Mr Daley
by W.S. Merwin

Mr Daley could whistle between his teeth
but just the one phrase over and over
it was in the good old summertime
and it made my mother sniff and shake her head
as he pushed the big wooden spoon around
and around the pot of flour paste he was mixing
on the old coal range in the back kitchen
near the laundry tubs that smelled of laundry tubs
as the flour paste smelled of flour paste
and Mr Daley smelled of Mr Daley
in a stale shirt he was old in his fifties
with a hump between his shoulders and it was
still summertime and he would carry the pot
up the back stairs to the heat of the attic
where he had already carried the truckload
of mattress cartons one at a time
got for nothing from the Furniture Store
& Funeral Parlor on South Main Street
and he had nailed them up under the attic beams
and then would paper them end to end with old
church bulletins as insulation
because the house was so cold in winter
he kept laughing to himself about something
while he worked and whistled they said he was not
like his daughter Isabel whom they admired
who worked in Thomas's Piano Store
that would burn down one winter with icicles
forming from the jets of the fire hoses
and the flames racing up inside the rooms until
the top floors stacked high with pianos
crashed slowly together through icicles
and piano chords chiming in chorus
while I stood watching from across the street
on the stone steps of the Methodist church
remembering Mr Daley whistling
between his teeth in the good old summertime


W.S. Merwin "Mr Daley" from The Moon Before Morning by W. S. Merwin. Copyright © 2014 by W.S. Merwin, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1972 that Jean Heller of the Associated Press broke the news that the federal government had let hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama go untreated for syphilis for 40 years in the now infamous Tuskegee study.

Before Heller’s story appeared others had objected to the experiment, but nothing was done. They included several employees of the Public Health Service, which ran the study, and a young professor at the Medical College of Virginia, who questioned it in 1955 but was warned by his superiors to drop the matter. Ten years later a young Chicago doctor read an article about the study and wrote a scathing letter to the authors declaring the experiment unethical. Anne Yobs, one of the authors, wrote an internal memo stating she did not intend to reply. In 1966 Peter Buxtun, a Public Health Service investigator in San Francisco, wrote to express his concerns about the mortality of the study; the CDC determined it needed to be continued to completion — meaning until all subjects had died and been autopsied.

Buxtun got frustrated and went to a reporter friend who referred him to Jean Heller. He gave her copies of letters he had received in response to his concerns. She described one of the letters as saying, “There is nothing wrong with this (study), it’s none of your business, ignore it.” Importantly, it did not deny that the study was taking place. Heller said, “It acknowledges that something like that was going on. That’s how I found out about it, and then it was just a matter of hammering on people until they gave me the information I wanted.” She later described the Tuskegee study as “one of the grossest violations of human rights I can imagine.”

Four months after Heller’s story broke the study was finally terminated. By that point, of the original 400 men, 128 had died of syphilis or related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with the disease.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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