AMERICAN WOMAN HELPS SAVE GREEK CHILDREN’S LIVES

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31449, 16 August 1967, Page 3

AMERICAN WOMAN HELPS SAVE GREEK CHILDREN’S LIVES

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter)

~~ . ATHENS. The lives of 56 Greek children have been saved by open-heart surgery made possible by Mrs Maria Ramsay, an American who refuses to say how much it costs. “With so much joy given all round what is the use of counting the money?” she says.

Mrs Ramsay was born in Brooklyn in 1913, one of five children of Italian parents. She was married at an early age and was a divorcee with five children on her hands when she wais in her twenties. Her second husband, by whom she had her sixth child, was the Metropolitan Opera bass, Nino Carbon!. Mrs Ramsay remembers that they rented a 10-roomed New York flat once occupied by Enrico Caruso and lived “a wonderful, mad life” with six children around them. As the children grew up they got

accustomed to their mother bringing in stray people who stopped her in the streets and asked for help. “I could not sleep at night because I could not help my fellow men,” Mre - Ramsay said. “I found that even when

I had no money to give, a cheerful good morning could make someone who wjs depressed feel there was still something good in life.” The opportunity to give more than just a good morning or a meal presented itself when Nino Carboni died and the widowed Mrs Carboni married Mr Joseph Gales Ramsay HL Mr Ramsay was a chemist and statistician who helped with the invention of synthetic rubber.

For the first time in her life, the little Italian from Brooklyn found herself with

far more money than she could ever disburse in free meals and nev clothes for the New York poor.

But her career to save children’s lives began quite unexpectedly on November 19, 1962. Mr and Mrs Ramsay were staying at a hotel in Rochester, Minnesota, and bought a copy of an evening paper, the “St. Paul Dispatch.” Reading through a “people-in-the-news” column, Mrs Ramsay saw an appeal from a Scottish mother to save her 19-month-old daughter who wash suffering from advanced cancer of the eyes. Mrs Ramsay said: “I told my husband that if he let me help the child I would promise not to buy even a hairpin for myself for one whole year.” Her husband took her at her word and she got on

the telephone to Scotland. “I have never got off the telephone ever since,” she says now.

Margaret McEwan, of Lanarkshire, Scotland, was taken to the United States too late for her sight to be saved but in time for surgeons to prevent the cancer spreading fatally. Now, at the age of seven, Margaret is developing a reputation in Scotland for songs at the piano.

The McEwan case was reported in Greek newspapers and letters started pouring in from parents of Greek children suffering from heart ailments. A career dedicated to saving young lives was launched.

Until a few years ago, children with congenital heart defects, the so-called “holes in the heart”, were as a rule

condemned to a few years of invalid life and an early death. They still are, unless they can obtain the expensive surgery performed in only a few world medical centres. Mrs Ramsay founded the Mrs Joseph Gales Ramsay 111 Foundation in 1962. So far the foundation has taken 82 patients, mainly children, from 15 countries to the United States for complex operations performed by a surgical team headed by Dr. Walton Lillehai, a pioneer in open-heart surgery. Of these, 61 have come from Greece and the difficult operations have saved 56 of them.