May 9, 2025 • 27 mins
Holly talks about the dynamics of Altina Schinasi's family. Tracy shares a dispute over nursing uniform procedures on the Boston Floating Hospital that played out in a trade journal.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about al Tina Shanazzi
this week. We sure did. I highly recommend that documentary
(00:22):
to anybody who is interested in more about her. It's
called Altina. Here's what's really interesting about it to me.
I got it kind of late in the game for
a behind the scenes I was feeling a little under
the weather this earlier this week, and I didn't finish
the episode in time for our regular recording, which worked
out great because it gave it time for this documentary
to finally get to me, and so I had extra stuff,
(00:45):
which was great. But the thing that's really interesting about
it is that I think because it was made by
members of her family who knew her, they skip over
a lot of key moments in her life just because
I think they think everybody knows that or like that
seems like, you know, of course everybody knows that she's
(01:05):
doing this at this time. But then it means that
the whole thing is fleshed out with a lot of
other stuff that you don't get in other places, which
is great. I will say this too. Both her ex
husband Charlie and her husband at the time of her death, Tino,
are interviewed in it for long periods of time, and
(01:25):
you know, they both speak so lovingly about her, and
I feel like she is a person that it might
have been easy when we look at the facts of
her relationships and how she you know, transferred from one
person to another after having an affair, et cetera, and
(01:45):
think negatively about her. These people did not, like her
ex husband, Charlie talked about her with such love and
reverence and never any like bitterness about it, which is
really interesting. And I don't know if that's to to
who she was. Yeah, you just if you loved her,
you knew she had a free spirit element to her
(02:06):
and that was part of the deal. But it was
really quite a sweet, sweet thing to see her sisters. Yeah,
we don't know much about them, no, because she didn't
seem to like them all that much. Like she actually
kind of says something really mean about one of her sisters,
Like basically they were more interested in continuing this sort
(02:30):
of life they were raised in. They sure they wanted
to marry well and be society wives and like, Okay,
that's fine, although she kind of suggests that one really
turned into quite a piece of work. But they're like
left out. I don't know if they were no contact
or low contact or what, but they don't seem to
be involved. Yeah. I can't imagine that. If your life
(02:53):
involved a mansion and then it involved an entire floor
of a hotel, it might be really hard to imagine
a different life than that being satisfying. Yeah, not to
excuse any kind of behavior, I just like, yeah, I
think you just have a different point of view on
how the world works. And yeah, I mean Altina is
(03:17):
the outlier who was like, no, I'd like to get
a job and do some stuff. I know, I'm fine.
It's also interesting in a situation like that documentary, where
you get different perspectives to hear how differently people perceived
her as a mother. A lot of people are like,
I don't know why she ever had kids. She didn't
seem that didn't seem to fit with her life. She
(03:40):
didn't really seem to want kids, although others are like,
she adored those boys, they were her everything. It's a
very weird, you know, the way that anybody especially if
you have like a in any kind of conflicted relationship
with a parent, you know. I know I've had that.
Like I often feel like my dad is not very
(04:00):
enthusiastic about me. But then I'll talk to one of
his friends and they're like, no, he sings your praises,
And I'm like, are you being nice to me? Or
do we just have a very different you know? So
I think that's part of it. I will say. She
her first husband, Marris Sanders, who died pretty young. It
sounds as though he really had to grapple with alcoholism,
(04:25):
but she does speak of him. Even though she says
he was a terrible husband to her, she is very
quick to point out that he was actually a very
good father and that, you know, once they were living separately,
he would call the kids every single night and read
them their bedtime story over the phone, which is sort
of sweet. I promised that I would talk about a
(04:47):
story involving the mob. Yeah, and so it sounded like
a fun story involved it is fun It's funny, okay, Okay,
So when she had her sunglasses factory in Los Angeles,
she tells the story in the documentary, and it's really funny.
That this guy. These two guys came by one day
(05:07):
and they were kind of like they were basically doing
the mob shakedown. They were like, this is a nice
little place. She got here, be ashamed. If something happened
to it, we could protect you. She did not understand
what was going on at all. She was like, I
don't no, I'm good. I think we're fine. Like she
was not didn't. It wasn't that she was like, I'm
not playing your game. She did not understand that the
game was being played. I love that and that. It
(05:29):
wasn't until later that she realized what had happened, and
that was probably a factor in the shutting down of
the factory. Like she already hated it, but it was
like and if I got to deal with this, this
is just one more thing I don't want to handle.
So that is a very interesting thing. Her husband, Charlie,
who was working on the MLK documentary with her, was
(05:52):
so clearly committed to that cause, and he talks about them.
I think they were in Alabama. They went to church
services that doctor King was giving as a guest pastor,
and they spent time with him and his family and
like their circle, and he was like I didn't know
(06:12):
how they were going to perceive us, Like here is
you know, my wife, a rich Jewish artist, and me
a political scientist who is the whitest of white guys,
coming in and saying we want to help tell your story,
and we didn't know how we were going to be greeted.
And he said that that community was more welcoming to
them than many of the white social circles that they
(06:36):
ran in, and he was so touched by it, which
was lovely. He was just a sweet story. He seems
like the sweetest human on the planet. Truthfully. Her fourth husband,
Celestino Tino, clearly adored her and admired her, but he
gave this quote that was really really fascinating to me.
(07:00):
He said, I always remained her employee. I was married
to her, but I wasn't her husband. I was her employee,
companion and guardian. And like it's I think part of
it is, and keep it. I want to keep in
mind too. He is a Spanish speaker, so everything we're
getting on that is through subtitles, so I don't know
(07:22):
if there's a translation thing, because I don't my Spanish
is not in any way to a point where I
could pick that out. It seems like it's an issue
of reverence for him. There was such a big age gap,
and he also noted that he never used the informal
oh yeah address of her in Spanish, always the formal,
(07:43):
even when they had been together for years and years
and years. It's very interesting to me. She commanded a
lot of respect, and she seems super interesting. I am
floored by again the casual way she would just be like, well,
I just really wanted to have a lot of sex,
and I needed to. I needed to have that affair.
I'm gonna have to have an affair, now what I
(08:06):
will admit right, this is a thing that I don't
want to sound judgy, but that's like a thing that
like gets my hackles up. I'm like, no cheaters, no,
But I couldn't even find myself disliking her. She seemed
to see it also clearly, right, Uh, she fascinates me utterly.
(08:28):
I don't know. I didn't. I mean, I it's I
never knew about all of her activism because it doesn't
come up in the little like she admitted the cat
eye glasses. Yeah, it makes her sound like a cool,
artsy little kind of you know, a chick on the
arts scene in the thirties of New York, like, oh,
how quaint, and it's like, no, she did a lot
(08:50):
of very risky stuff politically throughout her life, like the
fact that she signed thirteen f A. Davids for people
and was basically like, if they do something wrong, that's
on me, and that's fine. We got to get him
out of Europe. Very very bold. The New York Times
ad saying that the war was wrong. Very bold. You know,
(09:11):
as we discussed in those episodes and in that behind
the scenes, that was a divisive time in the country
where people really were tooth and nail over the issue
of the war. Yeah, So for her and her husband
to take such a strong stance on it in writing
was a lot. Yeah. She just seemed very She was
(09:32):
confident in her convictions, which I have to admire, even
if she wasn't maybe always great about treating other people
with respect. When it came to right, she wanted to
have an affair with right. I of course cannot imagine
having a prolonged affair with my best friend's spouse. I mean,
(09:56):
I can't imagine having a prolonged a fair full stop.
But I really ca not imagine having a prolonged affair
and then having social outings with that person's spouse as
though everything was fine, right, right, And I have to wonder,
like did the wife Surely she must have picked it, Yeah,
I kind of part of me is like, you know,
(10:17):
if she had lived in a time with different mores
around sex and relationships, but at the same time, she
lived through the seventies, right, you know, we're not talking
about someone who lived at a time when things, I mean,
part of her life more restrained than maybe now. But like,
I can imagine a world in which she was just
(10:42):
like openly polyamorous and it did not feel like a
series of affairs that then ended marriages and started new ones. Yeah.
I mean, here's what becomes really intriguing to me, right
I All of the behavior and all of the risky
(11:04):
things she did were definitely possible because she lived a
life of extraordinary privilege. Right. Sure, if everybody turned on
her because of her political opinion, I don't think she
would have cared. She would have been fine. She's like, great,
I got money, I'm going to hang out my house
and make art cool. So that's part of it. It
(11:24):
was risky, but it wasn't the same level of risky
as it would be for other people. But I also
think that offers her this odd sense of remove when
it came to having affairs and whatnot. It would be like, well, yes, socially,
this will blow up, but my life will be fine.
(11:45):
I can still go about my I think it may
have given her subconsciously. I don't think she would have
been conscious of it, but I think it gave her
like a remove from concern about the morality of it.
Was like, well, I have money, I'm fine, I'm good.
I can just keep making I'm gonna paint. I would
(12:08):
lose a friend, but so it's okay. It's wild to me.
It's very moment on many levels, but she is an intriguing,
intriguing person. It is also funny. I will say how
many of the people interviewed in that documentary talk about
(12:28):
these aspects of her personality that were maybe not the easiest,
but they still talk about her with so much love
and adoration that she seems like she must have been
a truly wonderful human who, just like other humans, is
flawed in variety of ways. And that one is a
pretty arly problematic flaw for a lot of people. I'm
(12:49):
not trying to brush it into the rug, but that
they just all loved her so much. It was like,
well that's Altina. Yeah. Yeah, we mentioned too that she
went by Tina a lot of the time, right. I
found myself having a hard time calling her that, which
I had written into the outline in some places, and
(13:11):
then I just stopped doing it. And then when I
saw that documentary and her husband Tino talking about how
he never addressed her at the informal, I was like,
I think I understand this a little bit. Sure, it
doesn't feel right to be so familiar with her for
some reason, and apparently even the people closest to her
(13:32):
felt that. It's very cute. One of her neighbors from
Santa Fe talks about they had she and Tino had
their house, and then down the hill a couple houses
away they had bought another house that they made their
art studio, and how every morning they would walk down
the hill hand in hand together to go to work,
(13:54):
and how charming everyone found it because they were obviously
very very deeply devoted to one another, which I find
really interesting because that's the one marriage that all of
her social circle was like, what are you doing? This
doesn't make any sense, Like this isn't do you just
want a younger man for the stamina, Like what's going
on here? But they clearly were emotionally completely connected, which
(14:19):
is really lovely. Listen, you gotta try several times sometimes
to get it right. I guess she did. In the end.
Her last marriage seems like it was very good, and
her second marriage I think was very very good. Had
he not died, I'm sure they would have been together
for the rest of their lives. Right. Yeah, Anyway, al
(14:40):
Tina Shnazi, you intrigue and fascinate me, and I can't
help but admire you, even as I make kind of
cringey faces about some of the things you do. We
(15:01):
talked about the Boston Floating Hospital this week. We did
so my little trip to just look at the Boston
Molasses flood plaque. I don't remember if I've told this
story on the show before, but it's there's two plaques. Now.
The initial one was not a very big plaque. It
(15:24):
was a small green plaque that used to be affixed
to a stone wall that was in kind of a
green space area. That space has been redone. There's I
think a baseball field there. There's Botchy courts there. Now
that sign it's still on the block from the stone wall,
(15:46):
but the wall is gone so instead of it being
it was a low wall, so it was kind of
like calf height before, huh, And now it's like the
just the one block from the wall down at ground level.
So I walked around for a period of time, like
I had the spot marked on Google Maps or whatever,
(16:08):
but I was like, where is it though, And when
I finally found it, I was like that, I see
why this was so difficult for me to find. The
other sign is a newer sign, and it is one
of a series of signs that has been put up
by the Friends of the Boston Harbor Walk and the
(16:29):
Friends of the Boston Harbor Walk sign about the floating
hospital is what inspired this. That is also where I
read the quote about where they went and stopping by
the lighthouse for the light housekeeper to play the fog
horn at them. So sweet, it was very sweet. So
I was very glad that I just, you know, I
(16:51):
don't remember exactly what I was doing, but I had
a little time that I didn't want to just sit
there in North Station doing nothing. It was a pretty date.
This is a pretty area to walk around, right there
by the water. Something I found in the research that
(17:13):
I just found so funny that I'm now going to
share with all of you is a dispute from the
pages of the American Journal of Nursing circa nineteen eleven,
so the first letter to the editor, or yes, the
letter to the editor from the American Journal of Nursing.
(17:35):
It's titled Boston Floating Hospital, Dear Editor. In the June
number of the journal. I read an advertisement of the
Boston Floating Hospital and went there this last summer to
take a postgraduate course. There was one thing which I
was surprised to find, and that was that the nurses
were expected to go from the hotel where they had
(17:55):
their rooms, down on the street car to the dock
in their uniforms. It did seem to me that, after
so much has been written in our journals, and so
much has been said in our county and state associations
about the nurse appearing on the street in the sick
rem uniform, that this state of things should not be allowed.
(18:15):
A great many of the nurses did object. It was
very hot, and often too hot to wear coats, but
some of us did swelter and wore our long coats.
I wondered after I got there, if the journal knew
of the state of affairs, if it would advertise such
a hospital. Of course, conditions differ in different parts of
the country. I know that in our state we are
(18:37):
very careful in admitting graduates of hospitals to our state association,
where nurses are allowed to go on the street in uniform.
Mary I. Hall. So. That was followed by a note
from the editor published just below it, which said, while
we disapprove on general principles of the wearing of the
(18:58):
uniform on the street, we should hardly consider this a
vital question in considering the practical value of the graduate
experience to be gained from the course as advertised. We
have yet to hear of a hospital or training school
anywhere in the world where everything is above criticism. But
it would seem a simple matter and an improvement to
set apart a state room where street costumes could be
(19:20):
exchanged for uniforms. Editor So. A couple months later, the
following ran in the American Journal of Nursing, titled a
Reply from the Boston Floating Hospital a B above. I
(19:40):
was very much surprised to read Miss Hall's letter published
in the January Journal. In the first place, it is
not compulsory for the nurses to wear their uniforms on
the street cars, but it is allowed so that their
hours will not be any longer than possible, as conditions
are such that it is necessary for us to travel
over a good part of the city to get a
(20:01):
place where the nurse can live comfortably. Personally, I object
very much to a uniform being worn on the street,
and so have former superintendents. The rules for uniforms on
the wards are skirts must be at least three inches
from the floor, sleeves turned back to the elbows, and
an over apron covering the entire dress, and never worn
(20:24):
outside of the wards. Miss Hall failed to mention these things,
which surely looks as though she was trying to misrepresent
a hospital which granted her a diploma which she seemed
quite anxious to secure. Very truly, yours, Sarah A. Egan,
r and Superintendent of Nurses. I found that whole exchange
(20:47):
so catty and hilarious. I love it. I love it.
I took pictures of it with my phone on the
screen of my computer and put it in my group chat.
Yeah it's a good one. I have so many thoughts. Yeah,
(21:12):
are you gonna Are you gonna share them? Are they
inside thoughts? Some of them are inside thoughts just because
they're not suitable for this podcast because they have But
I also like, we we know these people? Oh sure, yeah, yeah, yeah,
who will? And I know, listen, I don't know what
(21:34):
goes on in someone else's head. The older I get,
the more I realize that I feel like my perception
of the world is often very different from the people
around me, So I won I never know if this
is a case where someone purposefully is omitting something or
(21:55):
if they got some idea in their head that was
wrong and never sought any more information to see if
that was accurate or not. But it does. I mean,
we know those people that just want to be upset
about a thing, and so they will run with whatever
(22:15):
variation of the facts supports their state of upsetness and
just kind of put the pedal to the metal on
that and like that is the situation. The end closed,
Cat and I and then the response makes me think,
maybe she was kind of a pill while she was
there in her program and they were like, ugh, this
(22:38):
chick again. Yeah, I found it all hilarious. There is
a book about the Boston Floating Hospital. It is called
The Boston Floating Hospital How a Boston Harbor Barge Changed
the Course of Pediatric Medicine. It's a little more than
(22:58):
ten years old now, I think. Living in the Boston area,
I was able to go check a copy of it
out from the library and it is a nice little book.
It's not particularly long. It has lots of detail that
we really didn't get into hear. Some of it was
(23:18):
just like we didn't need a bunch of specific details
about specific seasons of the different years that the ship
went out. A couple of things are. One thing in
particular kind of struck me that I thought about talking
about and I didn't, and that is that we said
that this was a very popular charity. Understandably a hospital
(23:41):
that's helping save sick babies, Yeah, who does that? It's
very charming. But in eighteen ninety five, so early in
the history of the Boston Floating Hospital, some people apparently
came to the hospital and they suggested staging a production
of Cinderella to benefit the hospital. They did do the play,
(24:05):
but then they absconded with the money and did not
actually give it to the hospital. Yeah uh what jerks, Listen.
I'm not necessarily an afterlife believer, but if there is one,
I hope they were the worst version. They literally stole
from a children's a sick right children's charity. Yeah, yeah, ghastly.
(24:32):
I also, the book was sort of the last thing
that I looked at in many things of looking at
for this episode, And so there are some things, right,
I'm sure like I was not being the absolute most attentive,
and I am not fully clear on when exactly Rufus
(24:52):
Toby was no longer part of the hospital, because like
his he was in reports from the hospital with titles
like chairman or a chairman of the board and things
like that for a period of years and then he's
not listed anymore. But as far as I know, he
(25:14):
was still living. And I don't really know what the
story is there and whether there is a story, whether
it was you know, just sort of the natural progression
of going from a ship where they were doing medical care.
But also a big focus was we're getting into the
fresh air and away from the heat and the pollution
(25:35):
to being a hospital with you know, pathology labs and
a pharmacy and a medical staff and research going on,
and like whether having a minister with obviously heard in
the right place but no medical experience, like didn't make
sense to be in that role anymore. And I don't
really know. And maybe he just got to retirement age.
(25:57):
I mean maybe so. And I I got to the
point where I said we should record this episode now
and stopped trying to dig up the answer. Sometimes you
have to do that. You often get my outlines in
the dead of night because there's always part of me
it's like I got to look up that other thing,
and I gotta find that other that one last I
just want to make sure that oh I still can't
(26:21):
find it, and eventually I have to be like I'm
going to bed. Yeah. Yeah. So that is my periodic
installment of a Save some Baby story, as every single
day brings multiple new, alarming, upsetting things, some of which
just make me want to throw up. Yep. So spending
(26:43):
some time about babies on a boat a little bit
of a comfort in this moment. Whatever is happening on
your weekends, I hope you have some comfort in this moment.
Whatever is your version of a story about saving babies,
I hope you have some of that in your life
(27:05):
right now. We will be back with a Saturday classic
tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about al Tina Shanazzi
this week. We sure did. I highly recommend that documentary
(00:22):
to anybody who is interested in more about her. It's
called Altina. Here's what's really interesting about it to me.
I got it kind of late in the game for
a behind the scenes I was feeling a little under
the weather this earlier this week, and I didn't finish
the episode in time for our regular recording, which worked
out great because it gave it time for this documentary
to finally get to me, and so I had extra stuff,
(00:45):
which was great. But the thing that's really interesting about
it is that I think because it was made by
members of her family who knew her, they skip over
a lot of key moments in her life just because
I think they think everybody knows that or like that
seems like, you know, of course everybody knows that she's
(01:05):
doing this at this time. But then it means that
the whole thing is fleshed out with a lot of
other stuff that you don't get in other places, which
is great. I will say this too. Both her ex
husband Charlie and her husband at the time of her death, Tino,
are interviewed in it for long periods of time, and
(01:25):
you know, they both speak so lovingly about her, and
I feel like she is a person that it might
have been easy when we look at the facts of
her relationships and how she you know, transferred from one
person to another after having an affair, et cetera, and
(01:45):
think negatively about her. These people did not, like her
ex husband, Charlie talked about her with such love and
reverence and never any like bitterness about it, which is
really interesting. And I don't know if that's to to
who she was. Yeah, you just if you loved her,
you knew she had a free spirit element to her
(02:06):
and that was part of the deal. But it was
really quite a sweet, sweet thing to see her sisters. Yeah,
we don't know much about them, no, because she didn't
seem to like them all that much. Like she actually
kind of says something really mean about one of her sisters,
Like basically they were more interested in continuing this sort
(02:30):
of life they were raised in. They sure they wanted
to marry well and be society wives and like, Okay,
that's fine, although she kind of suggests that one really
turned into quite a piece of work. But they're like
left out. I don't know if they were no contact
or low contact or what, but they don't seem to
be involved. Yeah. I can't imagine that. If your life
(02:53):
involved a mansion and then it involved an entire floor
of a hotel, it might be really hard to imagine
a different life than that being satisfying. Yeah, not to
excuse any kind of behavior, I just like, yeah, I
think you just have a different point of view on
how the world works. And yeah, I mean Altina is
(03:17):
the outlier who was like, no, I'd like to get
a job and do some stuff. I know, I'm fine.
It's also interesting in a situation like that documentary, where
you get different perspectives to hear how differently people perceived
her as a mother. A lot of people are like,
I don't know why she ever had kids. She didn't
seem that didn't seem to fit with her life. She
(03:40):
didn't really seem to want kids, although others are like,
she adored those boys, they were her everything. It's a
very weird, you know, the way that anybody especially if
you have like a in any kind of conflicted relationship
with a parent, you know. I know I've had that.
Like I often feel like my dad is not very
(04:00):
enthusiastic about me. But then I'll talk to one of
his friends and they're like, no, he sings your praises,
And I'm like, are you being nice to me? Or
do we just have a very different you know? So
I think that's part of it. I will say. She
her first husband, Marris Sanders, who died pretty young. It
sounds as though he really had to grapple with alcoholism,
(04:25):
but she does speak of him. Even though she says
he was a terrible husband to her, she is very
quick to point out that he was actually a very
good father and that, you know, once they were living separately,
he would call the kids every single night and read
them their bedtime story over the phone, which is sort
of sweet. I promised that I would talk about a
(04:47):
story involving the mob. Yeah, and so it sounded like
a fun story involved it is fun It's funny, okay, Okay,
So when she had her sunglasses factory in Los Angeles,
she tells the story in the documentary, and it's really funny.
That this guy. These two guys came by one day
(05:07):
and they were kind of like they were basically doing
the mob shakedown. They were like, this is a nice
little place. She got here, be ashamed. If something happened
to it, we could protect you. She did not understand
what was going on at all. She was like, I
don't no, I'm good. I think we're fine. Like she
was not didn't. It wasn't that she was like, I'm
not playing your game. She did not understand that the
game was being played. I love that and that. It
(05:29):
wasn't until later that she realized what had happened, and
that was probably a factor in the shutting down of
the factory. Like she already hated it, but it was
like and if I got to deal with this, this
is just one more thing I don't want to handle.
So that is a very interesting thing. Her husband, Charlie,
who was working on the MLK documentary with her, was
(05:52):
so clearly committed to that cause, and he talks about them.
I think they were in Alabama. They went to church
services that doctor King was giving as a guest pastor,
and they spent time with him and his family and
like their circle, and he was like I didn't know
(06:12):
how they were going to perceive us, Like here is
you know, my wife, a rich Jewish artist, and me
a political scientist who is the whitest of white guys,
coming in and saying we want to help tell your story,
and we didn't know how we were going to be greeted.
And he said that that community was more welcoming to
them than many of the white social circles that they
(06:36):
ran in, and he was so touched by it, which
was lovely. He was just a sweet story. He seems
like the sweetest human on the planet. Truthfully. Her fourth husband,
Celestino Tino, clearly adored her and admired her, but he
gave this quote that was really really fascinating to me.
(07:00):
He said, I always remained her employee. I was married
to her, but I wasn't her husband. I was her employee,
companion and guardian. And like it's I think part of
it is, and keep it. I want to keep in
mind too. He is a Spanish speaker, so everything we're
getting on that is through subtitles, so I don't know
(07:22):
if there's a translation thing, because I don't my Spanish
is not in any way to a point where I
could pick that out. It seems like it's an issue
of reverence for him. There was such a big age gap,
and he also noted that he never used the informal
oh yeah address of her in Spanish, always the formal,
(07:43):
even when they had been together for years and years
and years. It's very interesting to me. She commanded a
lot of respect, and she seems super interesting. I am
floored by again the casual way she would just be like, well,
I just really wanted to have a lot of sex,
and I needed to. I needed to have that affair.
I'm gonna have to have an affair, now what I
(08:06):
will admit right, this is a thing that I don't
want to sound judgy, but that's like a thing that
like gets my hackles up. I'm like, no cheaters, no,
But I couldn't even find myself disliking her. She seemed
to see it also clearly, right, Uh, she fascinates me utterly.
(08:28):
I don't know. I didn't. I mean, I it's I
never knew about all of her activism because it doesn't
come up in the little like she admitted the cat
eye glasses. Yeah, it makes her sound like a cool,
artsy little kind of you know, a chick on the
arts scene in the thirties of New York, like, oh,
how quaint, and it's like, no, she did a lot
(08:50):
of very risky stuff politically throughout her life, like the
fact that she signed thirteen f A. Davids for people
and was basically like, if they do something wrong, that's
on me, and that's fine. We got to get him
out of Europe. Very very bold. The New York Times
ad saying that the war was wrong. Very bold. You know,
(09:11):
as we discussed in those episodes and in that behind
the scenes, that was a divisive time in the country
where people really were tooth and nail over the issue
of the war. Yeah, So for her and her husband
to take such a strong stance on it in writing
was a lot. Yeah. She just seemed very She was
(09:32):
confident in her convictions, which I have to admire, even
if she wasn't maybe always great about treating other people
with respect. When it came to right, she wanted to
have an affair with right. I of course cannot imagine
having a prolonged affair with my best friend's spouse. I mean,
(09:56):
I can't imagine having a prolonged a fair full stop.
But I really ca not imagine having a prolonged affair
and then having social outings with that person's spouse as
though everything was fine, right, right, And I have to wonder,
like did the wife Surely she must have picked it, Yeah,
I kind of part of me is like, you know,
(10:17):
if she had lived in a time with different mores
around sex and relationships, but at the same time, she
lived through the seventies, right, you know, we're not talking
about someone who lived at a time when things, I mean,
part of her life more restrained than maybe now. But like,
I can imagine a world in which she was just
(10:42):
like openly polyamorous and it did not feel like a
series of affairs that then ended marriages and started new ones. Yeah.
I mean, here's what becomes really intriguing to me, right
I All of the behavior and all of the risky
(11:04):
things she did were definitely possible because she lived a
life of extraordinary privilege. Right. Sure, if everybody turned on
her because of her political opinion, I don't think she
would have cared. She would have been fine. She's like, great,
I got money, I'm going to hang out my house
and make art cool. So that's part of it. It
(11:24):
was risky, but it wasn't the same level of risky
as it would be for other people. But I also
think that offers her this odd sense of remove when
it came to having affairs and whatnot. It would be like, well, yes, socially,
this will blow up, but my life will be fine.
(11:45):
I can still go about my I think it may
have given her subconsciously. I don't think she would have
been conscious of it, but I think it gave her
like a remove from concern about the morality of it.
Was like, well, I have money, I'm fine, I'm good.
I can just keep making I'm gonna paint. I would
(12:08):
lose a friend, but so it's okay. It's wild to me.
It's very moment on many levels, but she is an intriguing,
intriguing person. It is also funny. I will say how
many of the people interviewed in that documentary talk about
(12:28):
these aspects of her personality that were maybe not the easiest,
but they still talk about her with so much love
and adoration that she seems like she must have been
a truly wonderful human who, just like other humans, is
flawed in variety of ways. And that one is a
pretty arly problematic flaw for a lot of people. I'm
(12:49):
not trying to brush it into the rug, but that
they just all loved her so much. It was like,
well that's Altina. Yeah. Yeah, we mentioned too that she
went by Tina a lot of the time, right. I
found myself having a hard time calling her that, which
I had written into the outline in some places, and
(13:11):
then I just stopped doing it. And then when I
saw that documentary and her husband Tino talking about how
he never addressed her at the informal, I was like,
I think I understand this a little bit. Sure, it
doesn't feel right to be so familiar with her for
some reason, and apparently even the people closest to her
(13:32):
felt that. It's very cute. One of her neighbors from
Santa Fe talks about they had she and Tino had
their house, and then down the hill a couple houses
away they had bought another house that they made their
art studio, and how every morning they would walk down
the hill hand in hand together to go to work,
(13:54):
and how charming everyone found it because they were obviously
very very deeply devoted to one another, which I find
really interesting because that's the one marriage that all of
her social circle was like, what are you doing? This
doesn't make any sense, Like this isn't do you just
want a younger man for the stamina, Like what's going
on here? But they clearly were emotionally completely connected, which
(14:19):
is really lovely. Listen, you gotta try several times sometimes
to get it right. I guess she did. In the end.
Her last marriage seems like it was very good, and
her second marriage I think was very very good. Had
he not died, I'm sure they would have been together
for the rest of their lives. Right. Yeah, Anyway, al
(14:40):
Tina Shnazi, you intrigue and fascinate me, and I can't
help but admire you, even as I make kind of
cringey faces about some of the things you do. We
(15:01):
talked about the Boston Floating Hospital this week. We did
so my little trip to just look at the Boston
Molasses flood plaque. I don't remember if I've told this
story on the show before, but it's there's two plaques. Now.
The initial one was not a very big plaque. It
(15:24):
was a small green plaque that used to be affixed
to a stone wall that was in kind of a
green space area. That space has been redone. There's I
think a baseball field there. There's Botchy courts there. Now
that sign it's still on the block from the stone wall,
(15:46):
but the wall is gone so instead of it being
it was a low wall, so it was kind of
like calf height before, huh, And now it's like the
just the one block from the wall down at ground level.
So I walked around for a period of time, like
I had the spot marked on Google Maps or whatever,
(16:08):
but I was like, where is it though, And when
I finally found it, I was like that, I see
why this was so difficult for me to find. The
other sign is a newer sign, and it is one
of a series of signs that has been put up
by the Friends of the Boston Harbor Walk and the
(16:29):
Friends of the Boston Harbor Walk sign about the floating
hospital is what inspired this. That is also where I
read the quote about where they went and stopping by
the lighthouse for the light housekeeper to play the fog
horn at them. So sweet, it was very sweet. So
I was very glad that I just, you know, I
(16:51):
don't remember exactly what I was doing, but I had
a little time that I didn't want to just sit
there in North Station doing nothing. It was a pretty date.
This is a pretty area to walk around, right there
by the water. Something I found in the research that
(17:13):
I just found so funny that I'm now going to
share with all of you is a dispute from the
pages of the American Journal of Nursing circa nineteen eleven,
so the first letter to the editor, or yes, the
letter to the editor from the American Journal of Nursing.
(17:35):
It's titled Boston Floating Hospital, Dear Editor. In the June
number of the journal. I read an advertisement of the
Boston Floating Hospital and went there this last summer to
take a postgraduate course. There was one thing which I
was surprised to find, and that was that the nurses
were expected to go from the hotel where they had
(17:55):
their rooms, down on the street car to the dock
in their uniforms. It did seem to me that, after
so much has been written in our journals, and so
much has been said in our county and state associations
about the nurse appearing on the street in the sick
rem uniform, that this state of things should not be allowed.
(18:15):
A great many of the nurses did object. It was
very hot, and often too hot to wear coats, but
some of us did swelter and wore our long coats.
I wondered after I got there, if the journal knew
of the state of affairs, if it would advertise such
a hospital. Of course, conditions differ in different parts of
the country. I know that in our state we are
(18:37):
very careful in admitting graduates of hospitals to our state association,
where nurses are allowed to go on the street in uniform.
Mary I. Hall. So. That was followed by a note
from the editor published just below it, which said, while
we disapprove on general principles of the wearing of the
(18:58):
uniform on the street, we should hardly consider this a
vital question in considering the practical value of the graduate
experience to be gained from the course as advertised. We
have yet to hear of a hospital or training school
anywhere in the world where everything is above criticism. But
it would seem a simple matter and an improvement to
set apart a state room where street costumes could be
(19:20):
exchanged for uniforms. Editor So. A couple months later, the
following ran in the American Journal of Nursing, titled a
Reply from the Boston Floating Hospital a B above. I
(19:40):
was very much surprised to read Miss Hall's letter published
in the January Journal. In the first place, it is
not compulsory for the nurses to wear their uniforms on
the street cars, but it is allowed so that their
hours will not be any longer than possible, as conditions
are such that it is necessary for us to travel
over a good part of the city to get a
(20:01):
place where the nurse can live comfortably. Personally, I object
very much to a uniform being worn on the street,
and so have former superintendents. The rules for uniforms on
the wards are skirts must be at least three inches
from the floor, sleeves turned back to the elbows, and
an over apron covering the entire dress, and never worn
(20:24):
outside of the wards. Miss Hall failed to mention these things,
which surely looks as though she was trying to misrepresent
a hospital which granted her a diploma which she seemed
quite anxious to secure. Very truly, yours, Sarah A. Egan,
r and Superintendent of Nurses. I found that whole exchange
(20:47):
so catty and hilarious. I love it. I love it.
I took pictures of it with my phone on the
screen of my computer and put it in my group chat.
Yeah it's a good one. I have so many thoughts. Yeah,
(21:12):
are you gonna Are you gonna share them? Are they
inside thoughts? Some of them are inside thoughts just because
they're not suitable for this podcast because they have But
I also like, we we know these people? Oh sure, yeah, yeah, yeah,
who will? And I know, listen, I don't know what
(21:34):
goes on in someone else's head. The older I get,
the more I realize that I feel like my perception
of the world is often very different from the people
around me, So I won I never know if this
is a case where someone purposefully is omitting something or
(21:55):
if they got some idea in their head that was
wrong and never sought any more information to see if
that was accurate or not. But it does. I mean,
we know those people that just want to be upset
about a thing, and so they will run with whatever
(22:15):
variation of the facts supports their state of upsetness and
just kind of put the pedal to the metal on
that and like that is the situation. The end closed,
Cat and I and then the response makes me think,
maybe she was kind of a pill while she was
there in her program and they were like, ugh, this
(22:38):
chick again. Yeah, I found it all hilarious. There is
a book about the Boston Floating Hospital. It is called
The Boston Floating Hospital How a Boston Harbor Barge Changed
the Course of Pediatric Medicine. It's a little more than
(22:58):
ten years old now, I think. Living in the Boston area,
I was able to go check a copy of it
out from the library and it is a nice little book.
It's not particularly long. It has lots of detail that
we really didn't get into hear. Some of it was
(23:18):
just like we didn't need a bunch of specific details
about specific seasons of the different years that the ship
went out. A couple of things are. One thing in
particular kind of struck me that I thought about talking
about and I didn't, and that is that we said
that this was a very popular charity. Understandably a hospital
(23:41):
that's helping save sick babies, Yeah, who does that? It's
very charming. But in eighteen ninety five, so early in
the history of the Boston Floating Hospital, some people apparently
came to the hospital and they suggested staging a production
of Cinderella to benefit the hospital. They did do the play,
(24:05):
but then they absconded with the money and did not
actually give it to the hospital. Yeah uh what jerks, Listen.
I'm not necessarily an afterlife believer, but if there is one,
I hope they were the worst version. They literally stole
from a children's a sick right children's charity. Yeah, yeah, ghastly.
(24:32):
I also, the book was sort of the last thing
that I looked at in many things of looking at
for this episode, And so there are some things, right,
I'm sure like I was not being the absolute most attentive,
and I am not fully clear on when exactly Rufus
(24:52):
Toby was no longer part of the hospital, because like
his he was in reports from the hospital with titles
like chairman or a chairman of the board and things
like that for a period of years and then he's
not listed anymore. But as far as I know, he
(25:14):
was still living. And I don't really know what the
story is there and whether there is a story, whether
it was you know, just sort of the natural progression
of going from a ship where they were doing medical care.
But also a big focus was we're getting into the
fresh air and away from the heat and the pollution
(25:35):
to being a hospital with you know, pathology labs and
a pharmacy and a medical staff and research going on,
and like whether having a minister with obviously heard in
the right place but no medical experience, like didn't make
sense to be in that role anymore. And I don't
really know. And maybe he just got to retirement age.
(25:57):
I mean maybe so. And I I got to the
point where I said we should record this episode now
and stopped trying to dig up the answer. Sometimes you
have to do that. You often get my outlines in
the dead of night because there's always part of me
it's like I got to look up that other thing,
and I gotta find that other that one last I
just want to make sure that oh I still can't
(26:21):
find it, and eventually I have to be like I'm
going to bed. Yeah. Yeah. So that is my periodic
installment of a Save some Baby story, as every single
day brings multiple new, alarming, upsetting things, some of which
just make me want to throw up. Yep. So spending
(26:43):
some time about babies on a boat a little bit
of a comfort in this moment. Whatever is happening on
your weekends, I hope you have some comfort in this moment.
Whatever is your version of a story about saving babies,
I hope you have some of that in your life
(27:05):
right now. We will be back with a Saturday classic
tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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