TWO YEARS BEFORE, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, radio stations were broadcasting football championships all across America. Francis Moore, twenty-nine years old, affectionately nicknamed Franny, was on call as a surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in downtown Boston.
The night had been slow with few demands on his time. He was in the upstairs residents’ lounge listening to the games. Unlike Joe, he had been exempt from the military draft because of bronchial asthma he’d battled since childhood. Told that “your job is right here,” essential to the home front, he’d gone straight from medical school into his internship and residency. And now, after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1939, he was on his way to being a surgeon.
With America at war, surgical training was compressed from the usual five or six years to twenty-seven months, a severe challenge. Teaching hospitals were turning out surgeons for the war effort by the thousands. Harvard Medical School would not admit a woman until 1945, but nurses were in great need and their training was expedited as well, most often to four weeks.
Tall, with dark hair to eventually turn a distinguishing silver, Franny came from men and women who settled in Vermont, Maine, and Boston—all well-educated, successful, and resourceful. While his father and grandfathers were hard-driving and high-achieving, it was his mother, Caroline Seymour Daniels, who was the intellectual in the family. Educated in Connecticut and Vermont, she read the classics in both Latin and Greek and was always ready to engage in a lively intellectual discussion on any topic. Along with these inherited traits of intellect and temperament, Franny also had an imposing physical presence. His handsome, patrician features—longish nose, oval face, intense but kind eyes—were coupled with a resonant voice. His take-charge air became, in short, that old slippery thing we call charisma. To him life was music, well done, a performance to echo. In a sense, he embodied the traditional New England virtues of ambition, humility, and a dry wit.
With not a jot of athletic ability whatsoever, he had long, dexterous fingers that, paired with a musical talent, could fly over a piano keyboard. He was even adept enough as a musician to write a musical for the Hasty Pudding Club when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. He played the piano to accompany the cast singers and in April 1934 took the show on the road.
While the cast performed his musical, Hades! The Ladies?, he sat at the piano, playing cheerfully, nodding along, his eyes connecting with the singers to keep them in rhythm. When Eleanor Roosevelt heard that the show was on the road, she invited them to the White House for tea in the East Room. Franny played the piano while the cast sang. And since he’d looked up the Hasty Pudding show in which Franklin Roosevelt, as an undergraduate at Harvard, had played the part of a chorus girl, Franny and the cast sang some of the president’s songs. The president’s famous bellowing laugh, no doubt, roared through the White House.
As the son of one of America’s ingenious entrepreneurs, Franny didn’t have to worry that as a surgical resident he was making only twenty-five dollars a month with a wife and young children to support. Even he would admit that he had grown up spoiled: household help, chauffeurs, summer vacations in New England and Wyoming, fine cars, the best education. In the early 1900s, his father had drifted from New England to Chicago where he bought a patent for a rail anchor, known as an anticreeper, to keep a rail from rippling under the wheels of a heavy train. From that, his family became not just financially secure, but wealthy, eventually buying a large house in an affluent area outside of Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan.
At twelve, Franny had appendicitis. At fourteen, he had a busted knee. Admiring the surgeon who took care of him, he saw that few could claim such an exemplary life. He saw competence, the ability to relieve pain, and the reverence given to men of medicine. His eventual decision to become a surgeon was not grounded in ambitions that his parents had for him. He simply saw surgery as the most fascinating and rapidly advancing field of science. But he was also caught by something more difficult to describe, something that mellowed his take-charge temperament. It modulated his natural showmanship, filled him with a bottomless supply of compassion, and propelled him toward excellence—at least in her eyes: Laurie.
As if thrown off a cliff, the shock of falling in love was a force he could not control. At fifteen, he was mired in a mix of lust, the certainty of a soul mate for life, and an irreversible need to have her—not just temporarily but forever. A year younger, petite Laurie was an only child of wealthy parents. Her elfin face, short brown, wavy hair, and steady eyes spoke of a steadfast character and a ready playfulness, which Franny knew attracted not just him. Everyone fell in love with her, so he had to hurry to snap her up. Since she lived in a large house about a mile from his parents’ home, he would borrow the family car to drive there almost every night, all through high school. After a couple of years, his father said that when anyone else got behind the wheel of the car, it would automatically go to Laurie’s.
The intensity of their relationship lasted through Franny’s four years at Harvard and Laurie’s college years at Sarah Lawrence, remaining so strong that just before he began his first year of medical school, they announced they wanted to get married. No one was surprised. Marrying so early in a medical career was almost unheard of. Franny didn’t care. And his and Laurie’s parents made it financially possible.
On that night of November 28, 1942, when Laurie was home, looking after their young family, Franny was at Massachusetts General Hospital with the football radio broadcast winding down. At ten-thirty he heard the whine of a siren. Hearing a siren heading to Mass General was not uncommon. But then, he heard the whine of another, then another and another.
Quickly, he put on his white coat and ran downstairs, holding his pocket to keep his stethoscope from falling out. By the time he walked into the hall leading to the emergency room, dead bodies were lined up in rows. The smell of burned clothes and hair permeated that side of the building.
Only three years out of medical school, he was swept up in a tragedy of historic proportions. Indeed, the Cocoanut Grove fire would be one of the worst civilian disasters in American history. Going from patient to patient, overwhelmed with so many to help, he saw nurses trying to relieve the overwhelming pain of those with burns. They gave morphine freely, sometimes overdosing victims and hastening their deaths. Other nurses began writing an M in lipstick on the foreheads of patients to prevent duplicate doses of morphine.
Several hours later Franny finally learned exactly what had happened. A thousand young people had crowded into the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, most of them soldiers with their sweethearts, to celebrate the holiday break before going overseas. And to rib each other over the football scores in the title games.
The nightclub, near the center of downtown Boston, close to Boston Common, was under new management. Redecorated with imitation palm trees and drapes, it was overcrowded that night. At about ten-fifteen some of the decorations caught fire, and within five minutes the entire nightclub was an inferno. More than four hundred people died instantly. The fire, much like the fuel explosion from Charles’s crash, spread through the nightclub within seconds, stoked by the flammable drapes. It likely started in a basement lounge, possibly from a match or a cigarette. The burning decorations and drapes set off chemical reactions. Instantly, oxygen was used up in the tightly closed restaurant and carbon monoxide filled the building. Carbon monoxide poisoning turns human blood cherry pink rather than deep red. The faces of some of those who reached the hospital only minutes from dying had that deceptively healthy-looking color.
Burning wall paint and dyes in the drapes set off poisonous gases, leading to effects similar to those World War I soldiers suffered from mustard-gas poisoning. One naval officer, who made it to the hospital from the fire, ran from room to room looking for his friends and collapsed, dying from the secretions in his lungs that drowned him.
The fire department put out the flames within thirty minutes, but the tragedy was so awful that radio newscasts kept repeating the details. The public was horrified. Of the four hundred who died, a large number succumbed to suffocation so suddenly that they were found sitting at tables, unburned, rigid in death, clutching drink glasses.
Two months after the fire, Franny was still treating nine severely burned patients in the hospital. Eventually one of the nightclub owners was judged guilty of negligence and sent to prison.
While learning how to treat fluid loss, burn shock, infection, and respiratory tract injury, how to perform grafting, and how to monitor a dozen body chemicals, Franny became an expert in burn therapy. For the next five years, the navy and army funded his research with the side effect that his heroic role in the tragedy, and his guidance in preparing for other disasters, made him nationally known. And revered.
Two years later, his advancements in treating burns were known to other physicians, especially to those at the burn unit at Valley Forge. And Joe, equipped with that knowledge, was following the latest protocol for the young men who came every day, straight from the battlefields, horribly burned. Most were pilots. Most were hanging onto life by sheer will, like Charles.
This first contribution of knowledge that Franny passed on to Joe would be the lead-in to a career that would connect Charles, Franny, Joe, and a young scientist in Britain who also saw horrors of war he could never forget.