The Croaker

"He could cut a man open with a deft touch, lay his vital organs on his chest and put them all back inside again . . . He straightened noses painlessly with a pine broomstick and a hammer. In all things that counted in medicine, he was up to date . . ."

With these words from a lead editorial in the prison News, the convicts at California's San Quentin prison this week said goodbye to "The Croaker." Dr. Leo Leonidas Stanley, just turned 65, had retired after 38 years as San Quentin's prison doctor.

The Croaker first came to work as "chief surgeon" at San Quentin for $75 a month in 1913. The first operation he witnessed on his rounds of the dank, dirty, two-story prison hospital was performed under protest. Four convicts held a screaming patient while a fifth lunged at his infected tooth with a pair of pliers. Tuberculous patients wandered freely among healthy prisoners, "spitting blood until they were almost too weak to stand." There were no separate wards for women in the hospital, and the only semblance of a surgery was a table tucked in a corner of the doctor's office.

Two decades later Dr. Stanley finally got the up-to-date, four-story hospital San Quentin boasts today. Over the years he had also brought a new standard of medical care to the convicts. Stanley began using spinal anesthesia (which he could administer unaided) long before most doctors, because the prison anesthetist (a convict) was a drunkard who habitually drank up all the medical alcohol in the surgery.

New Wolf. Oldtimers at San Quentin still remember the surgery The Croaker did on "Wolf" Blaisdell, a snarling, point-eared dope peddler whose viciously lupine features were matched only by his surly character. One day, shortly before his release, the Wolf came to Dr. Stanley and with unwonted meekness begged that something be done about his face. He was tired, said the Wolf, of having people slink away whenever they saw him. Dr. Stanley smoothed out his gash-like wrinkles, trimmed down his ears, sent the rejuvenated Wolf back into the world personable enough to date Red Riding Hood. Since then, The Croaker has uncrossed scores of shifty eyes, remodeled many a jutting jaw and crooked nose.

The Croaker does not admit any softness for his patients. "You can't kiss these tough babies," he grunts. "They don't respect you for it." But when all the prisoners at "Q" deliberately snubbed unhappy James Watson, a spindly, mouse-eyed confessed murderer of seven wives, Dr. Stanley took pity. He made Bluebeard Jimmy a nurse in the TB ward, found him "a gentle, sympathetic man and a fine helper."

A Helluva Lot More. Last week when The Croaker left for good to attend to his private practice in San Rafael and the orange and lemon trees on his ten-acre place at nearby Fairfax, he turned his cons over to a medical staff of 13 doctors and four nurses, plus a host of part-time specialists. "They get," he says, "a damn sight better attention than I could afford for myself. It's a helluva lot more than most of 'em deserve."

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