Mary Quite Contrary

Above: Illustration and article on "Typhoid Mary" that appeared in 1909 in The New York American. At right, Mary Mallon with other quarantined inmates on North Brother Island. (Wikipedia)

The Irish-born Mary Mallon (1869–1938) lived a simple life as a maid and a cook, and it would have been a life of anonymity save for a sad twist of fate on the day she was born.

History knows Mary Mallon as Typhoid Mary. From 1901 to 1907 she would cook for seven wealthy New York families that would later contract typhoid. Mallon was born to a mother who was infected with typhoid, which offers a possible explanation as to why she became an asymptomatic carrier of the disease. Forcibly quarantined on North Brother Island (near Long Island) from 1907 to 1910, Mallon agreed upon her release to take hygienic precautions, including ending her occupation as a cook.

When other jobs failed to pan out, Mallon returned to cooking—this time in restaurants and hotels—infecting many more while evading investigators who were desperately trying to track her down (it is estimated she infected up to 122 people, resulting in as many as four-dozen deaths). When she was finally arrested in 1915, she was returned to North Brother Island, where she would live out her days. Stanley Walker (1898–1962), a native Texan, longtime editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and a New Yorker contributor from 1925 to 1956, featured Mallon in a profile for the Jan. 26, 1935 issue. Some brief excerpts:

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The Latest Sensation

Mary Mallon was the source of sensational headlines in the early 1900s, but even she couldn’t top the media frenzy prompted by the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and the trial of accused murderer Bruno Hauptmann. The New Yorker’s Morris Markey went to the courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, to file this report for “A Reporter at Large.” Excerpts:

TRIAL OF THE CENTURY…Clockwise, from top left: **Bruno Hauptmann** (center) at his murder trial, which ran from Jan. 2 to Feb. 13, 1935, in Flemington, New Jersey; **Charles Lindbergh** takes the witness stand; novelist **Fanny Hurst** and gossip columnist Walter Winchell at the trial on Jan. 30, 1935—the “Trial of the Century” was followed by more than 700 reporters; police ropes contained the large crowds gathered at the courthouse. (Library of Congress/umass.edu/*Courier Post*)

Hauptmann would be convicted of the crime and immediately sentenced to death. On April 3, 1936, he would meet his end in an electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison, maintaining his innocence to the very end.

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…here is Petty at work in 1939…

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