Parents v. Society

An inquisitive crowd of neighbors and newsmen last week clogged Hastings-upon-Hudson's unpaved Ridge Street to watch a motorcycle patrolman and a physician try to enter the residence of Mr. & Mrs. John Vasko, first-generation Czechoslovakian immigrants. The Vaskos had locked in themselves and their three children against invasion, barricaded their doors with furniture, prepared tubs of boiling water with which to douse anyone trying to force an entrance.

John Vasko punched one reporter. From a window he shook a hammer menacingly and shouted: "Everybody go away from here! Mind your own business! Our baby is sick! You make her sick! Leave us alone! God sent the baby to us with two eyes. I am going to send her back to God with two eyes. . . ." Mrs. Vasko shook a broom. Police cleared and roped off the street.

The Vaskos' stand was the outgrowth of a three-month fight by Westchester County doctors, lawyers and welfare workers to gain custody of two-year-old Helen Vasko long enough for surgeons to remove the child's left eye. Last January in Grasslands Hospital it was discovered that she had a malignant tumor on the retina, that she would die as soon as the growth reached her brain, perhaps within a month.

Industrious, impoverished, devoted to their three children, the Vaskos had persistently refused to surrender their daughter to surgery. They had given the courts a nice point to adjudicate: Has the State the right to force an operation over the objections of parents? Because the Vasko children had always been well cared for, because physicians interested in the case freely admitted that Helen had but a 50-50 chance to survive enucleation, welfare workers were unable to prove a charge of parental neglect.

The combined persuasiveness of a social worker and the Greek Catholic priest, gradually began to tell with Vasko. Said he: "If the court says I must take out the child's eye, then all right. But my wife, she still is not willing." But one morning early, a milkman saw the Vaskos, with their three children, bundles and one suitcase, steal from their house, climb into a dilapidated automobile, flee town.

The Vaskos originally settled in New Jersey. Lately they had taken an interest in the activities of a faith healing group in Peekskill. Their priest feared that was where they had now gone with their doomed daughter.

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