Henry Dawson, Leo Durochers and The Virile Age

In 1939, the fiery new manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers set the tone for his famous tenure at the beleaguered team.

The Dodgers, Leo Durochers thought, were nice guys.

However, the Thirties were a Virile Age, with no time for tortoises or 97 pound weaklings.


Hares beat tortoises every time and Goliaths defeat Davids : yes, nice guys are nice and a joy to be around, but nevertheless they finish last every time.

If terminal diffidence is a form of niceness, then Henry Dawson was definitely nice.

Far far too nice nice to be a successful scientist in an age of virile men, what we would today probably call Type A personalities and Alpha Males.

Fortunately for humanity, Dawson combined his extreme diffidence with a stubborn intellectual courage.

Point of fact, most Alpha Males have never expressed an unconventional thought in their lives.

True they make a point of being offensive to nice people and 'ladies' , offensive to conventional niceness.

But alongside of conventional public niceness is an equally large body of semi-public locker room sentiments.

Alpha males merely express publicly what a lot of people say and think in private.

One thinks of General Secretary Henry Dawson's much better known counterpart at the Third International Congress on Microbiology, President Thomas "Tom" Rivers., a favorite among the media.

Old fashioned Southerner Tom was always brutally and colourfully frank about preferring his "boys" , those on his teams of researchers who were within his favoured circle, his "good ole boys".

This in pointed contrast to his other researchers on the team ,left outside looking in : the colored boys, the Jew boys and the gals.

Dawson kept his mouth politely shut about his critics  - not just in public but apparently in private as well.

But he was intellectually stubborn, literally onto death.

If he didn't have tenure, he'd give up his career to see his weekend and holiday research completed over the resistance of his boss (Avery).

When he did have tenure, he bucked his critics by not requesting grants and extra facilities.

He knew of the snares in the strings that would come attached to those grants and extra facilities .

He stayed small and on the cheap, but he stayed free.

And if you like semi-happy endings and tortoises, yes he finished first, well ahead of his hare competitors . And then he died.

Died of the disease that crippled him all the time he was proving up the immediate use of wartime life-saving natural penicillin.

If he hadn't remained stubbornly in the race, we'd probably would not have had abundant natural penicillin for WWII's wounded and all those rendered sick in the hunger and dislocation of the war's end.

It turns out that even in The Virile Age, nice guys and 97 pound weaklings finish first....

WWII Brooklyn to be home to war's biggest killing machine or war's smallest life-saver ?

In the end, the Borough of Brooklyn (NYC) became home to both : the Iowa class of battleships and the home of most of the war's penicillin.

But it had been a near run thing ; this battle over the moral soul of Brooklyn.

After all, from the beginning of the war, the leaders of the Great Powers (Churchill, FDR,Tojo,Stalin and Hitler) were determined to show the world what the greatest entities on Earth could do, if they set their mind to it.

WWII is proof that they succeeded in spades .

Opposing them, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was also determined to show the world something too.

In this case, just what the world's smallest,weakest entities (cells of penicillium fungi) were also capable of.

So, as part of that Great Power display of massive size and killing force, the USA had commissioned the last series of battleships it ever built : heavily gunned, heavily armoured and extremely fast.

No war machine has ever been built that was better at going in, taking huge punishment, and still delivering lethal blows in return.

If the editors of machine-porn publications like Popular Mechanics are capable of having wet dreams, the Iowa class battleships were what they (and their mostly male readers) had wet dreams over.

The Iowa class was an extremely potent blend of what a battleship needs to shine and the design (now 75 years old) must have worked because WWII-built ships of that class remain to this day , still in reserve, ready to go back in action.

The Brooklyn Naval Yard built the two most famous, the USS Iowa itself and the USS Missouri ("Big Mo") --- they took 70,000 people in the huge yard several years to do so, working around the clock.

It was the war-related work that the Borough of Brooklyn liked best to be remembered for.

But in a small discarded ice-making plant in another less well known part of the Borough, another item of war was made and shipped all over the world - spreading the  good word about Brooklyn in places the USS Iowa class couldn't even think of going.

On a corner of Marcy Avenue was a improvised plant that the then tiny Charles Pfizer Company cobbled together to make naturally-made penicillin (penicillin made by Dawson's little fungi cells) as fast as Pfizer could, as hard as Pfizer could, starting in March 1944.

By June 6th of that same year, natural penicillin underwent its first mass clinical trials : a baptism literally of fire.

Because 80% of the penicillin that came ashore on the Normandy beaches that day was made in the Pfizer Marcy Avenue ice plant.

And Pfizer's naturally-made penicillin continued to be the largest single source of that life saving medicine, around the world, for the remainder of the war.

It doesn't take much natural penicillin to save a life in 1944 - a gram will do nicely - and a tiny glass ampoule, the world's smallest lifesaver, will easily hold it.

By contrast, a full loaded USS Iowa weighed 25 billion grams.

From his luxury apartment high above the exclusive Prospect Slopes area of Brooklyn, the manufacturing head of Pfizer, John L Smith, could easily see the building of the USS Iowa and USS Missouri .

Perhaps as a result he felt that Brooklyn was pulling more than its weight in the effort to stop Hitler and Tojo.

A cautious, frugal man, he wasn't about to bet the shop against the best brains in the world drug industry by producing massive amounts of natural penicillin when the smart money said cheaper synthetic penicillin was only another test tube away.

Sure Henry Dawson was always on his case, urging him to mass produce natural penicillin now, because a ampoule in the doctor's hand was worth a million in the mind of some drug company chemist.

"People are dying needlessly, daily, all over the world because the sulfa drugs are meeting more and more bacterial resistance and there will never be anymore new sulfas in the pipeline."

But John L long resisted (even if his wife was perhaps more open to Dawson's appeal) .

Maybe Smith was feeling that Pfizer had already done enough for the boys overseas, because didn't the firm's exclusive citric acid fuel the cold soda pops that all the overseas GIs, wounded or healthy, craved so avidly?

Soda pops hit the spot for sure, but to a GI dying of blood poisoning, only penicillin could really save their lives.

What if Smith's sole surviving daughter shipped out as a nurse and got seriously ill ?

Would she be grateful to her dad for providing the cold soda pop that eased her dying moments or would she have preferred the penicillin that could have saved her life, if only her father had been more decisive?

But nothing Dawson said seemed to have cut much ice with Smith.

Not until the plight of a dying two year old , saved by penicillin, touched Smith's heart, along with the rest of the world, in mid-August 1943.

Perhaps the crisis for the two parents of young Patty Malone reminded Mr and Mrs Smith all too vividly of the similar agony they went through a dozen years earlier with their first daughter, who died from a disease that penicillin could have saved her from.

Something must have clicked in the soul of John L, because despite strong reports that synthetic penicillin actually was 'just around the corner' this time, Smith suddenly committed Pfizer to an all out effort to mass produce natural penicillin both for the boys overseas by D-Day and for those dying back home for lack of it.

Smith's beloved Dodgers went on to chokedlike never before, during that summer of 1944, but Brooklyn (the Borough) scored big in its own extended road trip.

'Knocked them alive' in fact, in places like Omaha, Utah,  Juno,  Silver and Gold ....

The Boys of Summer '44 : DODGERS tank but Brooklyn shines in extended road trip: Omaha,Utah,Juno,Gold,Sword ...

   In that crucial summer of 1944, the Dodgers were on their way to the cellar in baseball, but despite that, something far greener and far more golden than "A Tree" was growing in Brooklyn and for a time, best-selling author Betty Smith had to move aside for an unknown chemist called "John L" (Smith).
   During WWII some say that there was a sign at the entrance to Brooklyn, off the Brooklyn Bridge, that said "Welcome to Brooklyn, the Borough that Builds."

   The borough that builds indeed !
   During WWII, Brooklyn was most famous for the Brooklyn Naval Yard ,where the US Navy was building the Iowa class battleships , the world's biggest killing machines.
   Less well remembered is Brooklyn's lead role in building the world's smallest lifesaving machine : tiny ampules of penicillin from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Plant.
   Along with lots of weapons and K-rations, the D-Day beaches had plenty of those ampules delivered to the beaches, against all odds, in just the nick of time for the first mass clinical trial of the world's first - and best - antibiotic.
   Penicillin must be the only antibiotic that was literally baptised by fire.
   Most of the penicillin on those blood-stained beaches came from just one plant: and that plant was Pfizer's, hitherto if know at all, known for making citric acid for soda pop.
  A definite thirst quencher, but hardly a lifesaver - except in Coke ads.
   If Pfizer boss, "John L", (or more likely his wife, Mae) hadn't become a last minute convert to the life-saving powers of fungi-grown penicillin over the mirage of man-made penicillin, there won't have been any amount of penicillin on those beaches.
   Brooklyn isn't the industrial power it once was - the jobs have all gone to China and Mexico - but when it had to, it did it up right.
   The Boys of Summer that summer weren't just from Brooklyn, they were from all over - and they really needed Brooklyn and Pfizer to bat 1.0 if they were to pull through.
  They did --- and they did.
   In that light, who really cares if the Dodgers tanked that year .....

Mae Smith ; the real life DOCTOR MOM that gave us penicillin

Readers sometimes asked me if DOCTOR MOM was a real person.

I usually say "No, Dawson was trying to reach all the Doctor Moms in America , via his success in preventing all the deaths and all the worries caused by childhood Rheumatic Fever."

But I have reflected and maybe my readers are right - yes, there was was one specific Doctor Mom that Dawson reached - perhaps, indeed, only one that he reached.

But one can be more than enough.

Her real name was Mae Smith, though she is sometimes known as Mrs John l Smith or ,more accurately, as Mary Louise Smith.

MAE SMITH in 1954

Her husband owned 25% of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team and after his death, she held those shares.

More books have been written on these , the original "Boys of Summer", than any other team.

Many people seem to rate the day the team left Brooklyn as more significant in the decline of America than Watergate or Viet Nam.

The other Mary Louise Smith is also very important in this story : she was the Smiths' daughter.

John L grew up in a small seaport in Connecticut and he loved to sail more than almost anything and he loved his cottage in his old home town.

One day when the family was out in the cottage, far from big cities and big city high tech hospitals, young Mary Louise said she had a stiff neck. And a headache. And a fever. And that in fact, she generally wasn't feeling very good indeed.

That put her family in a real panic.

Not as much as it did the local doctors - it was obviously Spinal Meningitis - still a deadly, every-minute-counts-disease even today with antibiotics.

By the time they got her to a big hospital, it was too late to even stabilize her - though surviving a late case of spinal meningitis can be a very mixed blessing - it often leaves you physically and mentally challenged.

An immediate (and I mean like yesterday) massive needle full of Penicillin was the best cure then , as it still is today.

Penicillin had been discovered at the time of Mary Louise II's death, but had not yet been produced, let alone mass produced.

In 1941 and 1942 and in 1943, as Dawson always naggingly reminded any and all visitors from John L.'s firm, it still was not being mass produced.

"But if it had been developed back then and if it was a staple in the black bag of even the smallest backwoods doctor, Mary Louise would be alive today."

"How many more Mary Louises would have to die needlessly before the world got enough penicillin to make a difference?"

And on and on.

John L had heard this all too many times before - he felt that Dawson simply didn't understand the technical and economic issues that prevented his firm from taking the plunge.

"What risk ", said Dawson , "are you not planning to take the company public, and to do a stock split?  This war has made you guys even richer - give something back to the fighting man - and the fighting woman."

I bet John L would go home at night, get a stiff drink and unwind at his wife, all about what a nag that Henry Dawson was -- "why he even said this and he dared say that."

I don't think John L bought Dawson's line.

But to her credit, I think Mrs John L eventually did.

I bet, late at night, just when John L was trying to get some shuteye , she would softly bring up the question of 'why couldn't the firm take a little risk for once, do something extra for the war effort?'

I think it must have rubbed off eventually, because if his firm was cautious, John L was even more so.

But between late August 1943 till March 1944, that 'stiff little man' was like a man possessed, so determined was he to get a big new, NATURAL, penicillin plant on line as soon as possible.

(This was just at the very time that the Florey team at Oxford University were semi-secretly announcing that they had totally synthesised penicillin chemically and that to continue to rely on natural production by the mold was a 'retrograde' step - so John L was betting against the received opinion.)

But they went ahead anyway: shifts of crews building around the clock, lit by Klieg Lights and posters everywhere reminding employees that this was a "Race Against Death."

 "The quicker this building is done, the quicker penicillin can go out to the wounded boys at the front."

It paid off  because by D-Day Pfizer, his firm, was producing most of the world's penicillin---and the company has never looked back.

We never did get any of that wonderful 'Refined Penicillin' out of the chappies at Oxford - but 'Brooklyn Crude' pulled us through the war anyway.

And I like to think a lot of the credit for starting Pfizer on the road to becoming the world's biggest company should go to a quiet but persistent push from  "Doc" Mae Smith.....

The NEEDLE that wasn't there....

.... changed History.

In the early 1940s ,a parent was bemoaning to a doctor that by the time he got his sick child to the New London hospital from his summer home in Stonington Connecticut a few miles away, the doctors told him it was too late and his sixteen year old daughter Mary Louise was dead from spinal meningitis.

The doctor lectured him, as was his want, that if every GP carried a needle and some penicillin G in their black bag and gave it to every suspected case of meningitis, without waiting to get the patient to hospital to have their spinal fluid tapped and typed, no child ever need die from meningitis.

But unfortunately, the doctor went on to say, drug company executives are still too slow off the mark and GPs have no penicillin to put into their bags, 15 years after its discovery....shooting a meaningful glance at the parent.

The parent went home and thought about it a while  ---- God he hated that guy - always wanting more and always giving you a lecture instead of thanks for whatever you could give him ------- but he did think about it and probably even talked it over with his wife.

Who knows what happened that night. Did he tell his wife," I'd like to help Henry but you know me, I don't like to move quickly."

And perhaps his wife said softly, "I know" and then immediately wished she had never said it.

Perhaps they always agreed to never again talk about that awful night so long ago.

Who knows ?

What we do know, is that something totally unexpected happened, thanks to that parent.

True he was notoriously known as a very frugal and cautious man, but now that he actually decided to ' do something about it'  , he worked like a whirling dervish.

His name was John Lawrence Smith and if you know his name at all, you know him as one of the owners of the famed Brooklyn Dodgers.

During June 1944, the Brooklyn Dodgers had one terrible road trip after another.

But John L's other Brooklyn team scored one knockout after another that June in 1944, in places like Omaha ............ Utah ...... Juno ...... Silver........ and  Gold.

This is the true story of  " How Omaha Got Its 'P' " - and the doctor's advice is still good today - doctors are still advised to carry and use a needleful of Pen G on every suspected case of meningitis, ASAP, if they want to save a life.

If your child's life has been saved by a prompt needleful of Penicillin G, aka benzylpenicillin , offer up thanks to that parent.

(John L Smith ,the head of Pfizer, when it produced most of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches - British and Canadian beaches as well as the American ones.)


And of course to that ever nagging doctor ,Martin Henry Dawson...