Better Mousetrap

When Dr. Martin Bernfield died in San Antonio two years ago, his office nurse, Rachel Starr, found herself with $44,000, the savings of 27 years, and nothing to do. But she had an idea. Bernfield had made a professional hobby of treating San Antonio's Negroes, and Mrs. Starr remembered his recurring anger whenever he couldn't get a patient into one of the two-dozen hospital beds available for the city's 25,000 Negroes. Why not, she thought, build and run a hospital for Negroes? As she put "it to herself, it was the "proverbial better mousetrap waiting to be built." Mrs. Starr, who had nursed in the rough & tough East Texas oilfields, had never been one "to mess around with churchgoing." Just the same, she thought that Negro churches might be interested in her idea, so she made the rounds. At the 15th she struck oil. The Rev. J. Henry Hardeman's Corinth Baptist Church was about to move from San Antonio's East Side to a new site. Mrs. Starr persuaded Hardeman that the $39,000 building fund should be used to turn the old church into a hospital instead. She put up her own $44,000 for equipment.

Last week, Good Samaritan Hospital was formally opened; already, twelve of its 70 beds were in use. In the basement were quarters for Mrs. Starr, laboratories, X-ray and fluoroscope rooms; on the first and second floors, six wards and four private rooms (maximum rate, $7 a day); two operating rooms.

The new hospital had raised some opposition. Ninety members of Corinth Baptist got out; they objected to the diversion of their $39,000 building fund (the congregation now worships in a private house), objected to the pastor's leasing the old building to Mrs. Starr for 20 years at a sum so low he refuses to name it.

Some didn't like the fact that Mrs. Starr continued the local custom of demanding down payments from patients (except in emergency cases), and she has received some threatening letters. Says she: "I can't afford to run a charity hospital ... If I started supporting the indigent Negroes of this town, it wouldn't be long before someone would have to support me."

For the moment (because of a funds dispute affecting San Antonio's big Robert B. Green Hospital), the opening of Mrs. Starr's Good Samaritan meant that the city's Negroes have proportionately more bed space than is available to white San Antonians.

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