Toledo, O., March 10—Hopelessly crippled through performance of one of the most heroic deeds of the Spanish-American war, John Kissinger, Honor, Mich., father of a family, is being rewarded by a grateful government.
At the rate of 39 cents a day!
Kissinger didn’t charge a machine-gun nest. He didn’t capture a regiment of Spaniards single-handed. He didn’t carry dispatches thru a rain of bullets. All those things, heroic though they may be, are commonplace compared to the supreme deed of self-sacrifice performed by Kissinger.
For Kissinger submitted his body to army surgeons as a human research laboratory that they might discover a virus to halt the speed of yellow fever—a scourge more deadly that all the Spanish rifle balls, shrapnel, sabers and bayonets put together!
He Volunteers
When the yellow fever plague was killing soldiers of the American expeditionary forces in Cuba like flies, the medical branch of the expedition asked for volunteers upon whom to try out their experimental virus.
Three volunteered. Kissinger was one.
The three heroes were inoculated with the germs of the dread malady. They went through suffering that has no parallel in Dante’s imagined tortures of hell.
Two of the volunteers died under the strain. Kissinger came through alive—but with his legs twisted and deformed and paralyzed.
He would have to crawl through life on hands and knees until death freed him, physicians said and shook their heads gravely.
Then congress, in recognition of Kissinger’s service, granted him an allowance of $1,200 a year.
On that he managed for years to get along. But his family was growing. He needed more to feed his children.
Friends secured for him a $12-a-month pension in addition to his annuity.
Then suddenly Kissinger received a bill from a government clerk in Washington, informing him he owed the government $1,600.
Kissinger, the clerk explained, had been drawing his annuity illegally ever since he had started drawing his pension!
And the annuity was immediately cut off.
$12 a Month
Kissinger, though, continued to draw his $12 a month, on which he is expected to support his family, for his crippled condition precludes his performing any profitable work.
But Congressman Isaac Sherwood of Toledo, a veteran of the Civil war, has become interested in Kissinger’s case. He’ll introduce a special act at the next session of congress to grant Kissinger an annuity.
Meanwhile a hero, perhaps the greatest of the Spanish-American war, must continue living on 39 cents a day!
From the front page of the Salisbury Evening Post, Saturday, March 10, 1923
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