Colonel convicted by court-martial
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Congress asked to delay drafting of all fathers
Manpower, tax and inflation problems faced as House and Senate end recess
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After 290 days –
Victim of nightclub fire beginning to walk again
‘Isn’t that something?’ Coast Guardsman asks after he takes a few steps
Boston, Massachusetts (UP) –
Falteringly, 22-year-old Clifford Johnson of Sumner, Missouri, walked unassisted today for the first time since he was burned almost beyond recognition in the cocoanut Grove Nightclub holocaust 290 days ago.
“Isn’t that something?” he asked his nurses with a grin as, like a baby learning to walk, he took a few steps across the Boston City Hospital room where he has lain – most of the time on his stomach – since the fire that cost 492 lives.
Although the young coast Guardsman is winning one of medical history’s most amazing fights for life, it will probably be four more months before he can go back to his parents and a sister on their Missouri farm.
On Aug. 4, newspapers throughout the country published the story of Johnson’s plucky battle for life. It was a fight in which some $20,000 was spent on nutritional treatment, blood plasma, sulfa drugs and skin grafting in an effort to patch up a body, 65% of which was covered with third-degree burns.
To Johnson came a flood of letters, many from mothers with sons in the service or from servicemen themselves, offering sympathy and encouragement.
Apparently, the letters were just the tonic the shy sailor needed. A six-footer, he has regained 16 of the 56 pounds he lost as a result of the accident and now weighs 124.
Johnson still has to sleep on his stomach, but in his waking hours is able to relieve the monotony by typing with one hand on a portable typewriter.
Dr. Newton Brower, who belittles his own large part in Johnson’s recovery, praised Dr. Charles C. Lund and the staff of the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory. He said Johnson already had had 17,000 pinpoint skin grafts on his head, back, arms and legs, and that more were yet to come.
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