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When Fred Snite Sr. decided to move his paralyzed son from Peiping to Chicago, he first had to arrange for supplies of electricity to operate the respirator's pump. Last week everything was in order. The respirator containing the young man was rolled into an elevator of the Union Medical College Hospital. The electric extension cord to the motor was disconnected. The elevator dropped to the ground level where another extension cord restarted the motor. When the invalid recovered his breath, he was rolled onto a motor truck, where a special gasoline motor was generating electricity. The respirator was connected to this mobile supply, and the truck proceeded to a special train which Fred Snite Sr. had hired. A baggage coach contained a gasoline-driven dynamo and an extra respirator in case Fred Jr.'s broke down.
At every stop in the 900-mi, trip across the plains to Shanghai, rich and poor Chinese crowded to see the man who was rich enough to hire a special. To the sick man they paid little attention, because the Press had raised a great tirade against the influential American who had pre-empted the respirator which might otherwise have been used to save a Chinese life.
At Shanghai, the respirator, continually working, was transferred to a tender and carried alongside the President Coolidge. Then for three precarious minutes the thread of Fred Snite's life was unknotted. That was the length of time it took attendants to take him out of his old respirator, carry him on a stretcher aboard the President Coolidge and insert him in another respirator. The shift was made without a hitch and Fred Snite Jr. sailed for the U. S. prostrate but undismayed. Installed in a twelve-room suite for his parents and medical retinue headed by Harvard-trained Dr. Claude Ellis Dorkner of Peiping, Fred B. Snite thus last week sailed for Chicago, hoping for a few more years of life before his unusable muscles and joints become too frail to support his will to live.
Transferring Fred Snite to Chicago is costing, said his father, $50,000, in addition to the $150,000 he spent during the first 14 months of the illness. Said Fred Snite Sr. just before sailing: "My most valuable possession is in the steel respirator in that room. I told him that all my dollars might as well be wooden, if not devoted to saving his life." Mindful of friends at home, Father Snite, a devout Catholic who sponsors an annual Knights of Columbus golf tournament at Olympia Fields near Chicago every July, is bringing back 1,000 Chinese umbrellas to give to players as they tee off.