Before Robert L. Strowd, Chapel Hill’s capitalist, went to the sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, three or four weeks ago, he had a woe-begone expression. Persons not in Mr. Strowd’s confidence might have supposed that he was concerned about his health.
Not so at all. What made him downcast was that an acquaintance of his had told him they didn’t allow smoking at the Battle Creek place. It was the prospect of being robbed of his cigarettes that made him look forward to his stay there with dread. But the doctor had told him to go, and he went.
A few days ago he came back, happy and smiling. “Did they stop you from smoking?” I asked him when we met on the street.
“They had a rule against it,” he said, “but it didn’t trouble us. A bunch of us patients would go across the street to a yard and smoke all we wanted to. I don’t know whose yard it was. It may have belonged to the sanatorium for all I know. Anyway, nobody interfered with us and we made ourselves at home. It made me think of the time I was a small boy and slipped off from home against orders.”
Mr. Strowd was amazed at the extent of the sanatorium and at the doctors’ familarity with every visitor’s anatomy.
“They had a machine there,” he said, “by which they could tell the strength of every muscle in your body. It was almost uncanny what they could find out about you. The head of the place, a Dr. Kellogg, who was 73 or 74 years old, and he was running around like a young boy. He hasn’t eaten a piece of meat in 40 years.
“They have a menu with the scores of articles of food in it. Everybody who goes there has his name put on a menu card, and then an expert checks off the things you may eat. The copy is then given to the woman who is the dietician, and she sees that you get everything that is marked. In a day they gave me from 9 to 12 different things to eat. Some people go there to fatten up and some to train down. A big fat man sat next to me. They were training him down. I noticed that his day’s allotment of butter was about the size of a butterbean.
“You could almost see the fat falling off of him as the days passed. Now, with me it was different—they were trying to put flesh on me, and I was to have the most fattening foods. Toward the last they turned me loose and let me roam through the menu at will.”
While Mr. Strowd was on this trip he visited his son, Wallace, in Madison, Wisconsin. He also stayed several days in Detroit and from there made a number of sorties into Canada.
From the front page of the Chapel Hill Weekly, October 9, 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073229/1924-10-09/ed-1/seq-1/#words=OCTOBER+9%2C+1924
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