Fluky Missionary

"Coo!" went the grey pigeons at Cleveland's Public Square last week. "Coo! Coo!"

"Gurrh!" went the white-gowned gulls at Cleveland's City Hospital out Scranton Road. "Gurrh! Gurrh!"

One Ralph H. Thurber had faltered into the hospital a fortnight ago with a detailed tale of having become infested with flukes while missioning in the Orient (TIME, May 4). He had, said he, but a month to live.

A most interesting case. Infestation with flukes is an oriental disease rarely seen in the U. S. Doctors probed their text books. Internes peeked at the pallid patient. Messages went to Dr. Horace Wesley Stunkard of New York University, authority on those flat, leaflike worms called flukes. Reporters learned to spell accurately trematode, clonorchis. Ralph H. Thurber made fine human-interest copy. That he was a minister diseased for the Gospel's sake added poignancy.

But Ralph H. Thurber was a liar, an unskillful liar. He said his mother lived in Philadelphia. Cleveland authorities tried to locate his mother in Philadelphia. Actually they found her at Lockport, N. Y. Forthwith they took Thurber's fingerprints. The prints indicated a Bertillon record which showed that the man had been in California, Ohio and New York prisons for forgeries most of the time he claimed he was in the Far East. As a forger he was inept. As a missionary he was fluky. But where did he get his worms? That remained Cleveland's puzzle.

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