Having spoken with half a dozen local residents before coming here to find the house where Hilleman was born, I already knew that there were no memorials or tributes to him anywhere in his hometown. This is all the more perplexing to me now as I’m driving down Main Street because I can’t help noticing that every other house appears to have its own historical marker. I’ve never seen anything like it. Most are mounted near the sidewalk on top of thin, waist-high stanchions shaped like a conductor’s stand, and the rest are bolted next to front doorways. I pull over to investigate. CARPENTER ERNEST ANDERSON BUILT THIS LOVELY ONE-AND-A-HALF STORY BUNGALOW IN 1916, notes one. A few lawns down: CONSTRUCTED IN 1913 FOR DR. CURTIS N. RINEHART, A PROMINENT MILES CITY DENTIST, THE HOME REFLECTS THE TOWN’S SECOND GROWTH SPURT. And for another doctor: RENOWNED MONTANA ARCHITECT CHARLES S. HAIRE DREW THE PLANS FOR PROMINENT LOCAL PHYSICIAN DR. FRANCIS GRAY, WHO WAS A CHARTER STAFF MEMBER OF HOLY ROSARY HOSPITAL.
I pass the Montana Bar, which boasts a bronze plaque from the National Register of Historic Places, and continue on toward the local museum to check out what information it has on Hilleman. I’m scanning homes and business fronts for additional markers en route, and I almost swerve into an older man slowly puttering along the shoulder on a John Deere rider mower.
Inside the museum I ask the only staff member present, a gentleman in his sixties, if they have any memorabilia or exhibits related to Dr. Maurice Hilleman.
“That name doesn’t sound familiar,” he says, reaching for a thick binder. He flips through the pages and traces his finger down an alphabetical list of noteworthy residents. I look over his shoulder.
No Hilleman.
“You need to talk to Bob Barthelmess. He’s pretty much the town historian.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
In walks the guy I almost clipped a few minutes ago.
“That’s him right there.”
Fortunately, Bob doesn’t seem to recognize me.
I say hello and explain that I’m in town to locate the birthplace of Dr. Maurice Hilleman and learn more about his early years in Miles City.
“Never heard of him,” Bob says gruffly. “What’s so special about him?”
“Well, among a number of things, out of the fourteen or so vaccinations that most people receive in their lives, Hilleman developed, like, half of them.”
“If that’s true, and he’s from here, how come I don’t know who he is?” Bob’s tone is more befuddled than accusatory, but there’s a hint of suspicion that I’m pulling his leg.
“I had no idea who he was either until a few months ago,” I say. “I’ve been talking with Art Larson here in Montana, who’s going to take me to—”
“Yeah, I know Artie. Used to be involved with the museum.”
“He’s Hilleman’s nephew.”
“His nephew? He never mentioned that to me.”
“I’m seeing him later today. Anyway, I hear you’re the expert on Miles City, but is there someone else you think I should talk to, someone who knows as much about the town as you do, if that’s possible?”
“Yes,” Bob says. “But he’s dead.”
“Ah.”
“Where was this Hilleman fellow born?” Bob asks me.
“I think right down the street from here.”
“Looks like somebody’s been asleep at the post,” Bob says, finally sounding convinced that this required further investigation. We exchange contact details, and I promise to update him on whatever else I find.
Art and his wife, Nancy, live an hour north of Miles City and are driving down to show me exactly where Hilleman was born. In the meantime, I’m meeting with the town’s mayor at a coffee shop called Kafé Utza.
Not that I’ve hung out with a lot of mayors—in fact, I believe this is a first—but I can’t imagine any of them being cooler than Joe Whalen. Bored working as the manager of an Internet provider company in North Dakota, Joe hopped on his motorcycle in May 2000 and headed west. While passing through Miles City en route to his native California, he stopped at the Montana Bar, had a cold beer, and right then and there decided he had found his new home. Joe opened up a bookshop in 2002 and, four years later, filled a vacant seat on the city council. Two months after that he was asked to serve out the previous mayor’s term, which he did, and since then he’s been “properly” elected.
In his early to mid-forties, I’m guessing, and ruggedly good-looking, Joe is friendly and approachable but not in a slick, political way. Just laid-back and personable. He’s well familiar with Maurice Hilleman and wants to see him honored. “I think we can get the town to do something,” Joe says, “and he certainly deserves the recognition.” After we chat for a good thirty minutes or so, Art and Nancy pull up in their Ford Bronco and Joe comes out to say hello before returning to work.
Art, a seventy-eight-year-old rancher, had a stroke earlier this year and doesn’t say much as we drive through town. “He wasn’t the chattiest person before the stroke,” Nancy tells me, “but this has been a hard couple of months. He’s doing better though.” Nancy is an accomplished local artist, and she, too, was born in Miles City. I ask them both where they lived, and Art chimes in: “My old house used to be the town brothel. Before our family lived there.”
“What do you all remember of Dr. Hilleman, as a person?” I ask.
“He was extremely modest,” Nancy says, “and serious, although he had a kind of wry sense of humor. Obviously he was very smart, but he never talked about his work.”
Art nods and adds, “He also knew how to hypnotize chickens.”
We drive along Main Street for a few minutes and, five hundred or so feet past the museum, turn onto Water Plant Road, which curves to the right for three-quarters of a mile and dead-ends directly in front of a dilapidated, light-blue two-story house.
“That’s it,” Nancy announces. “That was Maurice’s first home.”
I ask them if they want to walk around the property with me for a few minutes, and Art shakes his head.
“That’s okay,” Nancy tells me. “We’re fine right here. Take your time.”
Art and Nancy don’t know when the Hilleman residence was last occupied, and from the outside it’s hard to gauge. Much of the exterior paint has been worn away by rain and frigid winds, exposing patches of brown wood. Waist-high weeds poke through broken planks that were once a front porch. Half the windows are shattered, and yet a mysteriously clean white curtain flutters gently in and out of a front window. Behind it there’s a white metal birdcage hanging from the ceiling. Otherwise the interior looks forlorn and empty. I step back and notice cinder blocks neatly stacked near a side door. On a tree about ten feet from the house is a rusted shovel blade nailed into the bark about six feet off the ground.
Maurice Ralph Hilleman was born in this house on August 30, 1919, the eighth child of Gustav and Anna Hillemann. There was a ninth, Maurice’s twin sister, but she was stillborn. Gustav buried the baby girl hours later, followed by Anna the next day; during labor, she had developed eclampsia, a swelling of the brain, and died on September 1. Per his wife’s final request, Gustav dug up their infant daughter, tucked her into Anna’s arms after she passed away, and laid them both to rest in a single grave.
“I always felt that I cheated death,” Hilleman later said of his birth, and, by all accounts, he kept cheating throughout his childhood. Before reaching the age of ten, he had come close to drowning in the roiling currents of the Yellowstone River, getting crushed by a freight train on a railroad trestle (he leapt to safety with half a second to spare), and suffocating to death after a diphtheria infection puffed up his throat. “I was proclaimed near dead so many times as a kid,” Hilleman recalled. “They always said I wouldn’t last till morning.”
Hilleman attended Montana State University, graduated first in his class, and won a full University of Chicago scholarship to earn his microbiology doctorate. The skinny, perpetually broke young student who had to get by on one meal a day made medical h
istory at Chicago with his doctoral thesis. Hilleman discovered that chlamydia—which infects several million Americans a year and can make women infertile—wasn’t a virus, as most scientists believed, but a unique bacterium, and his research enabled doctors to treat the disease more effectively.
The New Jersey pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb recognized Hilleman’s brilliance and hired him right out of school. For four years he worked on creating flu vaccines, and in 1948 he joined the team of scientists at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., tasked with studying influenza and preventing future outbreaks.
Hilleman, almost single-handedly, did just that in the spring of 1957. On April 17 he read a short newspaper article about a nasty influenza bug racing through Hong Kong. As a precautionary measure, Hilleman cabled an Army medical post in Japan and told them to track down an infected U.S. soldier, collect a saliva specimen, and rush it to Washington. He regrew the sample and identified it as similar to the Asian flu strain that had swept the globe in 1889. Hilleman immediately alerted the World Health Organization, the U.S. Public Health Service, and the Army’s own Commission on Influenza about the potential threat, but all of them thought he was being hasty. In defiance of protocol, Hilleman issued a press release declaring that another pandemic was imminent and encouraged several vaccine manufacturers to get a jump on production. He also instructed them to advise their chicken farmers not to destroy their roosters at the end of hatching season, a standard practice Hilleman remembered from his Montana youth. Hundreds of thousands of additional eggs would be needed, he told them, to incubate millions of vaccine doses.
Critical time was lost when the health agencies initially dragged their feet, and seventy thousand Americans were killed by the Asian flu, but the numbers could have been dramatically higher were it not for Hilleman’s rapid response. “Many millions of persons, we can be certain, did not contract Asian flu because of the protection of the vaccine,” Surgeon General Leonard Burney later said. For his efforts Hilleman was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Public Service by the secretary of defense.
In 1957, Hilleman and his wife, Thelma, moved to Pennsylvania so he could accept a position heading up all virus and cell biology research at Merck. Thelma died of breast cancer in 1962, leaving a distraught Hilleman to care for their young daughter, Jeryl Lynn, by himself. On March 23, 1963, Hilleman’s little girl came down with epidemic parotitis. Better known as the mumps, the painful infection usually passes after a few weeks without inflicting any long-term harm, but in extreme cases the virus can cause deafness, diabetes, and brain damage.
After swabbing Jeryl Lynn’s throat, Hilleman returned to his lab and injected the culture into chicken embryos. From this he produced the “Jeryl Lynn” mumps vaccine, which continues to be administered to this day. (There’s still no cure for the mumps, and the best “treatment” remains getting immunized and not coming down with it in the first place.)
Emboldened, Hilleman began tackling one vexing disease after another—but, thankfully, without relying on his daughter to be stricken with each one.
Next came measles, a virus that was killing and blinding tens of millions of children a year. In 1968, Hilleman invented a vaccine that, within the United States alone, brought the number of infections down from four million to approximately one hundred. He followed up with a three-in-one measles/mumps/rubella shot that has made the vaccinations less expensive and more accessible, especially to children in poorer nations.
During the mid-1970s, Hilleman pushed Merck to mass-produce vaccines for pneumonia and related illnesses. Since these could be treated with penicillin, other pharmaceutical companies deemed the research a waste of resources. But as Hilleman accurately predicted, the overuse of antibiotics made it necessary to expand the medical arsenal, and the pneumococcal vaccines were eventually put into wide use.
When Hilleman reached Merck’s mandatory retirement age of sixty-five in 1984, he refused to stop working. For him, Merck made an exception. By the time he died in April 2005, Hilleman had helped to develop more than forty vaccines, including for chicken pox; Haemophilus influenzae type b, or “Hib,” a bacterium that can lead to meningitis and paralysis; hepatitis A; and hepatitis B (with crucial assistance from Baruch Blumberg and Irving Millman), thereby cutting liver disease by 99 percent in some countries. His measles vaccine alone is estimated to have saved, at a minimum, more than 100 million lives over the past four decades.
After taking one last look at Hilleman’s childhood home, I walk back to Art and Nancy’s truck, climb in, and ask them why they think Hilleman has been so overlooked. Nancy mentions that, as far as Miles City goes, Montana folks are reserved by nature, so his family wouldn’t have campaigned for any kind of tribute, lest it seem like they were bragging about one of their own.
“A lot of folks didn’t even know all that he had done until after he died,” Nancy adds. “He never boasted about it.”
According to his coworkers, Hilleman demonstrated that same reticence for self-promotion at Merck. He shied away from publicity whenever the company announced another of his breakthroughs, and he never named any of his vaccines after himself, which other scientists have done. (He did call the mumps vaccine “Jeryl Lynn” for his daughter, but he intentionally left off their last name.)
“You want to know why Hilleman’s not more popular?” Art pipes up from out of nowhere, just as we’re about to say our good-byes. “Nobody likes gettin’ those damn shots.”
Actually, I think he’s on to something. They may not hurt as much as they did in the old days, when the needles were bigger, but vaccinations are still an inconvenience. And when they work, which they overwhelmingly do, the result is—nothing. We can’t see or feel the payoff. No aches and pains have been alleviated, no inflammations relieved, no sores healed. It’s easy to take for granted something whose benefits can only be left to the imagination.
Which is why I thought it might be worthwhile to find a site associated with the world’s deadliest plague, a pandemic caused by a virus that scientists could neither cure nor restrain. Known as “Spanish influenza,” the disease is commonly thought to have kicked up first in Europe during World War I and then run riot across the globe, killing tens of millions of people in a matter of months.
Only in recent years has it come to light that a county doctor from Sublette, Kansas, treated the first documented victims of the Spanish flu in 1918, and they were most certainly not from Spain. They were his neighbors.
DR. LORING MINER’S HOUSE
Waving good-by in the Seattle depot, we had not known that we had carried the flu with us into our drawing rooms, along with the presents and the flowers, but, one after another, we had been struck down as the train proceeded eastward. We children did not understand whether the chattering of our teeth and Mama’s lying torpid in the berth were not somehow part of the trip.… We began to be sure that it was all an adventure when we saw our father draw a revolver on the conductor who was trying to put us off the train at a small wooden station in the middle of the North Dakota prairie. On the platform in Minneapolis, there were stretchers, a wheel chair, redcaps, distraught officials, and, beyond them, in the crowd, my grandfather’s rosy face, cigar, and cane, my grandmother’s feathered hat, imparting an air of festivity to this strange and confused picture, making us children certain that our illness was the beginning of a delightful holiday.
—From Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1946) by Mary McCarthy. (Both of McCarthy’s parents died from the Spanish flu soon after arriving in Minneapolis.)
WHILE WALKING THROUGH the airport in Liberal, Kansas, I notice a flyer pinned to the community bulletin board that cautions visitors to “please avoid the following acitivity” and, underneath, shows an adorable blond toddler kissing the wet, mud-splattered snout of a caged pig. Next to this tongue-in-cheek warning is a more somber government advisory about the swine-flu virus that recently swept through the country. Thankfully, the outbreak didn’t explode into the ep
idemic initially predicted (fewer people, in fact, died from this strain than from the regular seasonal flu), and after the threat petered out, there was a lot grumbling on radio call-in shows and cable news that the whole campaign needlessly frightened the public and wasted millions of dollars in unused vaccines. Pig farms, including those in this Kansas community, were hit hard financially because many consumers feared they could become ill by eating bacon or ham and stopped buying pork products altogether. Here in the airport, someone has apparently expressed frustration over the whole situation, having scrawled “Hogwash!” above the two swine-flu alerts.
But if health officials were overcautious, it wasn’t without reason; they knew full well what can happen when society is caught off-guard by a lethal, highly contagious influenza strain that, once unleashed, can’t be stopped by all the medicine in the world. Foremost in their minds was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed more people than any pandemic in history. And it did so with unrelenting ferocity. Symptoms included fevers that spiked up to 104 degrees; excruciating muscle aches; vomiting; profuse bleeding from the nose, ears, and eyes; and coughing fits so violent and prolonged that even the strongest victims tore rib cartilage hacking up a red, frothy sputum that constantly filled their lungs. Those unable to fight the virus or its accompanying complications, such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, usually died within ten days. There were anecdotal reports that some people got sick in the morning and were dead by nightfall, while others languished in agony for more than two weeks. Oddly, the disease killed otherwise healthy young men and women at almost the same rate as infants and the elderly. This had never occurred before with an influenza strain. (Nor has it since.)
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 31
