My uncle was was a sickly kid, so when he started coughing at 17, the adults in his life thought it was the usual allergies. Then he began hemorrhaging blood. It was 1939. People were dying from tuberculosis. A diagnosis inspired fear and stigma. He was quarantined for three years at La Vina Sanatorium near Pasadena, in Southern California. La Vina was a sanitized bubble, a space protected from the time and fray of World War II. Sanatoriums were known then as “waiting rooms for death.”
In the sanatorium, his health declined. His doctors collapsed one lung for healing. He got a secondary infection and spiked a dangerously high fever.
While he was lying there, facing almost certain death, his attending nurse tuned his radio to the Saturday afternoon New York Metropolitan Opera broadcast. Calvin Pedranti—he preferred being called Cal—was a creative person who’d studied music, although at this point his artistic expression had been mainly confined to playing piano at kids’ ballet recitals. The opera that happened to be playing on the radio that day was Wagner’s Tannhäuser…