Baca County has always been farm country, and in the fall of 1931 Springfield was talking about a rather unusual harvest. It wasn’t wheat, broomcorn or feed. This time the crop was tonsils and adenoids, and before it was over, some 400 people had reportedly undergone operations at a free clinic in Springfield.

The story has nearly everything one could want from an old Baca County newspaper account: hundreds of operations, doctors and nurses working in a mortuary, a local drugstore running out of ether, and an airplane dispatched to bring more from Denver. It also belongs among the stories of Baca County in the Dust Bowl decade. The great black dusters were still a few years away, but the Depression had arrived, and the people of southeastern Colorado were already finding ways to get by with the money, buildings, equipment and people they had available.

The clinic was sponsored by the American Legion and the Baca County Parent-Teachers Association. Seven doctors, along with nurses and other assistants, reportedly took part. A photograph published in Springfield’s Democrat-Heraldshows some of the crew dressed in surgical gowns: Dr. D. L. Burlingame, Mrs. Hyde, Miss Carlson, Dr. William H. Fickel, Katherine Becker, Mr. Millard, Mrs. Rushing and Mrs. Harry Glover. The photograph, credited to the Denver Post, described them as some of the doctors and nurses who had helped in “harvesting tonsils.”

That bit of farm humor apparently traveled. By October 1, 1931, the Greenville Advocate in Greenville, Illinois, was telling its readers that Springfield had produced a “record crop of tonsils and adenoids” when 400 people had them removed. Under the headline “COLORADO COUNTY HAS TONSIL-ADENOID HARVEST,” the Illinois newspaper called the whole affair a “regular surgical carnival.”

Perhaps the detail most likely to raise eyebrows today is where the operations took place. Springfield had no hospital equipped to handle a clinic of this size—the Southeast Colorado Hospital District would not be established until 1963, with its hospital opening in 1969. So in 1931 the community used a mortuary. Even the Greenville Advocate seemed to recognize how peculiar that sounded, reporting that the thought of undergoing surgery in an “undertaking establishment” held no terror for the children who were patients at the clinic.

Then they ran out of ether.

Husted Drug was a familiar Springfield business. A year before the clinic, a large advertisement in the October 30, 1930, Democrat-Herald promoted the Husted Drug Co. Rexall One Cent Sale. Its shelves held the assortment one would expect from a small-town drugstore of the period—cough syrup, aspirin, cold cream, shaving cream, dental paste and various Rexall remedies, along with candy, stationery and household goods.

With hundreds of operations underway, however, the important item on Husted’s shelves was ether. When the supply was exhausted, the clinic had a problem. Springfield was hundreds of miles from Denver, and in 1931 another shipment could not simply be put on an overnight delivery truck.

The solution was to charter an airplane.

The Democrat-Herald reported that Husted Drug chartered the plane to bring additional supplies to Springfield. The Greenville Advocate provided the quantity, reporting that 50 pounds of ether had to be hurried from Denver for the surgeons. It must have been quite a sight: an airplane arriving on the southeastern Colorado plains carrying enough anesthetic to keep Springfield’s tonsil harvest moving.

Husted Drug itself offers an interesting glimpse of the kind of businesses that served small High Plains towns during these years. By April 1932, an advertisement identified it as the E. G. Husted Drug Company, and the store was selling something considerably larger than bottles of medicine. Husted was a Frigidaire dealer. A four-cubic-foot electric refrigerator was advertised for $130.

[INSERT 1932 HUSTED DRUG FRIGIDAIRE AD]

There is a certain amount of humor running through the newspaper accounts of the clinic. The writers clearly enjoyed the idea of a “record crop” of tonsils, a “tonsil-adenoid harvest” and doctors and nurses doing the harvesting. But behind the colorful language was a remarkable community effort. Four hundred people receiving free operations in an isolated rural county during the Great Depression required organization, medical personnel, facilities and supplies. The American Legion and Parent-Teachers Association helped organize it, doctors and nurses did the work, a mortuary became a clinic, and a Springfield druggist made sure the surgeons had their ether—even when that required chartering an airplane.

The timing also places the episode near the beginning of the decade that would forever be associated with the Dust Bowl in Baca County. In the fall of 1931, nobody standing for the Democrat-Herald’s photograph could have known what was coming. The terrible years of 1934 and 1935 were still ahead, as were the black dusters, failed crops and years of drought that would become part of the county’s collective memory.

Yet the same habits that would carry people through those years are visible in this earlier story. There was a problem, the community organized around it, and people used whatever was available. If the building available for a medical clinic happened to be a mortuary, they used the mortuary. If the ether was hundreds of miles away in Denver, they found an airplane.

And apparently they maintained their sense of humor while doing it.

The story was good enough to travel well beyond Colorado as the Greenville, Illinois, discussed that “record crop” being brought in at Springfield.

Baca County would have plenty of difficult harvests during the decade ahead.

In the fall of 1931, they harvested tonsils.

Sources: Democrat-Herald (Springfield, Colorado), fall 1931, clinic photograph and caption, courtesy of the Denver Post; “Colorado County Has Tonsil-Adenoid Harvest,” The Greenville Advocate (Greenville, Illinois), October 1, 1931, p. 13; Husted Drug Co. advertisement, Democrat-Herald, October 30, 1930; E. G. Husted Drug Company advertisement, Democrat-Herald, April 14, 1932. The Democrat-Herald was Springfield’s weekly newspaper during this period; surviving online holdings include issues through May 1932

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