Category Archives: Writer

Dr Edith M Lincoln

Dr. Edith M. Lincoln, a pediatrician who pioneered the use of drugs for treating tuberculosis in children, was head of the children’s “chest clinic” at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan from 1922 until her retirement in 1956.

Born in New York City, Edith Maas graduated from Vassar College in 1912 with a stunning academic record that won her admission to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She received her medical degree in 1916. In 1917 she became one of the first women physicians to be accepted as an intern at Bellevue Hospital. She recalled later that she was advised to take her meals with the nurses, but insisted on eating with the other interns. She married Asa Lincoln in 1917 and the couple had two children.

After completing her training in pediatrics, Dr. Lincoln was appointed to start the children’s chest clinic at Bellevue in 1922. She joined the faculty at the New York University School of Medicine in 1930 and twenty years later was named a clinical professor of pediatrics.

Many of the pediatric patients that Dr. Lincoln saw at her clinic came from low income families who received public assistance and lived in crowded conditions. In the 1930s, one of every five children admitted to the tuberculosis ward of Bellevue Hospital died of the disease, usually within a year. Most of these children were first diagnosed in the hospital because a tuberculin test was part of the examination on admission. Sadly, the death rate of children with tuberculosis remained unchanged until streptomycin became available late in 1947.

Dr. Lincoln was instrumental in studying the effect of drugs on reducing the death rate of children from a first infection of tuberculosis, often called primary tuberculosis. In 1949, working with grants from the Federal Public Health Service and the National Tuberculosis Association, she found that a dozen children treated in her chest clinic with streptomycin and promizole recovered from tuberculous meningitis (an acute inflammation of the cerebral tissues caused by the tubercle bacillus) and miliary tuberculosis (which spreads throughout the body via the bloodstream), two forms of the disease that had almost always been fatal.

When the drug isoniazid became available, she undertook a clinical experiment that showed that children with pulmonary tuberculosis who were treated with the new drug avoided developing tuberculous meningitis. Before that, tuberculous meningitis caused 60 percent of deaths from primary tuberculosis.

In 1939 Dr. Lincoln was named chair of the pediatric section of the New York Academy of Medicine. In 1951 she received the Elizabeth Blackwell citation given annually to an outstanding woman physician; and in 1959 she was awarded the Trudeau Medal of the National Tuberculosis Association for her early work with chemotherapy for the treatment of childhood tuberculosis.

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Alice Gustava Smith

Alice Gustava Smith, better known by her students and readers as Sister Maris Stella, taught English at the College of St. Catherine (now St. Catherine University) in St. Paul for nearly fifty years. During that time she also published books of verse that built her reputation as a skilled and spiritual poet.

Smith was born in Alton, Iowa, in 1899. During her junior year in high school she moved to St. Paul to attend Derham Hall High School. At that time, Derham Hall was located on the campus of the College of St. Catherine.

Smith graduated from Derham Hall in 1918. Two years later she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of St. Joseph and took the name Sister Maris Stella. In 1924 she received her undergraduate degree from the College of St. Catherine with majors in English and music. Shortly after receiving her degree, she became a faculty member of the college.

Sister Maris Stella’s career took off when she sailed to England and earned her master’s degree in English at the University of Oxford. Soon after returning from Europe she became a star in the English Department at St. Catherine’s. She loved teaching and became a popular creative writing teacher as well as a poet-in-residence.

In 1939, Sister Maris Stella published her first volume of poetry, Here Only a Dove. During the 1940s she continued to write poetry for magazines. The English poet and novelist Alfred Noyes included a dozen of her poems in The Golden Book of Catholic Poetry, an anthology he edited in 1946.

By the end of the decade, Sister Maris Stella had published her second volume of poetry, Frost for St. Bridget. A nature lover, she linked the Irish St. Bridget with the frost in bleak trees, where, as she wrote in one poem, “Under the moon the orchards bloomed with hoarfrost, the white hills lay pale.”

During this poetically creative period, Sister Maris Stella continued to teach English at the College of St. Catherine. For almost twenty years she also served as chairperson of the school’s English Department. She enjoyed teaching literature, the history of the language, and, especially, creative writing. With such a busy schedule, she found less and less time to write her own poetry.

Then, in the early 1950s, the poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton visited the college as a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer. After Sarton returned home, she started a fellowship program for writers like Sister Maris Stella who had little time to travel and write. Sarton believed that writers often suffered from “divine discontent” when they lacked time for creative work.

Sister Maris Stella was surprised and pleased to receive a grant that allowed her to participate in Sarton’s program during the 1958–1959 academic year. She traveled to the Southwest, where she wrote poetry in a desert landscape markedly different from Minnesota’s. Several of these new poems were later published by North Central Publishing Company in a special Christmas edition.

Another highlight in Sister Maris Stella’s career was a collaboration with Paul Fetler, a music professor and composer from the University of Minnesota. Fetler wrote a cantata inspired by her poem “The Veil and the Rock.” The first performance of the cantata was held at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

After serving in the English Department at St. Catherine’s for close to fifty years, Sister Maris Stella retired from active teaching in May 1971. By then, she had returned to using her birth name, Alice Gustava Smith. It was under this name that St. Catherine’s Alumnae Association published her Collected Poems in 1982. The book included several new poems as well as poetry selected from earlier volumes.

Sister Alice died in 1987. Although she suffered from ill health toward the end of her life, she is remembered for her acceptance of aging and her spiritual outlook on life. Her colleagues often quoted her poem “Joseph of Dreams,” which includes the line, “in that last hour be a great light.” They agreed she herself was a great light for others, especially young women writers, for whom she was a strong guide.

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Estelle Ishigo

Artist and musician Estelle Peck Ishigo (1899–1990), a white woman who married a Nisei man, is best known for chronicling life at the Heart Mountain, Wyoming, concentration camp through her drawings and paintings. After falling into poverty and obscurity after the war, she was rediscovered in the 1970s, with former Heart Mountain inmates helping her to publish her memoir. She has subsequently been widely exhibited and was the subject of an Academy Award winning documentary.

Early Life and Wartime Incarceration
Estelle Peck was born on July 15, 1899, in Oakland, California, to Bradford and Bertha Apffel Peck. Her father was a landscape painter and piano tuner, while her mother sang opera. Her father was in his early fifties and her mother nearly fifty when Estelle was born; Estelle believed that she was a “mistake” and that her parents did not want a child. She recalled being raised by a nurse early in life, then lived with a succession of relatives and others after moving to Los Angeles at age twelve, one of whom raped her. On her own after high school, she “roamed streets alone looking for adventure” before eventually attending Otis Art Institute. In 1929, she met Arthur Ishigo, a Nisei man from San Francisco who had moved to Los Angeles with hopes of becoming an actor, and she fell in “love at first sight.” Due to anti-miscegenation laws, the couple had to marry in Mexico. Shunned by mainstream society, the couple largely lived in the Japanese American community. Both worked odd jobs, with Arthur landing bit parts here and there and eventually working for Paramount as a janitor. Estelle got some illustration jobs, taught art classes for children, and, when the war broke out, was working at a drugstore and soda fountain in Hollywood.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Arthur lost his Paramount job and Estelle lost a teaching job. As a Japanese American, Arthur was subject to the mass forced removal of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Though Estelle did not have to join him, she chose to accompany him, first to the Pomona Assembly Center, then to the Heart Mountain, Wyoming, War Relocation Authority concentration camp. Ironically, she reported that she “felt accepted for the first time in my life” while incarcerated. She took an active part in camp life, working as an artist and art editor for the Pomona camp newspaper—her co-editor was the noted graphic artist S. Neil Fujita —and organizing a string ensemble and teaching violin at Heart Mountain. She was also the director of the Art Students’ League at Heart Mountain. A familiar and easily recognizable figure in camp, Shig Yabu recalled “she played the violin and the mandolin, so each week she would be up on the stage, on the front, and she stood out playing the mandolin with this little band, with a smiling face.” Arthur worked as a boilerman.

From the initial roundup, Estelle took it upon herself to use her artistic skills to document what was happening to Japanese Americans. Throughout the incarceration, she made dozens of pencil and ink sketches of everyday events—everything from the dust and snow storms to the primitive living conditions to inmate adaptations and recreation—as well as some watercolor and oil paintings. She later worked for Heart Mountain’s Reports Office as part of the Documentary Section staff “to sketch and paint center life in all its aspects.” In that capacity, some of her paintings ended up in staff offices—including that of Reports Officer Vaughn Mechau—while other may have been given away to visitors. Late in the camp’s history, she assisted folk art scholar Allen H. Eaton on a project to collect and document arts and crafts in the WRA camps. Ishigo recommended notable items to Eaton, arranged for their photography, and collected and shipped some key objects to Eaton, including some of her own work. His book Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps was published in 1952.

Postwar Struggles
The Ishigos stayed in Heart Mountain until its very last day so that Estelle could document the camp’s closing. They were among the last to leave on November 10, 1945. With no place to go, they returned to the Los Angeles area and ended up in the notorious Winona trailer camp in Burbank with approximately five hundred other Heart Mountain inmates. Run by the War Relocation Authority and the Federal Public Housing Authority, it was one of a series of camps for released Japanese Americans like the Ishigos that were meant to serve as temporary housing. Two weeks after their arrival, they struggled to find work. “I’ve cut down on food to make the money last longer but it will interfere with the quality of my work,” she wrote to a friend, while lamenting her inability to play music or paint in the cramped quarters. Winona suddenly closed in March of 1946, and the Ishigos were shuttled to another WRA/FPHA trailer camp in Lomita. When that camp closed a couple of months later, and with the imminent closing down of the WRA, they moved yet again to a privately owned trailer camp in Lomita run by California Sea Food. “So much packing, moving and suspense leaves one too exhausted to do anything,” she wrote.

The couple searched for work and community, with Arthur working for a time as a gardener and Estelle teaching children’s art classes and trying to resume painting. Arthur eventually found a job with American Airlines, and after two more years in the “hideous slovenly” trailer, they moved to a small apartment in downtown Los Angeles. Estelle wrote that Arthur had aged twenty years in camp that his “spirit was broken, he was different now than he used to be.” He was also embittered by a long battle over claims filed under the auspices of the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act. An initial claim for $1,000 stretched out over years before he finally gave in and settled for $102.50. Not long after this, he died of cancer at age fifty-five in 1957. Estelle continued to work odd jobs including office work and managing an apartment building while also pursuing writing—including stories based on the wartime incarceration—while trying to paint and play music.

Rediscovery and Legacy
In February 1972, the California Historical Society opened an exhibition of art created in the Japanese American concentration camps titled Months of Waiting, 1942–1945. Ishigo was one of six artists featured in the exhibition, which toured nationally over the next three years. She was subsequently honored by the Hollywood chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which also presented her with an honorarium “in appreciation for her personal contributions to the world of art and to the Japanese American community.” The Hollywood JACL, along with the Pacific Southwest District Council of the JACL and private donors, also underwrote the publication of Ishigo’s illustrated camp memoir, Lone Heart Mountain, which went on sale at the end of 1972. Her original drawings were displayed at Amerasia Bookstore in Little Tokyo in 1974.

In subsequent years, she again fell into obscurity and financial hardship. In the mid-1980s, Heart Mountain community leader Bacon Sakatani was asked to find Ishigo by local officials who were interested in using one of her drawings on a plaque at the site of the camp. He found her living in squalor, destitute, and with both legs amputated due to gangrene. Sakatani and his former Heart Mountain classmates raised money to assist her and to republish Lone Heart Mountain. Through their efforts, her story came to the attention of filmmaker Steven Okazaki, who made a film about her life. Based on Lone Heart Mountain and featuring dozens of Ishigo’s drawings and paintings, Days of Waiting eventually won an Academy Award for best documentary short. Ishigo lived out the rest of her life in various convalescent homes in Hollywood. She passed away on February 25, 1990. In June 1999, a group of former inmates that included Norman Mineta and Sue Kunitomi Embrey trekked up Heart Mountain to scatter Ishigo’s ashes at the top, fulfilling her dying wish.

With growing interest in the Japanese American incarceration, her fame has grown since her passing. Her works were featured in exhibitions including A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the US Constitution (National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 1987), The View from Within (Japanese American National Museum and UCLA Wight Art Gallery, 1992) and Coming Home: Memories of Japanese American Resettlement (JANM, 1998). She is also featured in the films Heart Mountain: An All American Town (2011) and All We Could Carry (2011), the latter the introductory video at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. In 2015, Rago Arts offered for sale a cache of Japanese American incarceration related objects from the collection of Allen H. Eaton that included twelve watercolors and two oils depicting scenes at Heart Mountain by Ishigo. Japanese American community activists managed to stop the auction, and the collection was eventually acquired by the Japanese American National Museum. Some of her works were featured in the subsequent traveling exhibition, Contested Histories: Art and Artifacts from the Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection. JANM also loaned ten of the paintings to the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which featured them in the exhibition The Mountain Was Our Secret: Works by Estelle Ishigo in 2018. Dozens of her incarceration related drawings and paintings from collections at JANM and UCLA can be viewed online.

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L Jane Hastings

Architects around the world, and particularly women architects in Seattle and Washington, have long looked to L. Jane Hastings as an exemplar and professional leader, and often the first to achieve key professional aspirations.

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Esther Hall Mumford

Esther Hall Mumford is a Seattle researcher, a writer, a publisher and an authority on the history of African Americans in the Pacific Northwest.

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