FDR's Unsung Hero. Dr. Ross T. McIntire: The Man that Saved a President and Changed History
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This is a story of devotion to duty, intellect. competence and self-sacrifice.
It is a work in progress. Below find Chapter One.
Ross McIntire is the last major figure of FDR’s inner circle to have his or her biography written and, by far the most misunderstood. It will eventually complete my FDR trilogy. Ross was an amazing man with a compelling story. I’m anxious to hear what you think.
Chapter One
It All Seemed So Perfect
Remember that guy who everyone just knew was going to be “somebody” someday? That was Ross McIntire.
Turn of the twentieth-century Oregon (AW-re-gun) wasn’t exactly a breeding ground for heroes, but there were still opportunities for a churchgoing farm boy with a good head on his shoulders to make something of himself. Salem, in fact all of Oregon, in fact the entire Pacific Northwest, had only one institution of higher learning—that being Willamette (will-AM-it) University— which happened to be right smack dab in the middle of his hometown. And they even had a medical school, which also happened to be the only one in the Pacific Northwest, so that’s the path Ross T. (just “T.”) McIntire took.
After Lewis and Clark, the first non-natives to inhabit the Oregon Territory were John Jacob Astor’s fur traders and Methodist missionaries bent on bringing the word of Jesus to the fifteen-thousand or so indigenous Kalapuyan people. But what they also brought was smallpox—and measles—and syphilis— and God-knows what other infectious maladies. In some estimates, by 1850 the native population had been devastated to under a hundred;[1] by others, as many as six-hundred survived the onslaught of exogenous disease.[2]
Ross’ Oregonian kith and kin were a product of the cries of “Manifest Destiny[3]” that rallied American pioneers by the thousands to stock up their ox-drawn covered wagons and trek across the Oregon Trail towards the Pacific. His father, Charles, a carpenter by trade,[4] was born in Nebraska during his granddaddy Thomas’ odyssey from Quebec to the promised land. In this case, the land was literally promised—six-hundred-and-forty acres per family.[5] His mother Adda, nee Thompson, was born in Oregon in 1862, nine years after her parents had arrived from Iowa. Thomas, Charles and Adda now rest together under an impressive marble obelisk that marks the McIntire family plot in the Salem Pioneer Cemetery. Ross was the third of six children. An older brother lived for just fifty days. A bit more about the other four later.
American Progress, painted by John Gast in 1872.
By the time Oregon became a state in 1859, most of its population had settled in its northwestern corner along the Willamette River valley. Their promise of land had come with a few restrictions—one of them being that you had to be white! The territory’s first law excluding Black people was passed in 1844. A second, enacted in 1849, specified, among other egregious limitations, “it shall not be lawful for any negro or mulatto to enter into, or reside” in the territory. The coup de grâce came in 1857, when delegates to Oregon's State Constitutional Convention passed a law that banned slavery, while at the same time excluding Blacks from entering the now technically “free” state. You’ll have a much better idea of the flavor of those troubled times if you take a look at the notorious Dred Scott decision that the U.S. Supreme Court[6] cooked up just a few months earlier. Enough sordid history. Let’s get back to Ross.
“DR. MCINTIRE MARRIED
Salem Boy and Salem Girl Coupled at Newport
announced the Statesman Journal of Aug 15, 1913:
Newport by the sounding sea was the scene of a quiet wedding Wednesday evening, when Dr. Ross McIntire, a practicing physician at Independence, was united in marriage to Miss Florence Metcalf.”
The ceremony took place at the summer cottage of the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. George Metcalf, under a bower of graceful mountain ferns, amber dahlias, and sweet peas. The bride wore white satin elaborated with shadow lace and carried a bouquet of white asters. The flower girl was her niece, Miss Gladys Bielski of South Dakota, who wore white and pink lingerie. Rev. D.A. Waters of Portland performed the Methodist Episcopal ring ceremony.[7]
Dr. and Mrs. McIntire were registered at The Nicoli at Newport for several days and are now in Salem. They will be at home to their friends at Independence after September 1st.
Doctor McIntire finished the Salem High School in 1907 and entered Willamette University. He was a popular student and took an active part in school activities. He was a member of the Willamette University Glee Club for several years,[8] was one of the most prominent basketball stars Willamette had ever had [and] coached the second varsity football team for two years. He graduated from the College of Medicine in 1912 and has since been practicing in Independence. It was while both young people were in High School that the romance that ended with their wedding began.
Miss Metcalf graduated from The University of California at Berkeley last spring, where she earned a degree in Social Science after making a brilliant record as a student. She is a member of an old Salem family and beloved by a wide circle of friends in the Capital city. She graduated from Salem High School in 1908.[9]
Ross had definitely “married up.” In 1910, only ten percent of the entire population of America had even finished high school. An Oregon girl with a college degree, no less from a top-flight University, was a rara avisindeed. Florence was a force of nature— bright, vivacious— and very easy on the eyes—a “Gibson Girl” if there ever was one.[10]
Gibson Girl? Let me explain. At the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Dana Gibson was America’s most influential magazine illustrator. His muse was “The Gibson Girl,” an angelic face under a luxuriant pompadour bouffant coiffure—churchgoing, charming, witty, athletic, well-educated—most definitely not a feminist—the embodiment of ideal mainstream American womanhood—everything a man could possibly ask for.
Ross began his education in a one-room schoolhouse then went straight to the top of everything he touched.[11] Other than Florence, his passion was singing— and he was good at it! Lead tenor in the Willamette Glee Club, and its manager, he took the group on a fifteen-hundred-mile concert tour across the Pacific Northwest to promote his university. He starred in school musicals and concertized in churches.
He was president, of course, of the Willamette debating society[12] and a triple threat athlete, not just the best player on the basketball team, but, to no surprise, its Captain as well, and, in his spare time, a high school referee. He played football, pitched for the baseball team, and even shared a common credential with his future friend and Commander-in Chief, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—reporter for his weekly college newspaper. Ross T. McIntire was a multi-talented, charismatic leader with tireless energy. He was a man who got things done!
Ross’ yearbook captions are passports to his soul. 1911 was a romantic ode to Florence, “Oh! that girl, that girl, that pretty little girl,” almost surely purloined from the music he sung[13] It’s not difficult to picture our lovestruck tenor down on his knees, serenading his future bride to the chorus of the ragtime smash of the day, Oh! you beautiful doll, You great big beautiful doll![14] The lyrics and meter of an old Irish marching song “The Girl I left Behind Me,” are beyond coincidence.
But for 1912, his senior year, it was a prophesy that defined his life, a couplet he took from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington":
“Not once or twice in our rough island story,
The path of duty was the way to glory."
Dr. McIntire put out his shingle at Salem’s six-story Masonic Temple and emerged as “chief resident,” whatever that might have been in 1912, at the thirty bed Salem General Hospital.
We don’t know exactly why Ross T. McIntire chose a career in medicine, but we’re beginning to see a recurring theme here—a man who enjoyed, or to put it more strongly, craved the limelight. So, it’s not at all surprising why a performance artist and star athlete would gravitate towards the adrenaline rush of the operating room. A doctor in those days had little in the way of pills or potions for patients with diseases for which the only remedy was tender loving care, but the scalpel gave him the gratification of providing a dramatic benefit—like a life-saving operation—or putting people back together after falling off their horses—or, worse yet, after crashing in the new-fangled machine called the automobile. In other words— it gave Ross McIntire a regular opportunity to feel like a hero.
Florence’s upper-crust background earned her a notice on the society page of The Statesman Journal for May 17, 1913:
“Returns to Salem
Miss Florence Metcalf, a Salem girl who has been for the past winter attending school at the University of California at Berkeley and who graduated from that institution this spring returned to Salem yesterday morning. Miss Metcalf is a former Willamette girl having spent the first three years of her college course at that institution. She is planning to teach next winter.”
It all seemed so perfect. An early twentieth-century power-couple on the threshold of making their mark on the world. And then:
“MRS. ROSS MCINTIRE FOUND DEAD IN BED”
Blared the Salem Capital Journal on July 23, 1914:
“In Good Health When Husband Leaves Home in Morning but Dead When He Returned a Few Hours Later
“Florence Metcalf McIntire, wife of Dr. Ross McIntire, passed away at her home in Independence yesterday morning at 11:30 o’clock.
Apparently enjoying good health and about her duties in her new home in Independence, death came without a warning. Her husband had been called to visit a patient earlier in the morning. At 10 o'clock, during a short lull in his work, he talked to his wife over the phone. She was cheerful and in excellent spirits. Returning at 11:30 he found her dead … She seemed to be well, for only recently she spent a few days at Newport visiting her parents, and Friday she visited her sister, Olive Metcalf, at the Metcalf home, 1263 Court Street, in this city…With every promise of life’s happiness, her untimely death brings heartfelt sorrow to relatives and friends.”
Florence was 23.
The death certificate professed the cause to be “a rupture of a blood vessel in the head.”[15] “Heart failure,” said the newspapers. But surely another heart had been broken—twenty-two days short of his first wedding anniversary.
Florence “was ill a few months ago but had apparently recovered,” The Statesman Journal reported. Perhaps she’d been stricken with rheumatic fever or typhoid, both rampant and deadly at the time. We will never know. She was buried under a simple marker in Salem’s City View Cemetery..
Each week for the next two-and-a half years, a perfunctory announcement appeared in Salem newspapers:
Dr. Ross T. McIntire, Physician—
Surgeon. 214 Masonic Temple. Phone 440
He gave lectures on “Anesthesia” and “What the Literature of a Year Has Offered in Treatment”[16] to the Polk-Yamhill-Marion County Medical Society and spent his leisure time singing—often at churches, but also as manager and first tenor of “The Business Men’s Quartette.”[17]
Salem Capital Journal September 25, 1915
He even made an unsuccessful run for Marion county coroner—as a Republican.[18] “Dr. McIntire is a young man with ability above the average” a campaign advertisement lauded, “He has been working for others in whatever they had for him to do, without ever asking for a chance in his own behalf.”[19]
Early in 1916, Ross had made a trip to Seattle to take a civil service examination for the position of “physician.”[20] [21] Then, a bulletin in the Oregon Statesman Journal on February 14, 1917 announced: “Dr. Ross T. McIntire, recently on the medical staff of the Salem hospital, has gone to Bremerton where he has taken a special position as a physician.” Special indeed. Our now twenty-seven-year-old widower had become an officer in the United States Navy Medical Corps.
One wonders what the motivation might have been for our close-mouthed protagonist to make such a bold, life-altering decision? Was it grief? or perhaps the frustration of a dead-end, small-city medical practice?
He kept no diary. There are no letters. All we have is a yearbook caption. The path of duty. The way to glory.
Perhaps the Navy was Ross McIntire’s dream all along!
Poster, Ca. 1917
[1] Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,1992,10.
[2] Judy Rycraft Juntunen, May D. Dasch, and Ann Bennett Rogers, The World of the Kalapuya: A Native People of Western Oregon. Philomath, OR: Benton County Historical Society and Museum, 2005,13.
[3] The term was coined by magazine editor John L. O’Sullivan in 1842.
[4] “Mcintire”, derives from Mac an tSaoir, a Scottish Gaelic phrase which literally means "son of the carpenter". So in this case, Ross McIntire was, true to his surname, actually being a son of a carpenter.
[5] The Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850 promised settlers 320 acres of “free” land per person or 640 acres per couple.
[6] Explanation of Dred Scott TBA
[7] The following has been amalgamated from the 1911 and 1912 Willamette yearbooks and dozens of Salem newspaper articles. It’s all true.
[8] The Willamette Glee Club began in 1909. Knowing Ross McIntire, he probably organized it.
[9] This is an amalgum of articles from the Salem Capital Journal, Statesman Journal, Sunday Oregonian and Willamette University yearbooks.
[11] Ross was the third of six children, Lloyd (b.1888), died in infancy, Lena (b. 1884) married A.N David. She lived in Atlanta until 1925, then moved to Florida, where she became an editor for the Miami Herald. She died in 1938 at age 53, two days after emergency abdominal operation. Too bad Ross couldn’t be there to save her. She had two daughters, Jean Frances and Ann Joyce the only nieces, or nephews, Ross ever had. Nellie (b. 1892) was performing as an amateur singer as late as 1913. She married Douglas Dodd in 1925, moved toSan Francisco,then Lake Lucerne , CA. she survived until at least 1961. Floyd Harvard (b. 1901) followed brother’s footsteps to Willamette. Websterian He sung as well, mostly in churches. He moved to Portland, married Rosalia Keber and worked at a radio station there. KOIN. He survived his brother, just how long isn’t clear.
Harold’s (b.1906) tragic story will be told later; His father, Charles, came from Nebraska. His mother, Addie, was born in Oregon, her father from Indiana and her mother from Arkansas.
[12] The Willamette iteration was called the “Websterians.”
[13] Some versions of the song included the line “Oh, that girl, that pretty little girl.”
[14] The timing is perfect. The smash-hit ragtime love song was released in 1911.
[15] There was no autopsy. A massive brain hemorrhage is the most likely explanation.
[16]Statesman Journal, February 1,1913, 5
[17] Note the misspelling of his last name as “McIntyre.” This unintentional alias appeared in newspapers quite frequently.
[18] Sunday Oregonian, April 30, 1916, 8
[19] Salem Statesman Journal May 19, 1916
[20] “AVERAGE CITIZEN TO GET CHANCE AT JOBS: Civil Service Examinations Offer Opportunity for Life Employment.” Capital Journal, January 26, 1916, 3
[21] Capital Journal, May 22, 1917,10