Passengers

Dispatch

Crossing the Continental Divide in the hopes of finding Don

Don’t gamble in Reno, especially at lunchtime

We are all passengers here, abandoned to our singular devices

The howl of a train whistle instantly places me in the moonless bedroom of my childhood, its distant sob unlocking in me a loneliness I have no answer for. We are halfway to Iowa before I realize that I am, in fact, inside the sound that I am hearing. I am a passenger on the train. We left Chicago at 2 this afternoon, slipping past the backs of countless gray shipping warehouses and through the late-September cornfields of central Illinois. You see people’s outdoor punching bags and above-ground pools, their fabulous collections of seemingly useless cars in their driveways and backyards. Sometimes they even come out and wave as you pass. Just after sunset in Ottumwa, Iowa, is when you get a chance to smoke. From there it’s all downhill until tomorrow. The California Zephyr is the second-longest train route in America, a 2,438-mile journey through the Great Plains and into the Rocky Mountains, along the Colorado River and past the Great Salt Lake, through the Great Basin Desert and …

You Only Live Once

Leprosy’s Scourge

‘The 66 Star’ was America’s only newspaper by and for lepers, published at the national leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana.

Under a pseudonym, editor ‘Stanley Stein’ worked to dispel myths dating back to the Bible that led to the isolation of sufferers from Hansen’s disease.

Hansen’s disease, known in benighted times as leprosy, is not a form of uncleanliness or divine punishment for marrying a Cushite. It was treated with Promin.

By Ted Mann

The 66 Star — “Radiating the Light of Truth on Hansen’s disease” — was the patient publication of the national leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, known as United States Public Health Service Marine Hospital 66. The 66 Star ceased publication in 1934 after its founder and publisher, “Stanley Stein,” went blind. Stanley Stein’s real name was Sidney Maurice Levyson. He grew up in the tiny German-American town of Boerne, Texas (pronounced “Bernie”), was educated as a pharmacist, was diagnosed with leprosy at 21, and for years was secretly treated by a San Antonio physician. At the time he contracted his condition, Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, was an incurable, almost entirely untreatable, disfiguring, hideously painful condition in which patients often lingered between life and death for decades. When the doctor treating Levyson in San Antonio died, Levyson’s condition deteriorated. On the advice of his rabbi, he took himself to a leading specialist in tropical diseases in New York …

Passengers

Leprosy’s Scourge

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