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New York Times
01-05-2025
- New York Times
Overlooked No More: Joyce Brown, Whose Struggle Redefined the Rights of the Homeless
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. Joyce Brown's New York minute lasted longer than most. A onetime secretary, Brown became homeless in 1986 and began camping on a heating grate on Second Avenue and 65th Street in Manhattan. A year or so passed before she was picked up by city officials, involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital — where she was declared mentally ill — and forcibly given medication. Brown, who was better known as Billie Boggs, was the first homeless person to become the focus of Mayor Edward I. Koch's newly expanded initiative to address the increasing visibility of homelessness and untreated mental illness on the streets. But, as she would later say in interviews, the city chose 'the wrong one.' Unlike the dozen or so other people who would face similar fates, she said she knew her rights, and she would begin exercising them the very next day. What followed was a landmark lawsuit centered on mental health, civil liberties and the involuntary psychiatric treatment of homeless people. 'I'm not insane,' Brown would say. 'Just homeless.' Before long, Brown was lofted from the pavement to prominence, with a whirlwind of interviews on talk and news programs. By the time Brown died of a heart attack on Nov. 29, 2005, at 58, she had long been forgotten. But the repercussions of her transitory fame still echo on the city's sidewalks and subways, as Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams have introduced their own initiatives to address homelessness in New York, including involuntarily hospitalizing people in psychiatric crisis. Joyce Patricia Brown was born on Sept. 7, 1947, in Elizabeth, N.J., the youngest of six children, most of whom had been born in South Carolina and Florida. Her father, William Brown, told census enumerators in 1950 that he was unemployed. Her mother, Mae Blossom Brown, worked in a factory assembling luggage. Some time after graduating from high school, Joyce Brown worked as a secretary for the Elizabeth Human Rights Commission, where she may have learned a thing or two about her own constitutional privileges. She also worked as a clerk for Elizabeth's mayor at the time, Thomas G. Dunn, and for Thomas & Betts, an electrical equipment manufacturer, according to a death notice from Nesbitt Funeral Home in Elizabeth. By 18, though, she was addicted to cocaine and heroin and was stealing money from her mother. Her mother died in 1979, which, her relatives said, might have sparked a further downward spiral emotionally. By 1985, she had lost her job. She took turns living with her sisters in New Jersey and was treated briefly in clinics and hospitals. Her sisters' efforts to help her resulted in arguments, and in 1986 she moved to Manhattan, where she made her home on the sidewalk near a Swensen's ice cream parlor on the Upper East Side, urinating and defecating outdoors nearby. She adopted the name Billie Boggs, a twisted homage to Bill Boggs, a television host on WNEW (now WNYW), with whom she had become enraptured. To some neighbors and regular passers-by, she became a New York fixture, the kind you don't find in the guidebooks; they would converse with her about the news. To others, she was a menace — cursing and shouting racial epithets, particularly at Black men, and even punching people. Her sisters sought to have her hospitalized. But doctors said she did not present a danger to herself and released her. On Oct. 12, 1987, after she had been monitored for months under a Koch administration strategy known as Project HELP (the initials stood for Homeless Emergency Liaison Project) — intended to remove severely mentally ill homeless people from Manhattan's streets and forcibly provide them with medical and psychiatric care — she was taken to the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital, where she was admitted and injected with a tranquilizer and an anti-psychotic drug. The next day, according to a 1988 article in New York magazine, she called the New York Civil Liberties Union from a pay phone at the hospital. Norman Siegel, the organization's executive director, was one of the lawyers assigned to her case. In court, a Bellevue psychiatrist presented a diagnosis of 'chronic paranoid schizophrenia.' That night, one of her sisters recognized her from a courtroom sketch on the TV news. That image was in stark juxtaposition to a photograph produced by her family, which showed a smiling Brown, wearing a red dress and gold earrings as she was being hugged by a man in a tuxedo with a pink bow tie, her sisters smiling into the camera nearby. 'This used to be my sister,' one of the sisters told Newsday. 'This used to be us.' A State Supreme Court judge ruled that Brown was 'not unable to care for her essential needs' and ordered that she be released, but she remained at Bellevue while the city appealed the decision. The city won the appeal, but after a subsequent appeal by Brown's lawyers, a judge's ruled that she could not be forcibly medicated. That appeal was dropped when Bellevue released Brown, saying there was no point in her staying if she could not receive the hospital's care. She had spent a total of 84 days there. She soon evolved into a media star, a symbol of justice who, her lawyers said, presented herself in her lucid and articulate interviews a more or less rational example of urban bivouacking who was, she said, 'under surveillance' for months 'like I was a criminal.' 'In a civilized society you don't just go around picking up people against their will and bringing them to the hospital when they're sane just because of a mayor's program,' she told Morley Safer for a 1988 segment of the CBS News program '60 Minutes.' 'All of this is political. I am a political prisoner because of Mayor Koch.' In the same segment, Mayor Koch insisted that defecating on the street was 'bizarre' and said that Brown's ability to speak articulately on camera demonstrated the efficacy of her hospitalization and the medication she had been given. That year Brown also appeared on 'The Phil Donahue Show,' after being outfitted from Bloomingdale's, and delivered a lecture to a Harvard Law School forum in which she offered 'a street view' of homelessness. Book and film offers flooded the offices of the New York Civil Liberties Union. The Associated Press called her 'the most famous homeless person in America.' At his Moscow Summit with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, in 1988, President Ronald Reagan invoked her case as an example of freedom in contrast to Moscow's policy of detaining political dissidents by claiming they were mentally ill. 'Rather than talking about me, why doesn't the president assist me in getting permanent housing?' Brown was quoted as saying. In the wake of Brown's case, Project HELP faced public scrutiny and criticism. The program's momentum stalled, and it was eventually discontinued. Brown's lawsuit continues to serve as a precedent in debates over mental health, homelessness and civil liberties. After Brown was released, she worked briefly as a secretary for the civil liberties union. But she quit because, she said, she didn't like the job. 'The spunkiness that I had always admired dissipated,' Siegel said of her in an interview. She put on weight; her gait slowed; she might have been medicated again for a while. Around 1991, she moved into a supervised group home for formerly homeless women, but she also returned to the streets to panhandle, saying that her sisters had delayed forwarding her more than $8,000 in Social Security checks. She continued to live on $500 a month in disability pay and avoided the press. When Brown was initially released from Bellevue, it was against the recommendation of two dissenting State Supreme Court justices. 'We may be approaching the time,' they wrote, 'when the problem of the homeless will be confronted with sincere and realistic attitudes and resources.' 'Now,' Siegel said, '35 years later, the hopes of the dissenting justices have unfortunately still not materialized.'
New York Times
03-04-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Overlooked No More: Katharine McCormick, Force Behind the Birth Control Pill
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. Katharine Dexter McCormick, who was born to a life of wealth, which she compounded through marriage, could have sat back and simply enjoyed the many advantages that flowed her way. Instead, she put her considerable fortune — matched by her considerable willfulness — into making life better for women. An activist, philanthropist and benefactor, McCormick used her wealth strategically, most notably to underwrite the basic research that led to the development of the birth control pill in the late 1950s. Before then, contraception in the United States was extremely limited, with bans on diaphragms and condoms. The advent of the pill made it easier for women to plan when and whether to have children, and it fueled the explosive sexual revolution of the 1960s. Today, the pill, despite some side effects, is the most widely used form of reversible contraception in the United States. McCormick's interest in birth control began in the 1910s, when she learned of Margaret Sanger, the feminist leader who had been jailed for opening the nation's first birth control clinic. She shared Sanger's fervent belief that women should be able to chart their own biological destinies. The two met in 1917 and soon hatched an elaborate scheme to smuggle diaphragms into the United States. Diaphragms had been banned under the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal crime to send or deliver through the mail 'obscene, lewd or lascivious' material — including pornography, contraceptives and items used for abortions. (The law, which still prohibits mailing items related to abortions, has received renewed attention since the federal right to abortion was overturned in 2022.) McCormick, who was fluent in French and German, traveled to Europe, where diaphragms were in common use. She had studied biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was able to pose as a scientist in meetings with diaphragm manufacturers. 'She purchased hundreds of the devices and hired local seamstresses to sew them into dresses, evening gowns and coats,' according to a 2011 article in M.I.T. Technology Review. 'Then she had the garments wrapped and packed neatly into trunks for shipment.' She and her steamer trunks made it through customs. If the authorities had stopped her, the article said, they would have found 'nothing but slightly puffy dresses in the possession of a bossy socialite, a woman oozing such self-importance and tipping her porters so grandly that no one suspected a thing.' From 1922 to 1925, McCormick smuggled more than 1,000 diaphragms into Sanger's clinics. After her husband died in 1947, she inherited a considerable amount of money, and she asked Sanger for advice on how to put it to use advancing research into contraception. In 1953, Sanger introduced her to Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Min-Chueh Chang, researchers at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Massachusetts, who were trying to develop a safe, reliable oral contraceptive. She was excited by their work and provided almost all the funding — $2 million (about $23 million today) — required to develop the pill. She even moved to Worcester to monitor and encourage their research. Pincus's wife, Elizabeth, described McCormick as a warrior: 'Little old woman she was not. She was a grenadier.' The Food and Drug Administration approved the pill for birth control in 1960. Katharine Moore Dexter was born into an affluent, socially activist family on Aug. 27, 1875, in Dexter, Mich., west of Detroit. The town was named for her grandfather, Samuel W. Dexter, who founded it in 1824 and maintained an Underground Railroad stop in his home, where Katharine was born; her great-grandfather, Samuel Dexter, was Treasury secretary under President John Adams. Katharine and her older brother, Samuel T. Dexter, grew up in Chicago. Their mother, Josephine (Moore) Dexter, was a Boston Brahmin who supported women's rights. Their father, Wirt Dexter, was a high-powered lawyer who served as president of the Chicago Bar Association and as a director of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. He also headed the relief committee after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and was a major real estate developer. He died when Katharine was 14. A few years later, her brother died of meningitis while attending Harvard Law School. Those early deaths pointed her toward a career in medicine. She attended M.I.T. and majored in biology, rare achievements for a woman of that era. She arrived with a mind of her own, and successfully challenged a rule that female students had to wear hats at all times, arguing that they posed a fire hazard in the science labs. She graduated in 1904 and planned to attend medical school. But by then, she had started dating the dashing Stanley Robert McCormick, whom she had known in Chicago and who was an heir to an immense fortune built on a mechanical harvesting machine that his father had invented. As a young lawyer, he helped negotiate a merger that made his family a major owner of International Harvester; by 1909, it was the fourth largest industrial company in America, measured in assets. McCormick persuaded Katharine to marry him instead of going to medical school. They wed at her mother's château in Switzerland and settled in Brookline, Mass. But even before they married, he had showed signs of mental instability, and he began experiencing violent, paranoid delusions. He was hospitalized with what was later determined to be schizophrenia, and remained under psychiatric care — mostly at Riven Rock, the McCormick family estate in Montecito, Calif. — until his death. She never divorced him and never remarried. They had no children. Katharine McCormick spent decades mired in personal, medical and legal disputes with her husband's siblings. They battled over his treatment, his guardianship and eventually his estate, as detailed in a 2007 article in Prologue Magazine, a publication of the National Archives. She was his sole beneficiary, inheriting about $40 million ($563 million in today's dollars). Combined with the $10 million (more than $222 million today) she had inherited from her mother, that made her one of the wealthiest women in America. As her husband's illness consumed her personal life, McCormick threw herself into social causes. She contributed financially to the suffrage movement, gave speeches and rose in leadership to become treasurer and vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After women won the right to vote in 1920, the association evolved into the League of Women Voters; McCormick became its vice president. In 1927, she established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School, believing that a malfunctioning adrenal gland was responsible for her husband's schizophrenia. She provided funding for two decades and acquired an expertise in endocrinology that later informed her interest in the development of an oral contraceptive. After the F.D.A. approved the pill, McCormick turned her attention to funding the first on-campus residence for women at M.I.T. When she studied there, women had no housing, one of several factors that discouraged them from applying. 'I believe if we can get them properly housed,' she said, 'that the best scientific education in our country will be open to them permanently.' McCormick Hall, named for her husband, opened on the institute's Cambridge campus in 1963. At the time, women made up about 3 percent of the school's undergraduates; today, they make up about 50 percent. By the time she died of a stroke on Dec. 28, 1967, at her home in Boston, McCormick had played a major role in expanding opportunities for women in the 20th century. She was 92. Apart from a short article in The Boston Globe, her death drew little notice. The later obituaries of the birth-control researchers she had supported did not mention her role in their achievement. In her will, she left $5 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation (more than $46 million today) and $1 million to Pincus's laboratories (more than $9 million today). Earlier, she had donated her inherited property in Switzerland to the U.S. government for use by its diplomatic mission in Geneva. She left most of the rest of her estate to M.I.T.
New York Times
14-03-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Overlooked No More: Beulah Henry, Inventor With an Endless Imagination
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. From the time Beulah Henry was a child in the late 19th century, she dreamed of ways to make life easier. That impulse would eventually drive her to secure dozens of patents and would earn her a nickname: Lady Edison. When she died in the early 1970s, she held far more patents than any other woman, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and in 2006 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her contributions to technological innovation. 'I invent because I cannot help it,' she often said. 'New things just thrust themselves upon me.' Her first prototype, when she was 9, was for a mechanism that would allow a man to tip his hat to a passerby while simultaneously holding a newspaper. The visions kept coming. In 1912, while she was in college, she received her first patent (No. 1,037,762) for an ice-cream maker that functioned with minimal ice, something that was in short supply at the time. It was not a commercial success, but that did not stop her from dreaming up other innovations. 'Ice Cream Freezer' Anything and everything seemed to interest her: toys, typewriters, sewing machines, coffee pots, hair curlers, can openers, mailing envelopes. Her achievements were all the more remarkable because she had no knowledge of mechanics and lacked the technical vocabulary to describe what she was trying to do. Working out of a series of hotel suites — one reporter who visited described what he saw as resembling a boudoir more than a place of business — she hired model makers, draftsmen and patent lawyers to realize her visions. Sometimes she sold her ideas to manufacturers who then applied for their own patents. Henry could see the finished product in her head, she said, 'as clearly as you see a book or a picture or a flower held up before you.' Her challenge was to communicate that vision clearly enough so that others could bring it to reality. 'I say to the engineers, build me such and such, and they say to me, 'Miss Henry, it couldn't possibly work,'' she told The Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel in 1965. 'And I say to them, 'I don't know if it will work but I'm looking at it,' and so they build it and it works.' Beulah Louise Henry was born on Sept. 28, 1887, in Raleigh, N.C. Her father, Walter R. Henry, was an art connoisseur and collector who was active in local Democratic politics. Her mother, Beulah (Williamson) Henry, was an artist. Her brother, Peyton, was a songwriter. Henry claimed to be descended from Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States, and from the Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry. In interviews, she said her ability to invent may have been influenced by a neurological condition called synesthesia, in which unrelated senses are linked — certain sounds or tastes may call to mind particular colors, for example. 'I have it one million percent,' she would say. After graduating from Elizabeth College, in Charlotte, N.C., she moved with her mother to New York City to pursue her inventing career. One idea involved a parasol with snap-on covers in various colors that could be changed to match a woman's outfit. It wasn't an easy sell. 'Parasol' and 'Runner Shield Attachment' One after another, the experts told her, 'It can't be done,' she was quoted as saying in The Raleigh News and Observer in 1923. 'But I knew it could be done.' The final result, described in the press as 'a miracle for the smart milady,' was so popular that she established the Henry Umbrella and Parasol Company to make and market her creation. Lord & Taylor displayed the parasols in its windows, and they sold by the thousands. For a while, Henry put her energy into reinventing children's toys, primarily dolls. She used springs and tubes to make them kick, blink and cry; she put a radio inside one. Her most popular creation was the Miss Illusion Doll, with eyes that changed color to match its wigs. She also created a plush toy cow called Milka-Moo, which dispensed milk and had a secret compartment for a bar of soap. 'Simulating Dispensing Device' Later, she turned to typewriters. Of the 10 or so related patents she received, the most impressive was perhaps the 'protograph' (No. 1,874,749), an attachment that produced multiple copies of a document without carbon paper. She would 'just look at something,' Henry said, 'and think, 'There's a better way of doing that,' and the idea comes to me.' In 1941, she took a long look at sewing machines and invented the Double Chain Stitch Sewing Machine (No. 2,230,896), which functioned without the bobbins that seamstresses had to periodically stop and change. 'Double Chain Stitch Sewing Machine' She also found a way to make cooking easier. For years, she said, 'the percolator on the coffee pot said to me, 'Do something with me,' but I didn't know what. And then one day when I was basting a roast, I knew what I had to do with that percolator.' She went on: 'I worked out a device that percolates the juice in a roaster and bastes the meat continuously by itself.' She received the patent for it in 1962. Reporters portrayed her in effusive terms: She was 'a superb, commanding figure,' one noted; 'stylishly gowned,' another said — 'delightfully, almost theatrically feminine' and 'more like an opera star than a studious scientific person.' Those who visited her at work in her hotel room often detected a whiff of incense and mentioned her pink lampshades or the large telescope she placed near a window so that she could gaze at the night sky. Then there were the pets: At various times she kept small turtles, a parakeet, a tropical oriole, several doves and cockatiels, and a cat named Chickadee. Henry was active in the American Museum of Natural History, the National Audubon Society, the New York Women's League for Animals and the New York Microscopical Society, among other organizations. She never married. Her far-flung inspirations were a mystery to her mother, who lived with her much of the time. 'I don't know what to make of her,' her mother said in 1923. 'She gets up at night and prowls around making experiments with the electric lights and the water system, or hunting for sheets of brown paper to draw on or cut up.' Henry offered a mystical explanation for her compulsion. 'I have come to believe in spirit control,' she told The News Tribune, in Tacoma, Wash., in 1939. 'And I'm sure that the ideas that flock into my mind in the early hours of the morning are messages from a guiding spirit.' She was 85 when she died in February 1973, with her 49th and final patent — the nature of it is lost to time — pending.
