The Special Train That Carried Alma Kasemeyer to Surgery
When appendicitis struck at a Hanford house party, the Milwaukee branch line chartered an engine and coach to get a young woman to the Olympian—and a Spokane operating table.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Miss Alma Kasemeyer, while attending a house party at the Gregg home on the Ballygreen Farm, was taken suddenly ill Tuesday night with what Dr. Morrison pronounced appendicitis. She seemed to improve somewhat Wednesday, but Thursday her case became alarming, and upon the advice of Dr. Morrison the engine and coach on the Hanford-Beverly branch of the Milwaukee was chartered for a special trip to Beverly, where she was placed aboard the Olympian on the main line for Spokane, where an operation was performed Thursday night. Miss Kasemeyer was accompanied on the trip by her father, mother and sister and Mr. and Mrs. Chas. M. Sanford. The Kasemeyers now own the Boone ranch on the east side of the Columbia from Hanford, for which they traded last winter.
“the engine and coach on the Hanford-Beverly branch of the Milwaukee was chartered for a special trip to Beverly”
In the 1910s, a medical emergency in the Columbia Basin could require a chartered train; today the old Hanford branch is gone and the townsite is part of a federal cleanup. The story is a reminder of how rural isolation once turned ordinary illness into a race against time.
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