The Leper Spy

by Ben Montgomery

  He spent the rest of the day snapping photographs of a place once called “atrocious” and now greatly changed. His essay and photographs ran in the Philippines Free Press, November 22, 1947, between advertisements for new made-in-Holland Phillips radios and Omega watches, distinguished for beauty. TALA REVISITED, it was called.

  Early this year the shocking condition of the Tala (Central Luzon) Leprosarium was exposed to the horrified gaze of the public by Newspaperman A. H. Lacson. Lacson fittingly described the place as a “hell-hole.” The government issued denials as usual, then explanations, then mitigations, but the atrocious fact remained that the lepers, condemned by their disease to a life of suffering and ostracism, had been further sentenced by official neglect and indifference to greater suffering, to a life of hunger, nakedness, and filth.

  All that is changed. Suffering, natural to the disease, remains, but now there is proper care for the unfortunate victims of the disease. Public opinion, stirred by the press, compelled reform. The government listened to the plaints of the lepers and moved. Something was done for the forgotten ones. A miracle took place.

  Today, patients in the dormitories are all sleeping on beds and cots, none on the floor. Six hundred spring beds from Surplus Property and 50 brand new hospital beds from the UNRRA have been acquired in addition to old beds and cots. The lepers sleep well—or as well as their condition permits.

  Water points have been extended, giving inmates living in cubos water facilities. Rations are distributed in a shed where the patients need not walk far to get their needs. All patients have been issued blankets and clothing, aside from relief received from other sources. The food ration is served in variety, with ice cream once a month.

  For the construction of Quonset barracks and dormitories to prevent over-crowding and for repairs on damaged buildings the sum of P160,000 has been appropriated. Four Quonsets have been erected so far and are now occupied by inmates of the leprosarium. Telephone service has even been installed within the compound for emergency calls, etc.

  “Dormitories are very much cleaner now than 10 months ago,” the authorities point out—an admission and an achievement. A stage has been constructed for the holding of programs and other entertainments. The lepers need a laugh.

  Promin and diasone are now available to the inmates in limited quantities and research is going to improve the treatment of the disease. Nursing aids have been increased and two more nurses will be added to the present staff of three. A dentist and a laboratory technician and several relief workers have been added to the list of personnel while laboratory facilities and the operating room have been improved with the acquisition of more surgical instruments from the UNRRA and the Surplus Property Commission.

  Toilets and other plumbing works have been repaired, ground improvement and beautification are in progress while mechanized farming will be introduced as soon as the tractor and farm implements are received from the UNRRA.

  Conditions in the leprosarium today are indeed a far cry from what they were 10 months ago, and the authorities responsible for the change may congratulate themselves on a good job. For once the government has not stood in the way of improvement but has undertaken it.

  Tala revisited shows what the government can do when, after prerequisite prodding by the press, it gives a damn. It is a feather in the cap of the government. Let us hope it will not be the only one.

  37

  MEDALS

  Twenty miles outside of Manila, Joey put on her best dress and ran a comb through her black hair, parting it to the side. She stepped out of her little room filled with books and walked to the open-air chapel, where nearly a thousand ambulatory leprosy patients had gathered on May 29, 1948, a warm Saturday. Her friends congratulated her when she approached. She wasn’t sure how any of this came to be, or which of her friends had written letters, but she humbly enjoyed the attention.

  She took her place onstage between Gen. George Moore, defender of Corregidor, who was promoted from major general after the war, and Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York, the man who had promised the Quezon family all those years ago at St. Patrick’s Cathedral that he would not forget the valor of Filipinos.

  Moore was holding it together. He had seen a lot during the war, especially after Corregidor, when he had bounced from prison camp to prison camp in Manila, Formosa, and then Manchuria. He once saw a Filipino woman carrying a baby. When she didn’t bow low enough to a Japanese sentry, the sentry ran his sword through the infant, then through the screaming mother. Moore had been slapped and beaten and felt the rage rise up in his throat. He’d seen his comrades die. Retirement was coming, though, and days like this, when he got to honor the heroes of the war, were good.

  When the crowd quieted, Moore began to read a citation. He held in his hand a Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm, President Truman’s idea of how to honor foreign civilians who had resisted occupation and done something courageous to save American lives. Moore told the crowd that the work Mrs. Guerrero did in feeding internees and learning Japanese military secrets showed “more courage than that of a soldier on the field of battle.” With that, he pinned the bronze medal, the second highest military decoration for a foreign civilian, to her dress amid cheers. Cardinal Spellman then called her a “heroine of the cross” for her work during the war and then at the leprosarium, and he pinned over her heart the Cardinal Spellman Medal, for “Christian fortitude and concern for fellow sufferers.” She would cherish them both.

  38

  FRIENDS OF FRIENDS

  Father Fred Zimmerman never met an outcast he didn’t love. The balding Jesuit spent his life ministering to junkies in the slums, covering Mass in the black parishes, and shooting pool with ex-cons in smoky barrooms. And when he worked as a chaplain for the Pacific Air Service Command at Nichols Field in Manila just after the war, he took to driving two hours over bumpy roads every Sunday to visit the afflicted at Tala and especially his friend Joey. He never came empty handed and he never forgot about her even after his stint as chaplain ended and he wound up as head of Queen’s Work in St. Louis, Missouri. They corresponded by mail, and when he learned of her predicament and learned that there was a slight possibility that she could get permission to travel to Carville for treatment, he sat down and fashioned a passionate letter to a friend of a friend, Eugene Cronk, vice president and treasurer of the D’Arcy Advertising Company in St. Louis, which represented Coca-Cola and had offices in Atlanta and New York. Zimmerman had learned from the newspaper that things were falling into place, but the consul general of Manila had refused to grant Joey a visa and referred the case instead to US attorney general Tom Clark.

  “I worked with Joey Guerrero in the Philippines during the war and if there ever was a heroine, she was one,” Zimmerman wrote on June 9, 1948. “No one knows how many American lives she saved by her underground work against the Japs and by her unbelievable exploits leading the first American troops into Manila. I think everything should be done to allow her a temporary visa in order to receive treatment at Carville…. Since the decision now rests with Attorney General Clark I am in hopes something can be done in getting him to give a favorable decision. According to arrangements her trip to the States in an Army plane is to start June 14th. I think Mr. McDonald’s idea was to have you persuade Mr. Hannegan to put in a word for Joey with Attorney General Clark. Anything you can do will be appreciated.”

  Mr. Hannegan was Robert E. Hannegan, a St. Louis politician who had served the last three years as chairman of the Democratic National Committee and helped save Harry Truman’s political career. He was now co-owner of the St. Louis Cardinals of Major League Baseball, and he was also very close with Attorney General Tom Clark, a Democrat, sending him ties, birthday greetings, and postcards from Ireland. Clark attended Hannegan’s mother’s funeral and enrolled Hannegan’s family in the Bear Creek Orchards’ Fruit-of-the-Month Club. So when Cronk forwarded Zimmerman’s letter to Hannegan and Hannegan forwarded it to Clark, it carried
enough weight to make it to the Justice Department desk of the attorney general himself.

  Dear Tom,

  I enclose a letter that was sent to Gene Cronk, a dear personal friend of mine, by Father Zimmerman, S.J. I do hope that you might be able to help Joey Guerrero. If so, let me know.

  Kindest regards and all good wishes.

  Sincerely,

  Bob

  When the letter arrived, the US Public Health Service suddenly changed its position. Assistant Surgeon General Ralph Williams wrote again to Herman Hilleboe, Dr. Eloesser’s friend and commissioner of health at the New York State Department of Health.

  “Authorization has been given by the Public Health Service for the admission for treatment of Mrs. Joey Guerrero, the wife of a physician of Manila, Philippine Islands, to the National Leprosarium at Carville, Louisiana,” Williams wrote. “Mrs. Guerrero rendered valuable service to the American Army during World War II. In recognition of this, the United States Government recently awarded her the Medal of Freedom. Her case has been given special consideration by the Public Health Service in response to numerous requests from many sources. In view of the recommendation of the physician in charge of the case in the Philippine Islands and because of the many unusual circumstances relative to this patient, the Public Health Service agreed to accept her as a special study case if she presented herself at Carville…. Upon her arrival at Carville, a careful study will be made of her case to determine the type of treatment best fitted to her individual needs.”

  On June 14, newspapers across the country carried a brief with the news.

  “She is or will soon be on her way,” Clark wrote back to Hannegan. “It was good to hear from you. We saw Bobby the other night at Mimi’s dance. Give our best to Irma.”

  REGULATIONS WAIVED

  MANILA—The US Consulate today received permission from Washington to waive regulations barring lepers and issue a visa for Mrs. Josefina Guerrero to go to Carville, La., for leprosy treatment. Mrs. Guerrero, a Filipino war heroine whose espionage was credited with saving many American lives, missed the American ship Hope in Manila Sunday because she lacked a visa.

  39

  CARVILLE

  The patients, thirty or forty of them, woke before sunrise and gathered in their pajamas in front of the old plantation, under the live oaks dripping Spanish moss on the morning of July 11, 1948. They were joined by several of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, the butterfly nuns, plainly dressed in their gray habits and tall white cornettes. The newsmen showed up, too, one from the Associated Press and one from the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. They stood in the moonlight, smoking cigarettes and chatting and waiting, as the bullfrogs croaked on the banks of the Mississippi River across the two-lane highway.

  Carville’s newest guest was due any minute. They didn’t want to miss it.

  When the inky black began to give way to the blue-gray haze of morning, they saw headlights swing around a bend. She was finally here.

  Inside the car, Josefina Guerrero took a few deep breaths. She was still clutching an air-sickness bag and trying to hold down the nausea from her flight.

  The driver spoke up.

  “Here we are, Joey,” he said. “This is Carville.”

  At last. She was thirty years old and she had woken up that morning with the same wish she had been making for years: Let this be the day when I will be cured, when the disease that lives inside me will be arrested so I can enjoy a real life. Six years before, her diagnosis had been a death sentence and, because of who she was and what she believed, that afforded her the opportunity to do great things. Now that she had tasted the possibility of a cure, the desire to live consumed her.

  She had to come halfway around the world and cut through thickets of red tape, but now she was closer than ever.

  Her journey was long. She’d come by ship, the USAT General John Pope, from Manila to San Francisco, where she was welcomed by more than three hundred soldiers, men whose lives she had saved and men she had nursed to health after the Battle of Manila. They cheered when she stepped off the gangplank, flashbulbs bursting, television cameras rolling, and reporters scribbling in their notebooks. Though the San Francisco doctor who examined her after the landing called her disease “advanced,” the soldiers hugged her neck and stuck bouquets of roses in her arms and kissed her cheeks. They remembered her on the battlefield and outside the walls of Santo Tomas and walking through the cross fire. The courage she had shown during the war won her the adoration of brave men. A band played the Philippine national anthem. Her friend Frank Gaines was with her, along with the Philippine government consul general and Father Clement Barberich, who had paid Joey’s passage. Citizens in the crowd waved their handkerchiefs as she stood there smiling, arms loaded with giant bouquets of flowers.

  The scene was too much for the young woman with curly black hair who wore her Medal of Freedom pinned to her blouse. She stood just five feet tall and weighed one hundred pounds, but she seemed larger than life.

  “This is more than I expected,” she told the press.

  The reporters didn’t miss the significance of this defining moment. A newspaperman named John Chestnutt wrote in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, “In other places and other, less enlightened times, there would have been no such welcome. Instead of being greeted she would have been, quite wrongly, shunned because of her illness.”

  After the celebration, she caught an air force plane to New Orleans, falling ill from nausea, and then ducked into an ambulance for the seventy-five-mile trip to Carville. She rolled down the window and felt the cool rush of wind against her face as they sped past rows of tidy houses and palmettos and zinnias on well-kept lawns. She saw the lights of downtown New Orleans and the black expanse of the mighty Mississippi and the cypress swamps thick with life.

  “This is America,” she thought.

  She felt like she was finally waking from a bad dream and standing on the threshold of a new life as rural Louisiana blurred by outside the window.

  When the ambulance came down the gravel two-lane road and stopped in front of the clinic at Carville and the door swung open, the patients began to cheer. One of the Filipino patients forced a sheaf of ferns and red roses into her arms as a flashbulb popped in the morning light. The photograph captured a woman wearing red lipstick on a giant smile, stepping out of an old ambulance with MARINE HOSPITAL stenciled on the rear doors. The Hornbostels, Gertrude and Hans, hugged her neck and praised her for her heroics.

  “Welcome, Joey,” said Stanley Stein, a blind man who was the editor of the patient newspaper. “Welcome to Carville.”

  She looked fresh and trim in a gray pencil-striped suit, white blouse, and summer costume jewelry. Someone remarked that she looked more like she was arriving at a fancy resort than a leprosy hospital. Joey was smiling but nervous.

  “Thank you so much for the flowers,” she said.

  One of the nuns took her arm and led her down a long porch and then a quiet corridor to a temporary room with “13” painted on the door. Joey giggled when she saw it.

  At the window was a runner of red, yellow, and blue wool made by another patient, and on it were woven the words WELCOME JOEY. The room was filled with flowers. On a tray beside the bed sat a breakfast of grapefruit, warm toast, and drip coffee. Joey couldn’t stop smiling.

  Gertrude Hornbostel wanted to figure out the puzzle of how Joey had made it through enemy lines. Despite being at the center of attention during the race to Manila, the internees at Santo Tomas knew only what they heard through the grapevine and from their own intelligence gatherers. Hornbostel remembered hearing that when US troops got close to Manila, the Japanese planned to line the internees up in the courtyard and mow them down by machine-gun fire. She remembered hearing that a Nisei spy in the camp had found such orders on the desk of the Japanese commandant, notified the internee intelligence committee, then left camp to tell the guerrillas, with hopes they could inform MacArthur and tell him to hurry.
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  “Joey’s exploits saved the lives of all those men who were rushing to save us by a 36-hour forced march,” Hornbostel would write. “They raced with the other outfit to see which could get in first. But the biggest thing in our lives was the fact that they were there and that they were there in time—thanks to Joey, but at that time we did not realize that we owed our lives to this one little Filipino girl, although we had heard by grapevine about her mission. We did not know then that she had come through safely. All this knowledge had to be put together piecemeal from what little information we could glean here and there. It was like working out a crossword puzzle with the word that gave you the key to the whole list as ‘Billy Ferrer,’ Joey’s name with the underground.”

  When she finished visiting with the doting Gertrude Hornbostel, Joey took a shower and changed clothes, and the nurse guided her into a spring bed with clean sheets—both rare luxuries back at Novaliches—and fluffed the pillows around her. Joey then opened the door for the newspapermen who had been waiting. She answered all their questions the best she could. About the trip. About how she was treated during her travels. About Tala.

  “The Filipinos look upon leprosy as a curse,” she said. “When I first got to the colony, conditions were vile. Patients were sleeping on the floor, living promiscuously, and the government could do nothing about it. So I took some patients and said, ‘Let’s see what we can do with a little lye and soap.’ Before long we had it all cleaned up. Then I wrote my friends in California and the letter was published and we began receiving gifts of food and clothing from America. And the GIs, how they helped us! They would come and bring something, maybe only a candy bar, but something.

  “In changing squalid and almost unspeakable conditions there to at least bearable, and in exposing such conditions, some of my friends and especially Aurora ‘Baby’ Quezon, daughter of our late President Quezon, stood valiantly by me,” she said. The reporters “were fearless in their reporting. But I know I shall be able to serve the patients at Tala much better when I am well, and I fully expect to get well here now that I can receive treatment with the new sulfone drugs.”