University of Alabama Takes Over Jefferson Hospitals

Well, here we have the beginning of the vast University of Alabama at Birmingham medical center and hospitals that exist today. I found this brief item from December 1944 in my wanderings through old issues of the Gadsden Times saved by my paternal grandmother Rosa Mae Wright. 

Founded by Josiah Nott and other physicians, the Medical College of Alabama operated in Mobile from 1859 until 1920. In that year the school moved to Tuscaloosa and functioned as a two-year basic sciences program until moved again to Birmingham in 1944. The four-year school opened in September 1945. Students who had finished in Tuscaloosa had to leave Alabama to finish their medical degrees. 

As this brief article notes, plans for the medical school and center in Birmingham were already underway. In 1943 the state legislature had passed the Jones Act to establish and fund a school. Location in Birmingham was chosen because the large patient populations at Jefferson and Hillman hospitals offered the greatest opportunities in the state for physician training and clinical practice. Over 670 employees at the two hospitals also provided a large beginning base for the school.

I've added some illustrations and other comments below. 

Gadsden Times 31 December 1944

Hillman Hospital ca. 1929

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama 

The building is now known as Jefferson Tower on the UAB campus. This card is postmarked December 23, 1958. The building had opened as Jefferson Hospital in December 1940 with 575 patient beds. The county facility greatly expanded medical care in the city. Hillman Hospital was located on the opposite side of the same block. The buildings became University Hospital and Hillman Clinic at some point after the school opened. 

This postcard in my collection has some interesting history on this side. The four-cent Abraham Lincoln stamp was issued in July 31, 1958; first class postage increased to that amount the next day.  

The original The Price is Right premiered on NBC-TV in 1956. A feature of the show was the "Home Viewer Showcase", which Wikipedia describes:

"The Price Is Right frequently featured a home viewer "Showcase", a multi-prize package for which home viewers were invited to submit their bids via postcard. The viewer who was closest to the actual retail price without going over won everything in the Showcase, but one item was sometimes handmade so the viewer could not check the price of all the items."

I was unable to find the lady who submitted this bid at Ancestry.com I wonder if she won....

Beulah Vee Wright at the State Archives

Last month I received a letter from Mary Taylor Peake, Assistant Registrar at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery. In August 2020 our family had donated a sizeable amount of material related to Beulah Vee Wright, my dad's older sister who died in December 1939 just after her 18th birthday. Dad's mother Rosa Mae Wright kept many of Beulah Vee's personal items that filled a cedar hope chest. You can read more about her and the materials in blog posts here, here and here. 

Ms. Peake wrote to inform me and other family members that some of the items related to Beulah Vee are being shown through September 2027 in an exhibit Alabamians: Portraits of our State. The exhibit is located in the Temporary Exhibit Gallery of the Museum of Alabama, on the second floor of the Archives. She also provided me with the exhibit photographs seen below. 

Many thanks go to the Archives and staff members for accepting and processing  the Beulah Vee material and the scans provided to the family of many printed items such as notebooks and yearbooks. 

A few more comments are below. 

"Our new temporary exhibit, Alabamians: Portraits of our State, features examples of traditional portraiture, as well as advertisements, political ephemera, and informal photographs from the Archives’ collections. This 1930s Century Master studio camera was used by three photography studios in Montgomery between the 1930s and 1980s. Its final owner, Paul Robertson of Robertson Photography, purchased the camera in the 1950s and used it to photograph five Alabama governors!"

That's Montgomery native Nat King Cole in the wall poster featuring a syrup advertisement. You can see Beulah Vee's portrait on the wall in the background of both these photos. 

Birmingham's St. Vincent's Hospital on Postcards

In 2014 I posted an item about a photograph of St. Vincent's Hospital that appeared in a 1908 book Views of Birmingham. That photograph turned up on the second postcard included here. I thought I would discuss it and two others postcards of the hospital from my collection in this piece.

St. Vincent's, now a part of the UAB Health System, was founded in 1898 and occupied the building shown here in 1900. Within a few years the facility had begun serving over 1000 patients annually, paying and charity, white and African-Americans. Expansion began in the 1940s and continued in the 1970s and 1980s to produce the large hospital that exists today. You can see a 2008 photo here. 

More information about the hospital's beginnings can be found in Howard Holley's History of Medicine in Alabama (1982). An extensive history is Tom Wofford's The St. Vincent's Story: A Century of Caring 1898-1998 (1998). 

Some commentary is below the images. 

This card appears on the cover of the Wofford book mentioned above and is identified as ca. 1908. As seen below my copy was mailed and postmarked in Birmingham on January 28, 1909. I presume this one-cent Franklin stamp was the one issued in 1908 although the perforations don't match. Raphael Tuck & Sons was a business founded in 1866 in London and eventually moved into postcards. The "Oilette" series was introduced in 1903. 

According to Wikipedia, "In the night of 29 December 1940, London was heavily bombed and Raphael House was destroyed.^[2] Records of seventy-four years and 40,000 or more original pictures and photographs by the best artists were in ashes. In spite of having to start over, the company was soon making progress." The firm lasted until 1959 when a merger with two other companies formed the British Printing Corporation. 

The Souvenir Post Card Company operated in New York early in the 20th century. This one cent Franklin stamp has perforations around the perimeter and is thus the one issued in 1903. We can read the Birmingham postmark, sometime in September, but I can't make out the year. 

Via Ancestry.com I found Ella Tew, living at this address, in the 1900 and 1910 U.S. Census. The address "650 Montgomery Street" does not appear on Google Maps. 

"Tichnor Quality Views" were issued by the Tichnor Brothers of Boston, a graphic arts and printing company that operated from 1908 until 1987. This card, never mailed, must have been one of the firm's early ones. Whoever wrote the card kindly put a date on it: November 9, 1942.

Via Ancestry.com I found this photograph of Celia Reneau from the 1948 yearbook of Florence State Teachers College. According to Google Maps "472 North Pine Street" in Florence is no longer an active address.