Joe

On Christmas Day a few bottles of wine belonging to Graziano Taite of Jersey City disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Graziano got very angry, and in the resultant brawl a giant Negro called "Smiling Joe" Thomas was stabbed in the heart. Smiling Joe, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 220 pounds, was rushed to a hospital at Kearny, N. J., where doctors cut through his chest wall, opened the pericardium or heart envelope so that the heart lay visibly beating before their eyes, and delicately extracted a three-inch piece of broken knife blade. They took care to let no blood rush out, quickly closed the heart wound with three stitches.

Modern heart surgery was given its impetus during the World War, when it was frequently a case of operate or see the patient die anyway. It is more successful nowadays, but the patient must have absolute rest until the stitches are absorbed and the tissue heals. Until then, any exertion may burst the seam, loosing a fatal spout of blood from the heart. Therefore Joe's nurse, wanting to leave the room for a moment, warned him not to move while she was gone. That was two days after Christmas.

Joe suddenly remembered that the friend with whom he had been living in Newark was about to be dispossessed. He was afraid he would not find him if he stayed in the hospital any longer. He felt all right, so he got up, wrapped his pajama-clad hulk in a blanket, clambered over the window sill, slid down 35 feet of water pipe to the ground.

He still felt all right, so he started off across a swamp in his bare feet. At Harrison, a mile from the hospital, a night watchman gave him a pair of rubbers and a suit of overalls. Joe trudged stolidly on to Newark, found his friend. He still felt all right, so he decided to stay around for a while and enjoy himself. Meanwhile, police were searching the swamp for Joe's body.

Last week on New Year's Eve, Joe walked into the hospital and apologized. He felt fine, he said, but he had decided it was wrong of him to leave. The astounded staff rushed him back to bed where an examination disclosed that his healing heart had suffered no ill effects whatever.

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