Lenore Eastin Wayman's 'Dash Between' looks at TB clinic

Lenore Eastin Wayman, the subject of "The Dash Between" that ran in the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram on March 21, 2010, retired in 1981 as administrator for the Lorain County (Ohio) Tuberculosis Clinic.

Lenore, whose Dash fell between her birth in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, on April 28, 1919, and Feb. 22, 2010, when she died at Wesleyan Village in Elyria at age 90, began working at the clinic when it was located at Pleasant View Sanatorium in Amherst, Ohio, before it was moved to the Lorain County Health Building in Elyria, Ohio.

I included a little information about how treatment of TB patients had changed during Lenore's lifetime. Here's more you might like to know.

Chronicle-Telegram columnist Connie Davis once wrote, “I'm told Lorain County had a high incidence of tuberculosis because of the sandstone quarries here. Silica dust inhaled by quarry workers damaged lungs.”

Pleasant View opened on the southeast corner of Leavitt Road (Ohio Route 58) and NorthRidge Road in Amherst in the early 1930s. It became home to large numbers of TB patients who required long-term isolation before advances in medical treatment allowed for out-patient care.

When Lenore began working as a clerk-typist at the newly established clinic at Pleasant View in 1964, the number of residents had been dwindling.

By 1967, the handful of remaining TB patients had been transferred from Pleasant View to Richland County Hospital in Mansfield, Ohio.

Residents of the former (Lorain) County Home for the aged and infirmed were moved from Elyria to the vacated Amherst sanatorium, newly christened Golden Acres Nursing Home.

All out-patient services and TB testing continued to be conducted at the Amherst facility until the clinic was moved to the new county health building on Murray Ridge Road.

To read Lenore's "Dash" from the Chronicle, click here.

To recommend people for “The Dash Between” obit features for the Elyria Chronicle, Medina County Gazette, ObitsOhio.com or other print or online publications, contact Alana Baranick at abaranick@gmail.com or 216-862-2617.

This "Dash Between" column was posted originally on ObitsOhio.com on March 22, 2010.