John Stoeckle
Born: c. 1923
Died: April 23, 2020
Married: Alice Augusta Young
Children: Peter, Mark, Philip, Andrew
Dr. John Stoeckle was a patient at the Trudeau Sanatorium. He recovered his health and went on to an accomplished career in medicine, He was a longtime member of Historic Saranac Lake. Dr. Stoeckle died at the age of 97.
See his obituary at: [[1]]
From the Brookhaven newsletter, The Voice, 2012
Residential Life in Two Institutions
By John Stoeckle
I never thought I would have two institutional lives but I have. When I was young and sick with tuberculosis, Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, NY, was my first institutional residence; years later, when widowed and old, my second was here in Brookhaven. During my few months here I could not stop comparing how different Trudeau and Brookhaven were in their organization, facilities, and services, as were their residents too -- yet how well both met the needs and satisfactions of those who resided in them, the young ill at Trudeau, the old retired at Brookhaven -- all of which is my personal story.
First, being admitted was so different between the institutions. As a medical student, newly infected with TB, I was sent to Trudeau (the San) in 1946 to take "the cottage rest cure"; widowed and well in 2010, I chose to live at Brookhaven and was admitted. At Trudeau, I was assigned an open porch on the second floor of Kerbs Cottage, one of several sex-segregated cottages on its hillside campus. I was welcomed by some 12 fellow residents, most of them medical students and MDs. I learned that the San's other cottages held some 100 more residents, most under 50, more men than women. Coming to Brookhaven, I selected Exeter 223 among the available apartments, read the gender statistics of residents, more women than men, and was warmly welcomed by the hospitality committee chair, Barbara Rediker, who assured me there were many more residents to meet.
At Trudeau, my open porch housing on the cottage's second floor was sparsely furnished with two beds, one mine, the other belonging to my Harvard Medical School classmate, Mahon Hoagland, another "tubercular" sent for the "rest cure". Alongside my bed was a movable table that held my radio, thermometer, books, paper and pen and the San's meals delivered by truck. Behind our porch, a small empty room opened to a stairway down to the first floor porches, a telephone and a living room where the cottage cures could meet when allowed up and out of bed. Our unheated porch with its two beds and tables was near empty compared to Exeter 223, now filled up with my own home furniture and my modern information-communication aids, TV and computer. At Trudeau we filled up our near empty porch with our bodies in bed and our hopes to be cured.
Connecting to the outside and not wanting to be forgotten, when porch-confined far away from friends and family, was another matter. Long distance phone calls were expensive so we wrote countless letters sent with cheap postage. Radio gave us news but we didn't get the N.Y. Times. The San's nurses came to check us once or twice a week and we got out to see the doctor once a month after our monthly chest x-ray, more often if it was worse. At Brookhaven, my e-mail reaches my family everywhere almost instantly, TV and the N.Y. Times bring the news; health professionals are downstairs. Brookhaven is nearby to many visitors whereas the long drive up the Adirondacks brought few. Brookhaven is virtually an urban village with possibilities for personal connections everywhere.
Keeping busy was another matter in residential living. Despite being confined to bed rest day and night we kept ourselves busy at Trudeau but not quite like the ways that Brookhaven does for its residents today. Busy-but-in-bed at Trudeau meant reading countless books, writing letters, porch talk, listening to Radio Montreal, temperature-taking, and feasting on those meals-on-wheels, and so often musing on all sorts of themes while gazing in the winter months at the snow and Mt. Pisgah far away, and in the summer enviously viewing and yelling "hellos" at these lucky cottage residents cured enough to walk on the campus past our porch.
With its gym and pool, its numerous concerts, courses, talks, games, movies, a full curriculum of electives with trips to nearby events and shopping, Brookhaven beats all we did keeping busy in bed at Trudeau. Yet porch life would become more like Brookhaven's if your TB got better and very different if your TB got worse. If worse, you were moved to the infirmary where you might get one of the lung collapse therapies or streptomycin that just came. But if better with an unchanged or improved chest film after 6 months of the rest cure, your residential life became more like Brookhaven's. You could then walk the campus, eat in the main dining hall, sit at co-ed tables, attend workshops for beginning new hobbies, meet in the auditorium to join a chorus or try out for a play while still taking your afternoon rest. And on the sly, you might also "go cousining", e.g., "date", or sneak out with others to drink and dance at a nearby tavern or in the summer, go swimming at Ecstasy Island in Lower Saranac Lake. Trudeau had no campus police.
After my 14 months of institutional life at Trudeau, my TB "arrested", I was discharged, hoping never to return. Now in residence at Brookhaven, I hope I have a longer stay.
--John Stoeckle