A Formative Quarantine in an Earlier Era

When I was 5-and-a-half years old, and living in New York City, I developed double pneumonia and whooping cough. Both of these were very contagious diseases. I was a little skinny kid, and the combination of those two things meant I could hardly breathe. I had to struggle for every breath.

An ambulance came to take me away from my home, a tenement in the ghetto of the South Bronx. At that time, all poor children who had a contagious disease had to be quarantined in a hospital on East 16th St. in Manhattan, called the Willard Parker Hospital for Children With Contagious Diseases. It was basically a huge quarantine base for tuberculosis, scarlet fever, whooping cough, pneumonia, and polio (there was a polio epidemic around that time). There were hundreds of kids and hundreds of beds in my ward.

This quarantine took place for six months, from November 1938 to April 1939. At that time, there was no penicillin, no sulfa drugs, and no treatment of any kind. All I could do was lay there in bed, waiting for whatever fate had in store for me. In some ways, it was truly a daily (and nightly) nightmare.

What I mean is that, even aside from no available medical treatments, the hospital staff did not even have the most primitive sense of social or emotional care for children. I would just lie in a bed, 24/7. There was no radio, no music, no television (not yet invented until 1947). There was no mail, magazines, coloring books, or phones, and no possibilities for any kind of physical exercise.

Visiting hours—yes, maybe, or no

Visiting hours were limited to only two hours on Sundays. Actually, it was not even that. If my parents were able to come to the hospital (and they rarely did, because it was very difficult to do so), the nurses would wheel my bed against a big window, and my parents would be on the other side, and I would talk to them on a phone. But as soon as there were more than three beds waiting behind me, and the next set of parents came in, the nurse would say, “OK, finish up. You have to move out.” At the end of the day, maybe I would be lucky enough to get 20 minutes at the most to sustain this most precious connection.

This was a cold winter in New York. It was a six-block walk from my home to the subway, and then an hour subway ride, and then a six-block walk from the subway to the hospital. During that era, they used to have big storms in New York. My mother was pregnant with my sister Vera. My brother George had polio and braces. There was also little brother Donny, not even 2 years old, to lug along. It was clear that my mother could not travel those distances, and my parents could not afford a taxi, much less their own telephone.

Learning self-reliance

I would wait all week for that magical hour—and then no one would come, and no one would call. Pretty soon, I learned that the key to survival is to be self-reliant. I can’t depend on the nurses, I can’t depend on the doctors, and I can’t even depend on my own family to help me out in this horrific scenario.

Essentially, I decided, very consciously, that I was going to survive. I wasn’t going to die—it didn’t make sense to me to die when I had imagined a long and wonderful future ahead.

When it was lights out, at 8 p.m., I could not sleep because I was not tired—after all, I had not done anything all day. I can still remember, when they turned out the lights and the nurses walked in front of the light in their office, they made a shadow on the walls, which to me, at that age, was obviously the devil coming to make his choices.

Praying daily to Jesus and also to the devil

I became very religious. In the morning, I would pray to Lord Jesus to make me strong, healthy, and brave, and allow me to survive. And at night, I would go under the covers and pray to that ugly Devil not to take me because I was a good kid and did not deserve to go to his Hell.

I did not realize until much, much later that what I was doing was practicing a primitive form of self-hypnosis, because then I would wake up and it would be morning. I would never have nightmares; I would just wake up the next morning and happily realize that I had survived another day. (In my adult life, I became formally trained in hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis and used it often to deal with injuries and recovery from various surgeries.)

Leadership Essential Reads

"That Is Why We Need You"

Focusing on Making the Weak Links Stronger

Compliment-giving as a survival tactic

My other survival tactic was flattering the nurses. Before I went to the hospital, my mother had told me to remember the old saying that “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.“ I didn't really understand what she meant except that it was better to be a sweet than a sour person.

The nurses wore masks all the time, so I would tell them what beautiful eyes they had, or beautiful hair, or remark on an earring or some jewelry. That meant that they would remember me, and I would get an extra pat of butter or an extra dessert. The most important thing was that they would remember I was sitting on the potty since they would often forget.

It was a conscious decision on my part. I would say to myself, “Everybody around me is dying. I don’t want to die. What more can I do besides pray?” I realized that this compliment-giving thing was something that I had to do often and well.

My "Heroic Imagination Project"

To this day, when I talk about my Heroic Imagination Project, one of the most important things I share with trainees is, “Your job is to make other people feel special. Learn their name, use their name, find out something important about them, and give them a justifiable compliment that makes them feel special.” I started doing that when I was 5 after I realized that it works like a magic wand.

Learning to read and write via Superman comics

After getting the nurses, as well as the Devil and God on my side, I figured I had to get the other kids bedded around me on my side as well.

The only joy that we had was reading hero comic books. Because of the contagion, parents could not give us any toys or anything of value. They were poor in any event, but anything of value brought in could not go back out. All we had were these comic books that we shared, devoured, and passed around from bed to bed.

I could not read at that time. I looked at the pictures and thought they were nice, but I had to ask older kids to help me read the words. I got my mother to give me a pen and pad so I could write down each word. Then, an older kid in a nearby bed would tell me what it meant, like “Wow!” or “Help!” I would copy each letter on my pad and then pronounce it aloud. By the time I left the hospital, I could read and write in a primitive way, even before starting school the next year after I was liberated.

On becoming the leader of our Bed Gang

Essentially, from age 5 on, I began to take on a leadership role, not because I wanted to be a leader, but because I was bored out of my mind and I wanted something interesting to do. It was better to play at being a leader than following someone else who was proposing uninteresting games.

It was a way of amusing myself, but then, in the process, I realized the power of the group. Someone would have to be in charge of moving us all in an interesting direction and involve kids who were watching but not playing. For me, those group dynamics were more about not being alone or isolated, despite being quarantined. Others were dying around me, alone in their beds. These were my little resiliency tactics. How can I survive, thrive, and actually enjoy being here while temporarily separated from my family?

I was writing things, drawing pictures, playing these team games. At some point, I literally stopped thinking about my family because it was just more heartbreak. Even when they did come, everybody would be crying the whole time. It was clear that it didn’t pay to look forward to that Sunday visit, because if they didn’t come, the heartbreak was too great. It was better to be surprised if they did show up! I think it was a primitive resiliency tactic.

Our conspiracy of denial

The other sad experience was when I would wake up and Billy or Sally was gone. I would ask the nurse, “Where did Billy go?” And she would say, “Billy went home.” And when I would ask, “Why didn’t he say goodbye?” she would say something like, “Well, it was in the night and he did not want to disturb you, but he said to give you his regards.” Then the same thing would happen with another kid, and then another.

The interesting thing was that there was a conspiracy of denial between the nurses and us kids. We knew that “going home” meant that a kid had died, but we could not say it because then we would give up. The problem was, the thing we wanted most in the world was “To Go Home,” but we did not want to go home that way.

Victorious end game

Occasionally, kids would really be released to go home ... yeah! In fact, I still vividly remember that when a nurse told me, “Philip, you’re going home,” I wasn’t quite sure about it. At first, I cried, but my favorite nurse, Jenny, told me it was time to get out of bed because my mother was waiting downstairs to take me home in a real taxicab.

I remember finally jumping out of the bed—and then crumpling to the ground. All my muscles had atrophied! For six months, there had not even been a minimal exercise routine kids could do in their beds to maintain some muscle strength. It took me a month or more before I was able to walk again. I had to use a wheelchair when I got home.

But nothing mattered other than being home again!