And then there was one

8-4-02

By LORRAINE AHEARN, Staff Writer
News & Record

REIDSVILLE -- Any other night, she might have paused at the glass case in the hospital lobby and stared past her own reflection at the color portrait on display. It rests between some yellowed newspaper clippings and antique surgeon's tools -- a long-ago, air-brushed photo of four little girls posed, unsmiling, next to a can of Pet evaporated milk.

"The world's only identical quadruplets," the ad boasts. "Four years old, growing sturdy and strong on Pet Milk." A typed note explains this million-to-one quirk of nature, a relic from the era before fertility drugs: "Fultz Quadruplets, Born at Annie Penn Hospital, May 23, 1946." Their names, printed under their carefully positioned hands, are Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice and Mary Catherine.

Ever since she moved back home 10 years ago, Catherine would occasionally stumble across these stray fragments from her childhood. They turned up at flea markets or in the windows of old bookshops, scattered and out of order, like pages of a family album that lost its binding. Of course, they always had a price tag, and they always belonged to somebody else.

Online extras Memory book Photos not printed in the newspaper Flash slide show with Catherine Fultz Griffin interview Flash slide show -- no sound    Flash 6 player required

It might be the Fultz Quads on their first birthday, on the cover of Ebony (). As teenagers in the Rose Garden with JFK (). On a roadside Pet billboard () being auctioned off as black "memorabilia" -- rare souvenirs, like the Annie Penn Hospital display, the now-grown sisters could only window-shop.

But on this particular Sunday night last October, Catherine Fultz Griffin hurried past the glass case to the hospital elevators. Still dressed for church, she'd spent the afternoon in her sister Alice's room, and gone home only to be summoned back.

Alice was dead, leaving Catherine, the "baby" of the quads, born five minutes after her closest sister, as the next of kin.

The last one born, the unexpected one, she was now the only survivor. First, Louise had died of breast cancer at age 45, then Ann, from the identical cause at age 50. Finally, Alice had lost the same battle, at 55, her body about to leave Annie Penn in a funeral-home ambulance -- the same way the over-taxed hospital transported the four babies home to their parents' tobacco farm in 1946.

A double mirror image from the moment of birth, their death certificates read like carbon copies as well.

And then there was one.

The nurses called it "the basement" -- the wing that housed the emergency room, the cafeteria and the rooms for black patients. Just one nurse, Margaret Ware, was working that floor the night Annie Mae Fultz () went into labor.

As a precaution, Annie Mae, 37, had come in three weeks early. For one thing, she'd grown huge, and the X-rays detected triplets. Besides that, she and her husband and their other six children lived way out on a tenant farm down a narrow, rutted dirt road off R.F.D. No. 2. Without a car, electricity or running water -- let alone a phone -- it was no place to wait out an unusual and risky multiple birth.

Dr. Fred Klenner -- later the father of the notorious Fritz Klenner -- got his first fame by delivering the quads, who became a test of his messianic belief in massive vitamin-C therapy. (Courtesy of Ebony magazine)

The labor itself was neither long nor difficult because the babies were so small -- a little more than 3 pounds each. Annie Mae was deaf and mute, communicating only by gestures and reading lips, but Nurse Ware knew when it was time to call the doctor, Fred Klenner.

Years later, Klenner would gain fame as an early advocate of massive vitamin-C therapy, and then infamy as the father of Fritz Klenner, the delusional, kissing-cousin survivalist behind the made-for-TV murder-suicides of 1985.

But in the wee hours of May 23, 1946, Fred Klenner was just a family doctor with an office uptown, about to gain his first renown. He would deliver the world's first recorded set of identical black quadruplets, and the first set of quads ever to survive in the South.

It was an event sensational enough that national news organizations flocked to the little country hospital, and even Universal Pictures dispatched a camera crew. But here at home, it was treated as so-called "colored news."

In the Greensboro Daily News, the story was relegated to Page 9, with no picture and the headline: "Quadruplets Born To Negro Family In Rockingham Reported Thriving." The account didn't always jibe with the way family members recall it, but it made colorful copy. The ink was barely dry on the babies' birth certificates, and the mythology of the Fultz Quads was already being written.

The father (), who is called "Pete" by his friends, was not at the hospital when the children were born. When his brother-in-law, Bill Troxler, rushed out to the farm near Reidsville which "Pete" rents from T.S. Wray of this city, and broke the news, "Pete" it is said, uttered a laconic and justifiable "Good God" and fell back in his bed. His brother-in-law's message was reported as, "Man, you better get up to the hospital quick. You got a whole bunch of babies. They's so many of them, they laying 'em cross-wise of the bed."

The odds of single-egg identical quadruplets were one-in-a-million, but the fact that they survived and were thriving by their first birthday created a national sensation. (Courtesy of Ebony magazine)

Back at Annie Penn, the reality was less "Gone With the Wind" and more "The Grapes of Wrath." As the late Dr. Klenner would write of his so-called "vitamin-C" babies in a medical paper years later: "Our only nursery equipment was one hospital bed, an old, used single-unit hot plate and an equally old 10-quart kettle."

With no incubator, Klenner improvised cotton gauze blankets and laid the newborns together for warmth. The doctor meanwhile took it upon himself to name the girls -- all of them Mary, followed by the names of the women in the Klenner family. There was Ann, for the doctor's wife; Louise, his daughter; Alice, his aunt; and Catherine, his great-aunt.

To the delivery nurse, who is black, it didn't seem strange.

"At that time, you know, it was before integration," Margaret Ware, 79, recalled recently. "They did us how they wanted. And these were very poor people. He was a sharecropper, Pete was, and she couldn't read or write."

Meanwhile, the switchboard at Annie Penn was overloaded. News crews had camped out at the hospital from the morning after the quads were born, and police guarded the exits, lest someone try to steal the instantly famous babies.

"It was a big deal," said Ware, the only one of the quads' nurses still living. "And when something like this happens, everyone wants a piece of it."

Nurse Elma Saylor shows the quads their Ebony spread; Pet Milk paid her to care for the babies, whose dirt-poor parents already had six children to raise. (Courtesy of Catherine Fultz Griffin)

Nobody wanted a piece of the story more than the big national dairies that produced infant formula for the emerging post-war baby boom. Borden and Carnation were the first to come calling, but Klenner awarded the deal to Pet, a midland dairy based in St. Louis.

In exchange for using the quadruplets for "promotional purposes," the company would provide food and medical care, including a nurse, and buy a farm to be deeded to the four sisters when they reached adulthood.

So once the babies gained enough weight to be out of the woods, the Reidsville Review announced their hospital discharge, under a photo of the newly plump quads:

Dr. Fred Klenner stated that visitors would be welcome at the home between the hours of 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. each afternoon, and that the quads could be viewed through a glass screen.

And so it was that the Fultz Quadruplets left Annie Penn Hospital: under contract, named after their white doctor's relatives, headed home to a glass-enclosed nursery and driven there in a pair of McLaurin Funeral Home ambulances.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or at lahearn@news-record.com

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