Doctor William E. Putnam – Whiting’s Friend and First Physician Gayle Faulkner-Kosalko   June 2020

When he passed, the news of his death was the big headline of the day in the Lake County Times of 1923. The banner headline read “Doctor W. E. Putnam, Prominent Whiting Man Called.”

For it seems Whiting’s very first physician had been called to meet his maker early that morning. The last thing he had done was play a game of chess, the hobby that he adored. He had lost.

And that is how many in Whiting felt when his heart attack came.

Now Dr. William E. Putnam (b.1861) and his wife Jennie Wilson Putnam (b. 1865) came from Goodrich, Michigan to our town in 1889. Dr. Putnam had graduated from Valparaiso University and went to medical school at Rush.

They came to Whiting, just like everything else seemed to, at the end of the 1880’s and that was because of the Standard Oil Company. The doctor was contacted by a friend who told him that the Standard Oil Company was starting one of the largest oil refineries in Whiting and a needed a young surgeon. At the time, Dr. Putnam was practicing in northern Michigan.

His wife Jennie, in her memoirs about Whiting, wrote that “the Standard Oil Company said, ‘Doctor, you have to open up an office in Whiting for we need you’.” This was a time, according to one resident, that the only place you could get good drinking water was right opposite the Elks Club where Standard Oil had a faucet on 119th Street. It was more like a mining town, often wild and wooly, than what the Putnams were used to.

Whiting was just starting out and the Doctor and his wife were more than willing to work and make the little town a success. Unfortunately, when they arrived, there was no place in Whiting to live so the couple stayed in Roby for the first three weeks. Jennie wrote that they thought they would have to just live in a tent when John Fischrupp graciously offered to rent them rooms above his store.

“We thought we were in heaven at that time,” she wrote.

Only three days later, Dr. P. had his first patient. He was a worker from Standard Oil who had injured his hand so badly that he had to have three fingers removed. And from this first successful case, Dr. Putnam found himself a remarkably busy man, serving both the plant and local citizens.

His first office was right next door to the Standard Bakery. He was there from early morning, had an afternoon shift and then returned from 6p.m. to 9p.m. And at his side was his wife who first worked as his office assistant but was then trained by her husband to hold patients down when the doctor did amputations and trained to administered ether. It was not unusual that she herself could sew up a person in an emergency when the doctor was not around. Jennie herself became particularly good at stitching up patients and helping in emergencies. And often when the doctor was out of town, she took over the practice, whether she liked it or not.

“One time two fellows were cutting wood on Center Street about 11 one night,” she wrote. “One fellow was picking up the pieces and it was so dark that the one who was doing the chopping didn't see him. He brought his ax down and cut his helper's nose right in two.”

She said the man just came and sat on the steps and wouldn’t go away…and wouldn’t stop bleeding. She didn’t know what to do but to keep bathing the man’s nose with cold water. Finally, the bleeding slowed down enough for her to start sewing the nose back together. She gave the man a big glass of whiskey to deaden the pain.

“I told the man not to do any hollering or I couldn't work, and when I got him all sewed up, I realized I didn’t know how to bandage a nose,” she added. This happened in the days before adhesive tape.

“So, I made a cap of gauze then I wrapped bandages around and around his face and pinned them with little safety pins,” she recalled. When she was finished her patient started kicking about as he couldn’t see. She had also bandaged up his eyes.

So, she took a pair of scissors, cut out eyeholes and let the man walk home. “I was so nervous that all I could see was that nose in front of me all night long,” she said.

The next day the man came back to the office and Jennie was worried about what the Doctor would think of her midnight job. She was more than put out when her husband looked at the man and continued to laugh out loud.

She said that Doctor Putnam said “In all my experience, I never saw a bandage put on like that before. And when Jennie defensively asked if the job she did was all right, “He told me it was perfect, and he didn't have to take out one stitch.”

In between their busy schedule, the couple started a family. They had three daughters Elizabeth, Inis and Setna and one son Eugene. They made their home on LaPorte Avenue and each became involved in their growing community.

For example, if people wanted to get to Chicago, they would have to walk to 100th Street to get the train. So, the Doctor put together a petition and got citizens to sign it and soon the Pennsylvania railroad had a stop at Whiting. The first depot was a shack on 119th Street.

Dr. Putnam also played a part in annexation between Hammond and Whiting when he was chosen as one of the two Whiting votes in the 10th District Republican convention.

In addition to being a full-time physician, Dr. Putnam also served as Deputy Coroner in the region. Socially he was a member of the Elks, the Modern Woodmen, the Knights Templar, the Masons and was also the secretary of the Board of Health.

Jennie was involved as a member of the Vivians, the American Legion auxiliary and was a charter member of the Women's Club and the Lady Maccabees.

The couple was often listed in the newspaper society pages about the parties they attended and events at which they were present. They were a leading Whiting family.

They were also very generous. A young man, Johnny Ryne, was run over by the Pennsylvania train. One leg had to be taken off immediately and a little later gangrene set in the other, so he lost that too. Jennie, Mrs. Theresa Schaub and Mrs. William Warwick raised $75 to buy the lad some wooden legs. Later Dr. Putnam personally put him through Valpo University where young Ryne turned out to be the smartest boy in his class and went on to be a success.

Outside of the normal cases a doctor would handle, Dr. Putnam had many emergency cases such as the time a young man, impatient for the train to stop, jumped off and plowed his head into the sand, almost biting off his own tongue. When they found him, they ran him to Putnam’s office at the plant where the Doctor proceeded to attach the tongue. It was also not unusual for the doctor himself to make house calls in what was referred to as “the foreign district.”

Dr. Putnam has been described in the newspaper as being such a positive person who had a very eccentric manner of thinking and was exceptionally curious.

Before he passed, he had been working a long time on a simple concoction with which he hoped to alleviate men’s ills and warn off other sickness. He planned to call it Putnam 57. This was just another sign of the doctor’s curiosity in the world around him and his genius in medicine.

Putnam was incredibly open minded and whether it was experimenting not only in medicine but in philosophy and religion. It was noted in his obituary article that the doctor had been extremely interested in the study of Christian Science, a religion which believes that illness can be cured through prayer, not medicine. He studied its tenets and practices. What seemed to intrigue him about Christian Science was it being medicine for the mind. But it never became his choice of religion.

When they first arrived, he and Jennie became members of the Congregational Church on Center Street…it was the only church in town.

“We all went there and got acquainted and had such good times,” Jennie writes of her Whiting memories. “When we went to church at night, Mr. John Core always walked ahead with a lantern, so we all went "Goose Fashion. Sometimes the lantern went out then we would fall over the stumps. There were no lights in the whole town. When we left out on 119th Street we used to step on garter snakes.”

On Sunday afternoons, the Putnams would hold services in his office. They would pay a minister from Chicago $10 to come. Later Dr. and Mrs. Humphreys of Standard Oil helped start the Methodist Church in Whiting and Putnams then became active members of that church.

She said that Doctor Putnam said “In all my experience, I never saw a bandage put on like that before. And when Jennie defensively asked if the job she did was all right, “He told me it was perfect, and he didn't have to take out one stitch.”

It was written that the Doctor “got a lot of fun out of life. Innumerable stories are told of him.”

And his sense of humor could often be seen in his practice as well.

One day some men brought him a patient in a wagon. It was their cow who had a broken leg and they wanted the Doctor to fix it. The Doctor explained that he was not a veterinarian, but it made no difference to the men who demanded he fix it. According to Jennie, the Doctor told them, “I'll tell you what you do. You take the cow home and kill it, then you bring me a good big steak.”

One of Putnam’s biggest accomplishments and really a gift to his community was the building of its first and only hospital. Putnam had built a three-story building on the corner of Schrage Avenue and 119th Street for $2,000. (Later it would become the Standard Hotel and eventually a Memorial to Whiting’s Vietnam military.) To show his concern for the community, Putnam’s building also served as a temporary home for the Library when the new library was under construction in 1905.

But now it was 1903, Valentine’s Day when the Lake County Times printed a piece announcing Putnam’s new Whiting Hospital. They wrote that for Doctor Putnam, the necessity for a hospital in Whiting “had dawned upon him forcibly for a very long time.” The hospital would be located in the back of the building and at first, would be for men only. It would start off with 8 beds. The basement would be used for a kitchen and the first floor as a surgical ward. Floors two and three would be used as needed for “typhoid patients etc.” The Doctor would also employ two nurses from Chicago and with the help of Dr. George Hoskins, there would always be a doctor there. At this time, the only other hospital in the county was St. Margaret’s in Hammond which had opened in 1898 Putnam’s hospital opened March 15.

Besides his community and the world of medicine, the one thing Dr. Putnam truly loved was chess. He was the best chess player in this part of the state. He also took it upon himself to form a Chess Club for young men at the Community House (Community Center) where he spent what free time he had. The club was there to teach young men from Hammond, East Chicago and Whiting the strategies of the game. Not only did he play the game, but often philosophized how the game was like the game of life.

In the story of his death, the newspaper gave a detailed report on the way the Doctor had spent his last few hours. He had just finished a chess game at the Community House at 11p.m. and lost. He was quoted as saying to the young man, one of his own proteges from East Chicago, “It’s like that,” Dr. Putnam said. “Here I am a past master at this game. I understand it pretty thoroughly but now I lose to you an amateur and a novice.”

Dr. Putnam stopped at the door and spoke to his friend Klink Collins, the son of Clay Collins, the police chief and said, “I don’t feel so good tonight, Klinks. And do you know I lost that last game of chess. That young fellow simply took it away from me.” With that the paper said that Doc brushed his big hand across his forehead, pulled down the soft felt hat that he wore, and went home. It was around 3 a.m. that evening he suffered a fatal heart attack.

“Sorrow hung over the Oil City today when news flashed around that one of their first citizens was dead. Burly in build, startling in ideas, competent in execution, kindly in heart, Dr. Putnam expired a few minutes after 3 a.m.” the feature read.

Dr. Putnam and his wife had been so instrumental in helping Whiting become the family type town it became. In her 1939 memoirs Jennie, who incidentally claimed that she still had the reputation for being the best bean baker in Whiting, wrote “Everything that happened in Whiting happened right in our office. I am very glad we came to Whiting and I wouldn't live any other place."

But perhaps the most charming of tales is the one Jennie writes about…Dr. Putnam’s first hospital, in his early days. He made it in their own backyard.

“The roof was an apple tree in full bloom. The patients would lay out there in the shade and have their meals brought to them,” she wrote. She said that their friend, Standard Oil’s Dr. William Burton said that it was the most beautiful hospital he had ever seen.”

Wouldn’t it be something if Whiting’s own Dr. Putnam were the actual source of the adage “an apple a day keeps the doctor away?” Now while that probably is not true, it is evident that Dr. Putnam and his wife were “core” citizens of our fair community.