By Danielle Ameden/Daily News Staff
Posted Jul. 24, 2015 at 12:01 AM
FRAMINGHAM – Quentin Sewell remembers the American Red Cross trains rolling into town during World War II, carrying wounded soldiers bound for Cushing Hospital.
As a high school student hanging out downtown, he’d see servicemen on the mend, going to movie theaters using wheelchairs and canes. Sewell, who graduated with Framingham High School’s Class of 1945, would go to Cushing with his church youth group to visit them and be a part of the war effort.
“We really felt the war because we saw these guys there that came back badly wounded,” said Sewell, 87, an Ashland resident and retired Framingham history teacher.
Sewell and about a dozen other people with fond memories of Cushing Hospital gathered to share stories and memorabilia during a Framingham History Center roundable Thursday night at Edgell Memorial Library.
From Sewell, who remembers Cushing being a dominant part of Framingham in the days of the war, to Gary W. Payton of Hopedale, a former employee who said he locked the doors before the hospital’s demolition in 1994, the group was glad to reminisce about an important institution in the town’s history.
Town Historian Fred Wallace, who penned a new book called “Pushing for Cushing in War and Peace,” said the hospital was a significant employer during its time and many residents answered the call to volunteer there.
“I think it was one of the bright chapters in the history of the town, with the way the whole town rose up to support it,” he said.
Wallace said the hospital, named for World War I Army surgeon and neurosurgery pioneer Dr. Harvey Cushing, treated nearly 14,000 WWII soldiers shipped back to the U.S. with injuries ranging from burns to bullet wounds to blindness. It specialty, he said, was neurosurgery on the brain, spinal canal and peripheral nervous system.
Opened in January 1944 as a U.S. Army hospital, Cushing became a V.A. hospital after the war and closed in 1953, Wallace said. The state acquired it a year later, and opened it as a geriatric hospital in 1957. Decades later, the state’s grand plan to renovate the facility in the late ‘80s fell apart when the economy tanked, and the hospital closed in 1991, he said.
Today, the original, still-standing chapel on Dudley Road harkens back to the hospital’s heyday and residents use the grounds of what’s now called Cushing Memorial Park.
“There are moms with children,” Wallace said. “There are people walking dogs, there are joggers, there are bikers. It really gets a tremendous amount of use.”
While the park is a jewel for Framingham, “at the same time, that really wonderful hospital is gone,” Wallace said.
Payton gifted Wallace with a restricted copy of the hospital’s completion report from 1943, including blueprints and project specifications.
“Unbelievable,” Wallace said as he leafed through the book.
Payton used the word “caring” to describe the hospital, where he worked for 24 years. He said his father, Arthur, worked at Cushing, as did his mother, and then he started in 1970, working his way up from dishwasher to principal storekeeper, in charge of the inventory.
After the hospital closed in 1991, he remained and a few other workers stayed on until 1994.
“I still have the key to the front door,” he said.
Wallace’s book is for sale on amazon.com and through Framingham History Center.