Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about al Tina Shanazzi this week. We sure did. I highly recommend that documentary to anybody who is interested in more about her. It's called Altina. Here's what's really interesting about it to me.
I got it kind of late in the game for a behind the scenes I was feeling a little under the weather this earlier this week, and I didn't finish the episode in time for our regular recording, which worked out great because it gave it time for this documentary to finally get to me, and so I had extra stuff,
which was great. But the thing that's really interesting about it is that I think because it was made by members of her family who knew her, they skip over a lot of key moments in her life just because I think they think everybody knows that or like that seems like, you know, of course everybody knows that she's doing this at this time. But then it means that the whole thing is fleshed out with a lot of other stuff that you don't get in other places, which
is great. I will say this too. Both her ex husband Charlie and her husband at the time of her death, Tino, are interviewed in it for long periods of time, and you know, they both speak so lovingly about her, and I feel like she is a person that it might have been easy when we look at the facts of her relationships and how she you know, transferred from one person to another after having an affair, et cetera, and
think negatively about her. These people did not, like her ex husband, Charlie talked about her with such love and reverence and never any like bitterness about it, which is really interesting. And I don't know if that's to to who she was. Yeah, you just if you loved her, you knew she had a free spirit element to her and that was part of the deal. But it was really quite a sweet, sweet thing to see her sisters. Yeah, we don't know much about them, no, because she didn't
seem to like them all that much. Like she actually kind of says something really mean about one of her sisters, Like basically they were more interested in continuing this sort of life they were raised in. They sure they wanted to marry well and be society wives and like, Okay, that's fine, although she kind of suggests that one really turned into quite a piece of work. But they're like left out. I don't know if they were no contact or low contact or what, but they don't seem to
be involved. Yeah. I can't imagine that. If your life involved a mansion and then it involved an entire floor of a hotel, it might be really hard to imagine a different life than that being satisfying. Yeah, not to excuse any kind of behavior, I just like, yeah, I think you just have a different point of view on how the world works. And yeah, I mean Altina is the outlier who was like, no, I'd like to get a job and do some stuff. I know, I'm fine.
It's also interesting in a situation like that documentary, where you get different perspectives to hear how differently people perceived her as a mother. A lot of people are like, I don't know why she ever had kids. She didn't seem that didn't seem to fit with her life. She didn't really seem to want kids, although others are like,
she adored those boys, they were her everything. It's a very weird, you know, the way that anybody especially if you have like a in any kind of conflicted relationship with a parent, you know. I know I've had that. Like I often feel like my dad is not very enthusiastic about me. But then I'll talk to one of his friends and they're like, no, he sings your praises, And I'm like, are you being nice to me? Or do we just have a very different you know? So I think that's part of it. I will say. She
her first husband, Marris Sanders, who died pretty young. It sounds as though he really had to grapple with alcoholism, but she does speak of him. Even though she says he was a terrible husband to her, she is very quick to point out that he was actually a very good father and that, you know, once they were living separately, he would call the kids every single night and read them their bedtime story over the phone, which is sort of sweet. I promised that I would talk about a
story involving the mob. Yeah, and so it sounded like a fun story involved it is fun It's funny, okay, Okay, So when she had her sunglasses factory in Los Angeles, she tells the story in the documentary, and it's really funny. That this guy. These two guys came by one day and they were kind of like they were basically doing the mob shakedown. They were like, this is a nice little place. She got here, be ashamed. If something happened to it, we could protect you. She did not understand
what was going on at all. She was like, I don't no, I'm good. I think we're fine. Like she was not didn't. It wasn't that she was like, I'm not playing your game. She did not understand that the game was being played. I love that and that. It wasn't until later that she realized what had happened, and that was probably a factor in the shutting down of the factory. Like she already hated it, but it was like and if I got to deal with this, this is just one more thing I don't want to handle.
So that is a very interesting thing. Her husband, Charlie, who was working on the MLK documentary with her, was so clearly committed to that cause, and he talks about them.
I think they were in Alabama. They went to church services that doctor King was giving as a guest pastor, and they spent time with him and his family and like their circle, and he was like I didn't know how they were going to perceive us, Like here is you know, my wife, a rich Jewish artist, and me a political scientist who is the whitest of white guys, coming in and saying we want to help tell your story, and we didn't know how we were going to be greeted.
And he said that that community was more welcoming to them than many of the white social circles that they ran in, and he was so touched by it, which was lovely. He was just a sweet story. He seems like the sweetest human on the planet. Truthfully. Her fourth husband, Celestino Tino, clearly adored her and admired her, but he gave this quote that was really really fascinating to me. He said, I always remained her employee. I was married to her, but I wasn't her husband. I was her employee,
companion and guardian. And like it's I think part of it is, and keep it. I want to keep in mind too. He is a Spanish speaker, so everything we're getting on that is through subtitles, so I don't know if there's a translation thing, because I don't my Spanish is not in any way to a point where I could pick that out. It seems like it's an issue
of reverence for him. There was such a big age gap, and he also noted that he never used the informal oh yeah address of her in Spanish, always the formal, even when they had been together for years and years and years. It's very interesting to me. She commanded a lot of respect, and she seems super interesting. I am floored by again the casual way she would just be like, well, I just really wanted to have a lot of sex, and I needed to. I needed to have that affair.
I'm gonna have to have an affair, now what I will admit right, this is a thing that I don't want to sound judgy, but that's like a thing that like gets my hackles up. I'm like, no cheaters, no, But I couldn't even find myself disliking her. She seemed to see it also clearly, right, Uh, she fascinates me utterly. I don't know. I didn't. I mean, I it's I never knew about all of her activism because it doesn't come up in the little like she admitted the cat
eye glasses. Yeah, it makes her sound like a cool, artsy little kind of you know, a chick on the arts scene in the thirties of New York, like, oh, how quaint, and it's like, no, she did a lot of very risky stuff politically throughout her life, like the fact that she signed thirteen f A. Davids for people and was basically like, if they do something wrong, that's on me, and that's fine. We got to get him out of Europe. Very very bold. The New York Times
ad saying that the war was wrong. Very bold. You know, as we discussed in those episodes and in that behind the scenes, that was a divisive time in the country where people really were tooth and nail over the issue of the war. Yeah, So for her and her husband to take such a strong stance on it in writing was a lot. Yeah. She just seemed very She was confident in her convictions, which I have to admire, even if she wasn't maybe always great about treating other people
with respect. When it came to right, she wanted to have an affair with right. I of course cannot imagine having a prolonged affair with my best friend's spouse. I mean, I can't imagine having a prolonged a fair full stop.
But I really ca not imagine having a prolonged affair and then having social outings with that person's spouse as though everything was fine, right, right, And I have to wonder, like did the wife Surely she must have picked it, Yeah, I kind of part of me is like, you know, if she had lived in a time with different mores around sex and relationships, but at the same time, she lived through the seventies, right, you know, we're not talking about someone who lived at a time when things, I mean,
part of her life more restrained than maybe now. But like, I can imagine a world in which she was just like openly polyamorous and it did not feel like a series of affairs that then ended marriages and started new ones. Yeah. I mean, here's what becomes really intriguing to me, right I All of the behavior and all of the risky things she did were definitely possible because she lived a
life of extraordinary privilege. Right. Sure, if everybody turned on her because of her political opinion, I don't think she would have cared. She would have been fine. She's like, great, I got money, I'm going to hang out my house and make art cool. So that's part of it. It was risky, but it wasn't the same level of risky as it would be for other people. But I also think that offers her this odd sense of remove when
it came to having affairs and whatnot. It would be like, well, yes, socially, this will blow up, but my life will be fine. I can still go about my I think it may have given her subconsciously. I don't think she would have been conscious of it, but I think it gave her like a remove from concern about the morality of it. Was like, well, I have money, I'm fine, I'm good. I can just keep making I'm gonna paint. I would lose a friend, but so it's okay. It's wild to me.
It's very moment on many levels, but she is an intriguing, intriguing person. It is also funny. I will say how many of the people interviewed in that documentary talk about these aspects of her personality that were maybe not the easiest, but they still talk about her with so much love and adoration that she seems like she must have been a truly wonderful human who, just like other humans, is flawed in variety of ways. And that one is a
pretty arly problematic flaw for a lot of people. I'm not trying to brush it into the rug, but that they just all loved her so much. It was like, well that's Altina. Yeah. Yeah, we mentioned too that she went by Tina a lot of the time, right. I found myself having a hard time calling her that, which I had written into the outline in some places, and
then I just stopped doing it. And then when I saw that documentary and her husband Tino talking about how he never addressed her at the informal, I was like, I think I understand this a little bit. Sure, it doesn't feel right to be so familiar with her for some reason, and apparently even the people closest to her
felt that. It's very cute. One of her neighbors from Santa Fe talks about they had she and Tino had their house, and then down the hill a couple houses away they had bought another house that they made their art studio, and how every morning they would walk down the hill hand in hand together to go to work, and how charming everyone found it because they were obviously very very deeply devoted to one another, which I find really interesting because that's the one marriage that all of
her social circle was like, what are you doing? This doesn't make any sense, Like this isn't do you just want a younger man for the stamina, Like what's going on here? But they clearly were emotionally completely connected, which is really lovely. Listen, you gotta try several times sometimes to get it right. I guess she did. In the end. Her last marriage seems like it was very good, and her second marriage I think was very very good. Had he not died, I'm sure they would have been together
for the rest of their lives. Right. Yeah, Anyway, al Tina Shnazi, you intrigue and fascinate me, and I can't help but admire you, even as I make kind of cringey faces about some of the things you do. We talked about the Boston Floating Hospital this week. We did so my little trip to just look at the Boston Molasses flood plaque. I don't remember if I've told this story on the show before, but it's there's two plaques. Now.
The initial one was not a very big plaque. It was a small green plaque that used to be affixed to a stone wall that was in kind of a green space area. That space has been redone. There's I think a baseball field there. There's Botchy courts there. Now that sign it's still on the block from the stone wall, but the wall is gone so instead of it being it was a low wall, so it was kind of like calf height before, huh, And now it's like the just the one block from the wall down at ground level.
So I walked around for a period of time, like I had the spot marked on Google Maps or whatever, but I was like, where is it though, And when I finally found it, I was like that, I see why this was so difficult for me to find. The other sign is a newer sign, and it is one of a series of signs that has been put up by the Friends of the Boston Harbor Walk and the Friends of the Boston Harbor Walk sign about the floating
hospital is what inspired this. That is also where I read the quote about where they went and stopping by the lighthouse for the light housekeeper to play the fog horn at them. So sweet, it was very sweet. So I was very glad that I just, you know, I don't remember exactly what I was doing, but I had a little time that I didn't want to just sit there in North Station doing nothing. It was a pretty date. This is a pretty area to walk around, right there
by the water. Something I found in the research that I just found so funny that I'm now going to share with all of you is a dispute from the pages of the American Journal of Nursing circa nineteen eleven, so the first letter to the editor, or yes, the letter to the editor from the American Journal of Nursing. It's titled Boston Floating Hospital, Dear Editor. In the June number of the journal. I read an advertisement of the Boston Floating Hospital and went there this last summer to
take a postgraduate course. There was one thing which I was surprised to find, and that was that the nurses were expected to go from the hotel where they had their rooms, down on the street car to the dock in their uniforms. It did seem to me that, after so much has been written in our journals, and so much has been said in our county and state associations about the nurse appearing on the street in the sick rem uniform, that this state of things should not be allowed.
A great many of the nurses did object. It was very hot, and often too hot to wear coats, but some of us did swelter and wore our long coats. I wondered after I got there, if the journal knew of the state of affairs, if it would advertise such a hospital. Of course, conditions differ in different parts of the country. I know that in our state we are very careful in admitting graduates of hospitals to our state association, where nurses are allowed to go on the street in uniform.
Mary I. Hall. So. That was followed by a note from the editor published just below it, which said, while we disapprove on general principles of the wearing of the uniform on the street, we should hardly consider this a vital question in considering the practical value of the graduate experience to be gained from the course as advertised. We have yet to hear of a hospital or training school
anywhere in the world where everything is above criticism. But it would seem a simple matter and an improvement to set apart a state room where street costumes could be exchanged for uniforms. Editor So. A couple months later, the following ran in the American Journal of Nursing, titled a Reply from the Boston Floating Hospital a B above. I was very much surprised to read Miss Hall's letter published
in the January Journal. In the first place, it is not compulsory for the nurses to wear their uniforms on the street cars, but it is allowed so that their hours will not be any longer than possible, as conditions are such that it is necessary for us to travel over a good part of the city to get a place where the nurse can live comfortably. Personally, I object very much to a uniform being worn on the street,
and so have former superintendents. The rules for uniforms on the wards are skirts must be at least three inches from the floor, sleeves turned back to the elbows, and an over apron covering the entire dress, and never worn outside of the wards. Miss Hall failed to mention these things, which surely looks as though she was trying to misrepresent a hospital which granted her a diploma which she seemed quite anxious to secure. Very truly, yours, Sarah A. Egan,
r and Superintendent of Nurses. I found that whole exchange so catty and hilarious. I love it. I love it. I took pictures of it with my phone on the screen of my computer and put it in my group chat. Yeah it's a good one. I have so many thoughts. Yeah, are you gonna Are you gonna share them? Are they inside thoughts? Some of them are inside thoughts just because they're not suitable for this podcast because they have But I also like, we we know these people? Oh sure, yeah, yeah, yeah,
who will? And I know, listen, I don't know what goes on in someone else's head. The older I get, the more I realize that I feel like my perception of the world is often very different from the people around me, So I won I never know if this is a case where someone purposefully is omitting something or if they got some idea in their head that was wrong and never sought any more information to see if
that was accurate or not. But it does. I mean, we know those people that just want to be upset about a thing, and so they will run with whatever variation of the facts supports their state of upsetness and just kind of put the pedal to the metal on that and like that is the situation. The end closed, Cat and I and then the response makes me think, maybe she was kind of a pill while she was there in her program and they were like, ugh, this chick again. Yeah, I found it all hilarious. There is
a book about the Boston Floating Hospital. It is called The Boston Floating Hospital How a Boston Harbor Barge Changed the Course of Pediatric Medicine. It's a little more than ten years old now, I think. Living in the Boston area, I was able to go check a copy of it out from the library and it is a nice little book. It's not particularly long. It has lots of detail that
we really didn't get into hear. Some of it was just like we didn't need a bunch of specific details about specific seasons of the different years that the ship went out. A couple of things are. One thing in particular kind of struck me that I thought about talking about and I didn't, and that is that we said that this was a very popular charity. Understandably a hospital that's helping save sick babies, Yeah, who does that? It's
very charming. But in eighteen ninety five, so early in the history of the Boston Floating Hospital, some people apparently came to the hospital and they suggested staging a production of Cinderella to benefit the hospital. They did do the play, but then they absconded with the money and did not actually give it to the hospital. Yeah uh what jerks, Listen. I'm not necessarily an afterlife believer, but if there is one, I hope they were the worst version. They literally stole
from a children's a sick right children's charity. Yeah, yeah, ghastly.
I also, the book was sort of the last thing that I looked at in many things of looking at for this episode, And so there are some things, right, I'm sure like I was not being the absolute most attentive, and I am not fully clear on when exactly Rufus Toby was no longer part of the hospital, because like his he was in reports from the hospital with titles like chairman or a chairman of the board and things like that for a period of years and then he's not listed anymore. But as far as I know, he
was still living. And I don't really know what the story is there and whether there is a story, whether it was you know, just sort of the natural progression of going from a ship where they were doing medical care.
But also a big focus was we're getting into the fresh air and away from the heat and the pollution to being a hospital with you know, pathology labs and a pharmacy and a medical staff and research going on, and like whether having a minister with obviously heard in the right place but no medical experience, like didn't make sense to be in that role anymore. And I don't really know. And maybe he just got to retirement age.
I mean maybe so. And I I got to the point where I said we should record this episode now and stopped trying to dig up the answer. Sometimes you have to do that. You often get my outlines in the dead of night because there's always part of me it's like I got to look up that other thing, and I gotta find that other that one last I just want to make sure that oh I still can't find it, and eventually I have to be like I'm
going to bed. Yeah. Yeah. So that is my periodic installment of a Save some Baby story, as every single day brings multiple new, alarming, upsetting things, some of which just make me want to throw up. Yep. So spending some time about babies on a boat a little bit of a comfort in this moment. Whatever is happening on your weekends, I hope you have some comfort in this moment. Whatever is your version of a story about saving babies, I hope you have some of that in your life
right now. We will be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.