Bea Austin of Restoule still vividly remembers the day her tonsils were removed in the village’s Orange Lodge.
RESTOULE – More than 80 years after the fact, Bea Austin of Restoule has a very clear recollection of the day the doctors came to town and she became an unwilling patient.
It was sometime between 1926 and 1928 when the children of Restoule and the surrounding area were rounded up at the village’s Orange Lodge for surgery.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” says Bea who was then known as Bea Jones. “In those days they didn’t tell you what the reason was. They just sent you.”
Where her parents sent her was a scene that today’s dark minds of Hollywood horror would have great difficulty conjuring up.
Picture a large one room hall with curtains strung up cordoning off children. The air filled with the sounds of cries from those afraid of what was about to happen to them and those awakening in pain from what had happened. From behind the curtain small, pale and bloody faces emerge to be replaced by equally pale, tearful wide-eyed ones unsure of what was in store for them.
The children were being rounded up to have their tonsils removed.
Bea was about eight-year-old when she took off from her family farm on Lake Commanda on a short trip down the road to the lodge.
Bea wasn’t at the hall for very long before she figured out that what was going on wasn’t what she wanted.
The scene as she tells it is a macabre one filled with school-aged children either waiting nervously to see a doctor or walking dazed and bloody from a make-shift surgery set up behind a curtain in the village’s gathering place.
“They didn’t stand me in line for very long. They just carried me straight in because I didn’t want to go.”
Bea was eight years old at the time and says she put up enough of a struggle that at least three people had to carry her in and restrain her until an ether mask rendered her unconscious.
“I wasn’t very big, but I must have been very mighty,” says Bea.
“I was always afraid of a doctor anyways and to see that mess . . .”
Bringing the unwilling patient under control, Bea says she got an extra dose of the magical ether gas. It wasn’t until many hours later, late in the evening that she awoke with a sore throat.
Still wrapped in fear, the attendants had just about as hard a time getting Bea off of the recovery table as they had getting her onto the surgery table.
“My brother Holly was there, but there was no way I was going to go with him,” says Bea. What about her parents, George and Elizabeth Jones? “They were there too, but I wasn’t having any part of them, because they brought me in.”
Finally family friend Manson Kidd, who lived just up the road from the Jones’ farm, convinced young Bea to come with him and return home to recover.
May McVeety remembers that she was one of only two children that attended the public school is Restoule at the time who, with doctor’s permission, didn’t have to have her tonsils removed that bloody day.
“We had to go up there to the hall and the doctor looked at (my tonsils) and said they were okay and I didn’t have to get them out. I was lucky I guess,” says May.
There were two other Restoule students who didn’t get their tonsils removed by the visiting doctor that day – but Archie Atchison and Allan McVeety gained much more renown.
“A couple of young lads ran off into the bush when they got wind of what they were up to,” says May. “My husband Allan was one of them and Archie was the other. They were a bad pair when they were kids.”
Legend has it that Allan and Archie didn’t return home until well after dark when the coast was clear.
May meanwhile was busy helping her mother Rachel at home who was serving as an outpost for the Martin family who lived a long way by bush trail from the lodge.
“The whole bunch of those Martin’s kids stayed at our home until their parents could come get them after the chores were done on the farm,” says May.
Then known by her family name Grawbarger, May says for a time in the house there were at least six children from ages five to 15 recuperating from tonsil surgery.
May believes that more than 50 children would have gone under the knife of a Dr. Guest that day in the Orange Lodge.
Neither lady can remember much of an explanation for the mass surgery that day, though they know it was happening everywhere it seemed.
“At the time they thought that any sore throat had to do with the tonsils. I guess they thought they might as well get them out, especially for kids so far away from a hospital,” says Bea.
And while the conditions were less than ideal compared to today’s modern sterile environments, Bea and May say they can’t recall any major complications or even deaths from amongst the host of patients.
Bea says she doesn’t remember much about the days after her forced surgery, but says she must have talked about it with her friends. She does recall that it didn’t come up at the dinner table with her parents.
“I never had much discussion about it. I was too disgusted with them. But everybody was doing it and they thought they were doing the right thing so you can’t blame them,” says Bea.
She still shakes her head all these decades later at what went on at the lodge that day.
“It’s hard to believe, when you think of it now, what they would do. Now they have to have everything sterilized and there we were in this open hall,” says Bea.
As for the surgery itself, Bea gives it a failing grade.
“They didn’t get all of mine and (her tonsils) grew back and I had a sore throat worse than before,” says Bea. “It’s still there. (Doctors) thought they should take it out and I said ‘No way!’ ”
May guesses the doctors that day got it right and reports she’s never had any trouble from her tonsils.
“I’ve been with them for 90 years so I guess I’ll keep them.”
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