her niece, as were other members of the family. Susie looked haggard, wan, and frail. Su-Su thought she might have contacted some mysterious illness in Taiwan and urged her to get a checkup. Florence was worried, too. And she finally talked Susie into going to Reidsville for an examination by her uncle, Dr. Fred Klenner, who had delivered her and supposedly cured her of polio.
His diagnosis brought no relief. Susie, Dr. Klenner pronounced, had multiple sclerosis, a debilitating disease of the nervous system that in time can cripple and kill, a disease for which medical science claims no cure. But Dr. Klenner disagreed with conventional medical science. Susie should not worry, he said. He would take care of her.
22
The second floor above a drugstore in an old brick building in downtown Reidsville seemed an unlikely spot in which to find a doctor of such renown as Frederick R. Klenner, and some of his first-time patients who came great distances seeking his miraculous cures were dumbfounded upon encountering it.
An inconspicuous glass-top door bearing a hand-painted sign that said FRED R. KLENNER, DISEASES OF THE CHEST, LIMITED GENERAL PRACTICE led patients up a steep, dimly lighted, creaking wooden staircase to a hallway with rain-stained ceilings and plaster crumbling from dull green walls, dominated by an ancient, dusty refrigerator, its white finish yellowed by age. Doorways led to separate waiting rooms for blacks and whites—which Dr. Klenner maintained even into the eighties, defying anybody to do anything about it—to dingy, cluttered treatment rooms with antiquated furnishings, and to Dr. Klenner’s homey office.
It often was said that walking into Dr. Klenner’s office was like stepping back half a century in time. “If there ever was a prototype of the old-time family doctor, he was it,” a friend said.
Two walls of his office were covered with more than four dozen official-looking certificates and diplomas, certifying his credentials. The furnishings were stout, antique and masculine, and included a huge grandfather clock Dr. Klenner had bought at an auction; old medical instruments; a vintage, leather-bound Bible, always open; and two hornets’ nests, which he had fetched from the woods and dangled from an overhead pipe.
An unbelievable clutter overwhelmed the shabby, rambling suite of rooms that made up the clinic. Medical supplies and medicines were scattered in disarray, some of the vials looking as ancient as the doctor himself. Bric-a-brac and crude handcrafts, gifts from worshipful patients, were everywhere. Few open spots were to be found on any wall, and those that appeared were quickly covered by notes, signs, schedules, notices, political posters, needlepoint homilies, and children’s drawings.
Dr. Klenner’s clinic told much about his political and philosophical beliefs. A huge red, white, and blue GEORGE WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT poster dominated one wall more than a decade after Wallace’s failed campaign. A quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson proclaimed GOVERNMENT BIG ENOUGH TO SUPPLY EVERYTHING YOU NEED IS BIG ENOUGH TO TAKE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE. A sign that said THERE ARE NO GUNS IN THIS HOUSE had been altered so that the word NO was blacked out. Gun magazines were scattered through the waiting areas along with tracts from the John Birch Society, White Citizens Councils, and Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade. Books and pamphlets decried public education as a forum for Communists, integration as a Communist plot, trade with Communist nations as treason, women’s rights as sacrilegious, Franklin D. Roosevelt as a traitor and Martin Luther King as a spokesman for the enemy.
“Very conservative,” “ultra-conservative,” “very much Old South, more Old South than anybody from the South” were phrases that close associates used to describe Dr. Klenner. A Civil War buff, he had been known to proclaim that the wrong side had won that war, and to speak favorably of the Ku Klux Klan. Some thought that strange, for nearly everybody in Reidsville knew that not only was Dr. Klenner devoutly Catholic, a religion targeted by some Klan groups and anathema to fundamentalist southerners, he also was a Yankee.
Fred Klenner was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on October 22, 1907, the last of Frank and Mary Klenner’s eight children. His parents had come to this country from Austria as youngsters, brought by their families in the great migrations from Europe late in the last century. Drawn to Johnstown by the promise of jobs, both of their fathers found work in steel mills.
Johnstown sits at the confluence of Stony Creek and the Conemaugh River in Cambria County in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania. The town was laid out in 1800, four years before the county was formed. In 1840 iron was discovered nearby, and a new industry sprang up to exploit the area’s vast reserves of iron and coal. The town had one major problem: it was regularly flooded.
When he was eleven, Frank Klenner got a job making cigars. In his teens he went to work at Cambria Iron Works, later to become Bethlehem Steel Corp. On a rainy May 31, 1889, when Frank was eighteen, he was at work when a man on a white horse rode up at a gallop yelling for everybody to flee to the hills. A dam in the mountains northeast of the town had burst and a wall of water was racing with a fury through the long, narrow Conemaugh Gap toward Johnstown. Frank was one of the lucky ones who made it up the side of Prospect Hill, where he watched the water sweep much of Johnstown away. Mary, then a domestic for a wealthy family whose home was on high ground, later claimed that she had seen the whole thing in a dream three days before it happened. Their children grew up hearing many tales of the Great Johnstown Flood, which killed more than 2,300 people, 300 of them suffering the horrible irony of dying in fires started by the water.
When Fred was born, Frank and Mary were living on a farm near Johnstown, although Frank continued to go to work in the mill every day. One of their daughters, Gertrude, had breathing problems, and the doctor suggested that she might fare better in the country, away from the grime and smoky gray skies produced by Johnstown’s blast furnaces. Gertrude died on the farm of pneumonia at sixteen.
Mary was devoutly religious, and she brought her children to mass every week at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, a grimy, fudge-brown cathedral with a slate roof, on Railroad Street close by the steel mill where her husband labored. Next door, in a squat, three-story yellow brick building, was the parochial school where Fred began his education. He was a smart child, some said the smartest of all the Klenner children, sensitive and earnest.
When Fred was eight, his family moved back into town, and he was able to spend more time at church, where he found much attention and great joy. He was an altar boy, and after school, eager to please, he stayed to wash windows and do other chores for the nuns at the adjoining convent.
In 1918, when Fred was eleven, a flu epidemic swept the country, felling hundreds in Johnstown. The hospitals were filled, and new patients were turned away. Whole families died. Fred and his sister Agnes, two years older, fell ill with high temperatures. The family feared that both would be lost, but Mary, a believer in herbal remedies, treated her children with large amounts of tea made from the leaves of the boneset plant, and both recovered. Years later, when he had become one of the early proponents of the healing qualities of vitamin C, Fred told his family that he’d had boneset tea analyzed to find out what was in it. He was not surprised, he said, to learn that it contained great quantities of vitamin C. Boneset tea was not the only herbal remedy that Mary used. She also made an all-purpose salve from a variety of plants and sent her children into the fie
lds and woods to gather them.
Frank Klenner worked long hours, came home bone tired, and collapsed snoring on the sofa after supper. When he managed free time, one of his favorite activities and greatest joys was playing in an Austrian band. He had mastered several instruments, including the cornet, violin, harpsichord, and zither, and he urged music on all of his children. Fred learned the piano and played duets with his sister Agnes at school and family gatherings.
A proud man, Frank was a strict disciplinarian. “Typical German,” his daughter Marie recalled. Yet it was Mary who really ruled the house with her gentleness and mystical religious fervor, and Fred became far closer to his mother. He was her favorite child, always singled out for special attention, her hope for the future.
When the Klenners first moved back into town after Gertrude’s death, they lived in a two-story, shingle-covered frame house on Boyd Avenue in the eighth ward on the bluffs overlooking the river. Later, Frank built a brick house on a hillside at the end of Confer Avenue, two blocks away. Fred got a paper route in the neighborhood, delivering the Tribune on foot every afternoon after school.
Johnstown was a lively town while Fred was growing up, a mélange of ethnic groups molded into a strict social order, with the descendants of English settlers at the top, followed by Germans, Welsh, and Irish, the first immigrants to arrive. Eastern and southern Europeans, who came later, fit in below. At the bottom were the few hundred blacks who had been brought in from the South to work in the mills in a time of labor strife. They lived in a shantytown in the flats near the river, isolated from the rest of Johnstown. Fred had no contact with them, and his strongly outspoken feelings about blacks didn’t surface until he moved south. There was another thing with which he had no contact in his youth, but about which he also later came to have strong feelings: guns. His mother wouldn’t allow them in her house.
Fred grew tall and slim. In high school, he played on a football team that never lost a game, but unlike his teammates, he showed no interest in the girls who showered the victorious athletes with flirtatious attentions. His main interests were his studies and the church. And when he became one of the first graduates of Catholic High School in 1924 and announced that he wanted to become a priest, his mother showered Heaven with praises of gratitude.
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