Ree Rickard
Born: July 28, 1944
Died: May 25, 2018
Agnes “Ree” Rickard was a teacher in Lake Placid.
Ree Rickard conducted a series of oral history interviews in 1987. This introduction tells of her personal history. To read all of her interviews, visit Ree Rickard Oral History Interviews.
In its heyday Saranac Lake was exciting and alive. People from all walks of life, from every culture, religion, and race flocked to the village to cure the TB that gave them a common bond. Because of the variety among this transient population, the village was uncommonly cosmopolitan for a place its size. The full-time residents, influenced by the rich texture of their sick guests, were open-minded and open-armed. Saranac was a welcome, nourishing place in which to live. It was to this environment that my family moved in 1948, seeking relief for my little sister’s asthma. Doctors in our hometown, Auburn, NY, had suggested the clean air in either Saranac Lake or Arizona. My sister, Caroline (Stacy), licked the asthma, but as a family we all became addicted to the glorious Adirondack Mountains.
Our father ran the Railway Express office located at the train station. My earliest memories of that place are of patients being helped off the rain in litters and of seeing the boxes containing the corpses of those who didn’t make it being loaded on to the baggage cars. I used to gaze at those silent, wooden boxes with curiosity and wonder. Throughout my neighborhood there were a dozen cure cottages with interesting people lounging in cure chairs on the screened porches. I remember my first conversation with some patients in the Sageman Cottage, two doors from my house. I asked them what they were doing there, and a young man said, “This is a prison.” I knew they didn’t seem like “bad” people. More mystery. I was four years old. I soon learned, like all children of the village, that these people were “curing” for TB and were contagious so best kept away from. What with fears of polio and TB, I never was allowed to go to a public beach until we moved ten years later. My mother warned us especially not to go to Trudeau Sanitorium which was located a half mile down our street. Naturally, as soon as I could ride a two wheeler, Trudeau was my constant haunt. The place was irresistible. The grounds were beautiful. There was a charming chapel made of rough stone and wood and a small but impressive brick library with two large white columns and screened-in reading porches, on either end. The cottages were painted in pale earth tones. The tiny post office shared quarters with a barber shop that sprouted the traditional red, white, and blue revolving symbol. While most patients were conventionally dressed, some strolled in bathrobes and slippers. There were people with colorful outfits, some even wore turbans on their heads, a few women were in saris, many spoke with accents. All of the patients were extremely friendly to a little girl. I was enchanted. If you stood by watching, long enough, you’d be invited to join in the croquet game on a beautiful manicured lawn in front of the administration building. When an over anxious nurse would shoo you away, the lap of the statue of Edward Livingston Trudeau, hidden in a cedar grove overlooking the Saranac River Valley, was a safe haven until she was otherwise occupied. It was the only place in the town, to my knowledge, where the bittersweet sounds of the mourning dove could be heard. They too felt at home there.
Each day, on my way home from school, it was easy to spot the patients on the street who had submitted to surgery by the drooped shoulders and the slight chest concavity. They never seemed to be in a hurry.
I’ve always had a fascination and a warm place in my heart for those nameless patients who were a large part of my childhood.
Recently a few books have been written about the Saranac Lake cure days. One deals with the architecture of the cure cottages and another is concerned with the numerous famous people who cured in the village, including R. L. Stevenson, Bela Bartok, Somerset Maugham, heads of state, the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, and a few gangsters, among many others. Although these books were most interesting, I was left wanting to know about the life stories of the countless, nameless and ordinary patients who cured in the town of my youth. What were they thinking as they wiled away the time in the cure chairs? How did forced confinement alter the cause of their lives? Just what did they do all day? To satisfy these curiosities and to preserve the memories of some of the patients and caregivers of earlier days, I decided to do an oral history. Not too many are left in the area. The participant’s ages ranged from fifty-seven to eighty-four years. Most former patients, even those hesitant at first, were happy to talk about their experiences, some with surprising results. A couple declined explaining that their bout with TB is a memory that they’d rather not awaken.
The following patients and caregivers have my sincere thanks and respect of their willingness to share their memories.
EPILOGUE
In 1956 Trudeau Sanatorium closed its doors. The last patient, former Yankee great, Larry Doyle was photographed walking through the iron gates. The discovery of drugs as a method of cure sounded the death toll for the only industry in Saranac Lake. Larry Doyle took a room in town where he lived out his last few years but most patients were long gone. The last of the sanitoriums, Raybrook, and Will Rogers, were lone holdouts with their ever dwindling populations. Finally, in 1971, they too were finished.
The cure cottages had long since reverted to family homes. Many businesses and stores shut down. The company my father worked for closed its doors and he was transferred downstate. We left in 1958.
Throughout my high school and college years I often returned to the area to visit. The town was lacking its former sense of excitement. The economy had suffered. Gone was the influx of interesting people. Perhaps it was economic hard times and a lack of new blood in the village but even then, I noticed an absence of the openness and friendly manner that had previously characterized the locals. People noticed strangers in town whereas before they were an expected part of the fiber of the community.
Today, I sometimes take solitary walks through the grounds of the old Trudeau Sanitorium which now houses the offices of the American Management Association. It’s always quiet there; the employees are shut up inside the offices. The stillness is broken up by the haunting beautiful sounds of an occasional mourning dove. In my imagination the sights and sounds of my youth return: patients walk together, the crack of a croquet mallet, a sick young man yells a greeting from his porch. I remember the maintenance men who looked the other way as a young girl stole daffodils for the May procession. A way of life is over but the memories remain.
Some of the cure cottages in the village are filled with students from the community college. The town is now enjoying a small Renaissance. Two former sanitoriums are now federal and state prisons. They have created badly needed jobs in the area. Now, the mindset of the major industry is concerned with keeping people in – not out of doors – as in old.
Tourism long neglected in the Adirondack village curing the curing days, is becoming a robust industry. Today’s visitors don’t stay as long. They are, however, rejuvenated by the same tranquility and crisp mountain air that proved so beneficial to their ill predecessors.