The Pittsburgh Press (April 11, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SILVER CITY, N.M. – Silver City is one of these high-altitude once-tough old mining and cattle towns of the Southwest.
Most of the picturesque two-gun men and iron-nerved sheriffs have died off now, but Silver City has many a more tractable resident who has a glamor about him.
Such a man is Wayne Mac V. Wilson, who never shot anybody and who has never been shot. He is an Easterner who came to New Mexico more than 40 years ago.
He is past 60 now, but walks with a lilt, smokes a pipe, knows more funny stories and tells them better than anybody else in town, and dresses as though he were still in Princeton, where he went to school. And in spite of all this youthful gaiety, he has probably been through more torture than anybody else in the city.
Wayne Wilson first came here for tuberculosis when he was 19, and in college. In a year he was able to go back to school. He got his diploma, and worked a few years in Philadelphia, but he worked too hard and broke down again. That time he came here for good. His lungs have never bothered him since.
But, a few years ago, he did come down with spinal tuberculosis. That is the main thing I want to write about. Before the doctors realized what it was, several of the vertebrae in his upper spine had been destroyed and his backbone, as he describes it, was just like a willow twig – it wouldn’t stand up straight.
The pain was indescribable, and gradually his legs started to get paralyzed. Even in bed, when he’d lift one of them, he couldn’t tell which way it might go. Doctors said he would be dead within a few months.
Suspends motion in spine
Then he finally got hold of one doctor with a different idea. This doctor’s idea was not to operate, but to suspend all motion in Mr. Wilson’s spine – from that day until it had healed itself. The only way to do that was to make him rigid.
So this doctor made a plaster cast of Mr. Wilson’s back, and then had a permanent mold made, and built this solid mold into a special steel bed. The lower half of the bed was canvas, for the Wilson legs to rest on.
Then they put Mr. Wilson onto this rack, and told him he might have to lie there two or three years. The natural thing happened. With no exercise and never changing position, his internal organs became disturbed and he took on terrific gastric troubles.
There had to be a solution to that, so they found one. They rigged up another thing, whereby he could lie on his stomach half of the time. This new apparatus was a canvas arrangement over a wooden frame, which they would place over Mr. Wilson’s chest and head, and strap down tight. Then they would turn him over, and he’d lie on his stomach, with the hard mold still fitted to his back.
Of course, it took several people to turn him over twice a day, so he thought up an arrangement to take care of that. He had the bed fitted with spindles at each end, and the whole rack hung on these two swivels. That way, one nurse could simply turn a crank at the end of the bed and twirl Mr. Wilson, rack and all, right over. “Just like turning a roast pig on a spit,” he says.
Mr. Wilson lay in this thing for a year and a half. The doctors told him the terrible pain would start to subside in six weeks, and it did. After that, he never minded his imprisonment a bit. He never got despondent; in fact, enjoyed himself.
Read books, wrote letters
During the 12 hours of the day he’d spend flat on his stomach, he read books and wrote letters. How did he do that, you ask? Well, his shoulders stuck out beyond this canvas rack, so he could put his arms under the rack.
Then they put a low table under it, and put either a book or writing paper on the table, and Mr. Wilson went to work. For, you see, there was a hole cut in the canvas for his face to stick through.
During the entire year and a half that Mr. Wilson was encased, he had a drink of whisky every evening. It helped his digestive system, and gave him something to look forward to all day long. Also, he was never lonesome – he had lots of visitors, attracted to him, he says, by the fact that he always had a drink to offer them.
Mr. Wilson finally got out of his rack three years ago. Then he was in a solid plaster cast for several months. Then a steel and leather brace affair. He even abandoned that six weeks ago. It took him a year to learn how to walk again.
Today, you’d never know there had ever been anything wrong with him. He’s one of the chipperest men in town. And he works hard, too.
He’s head of the Grant County War Bond drive, and they have set some sort of a record here in selling $600,000 worth of bonds to a population of 20,000. They say it will hit a million before long.
Mr. Wilson’s father was a colonel in the Civil War, and stayed in the Army afterward to fight Indians in the West. Mrs. Wilson’s uncle was Gen. John C. Bates, once chief-of-staff. So there is a lot of military in the family, but none in Mr. Wilson.
However, as somebody in Silver City remarked, he’s the kind of fellow who, if he were a military leader, you would follow to the death.
Just to hear his latest story with the last breath, if nothing else.