Sometime in the recent past there was a story that took place at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Here’s the promo, straight off The History Detective website:
A Colorado woman wants to know if a silver baby cup from the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, engraved with the name "Patricia", can unlock the mystery to her mother's unusual start in life.
Family lore says the Chicago Public Health Board took premature Patricia from her shoebox cradle at home and put her in an incubator at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. But why were babies exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair?
History Detectives learns about the forgotten doctor who brought life saving incubator technology to the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
The story itself was amazing, but what was more amazing to me was that at least five years earlier I had read “The Hatbox Baby.” a novel set in this same time and place. Watching History Detectives brought back the recollection of that book. So I borrowed the Synopsis of that book from Barnes and Noble’s website here:
On a sweltering summer morning in 1933, a baby is delivered in a hatbox to the Century of Progress Exposition - the World's Fair - in Chicago.
This very tiny baby, born three months early, is brought by his desperate young father to the fair's famous baby doctor, Leo Hoffman, to be saved. Dr. Hoffman - part showman, part scientist - finances his neonatal research by exhibiting a collection of live premature babies in their incubators. His "Infantorium," with its giant test-tube fountain spouting pink-and-blue water and its pair of wading storks, attracts huge, gawking crowds every sultry day.
At the fair, a place of freaks and marvels, mysteries, miracles - and even murders - the notion of what is "normal" and what is not comes into questions daily. And before the summers ends and the fair closes, a number of remarkable persons will invest heavily in this fragile baby's life: Dr. Hoffman; his registered nurses; his wet nurses; the baby's spinster aunt; Caroline Day, the beautiful fan dancer and another of the fair's biggest attractions; and a dwarflike sideshow barker named St. Louis Percy, the fan dancer's cousin, manager, and bodyguard, whose stake in the hatbox baby's future becomes the most serious of all.
Inspired by the real life and work of a pioneering neonatologist, Carrie Brown once again delights us with a richly imagined story about the transforming power of love.
So today’s blog is to encourage you to watch History Detectives if you haven’t done so already; for genealogists it really gives us a look at in-depth research and makes us wish that money were no object for travel to research sites. The blog also is to recommend this most-unusual book “The Hatbox Baby” which has to be one of the loveliest books I’ve read in a long time.
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