Nurturing the Childrens Hospital in Its Early Stages

It began with four beds and a handful of volunteers in a tiny Victorian cottage, but two wealthy mothers’ unshakable concern for the ailing children of the poor ultimately transformed Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles into a world leader in pediatric medicine.

The original facility’s volunteers were members of the King’s Daughters Day Nursery, a genteel group of turn-of-the-century ladies who were encouraged by a prominent local surgeon and horseman, Dr. LeMoyne Wills, to make and sell needlework and handmade dolls and to stage galas to fund the care of sick children.

Ignoring critics--whose philosophy of “spare the rod, spoil the child” led them to sneer at the efforts--the women established their own facility to care for sick and indigent children in 1901.

The women took over a Civil War veteran’s two-story yellow house at the southwest corner of Alpine and Castelar (now Hill) streets in the midst of a prized citrus orchard. There they established the Childrens Hospital Society, which charged only those families able to pay for treatment.

During the financial panic of 1907, Kate Page Crutcher, mother of two and the wife of influential lawyer Albert Hodges Crutcher, took over as president of the tiny hospital’s all-woman board.

Blending homespun wit and pure doggedness, Crutcher wrote letters, rang doorbells and talked over crying babies and barking dogs to get her message across.

She opened a thrift shop and cajoled potential donors with her slogan: “What’s unbecoming to you, should be coming to us.” She enlisted firefighters to make house calls on her behalf, collecting donations ranging from used clothing to chicken coops.

The number of beds grew from four to 19, but even so, conditions in the house--where hundreds of tonsillectomies were performed in the kitchen pantry--grew still more cramped and inadequate.

Crutcher set out to find larger quarters. A benefactor willed the hospital her four-acre home site in the “boondocks” at Sunset and Vermont, where weeds stretched as far as the eye could see and streets were only half paved. Crutcher began making plans for a bigger, more modern hospital there.

In 1912, at groundbreaking ceremonies, one tiny patient named Rita Belmont, who had spent three years bedridden in an elevated contraption of weights and pulleys with a tubercular hip, joined hands from her stretcher with Crutcher to turn the first spade of dirt.

Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson officiated as the “virtual” ribbon-cutter at the dedication of the new 12-story, 100-bed hospital, pressing a telegraph key from the White House.

It was Crutcher’s crowning achievement, and crowds packed the Morosco Theater on Main Street to help celebrate with stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and the Keystone Kops.

The Fire Department delighted the public with fund-raising street performances of firefighting skill and athletic ability. Firefighter and “strongman” Harry F. Griffin, a former circus performer, topped the show by drawing a horse and wagon through the streets with his teeth.

During the Great Depression, Crutcher’s interests in long-range solutions took root, as the hospital began training medical students from the USC School of Medicine. She also encouraged donors to think of the hospital on their birthdays and to send $1 to the Birthday Club each year.

In 1944, when a polio epidemic was taking lives and crippling victims all across the nation, Crutcher and her network of volunteers rejected the immobilization of polio-stricken limbs in casts or braces and adopted the “far-out” ideas of Australian Elizabeth Kenny, who recommended physical therapy and hot packs.

Sacrificing their home lives, these angels of mercy worked 12-hour shifts restoring life to the limbs of 40 stricken youngsters. Their ministrations involved filling washing machines with boiling water, then soaking heavy flannel blankets, hand cranking them through wringers and cutting them to size. Each body part was wrapped first in hot flannel, then in rubber sheeting and finished off with dry flannel and safety pins. The entire procedure was repeated on each patient every 90 minutes.

In 1947, Crutcher, known as the “Mother of Childrens Hospital,” retired after 40 years of service. Before her death in 1954, she witnessed a family of five siblings, all born with severe club feet, walk out of the hospital together, and she saw the opening of the four-story wing, the Michael J. Connell Clinic building, named for the Los Angeles financier and philanthropist who died in 1935. Another hospital wing would later be named for her.

Struggling to meet the needs of Los Angeles’ expanding postwar population, another downtown attorney’s wife--Mary Duque--took the helm at a time when Childrens Hospital had just one full-time physician. With a special capacity for giving and a special ability to inspire it in others, she would raise more than $100 million and expand women’s support groups to nearly 4,000 members.

In the 1950s, as rapid medical advancements required additional funding, Duque’s fund-raising goals made expansion possible and led the way for the hospital to become the first on the West Coast to use chemotherapy to treat leukemia, and the first to conduct pediatric open-heart surgery in Southern California.

During that same decade, Dr. Richard Koch made his mark saving phenylketonuria (PKU) babies. His landmark research, screening newborns by pricking them on the heel for a few drops of blood, put an abrupt end to a type of mental retardation by treating it with a no-protein diet. Today Koch, nearing 80 and affectionately known as Dr. PKU, still rides his bicycle to the hospital, where he continues studying and saving the at-risk children of his first patients.

Six years after a team of doctors successfully performed the first kidney transplant on a 6-year-old boy in 1967, the main building at the hospital was renamed in Duque’s honor.

Her response was typically modest: “If a child were lying injured in the street, everybody would rush to help, wouldn’t they?” she asked. “It’s the same here.”

Helping bring the hospital back from the brink of bankruptcy in 1980, she dipped into the endowment she had begun when a generous donor walked into her office, opened a paper bag and dumped $135,000 in negotiable stocks on her desk. That same year, a 16-room Ronald McDonald House opened near the hospital for families of seriously ill children.

After Duque’s death in 1990, Childrens Hospital--with the only pediatric trauma center in Los Angeles County--continued its fund-raising, charting a new course for the 21st century.

Celebrating its 100th anniversary, the hospital is publishing its history in a 300-page book, “Childrens Hospital and the Leaders of Los Angeles: The First 100 Years,” by Margaret Leslie Davis.

Crutcher and Duque, who were often rewarded with grateful hugs, will also be remembered for their gift of life as the hospital’s new Gateway Building is opened in May.