Norburn Hospital, 346 Montford Ave., Asheville, NC
Ewart M. Ball Photographic Collection, balln1317
D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville, 28804
Tape I ; Side I
Silveri: Ok doctor, I'd just like to start with where you were born, and when.
Norburn: I was born March 7, 1893 in Danville, Virginia. My parents brought me to
Asheville in 1901. [Died: November 27, 1989]
Silveri: Were your parents born in Danville, Virginia?
Norburn: My father was born in England. He was brought over here when he was a
child, and was reared partly in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Then his parents
came south and he, in the course of time, was in business with his father
there. They had a great business, and the Norburn home in Danville,
Virginia was on Norburn Hill. It had been built by one of the railroad
presidents. When I was born in '93, the Depression wrecked their business, and
wrecked the health of my father. His father, at the age of 46, contracted
pneumonia and died from it.
Silveri: What business were they in?
Norburn: Tobacco, and they had several other businesses.
Silveri: Now, you mention your father. Did your father come over before the Civil
War or after the Civil War?
Norburn: After the Civil War. He came here, to Asheville, in '98, on account of his
health, and made several trips back and forth, and then the family decided to
move up here. And so we came up in 1901. Now, my mother's forbearers
came back before revolutionary days. They settled in Danville,
Virginia. She has a very large family tree which my sister Martha can show
you when you visit her. They've got large connections, but there are very
few Norburns in the land. My father had an uncle who went out west, and
Norburn, Missouri is named after him. [Martha Meade, later Martha White]
Silveri: What was your mother's maiden name?
Norburn: Susan Lillian Strickland. Her mother's name was Martha Hunt Clark.
Silveri: Your mother's ancestors were here before the revolutionary war?
Norburn: Yes. She had a number of relatives that were in the revolutionary war.
Silveri: Now, when the family moved to Asheville in 1901, you were 8 years old?
Norburn: Yes.
Silveri: What do you remember about that trip, and coming here? Could you recall
any of it?
Norburn: I remember the description on the riverbank that we could see, particularly the
Catawba River, and that impressed me very much. We lived for a few months
in a hotel on what is now Biltmore Avenue. In the course of time, we moved
to a place on Charlotte Street, on up Charlotte and Blair. That place has
changed since then. At that time, from where the Manor was, the Unitarian
Church, so on, was all farm land. One of my teachers in Asheville was Miss
Mary Kimberly. Her father had been a professor down at the University of
North Carolina. He came up here to teach the natives how to farm. He
bought the land from Merrimon Avenue to the top of the mountain, east.
Kimberly Avenue now just about divides his farm. At the time I knew the
family, Miss Mary and her sister Alice were teaching school, and using all of
their money to pay taxes. They had two brothers. One was a farmer
and the other got back into business. Coal business, I believe. The
Asheville Country Club used to be on the west right hand part of College Street,
right near the Wachovia bank, right across there. The opening that was to
the club is still there. One of those shops. The Asheville Country
club paid them $1000 an acre for that land, and that started them off
fine. Grove came along and bought the bulk of it, and Grove Park Inn was
built later on. They had most of their money in the central bank
here. The Central Bank failed in the late 20's or early 30's...I guess it
was the early 30's. They lost heavily. But their brother John had
invested his available money in large acreage near Charleston, SC. One of
the nieces of my teacher, Miss Mary, never married. Neither did her sister
Alice, nor her sister Rebecca, who took care of the home. Their brother
John, the other one was David...she must have had three brothers...there was
David and another one. David just did what he could. He raised an
interesting family of three [four] girls and a boy. [One daughter was
Marguerite Kimberly (Mrs. Piercy) Carter: see VOA Marguerite Carter Oral
History] The boy, Dr. David Kimberly,
practiced medicine down at Hot Springs. His sister [Dr. David Kimberly's
sister, David Kimberly's daughter] Elizabeth married Pete
Schoenheit [nephew of Dr. Karl Von Ruck, founder of Winyah Sanitarium for the
treatment of tuberculosis]. If you haven't interviewed Schoenheit, Dr. Pete
Schoenheit, he can give you a good resume of the history of this country.
He is a competent person. [1927 Asheville City Directory: Edward W.
Schoenheit, medical director of Winyah Sanatorium, Spears av at end Mt Clare av]
Silveri: Let's get back to when you came to Asheville. Do you remember the first
school you attended in Asheville? What was the name of it?
Norburn: The school...I attended two...Montford Avenue, which has been changed to
Randolph. I was there for the best of a year. Then Orange Street,
which has been demolished and the state highway has their offices there at
present.
Silveri: Was that the high school you went to? The last one you mentioned?
Norburn: Well, no. I went to the fourth grade there. We moved out to the
country. Doctors told my father the best thing for him and the rest of us
was to get out of the city. One summer we were east of Asheville, and then
we bought a place out here west of Asheville, of 20 acres. I went to Sand
Hill High School there. That's where we lived most of my life until we
came into the city in '32.
Silveri: What year did you graduate from high school?
Norburn: 1916.
Silveri: What did Asheville look like in those early years when you were going to school
here? Can you describe it? Was the old Battery Park Hotel still in
existence?
Norburn: Asheville had two or three groups of people. There was the Vanderbilts and
their circle, those who knew the Vanderbilts, and those who knew of the
Vanderbilts. The Battery Park Hotel was the center of things, of the
people, of the city, and below the Vanderbilt hotel was a marble terrace.
The aristocratic part of Asheville was Cumberland Avenue, in Montford
section. Out there on Montford Avenue, Maurice DuPont lived. [1915
Asheville City Directory: Maurice and Margery DuPont, Miss Charlotte, author,
200 Montford Ave.] And on
Cumberland Avenue Roebling, the builder of the Brooklyn Bridge lived. And
Roebling had two boys, Paul and Siegfried. [John A. Roebling, the builder
of the Brooklyn Bridge, was the great grandfather of Paul and Siegfried.
His son Washington A. Roebling had a son John A. Roebling II, who had three
sons: Siegfried, Paul (1893-1918), and Donald.] And in the course of time,
Charlotte DuPont and Paul were sweethearts and planned to be married. My
brother Charles used to run with Paul a good deal, and my sister knew Charlotte,
so through them I happened to know about that match-to-be. [Terrell] came
along, and Paul died of the flu. Charlotte's mother took her on a trip
around the world, and they came back on the west coast. Her mother got her
used to the...oh, what's that well-known gun-maker...Gatlin?
Silveri: Yes.
Norburn: Gatlin. And the story came to me that this young Gatlin
man and Charlotte were out driving, and she turned him down in marriage, or
something. And he just pulled out a gun and stuck it in his mouth, and
committed suicide before her. Well, that finished her. We lost all
track of her. Now, to backtrack, Roebling bought what is now Lake View
Park, and part of the property that belongs to the University out there.
Anyway, part of that property was the Kimberly property. They had horses
out there in the city, and millions of flowers. My brother used to make
his change in the summertime by killing the flies, and they would pay him a
penny a dozen, or something like that. Occasionally one of us would find a
turtle, and they would pay us fifty cents for the turtle and take it out to the
pond. Paul was a brilliant young man. He built the Haywood building,
which was one of the best-built buildings in Asheville, and still a very useful
building there. After his death, Siegfried came down here to close out
the estate and we had a group of five overseers that took him in charge and told
how Paul was such a playboy and the Haywood building was a bad investment, that
this property out there on Lake View Park would be no good. And so they got
all the right property for a song, and went on and developed Lake View
Park. It made them all wealthy, until their bank, the Central Bank,
crashed, and they lost it. When we decided that it would be best for us to
move into Asheville and get off that road, that was so congested after Enka was
built in the '30's, we considered buying property in Lake View Park because that
was near the hospital in the northern part of Asheville. [1932 Asheville
City Directory: Lake View Park, a sub-division around Beaver Lake, north of
city, just beyond Grace on Merrimon Ave.] --We went out there
and the biggest home out there had been built by Wallace Davis. He was in
prison at that time,= [served 2 ½ years of a 5-7 year sentence for banking law
violations; parolled by Gov. Ehringhaus in 1935, pardoned in 1937], and then we looked out at another place there from the
house we considered buying. And there was Rankin's house. [1929
Asheville City Directory: Arthur E. Rankin, president of American National Bank,
home West Avon Parkway, Lakeview Park] He was
the president of one of these banks that failed, and had committed
suicide. [Feb. 17, 1931] So much of our property was involved in that scandal.
Dispossession of the Roebling estate, so we decided to come out here and bought
the place where Martha lived in 1932. [in Biltmore Forest. 1931
Asheville City Directory, Mrs. John H. Powell, 16 Stuyvesant Rd. ; 1935
Asheville City Directory: Dr. Russell L. Norburn, 16 Stuyvesant Rd.]
Silveri: When did Biltmore Forest begin to be built?
Norburn: The later '20's. This place was built up, and it was built
up largely for retired, wealthy people. During the Depression, they
realized they would have to cut up some of these lots and permit less-expensive
buildings to be built. And so the nature of the place changed after the Depression.
Silveri: Yes, we'll come back to that later on. Let's go back to
when you graduated from high school. What did you do after that?
What did you do after you graduated from high school?
Norburn: Well, at that time I was farming, and continued to farm until
1917. I had an opportunity to enter school, so I seized it, and went to
the University of North Carolina.
Silveri: OK, what were you going to study there? Had you made up
your mind what you wanted to study, or what your career...
Norburn: I had made up my mind that I was going to study medicine, so I
took a premedical course.
Silveri: Now, how did you decide on that? Family, or what? How
did you decide on studying medicine? Why did you want to study medicine?
Norburn: At the time we came to Asheville, this was a Tuberculosis
center. I had lost an older brother from it in 1916, [crying] and I was
particularly interested in that. Then it seemed to be in the blood.
I think my brother and myself are about the ninth generation of doctors on my
mother's side.
Silveri: Your brother became a doctor too?
Norburn: Yes.
Silveri: So you went to Chapel Hill, and what were the requirements
there? What did you do, go to four years of college, and then medical
school for two years, or four years, or what?
Norburn: At that time, you could enter some of these medical schools with
less, and I started out with the intention of taking a full academic course, but
was drafted out in the spring of '18, when...everybody got panicky, and they
came back here and drafted me out. When I came back the help that we had
used on the farm was out here on strike at Oteen Hospital. They had been
paid about 75 cents or a dollar a day farming, and they were being paid a big
wage there, 7 or 8 dollars, and they were all on strike. It was up to me
to either return to farming or go into the service. We had just lost my
brother the year before and my other brother was in service, so I decided to
continue to farm, and I farmed there until January of '19, when I returned to
school, with the idea of finishing school. But I never did take four years
of academic work because it was unnecessary, and I was getting along in
years. I entered medical school in '21, and when I graduated I was
32. While I graduated late, I was mature in many ways, and my brother was
an outstanding surgeon. With him, we had the largest practice in this
area.
Silveri: As soon as you graduated from med school, you came back home and
opened an office in Asheville?
Norburn: Yes.
Silveri: I see. I wanted to back for just a little while. You
mentioned a family farm. Where was it, in West Asheville? And what
was produced on the farm?
Norburn: Well, the best paying crops were vegetables, and we had chickens
and cows also.
Silveri: How many acres was it?
Norburn: 20 acres. Silveri: Ok, when you were at Chapel Hill, was
there any controversy going on over homeopathy, the homeopathic way of
practicing medicine...
Norburn: I just heard the name. It wasn't in general use.
There were two or three doctors here in Asheville that were still using it, but
I think they were changing over to more modern methods.
Silveri: When you came back to Asheville, were you in general practice
here? You were in the general practice of medicine? Norburn: Well,
I've turned my hand to most everything, in general, but I finally became
familiar with, working with my brother I developed into a very successful
surgeon. There were no orthopedic surgeons in Asheville when I started to
practice, and we did our own fracture work. The later '20's or early
'30's...early '30's I guess, I went to the Massachusetts General Hospital and
took a course. Smith Peterson was a leader in pinning hips. I found
out how he did it, and when I came back here from then on, I would pin
hips. One series from the time the first patient came until that was
completed, I had nine fractured hips. Then it was March of another year or
two before I saw another fractured hip. I can understand how you can have
a run of measles or whooping cough, but I never could understand why fractures
were running like that, where you have a number of fractured legs, then no
fractured legs for a while, fractured arms, and so forth. I took care of
most of the fractures. My brother was busy with other things. We
were up against a proposition here that the old physicians had control over the
small hospitals, and we had no place to put our patients at times. And
then when we could get them in the hospitals, we had trouble getting them in
operating rooms. The older men would have the say-so. We went into
the hospital business largely as a necessity. We opened a hospital in
April of '28. In six months we doubled the capacity. Then in the mid
'30's, we enlarged again.
Silveri: It was named after Sammy. Norburn Hospital.
Norburn: Then, after the war in '46, this place was for sale, and it was
going to be bought for commercial purposes. We jumped into it, got some
help from my wife's family. Up to that time we hadn't had a dollar's help
from any other outside source, but we got some help there and opened this
hospital, and ran it for years.
Silveri: Was this one located at the same place? Norburn:
Yes. You can take this along with you. It gives a little history of
it. Things became more complicated. We would get nurses there, and
Oteen would take our nurses, or some other government agency...the aviation
people. We could match their salaries, but we couldn't match their
hours. At least the patients couldn't pay it. We just about lost
everything we had in that experience. Silveri: Is that building still
standing today? Norburn: Yes, its the southern part of the Mission
Memorial Hospital, that's still in use. Silveri: I see. Norburn:
But they have built a multi-million dollar hospital in front of it. But
it's part of the Mission Memorial Hospital. After this was printed, we got
35 more acres of land down there, and had over 50 acres there of land with
that. We got too heavily involved, and as I said, patients couldn't pay in
that day and time, and if it had been later we may have still been in the
hospital business. At the time I started to practice medicine here, the
county of Buncombe didn't pay one dollar for indigent patients. The city
paid 75 dollars to the Mission Hospital. Later that was increased to 100,
I think, but they wouldn't pay any county patients in the surrounding
counties. In particular Madison, and the counties north, would send
patients in here and they wouldn't pay a dollar. Those people couldn't
meet their expenses. Well, how on earth we made it was a miracle, but we
took care of over 33,000 bed cases here. The Mission Memorial took it over
and that closed the Biltmore Hospital and the colored hospital. Our
hospital made four combined hospitals there. Our experience there saved
that site from the Memorial Hospital. The Mission Hospital at that time
had been given 10 acres of land in Chunn's Cove by Mrs. Seely [Evelyn (Mrs.
Fred) Seely]. And the
ones who used it in building that hospital had gone so far as to have the ground
tested for the building. It would've been a most unfortunate thing if they
had built over there, with this tunnel situation, you see. Silveri: Tell
me, were you ever called out into the mountains, in some of the remote counties
out here to practice medicine? Norburn: I did that for the
first year, yes. After we got our hospital going, I didn't do that often,
but occasionally I did, as time would permit. For some reason I was able
to put in many hours a day, and when I wasn't busy at the hospital I would make
calls. Silveri: What were some of your comments about the extent of
health care way up in the mountains. It was pretty lacking in those years,
wasn't it? Did the mountain people get enough health care? Norburn:
Well, the big problems here were bad teeth. Later on, I got interested in
that and I think that the ones that remembered about it had realized that my
activity in helping fluoridation moved it ahead several years. And my son,
Russell Lee, was the one that put it across finally, with the help of a number
of citizens here. Silveri: Asheville's water has been fluoridated for a
number of years, hasn't it? Norburn: Yes. Silveri:
Did you know the Wolfe family when you were practicing medicine? Norburn:
Tom Wolfe was in the University of North Carolina during part of the time I was
there, and I saw him, and knew him. My sister Martha was in a private
school here with his sister Mabel, and she knows more about it than I do.
I just knew Tom. At that time I was busy with my work of getting through
school, and I didn't have any time to run around much. Another thing was
that Tom, to me, appeared to be kind of a lone wolf, you know? Quite a
character. Silveri: So you knew him both at Chapel Hill and in
Asheville? Norburn: Yes. Silveri: Were you upset when you read
his book? Look Homeward, Angel? Did that anger you? Norburn:
I've only read part of it, I've never found time to read it all. Silveri:
Well, there's quite a controversy about it in Asheville, isn't there? Norburn:
Very much of a controversy. Very much. And it was several years
before he was persuaded to come back here. I think he came back before he
passed. Silveri: Yes, I'm sure he did. When did you first
meet Reuben Robertson? Norburn: Well, it was in the '30's I met
him. My brother began to do the surgical work for the accident cases, [for
Champion Paper company] and
in the course of time I met Mr. Robertson during the '30's or early '40's.
There was Sam Logan [Robertson], who used to visit the hospital on Montford Avenue, and
stayed on the third floor there during the summertime. It was there that I
met his father, and later on I met their daughter, Mr. Robertson's daughter,
Hope, whom I married in 1939. Silveri: You mentioned that your
patients had a hard time paying their hospital bills during the '30's. And
you remember the crash that hit Asheville, when all the banks failed and so on,
you were talking about that a little while ago. Remember when all the
banks failed in Asheville? In 1928 and '29 the banks failed and the mayor
committed suicide, and then the Depression hit and for the whole 1930's it was
tough times for everybody. Norburn: Yes. Silveri: What about
FDR? What are your comments about Franklin Roosevelt? Do you think
he did good for the country? Norburn: I think that Franklin Roosevelt
gave the people of America another chance to make our capitalistic system
work. It was an unfortunate thing that he didn't seize the opportunity to
correct our monetary system. He had the opportunity, but he did many good
things. I think that he rallied the nation to hope of the future, and then
got the allies together for the defeat of the central powers. He was a
main leader there. He and Churchill made a very good team and they
rendered many services. Among his good things that was done was the
building of the place Oak Ridge in Tennessee, that enabled us to have control of
atomic energy. Then this social security business is a great step
forward. The aged were in a dickens of a fix back in the time I started
practicing medicine, and they do have something now, to fall back on, most of
them, and in the course of time all of them will. Silveri: Did you vote
for Roosevelt in 1932? Norburn: I voted for Roosevelt four times.
I didn't agree with everything that he did, but I voted for him four
times. The reason I didn't vote for him five times was he didn't run. Silveri:
How about politics in the family? Was your family republican or democrat
when you were growing up? Norburn: They were democrats, but we tried to
vote for the best person. Now, in '28 I thought I knew it all, and I voted
for Hoover. And I took my mother and father to the polls with me to vote
that day, and my mother stated on the way home that she knew her parents would
turn over in their grave if she voted the Republican ticket, so she voted for
Smith but prayed for Hoover. Silveri: [Laughs] That's
a good story. Very good. Al Smith lost almost the whole south. Norburn:
It was a great mistake that he wasn't elected. People just didn't
appreciate the fact that he could make circles around Hoover. Smith had
been three or four times governor of New York, and he was a very versatile
man. He knew the political situation and what the money people wanted, and
after the election he went ahead and built the Empire State Building. He
was one of America's greatest characters, but he butchered the English language,
and from the east side there, the sophisticated Democrats couldn't stomach him. Silveri:
How about the question of religion? That didn't bother you at all?
The fact that he was a Catholic was no bother as far as you were concerned, or
was it? Norburn: Well, of course that may have made some difference, but
I think the main thing was that he couldn't speak good English. And he was
considered an inferior person from east side New York. Silveri: I wanted
to ask you about race relations in the south. You were born a southerner,
you were born in Virginia, you lived all your life in the south, and there has
always been the problem of race relations between the whites and the blacks over
the years. How did you view that problem? Norburn: Well, I think
that the thing would have worked out if some of the whites had minded their own
business. It was being worked out. I had relatives that had freed
slaves, and they all realized that the thing was on the way out,
economically. The north had gotten rid of theirs through economics.
It was hardly the way out in the south. It was just a group there in
Washington and the north that didn't understand the problems we had down
here. Of course there were injustices done to the blacks. But I
think I could point out two to one the injustices that were done to the poor
whites. Silveri: Right. Good point. Norburn:
The way has been hard; it has just made a mess of the whole
business. Silveri: Well, FDR came along, and the New Deal
programs were supposed to help both the blacks and the poor whites. And
from that time on there has been greater hope for those two classes, I think, in
the south. Norburn: The congress passed a bill to issue 3 billion
dollars in United States note and pay the governors their bonus. Instead
of doing that the bank persuaded FDR to let them handle it. In my
opinion, the issue of money as done through the federal bank of this country, is
the greatest evil we've got, and it's the root of much of our crime. Would
you like for me to go back a little on that? Silveri: Yes. Norburn:
I'm interested in it because it has injured so many people that I know, and
since my retirement from medicine I have been working on it. Briefly, I'll
go into it. The so-called "dark ages", the environment that
produced the greatest people we know about during the Renaissance, Toynbee
[author Arnold Toynbee] states that in his opinion, civilization reached its zenith about the sixteenth
century. Since then, it's been going down. You can go back to your
history and see the many fine men that came along about that time, that have
contributed so much to civilization, they were more interested in the individual
than in the making of profits. In 1693, William III of England, in order
to carry on his war with France and maintain his expensive courts, he sold the
right to issue the money of the people of England to a pirate by the name of
William Patterson. Patterson, with some other financiers, started the bank
of England, and his theory was that he was entitled to all of the profit.
The bank would be entitled to all the profit they could make out of
nothing. That led to the American Revolution. The historians have
covered it up, but it was the main prime cause of the American Revolution.
Benjamin Franklin said the colonists would have paid the taxes if they had the
money. It was the concerted effort of the Bank of England that caused
it. After winning the economic freedom, Alexander Hamilton was the front
of the bankers in giving a prerogative for state to the financiers. The
issue of money is one thing. Banking is another. I think bankers are
doing the best they can with a law that is defeating itself. Jefferson
said that the ones that seized the economic freedom won by the war of
independence were traitors. I think time has proved it. The
inexperienced congress of Alexander Hamilton's days and today's congress are all
blind to the fact, apparently, that the issue of money is a prerogative for
state, and they've got no more right to give it to financiers, than to give the
department of justice to the lawyers, or the treasury department to collecting
agencies. Our experience with the post office in the past two years ought
to open people's eyes to the fact that the government should develop the
integrity and character to run their business, and that they can do it.
That's the big object. Our government here is to develop people.
Instead of that, we've got a regulatory agency that is slanted for creditor
interest, and is run by people of criminal minds. They are
criminals! They are ordinary law breakers, and if people don't realize it,
we've got to realize that the issue of money is a prerogative of state, and
these people have seized it and they are holding it. They are supported by
the churches and big businesses, and the thing is going to bankrupt this
country. Not only bankrupt it, but lead it into some form of
totalitarianism, something on the order of what they've got in China. This
can't continue. We've got a little breathing spell now, on account of tax
cuts and so on, but every time the government borrows more money for deficit
spending, it lowers the value of the dollar. Silveri: So, if I
understand what you are saying, the federal reserve system should not issue
money, even though it is a government agency? Norburn: Well, it's rigged
for creditor interest. It's under the control of private enterprise.
The president or the congress can't tell them what to do. It's all
slanted. Now, England and this country, and the leaders of the world for
the past 200 years, and all the other countries have the same system. And
if it worked it would be one thing, but it's not working. We are
developing a gang of criminals, the worst the world has ever known. Silveri:
Now, does this system hurt everybody, or just a certain class of people, or
what? Norburn: Well, I think that the system just permeates
everybody. I still like to feel that basically the majority of Americans
are reasonably honest. But self-preservation is the law of nature.
We've got that law of nature, we've got the Christian philosophy, and I'm not an
orthodox Christian, but I think there's a great deal to religion. Religion
is doing something for your fellow man. If you're exploiting, you're not,
in my opinion, the type of citizen that is developing this country. Now we
have made great progress, but when you consider we are 3 trillion dollars in
debt, and things going bad to worse, crime going from bad to worse...when I was
in my teens, nobody that I knew of locked their doors at night. At the
University of North Carolina, I was down there for three years, no one locked
their doors until the last year I was there. A bunch of folks came in just
for Christmas and went into the various rooms and robbed the students, so they
put locks on the doors. But it was happening then. I got interested
in this on account of an experience my family has had. My father told me
about it. Then after I got a breathing spell I began to write on it.
And the first thing I got out was this...twelve or fifteen hundred of that [Not
sure what he is referring to...]. Patman, who had read this, telephoned me
to come up there to testify in '64, and at the time he telephoned me I was out
in one of these trailers during some medical project polio business, treating
folks for that, and so I called him up and they sent me a bunch of stuff and
wrote me, that they needed me to come up, and they let me know when I had my
article written, I'd be ready to testify. So I notified him, and he said
to send up copies, and he let me know. Then the next thing I knew they
said that they would use this in closing the hearings. I don't know how
many copies have been made, but Liberty Lobby made a demand to put this out, and
this is copied in here, verbatim, and the first line of this paperback was fifty
thousand. I bet you over a million of these have been distributed and
copied in other things. Let me see where this is...it's in here somewhere
[shuffles through papers]...here it is. Liberty Lobbies backed this man,
and that's the same thing as that. Silveri: Chapter 18 in the book The
Federal Reserve Bank, by H. S. Kennen, written in 1966. So your
comments about the system before congress in 1964 appear in chapter 18 of this
book. Norburn: Yes. Silveri: Ok. Fine. Very
good. Now, is this another book here that you have? Norburn: My
brother and I got this out on it. Silveri: This is called Mankind's
Greatest Step: A New Monetary System, by Charles Norburn and Russell
Norburn. Norburn: Yes. Silveri: Is your brother still alive? Norburn:
Yes. Silveri: Your brother was, as seen by the jacket, Navy surgeon
during WWI. I guess you and he were associated together, right? Norburn:
Yes. Silveri: Mankind's Greatest Step: A New Monetary System. Now
you're proposing a new monetary system for America, or generally speaking? Norburn:
Well, America is what we are interested in, but the whole western world is going
to have to come around to it because all of them are run on the same principle
with various government controls. Now, England nationalized the bank of
England in '46, but it's under private control, what amounts to private control,
still. Now, for instance, one of our biggest debts is the public debt of
500, and its been raised to 577 billion now. The public debt for this year
will be 30 billion dollars. Well, that goes to financiers and money people
up in their hole who ought to have enough there for belief in our system to
invest in private enterprise. If not, to be able to save their money and
when they need it in ten years, for it to have the same purchasing power.
In the past 10 years, money has decreased in value nearly two thirds.
Yesterday I saw a man, who originally came from England. This man that,
his wife was one of my patients, and I was her guardian for over 25 years.
Now he had one of the lesser official jobs of the southern railroad back in
'47. That is when he made $2,980, but the tax that year was nearly $500. Silveri:
Yes. Norburn: This man said that this man today would be making an
income of $15,000. It just shows how the thing has skyrocketed all the way
along. Now, this fellow with that income paid a state income tax of
$52.51. This is a copy of what he had. I noticed here that two life
insurance companies that he had life insurance with, he had borrowed from both,
and he had to give them up before he died. The engineers have a strong
union, at that time they probably made more than that...I don't remember.
But I've got this record, you see. Silveri: I'd like to ask you a
question about this book that you co-authored with your brother, Mankind's
Greatest Step. On the inside it says: informateur, [William Powell],
bishop of [Andigarnish], Nova Scotia, Canada. What does that mean on
there? It says informateur, that's usually what's done by the catholic
church in works written on dogma of the church. Norburn: I don't
know. Now, we jumped...this book was sabotaged at least people from
various parts of the United States wrote me that they had ordered this book and
couldn't get it. The publisher wouldn't supply it to them. And they
ran out of the first edition. We took it up and through the little
business folks we got after them and they printed a few hundred more, and this
is one of the last ones they printed. And what that means I don't
know. It's not in the other books, I'm quite sure, but this was still the
last that they printed. That's not in the original books. Silveri:
I see. [break in tape] Silveri: You remember Father
Coughlin [Father
Charles Coughlin]
during the New Deal? You remember listening to him on the radio? He
was for monetary reform. Norburn: Oh yes, very much. I have had
correspondence with him. He, one of his friends wrote me not too long ago,
he's not so well at present. But I remember his voice very well.
I've got a friend in Florida, formerly lived in New York, he's a devout
catholic, and he's very much for monetary reform. And then there's a
number of them out in Wisconsin, I've been in correspondence with, and they are
for it also. But officially of the church, they have taken no action that
I know of. Silveri: Well maybe we can get back to where we kind of left
off before, in the 1930's. Did the Depression hit Asheville very hard? Norburn:
Absolutely. You see, the failure of the Central Bank took nearly 40
million dollars of city and county funds. And there were over five
thousand pieces of property listed for sale for taxes in the fall of '33.
That's a good many people for a town of that size, and that day. We had
quite a number of failures here, our ash of fires. I know I just wouldn't
insure any of the buildings owned by Jews [laughs]. We have, however, some
very substantial fine Jews of this city. They are good people. Silveri:
Well, there wasn't too much industry in the area back then, was there? Norburn:
Not immediately, in or around Asheville. There were several large
companies away, Champion being the largest, and Enka, of course, had just come
in in the latter '20's. But in the city itself, there were no large
industries that I remember. Silveri: Ok. So, Asheville had a
difficult time in the '30's getting along? Norburn: Very much. Silveri:
Ok. But as far as you're concerned, your practice went along pretty well,
right? Norburn: We made money off of people coming to us from outside
the city, and lost on our city patients. We had patients come to us from
Cuba, Guatemala, Nevada and different states. The Champion patients on the
whole were able to pay their expenses through time deduction. They
couldn't pay it all right off, but they would give orders to deduct 2 to 5
dollars a week from their wages, you see. And that was very helpful.
We had an experience with our industrial workers that may be of interest to
you. In '28 we had a number of these industries surrounding this area,
that would send their worst injured cases to us. The insurance adjusters
would tell us to do everything for them possible, they didn't want a man to go
before a jury with a bad hand, for instance. In '29 the North Carolina
Industrial Commission was implemented, and they went in to reduce the medical
expenses. Well, of course there were some doctor's charges out of line
then, but when it came to fees set by a hospital board, that was a different
thing. The North Carolina Industrial Commission was very ruthless in
regard to their bills, and it hit us hard because we had been dependent on their
industrial work to stabilize our hospital. For instance, we would keep a
patient over there five days. The Industrial Commission would cut that in
half. I thought it was kind of a personal thing, but I rode around all
over the state and found that was being done in a hundred hospitals that I
communicated with. They were very ruthless, both with the hospitals and
the doctors. We had an armor adjuster and a patient, and when he got so he
could talk after his appendectomy, he told me that armor and company expected to
pay routine charges, but when the Industrial Commission cut their bills, they
couldn't do anything about it, it was a misdemeanor to pay the difference.
He said, I've just been down to Charlotte, where we had a case and the
Industrial Commission cut it, and he said we didn't feel like it was
right. That North Carolina had probably the best industrial law, workman's
compensation law in the union. But in his opinion, it ended up by paying
the least. Well, it antagonized the hospitals and doctors of this
state. I don't know that anyone, where life was threatened, turned a
patient down, but they began not to want to treat these cases in surrounding
states. For instance, Carolina Power and Light sent a crew of men down to
South Carolina on a job and one got injured there. The hospitals of South
Carolina wouldn't admit him. Doctors began to not want to take them.
Wouldn't take them in some cases. There were some doctors who wanted them,
but some that would not. And that enabled them to be more effable in
paying for these cases. I have in my files records that show that for 20
years, the insurance companies made more money out of the premium dollar than
were paid to the hospitals, doctors, nurses, rehabilitation programs of these
patients. Silveri: Well, in 1941, of course, the rumblings
in Europe and the attack on Pearl Harbor and the second World War began.
What did you do during the second World War? Did you carry on your work in
Asheville as a doctor? Norburn: Yes, I carried on. Some board
wanted me to go someplace down the railroad junction, but we had more work than
we were able to do, so I remained here in Asheville with my brother, looking
after patients in their own hospitals. Occasionally we would have one in
another hospital, but most of them were right in our own hospital. We
closed our office uptown, and concentrated all of our energy into taking care of
patients there. As a consequence, as I've mentioned, over a period of a
relative few years, the hospital took care of over 33,000 bed patients.
They were not all our patients, but most of them were. Silveri:
Ok. You were too old to be drafted in the second World War, right? Norburn:
Yes. Silveri: The same with your brother, too. Is your brother
older or younger? Norburn: Older. He's nearly three years
older. Silveri: Did you ever do any teaching, as a
doctor? Well, there's no medical schools in this area, in Western North
Carolina. Norburn: I never did any teaching. When I was going to
school at Chapel Hill, I was a laboratory assistant of Dr. Wilson, and also of
Dr. Patterson, but my work for Patterson was mainly grading books, examination
books. While I was at Vanderbilt, they needed someone to teach some
English to the last dental class, and they gave me that job. It would come
after 4:00, and the students of the class, it was a very large class, hadn't
finished that work in their home schools, had to do it in order to meet some
standard of the dental association. And I did that for, I don't know if it
was a full year or a half a year. I think it was a full year. Silveri:
What were you doing at Vanderbilt? Norburn: Well, I was a medical
student there. I was four years at medicine in Vanderbilt. Silveri:
Oh, you went from Chapel Hill to Vanderbilt. You got your medical degree
at Vanderbilt? Norburn: All of my medical courses were taken at
Vanderbilt. Silveri: And did they have internships then? After you
graduated from medical college, did you go right into practice or did you have
an internship? Norburn: I went as part of the surgical interns from June
until December of '25. I came home in the last part of '25 and joined my
brother here. Silveri: It's very interesting, I've heard a lot about
Reuben Robertson, who was your father-in-law, right? And the founder of
Champion Paper Company? Norburn: Yes. Silveri: I'm very
interested in what you can tell me about Reuben Robertson, and how he started
out. Norburn: I didn't quite understand... Silveri: I'm
interested in the career of Reuben Robertson, your father-in-law. I'm
interested in how he started the company and when, and how it progressed, and so
on. Norburn: Well, the company was started by Peter G. Thompson, the
father of his wife, and in 1909, his father needed someone down here, and so he
got Mr. Robertson, his son-in-law to come down with his wife and baby girl, whom
I later married. And he was a very successful manager of the
Champion. During the Depression, the Champion was really the one that
carried the Champion Paper Company through the Depression. They had some
very efficient workers up here, and Mr. Robertson got the contract for the paper
for the post cards of the government, and some of the other government
contracts, and shifted around. It was this Champion branch that really
carried the whole caboodle. And then later the park took over a large
boundary of their timber, and he, with the others, reinvested the money in Texas
and built a mill down there. That's been quite a paying investment.
[In the City Directory of 1947, Norburn Hospital had moved from 346 Montford
Avene to 509 Biltmore Avenue. 1950 was the last City Directory to list Norburn
Hospital. In 1951 509 Biltmore Avenue houses the Victoria Unit of Memorial
Mission Hospital. Memorial Mission even kept the phone number used the
previous year by Norburn Hospital. The Asheville City Directory of
1951 lists Memorial Mission Hospital of WNC, Inc. with a unit on the corner of
Charlotte and Woodfin, a unit in Biltmore, and a Victoria Unit at 509 Biltmore
Ave. The Colored Hospital was still in existence at 185 Biltmore Avenue in
1951.]
In 1953, the Biltmore Unit of Memorial Mission and the Colored Hospital are
no longer listed, but there is still a unit of Memorial Mission at the corner of
Charlotte and Woodfin [streets].
In 1954 Memorial Mission had consolidated all its services to the facility on
Biltmore Avenue.] |
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