By John Vincent
ENTERPRISE CORRESPONDENT
LAKEVILLE – Bedridden for years and confined to a body cast due to an outbreak of tuberculosis that lodged in her spine at the age of 3, Gale Perkins, now 70, is hoping people will take a glimmer of hope from her self-published book, “The Baby’s Cross.”
Perkins spent the first 14 years of her life at the Lakeville State Sanatorium, from 1936 to 1948, and said she knew no other life than the one she had there. While a bit of a rabble-rouser, she was relatively happy growing up in a large bunk room with 20 other children with tuberculosis, some in body casts, some not, usually being wheeled out onto the wide porch daily to get some sun which was thought to be helpful at the time.
It was an outbreak of polio that turned things around for her, as while the staff of the sanatorium was trying out physical therapy on the many polio victims they also tried it out on 12-year-old Gale, who had been bedridden for three years at that time due to a spinal fusion that went awry. Gale said her muscles quickly responded and before long she was up and about with only a back brace.
She left the sanatorium at 15, went to public high school, got an associate’s degree and worked as a secretary, got married, had three children, worked as a nurse’s aide, worked at the IRS and then turned to occupational therapy and worked in that field for 27 years, becoming director of occupational therapy at the hospital in Georgetown where she still lives.
“All the jobs that Mass Rehab said I couldn’t do, I ended up doing,” Perkins said. But writing a book wasn’t really on the top of her list of things to do. Her coworkers had told her for years she should do it, and then her husband, Evan Perkins, made it his dying wish. She started telling him some of the stories, taping them at the same time, as he laid in bed. He said her voice soothed his poor condition.
“The last thing he asked me before he left this world was to tell my story,” said Perkins, so after he died she made it her mission and wrote “The Baby’s Cross.”
Perkins said her whole family was stricken by tuberculosis when she was a young child. The picture on the cover of the book is Gale at 3 in a cast, being visited by her Aunt Eunice. Perkins said that two days after the photo was taken, her Aunt Eunice went to visit Gale’s mother who was dying of tuberculosis of the lungs and told her of her visit. That inspired Gale’s mother, who died in 1937 at age 24, to write a poem for her daughter, “The Baby’s Cross.” The poem read, in part, “Some day I’ll run and run, so far that nobody can catch me again.”
“She left me a gift, this poem that I can use as the title of my book,” Perkins said.
Perkins said that while most of the people in her family had caught tuberculosis of the lungs, she had fallen down the stairs at that time and the tuberculosis lodged in her spine.
With her mother dying, her father out of the picture, and the rest of her family ailing, she became a ward of the state and came to Lakeville. Her family was told she wouldn’t live past the age of 16.
From ages 3 to 6 she was in a plaster cast from her shoulders to her knees with a bar in between her legs and was unable to walk. At 6, they cut the cast off at the waist and she began to walk until at 9 the spinal fusion went wrong and she was paralyzed from the waist down and in a full shoulder-to-knee cast again until 12.
Teachers tutored her and the other students as they lay in bed or where they had been wheeled to the get some sun on the porch, and by the time she left she had reached the eighth grade.
She said she would do chores, especially during World War II when the hospital was short-staffed, such as do people’s hair or dish out food. She said the food was good, as that was one of the things they felt would help the children heal, but it was always cold as it was made in a separate building and brought over.
“That was the biggest thing when I got out of the hospital, my aunt thought I didn’t want to eat and it wasn’t that I didn’t want to eat, it’s just that I wanted to wait for it to cool,” Perkins said.
At the sanatorium, she said learned to knit and crochet and do woodwork, played cards and games and “I was forever putting on plays” that they made up. She earned a reputation as a bit of trouble-maker, as she would talk back or play pranks on the staff such as bringing a frog in from outside or speak up if others were abused.
“If I had to stop and think about how I got through, I just don’t know how I got along,” said Perkins. “But I’m a very spiritual person and I think if you just open up your eyes and follow your path, you’ll get where you need to go.”
She said thought often of God and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
“I just adopted them as my parents,” said Perkins, noting she would share her vision with others. “When people would cry, I would say, ‘These are my parents and they live up in the sky and you can talk to them.’”
Her friend, Angie, also had tuberculosis of the spine. She said she and Angie would talk from bed to bed. “We used to make plans, what we were going to do when we got out, how we were going to live together … She used to beg me to be good. They’d punish me, put me in solitary and that left her without her best friend. She was always praying for me to be good.”
Unfortunately, Angie died when she was 13, and Gale was 12. Perkins said she looked out the window and saw her being wheeled to the morgue, so she told the nurse who came to tell her not to bother giving her the bad news, because she already knew.
“I said, ‘I wish it was me,’ and she said, ‘It wouldn’t be you because only the good die young,’” Perkins said.
She said it didn’t occur to her to want to leave until her aunt had a baby.
“It was that little baby that made me want to get out of there, because I wanted to see the baby,” she said. It was then she found out her mother had died years earlier, as her aunts had kept writing her letters in her mother’s name because they thought she was going through enough as it was without finding out her mother had died, which she said she was all right with. She was just about to turn 15 and her aunt took her in. She attended Malden High School and continued to persevere when others had their doubts.
“I wasn’t supposed to have any children. When I got pregnant, they wanted to stop the pregnancy right away,” she said, saying they told her both her and the baby would die, but she wouldn’t hear it.
“I guess I kind of marched to my own drummer. I don’t listen a lot to what other people say. If I think I can do it, I just do it.”
She said she also has spent years as a professional clown. “A sense of humor has gotten me by. You have to laugh at yourself.”
Of the demolition of the site, Perkins said she at one point wished her book would sell millions so she could buy it, but now she just hopes a memorial is made for all of the people who struggled to make the most of their lives at the site.
About 40 people came to a recent book-signing Perkins held at the Lakeville Senior Center, and Perkins said she is glad to think the story can help others. The book is self-published through 1st Books/Author House and is available at Maria’s in Middleboro.
“I really feel that I’ve been blessed … that God has given me a gift and I need to use it and let people know that there is hope. I never thought that I couldn’t do it, I just thought that I had to do it.”
This story originally appeared in the Brockton Enterprise.