Johnstown was a lively town while Fred was growing up, a mélange of ethnic groups molded into a strict social order, with the descendants of English settlers at the top, followed by Germans, Welsh, and Irish, the first immigrants to arrive. Eastern and southern Europeans, who came later, fit in below. At the bottom were the few hundred blacks who had been brought in from the South to work in the mills in a time of labor strife. They lived in a shantytown in the flats near the river, isolated from the rest of Johnstown. Fred had no contact with them, and his strongly outspoken feelings about blacks didn’t surface until he moved south. There was another thing with which he had no contact in his youth, but about which he also later came to have strong feelings: guns. His mother wouldn’t allow them in her house.
Fred grew tall and slim. In high school, he played on a football team that never lost a game, but unlike his teammates, he showed no interest in the girls who showered the victorious athletes with flirtatious attentions. His main interests were his studies and the church. And when he became one of the first graduates of Catholic High School in 1924 and announced that he wanted to become a priest, his mother showered Heaven with praises of gratitude.
None of the other Klenner children had gone to college. All either married or went to work young. But with the older children gone from home and no young ones waiting to be fed, clothed, and educated, Frank knew that he could find the money to allow his youngest child to escape the hard labors of the steel mills and become a servant of the Church. To have a priest in the family would be high honor.
Fred enrolled at St. Vincent’s, a Catholic college at Latrobe, and later he told of living in an attic cubbyhole with inadequate ventilation and rising at 4 every morning to work in the fields. He also came in contact with a tubercular priest, and by the end of his first school year, he, too, had the disease. He returned home, where he remained for more than a year, nursed by his mother with her prayers and home remedies. During that time, he determined that the priesthood was not for him. Instead, he told his mother, his bout with illness had caused him to realize that he wanted to become a doctor. Eventually, he returned to college, this time at St. Francis in Loretto, where he majored in chemistry, and went on to get a master’s degree. Later, he taught chemistry at Catholic University in Washington while working on a Ph.D., and on a research trip through the South, he stopped at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, an institution endowed with the tobacco money of James Buchanan Duke, and decided that Duke was where he wanted to go to medical school. “He said it was one of the best,” his sister Marie recalled.
At Duke, Fred met Annie Hill Sharp, setting the course for the remainder of his life. During his final year of medical school, another big flood hit Johnstown, and his sister Agnes’s husband, Daniel, was one of those who drowned in it. Fred came home to be with his family, and he was filled with talk of the long-haired, dark-eyed nurse he had met. His mother was concerned. This girl wasn’t Catholic.
Mary Klenner’s concern paled compared to that of Annie Hill’s mother, especially after Annie Britt Sharp accidentally discovered that her daughter had converted to Catholicism. There could be only one reason for that: Annie Hill intended to marry this brooding young Catholic from the North. Annie Britt made her opposition known in her strongest terms, but no amount of argument could sway her headstrong daughter. The opposition led Fred and Annie Hill to deceit. They married in Greensboro on November 24, 1937, while Fred was working on his residency at the tuberculosis sanitarium in Winston-Salem, but they kept it from her family. Not until the following fall did they tell their secret, and then they said that they had been married just three days before, prompting the Sharps to hold a wedding dinner and to unknowingly put a false notice of their marriage in the Greensboro newspaper.
Fred Klenner was the complete outsider when, in 1939, he finally settled in Reidsville to begin his practice: a Catholic in a town which did not yet have a Catholic church, a northerner in the South, an unwanted son-in-law of one of the town’s most prominent families. Perhaps that was the seed that caused a bunker mentality to begin to grow in him, family members later speculated.
But in the beginning, few signs of what were later considered bizarre thoughts and deeds were publicly evident, and the medical practice of Dr. Klenner, the husband of a Sharp, grew more quickly than expected. He encouraged this growth by giving free care to policemen, firemen, ministers, and pharmacists, who helped spread the word that he was a decent fellow.
“Fred was a darn good person,” his sister Marie said. “Nice, sociable. He was too easygoing. He’d give too much all the time. He never was greedy. If people needed something, he’d give.”
He proved her right by never sending bills to his patients, a practice he continued throughout his career. If a patient couldn’t pay when treated then he could pay when he could. And even if he couldn’t pay and still needed a doctor, Dr. Klenner would be there, making house calls no matter the hour.
More and more people who went to him began to think of him as a trusted friend, not as a strange outsider. The only things that blemished Dr. Klenner’s early years in Reidsville were his occasional outspoken support for the views of the Nazis of his family’s homeland and his contention that Adolf Hitler was misunderstood, which continued even after the United States went to war with Germany. This brought great embarrassment to the patriotic Sharps when they heard gossip about it. James Sharp, after all, had been a champion war bond salesman in World War I, honored by the secretary of the treasury, and he would again do his part raising money for the war effort during World War II. After several people who heard Dr. Klenner’s pro-Nazi statements challenged him, questioning his loyalty, the doctor became more circumspect.
During the war, Fred and Annie Hill began a family. Four days after the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, their first child, Mary Ann, was born at Duke University Hospital, where Annie Hill had gone so that one of her respected former professors could deliver her baby. Soon after Mary Ann was born, the Klenners moved into a two-story brick house on Huntsdale Drive on the southern side of Reidsville about a mile from the big Sharp home on Lindsey Street. In September 1944, a second daughter was born at Duke. She was named Gertrude for Fred’s sister who had died a teenager.
Near the end of the war, Annie Hill went to her dentist with bleeding gums. He recommended pulling all of her teeth. When she told her husband about it, he thought the solution too drastic. He remembered reading about research using ascorbic acid—vitamin C—to cure chimpanzees with a similar problem. Why not try it? Annie Hill agreed, and after several shots, her gums stopped bleeding.
A short time later, Dr. Klenner tried vitamin C again, this time on an obstinate man who was “near death,” as Dr. Klenner later described it, from viral pneumonia.
“I went to his house and gave him one big shot with five grams or five thousand milligrams of vitamin C,” he told Greensboro reporter Flontina Miller years later. “When I went back later in the day, his temperature was down three degrees and he was sitting on the edge of the bed eating. I gave him another shot of C, five thousand milligrams, and kept up that dosage for three days, four times a day. And he was well. I said, ‘Well, my gosh! This is doing something.’”
Soon afterward, when Mary Ann and Gertrude came down with measles at the same time, their father tried an experiment, first giving the girls large amounts of vitamin C, then withholding it. When he gave it to them, he later reported, the symptoms disappeared. When he withheld it they returned. After he’d satisfied himself that the vitamin really was affecting the disease, he went ahead and gave them large dosages for five straight days and the measles went away to stay.
In May of 1946, Dr. Klenner delivered quadruplets to the thirty-six-year-old deaf-mute wife of a fifty-nine-year-old black sharecropper. The babies were tiny, three of them weighing only about two pounds each, the fourth a little more than three pounds, and in the beginning they had to be fed with medicine droppers. Dr. Klenner began giving them vitamin C immediately.
“A premature baby specialist from Duke said they had a fifty-fifty chance to survive,” he later recalled. “I kept the humidity normal and kept giving them a lot of vitamin C, starting with five hundred milligrams a day and as they got older gradually increasing the amount.”
The babies, all with the same first name, Mary, the only known identical quadruplets in the world, not only survived but thrived and proved a boon to their parents, Annie Mae and James Fultz. In exchange for using the girls’ pictures in ads, the Pet Milk Company bought the family a 150-acre farm from Dr. Klenner’s father-in-law, James Sharp, and built on it a modest house and a barn, complete with a mule. The quadruplets also brought Dr. Klenner his first national attention when, a year after their birth, his picture appeared in, of all places,
Ebony
magazine. Decades later pictures of the quadruplets still hung in Dr. Klenner’s office and home.
These cases led Dr. Klenner to other experiments with vitamin C, and in 1948 he published his first article in a medical journal about his success in treating pneumonia with it. Dozens more such articles would appear in coming years.
In 1949, a polio epidemic hit North Carolina, and Dr. Klenner soon was diagnosing the disease in dozens of young patients, all of whom he began treating with massive amounts of vitamin C. Among them were his young niece Susie Newsom and her cousin Nancy Miller. All of his patients, he claimed, recovered completely, and later he told of pleading with doctors at the polio hospital in Greensboro to give vitamin C to all of the patients there. He even offered to pay for it. But the doctors wouldn’t listen to him, he said, and many lives were lost and many children were left crippled as a consequence.
In her best-selling book,
Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit,
published in 1954, nutritionist Adelle Davis wrote about one of Dr. Klenner’s polio patients, an unidentified eighteen-month-old girl. As Davis described the child, she was paralyzed and unconscious, her body stiff, cold, and blue. The frantic mother thought her daughter dead. But a single, massive shot of vitamin C brought the child back to life. After a second shot four hours later, Davis wrote, the child was laughing and taking a bottle, and her paralysis had disappeared.
That wasn’t the only miracle that Davis attributed to Dr. Klenner. She told of burns he’d healed quickly with vitamin C, without pain or skin grafts, leaving no scars. She allowed him to boast of putting arthritic cripples back to work, curing even the most hopeless cases within six months.
Not surprisingly, Adelle Davis’s book had a big effect on Dr. Klenner’s practice. Desperate people from all over the country, given little hope by their own doctors, began making their way to his clinic. His waiting room was filled every day, some of the patients carried up the steep steps in wheelchairs or on stretchers. Patients often waited hours to see the doctor. While they waited, veteran patients often entertained new ones with tales of wonder about the miraculous results Dr. Klenner had wrought with his vitamins.
“It was not without justification that the new patient found the very air of the doctor’s waiting room permeated with hope,” one longtime patient, Bill Davis, wrote in tribute. “A very young Fred Klenner must have missed the day in school when the word ‘hopeless’ came before the class. It was not in his vocabulary.”
“He got all the chronics,” recalled Phil Link, a Reidsville pharmacist who admired Dr. Klenner. “He got all the ones the others had given up on.”
And to each, regardless of condition, he offered hope.
“He really believed he could help anybody,” said another pharmacist, also a friend of Dr. Klenner.
Dr. Klenner’s very presence seemed to inspire hope and confidence. “He had an aura about him,” a close family friend recalled.
Everything about him spoke authority, from his firm handshake to his commanding voice and powerful blue eyes that were at once calming and reassuring.
“You felt better when Dr. Klenner walked into the room,” one longtime patient observed. “And when he touched you, you knew everything was going to be all right.”
“When he told you something, you believed him, and when he told you he could help you, you knew that he would,” said another patient.
“He was the kindest, most caring and most giving man I’ve ever known,” said yet another.
Many patients observed that once they were in the presence of Dr. Klenner he had a way of making them feel as if they were his only concern. His wife, too, shared some of these qualities. In the years when their children were growing up, she worked with her husband only occasionally, but in later years, she became his full-time nurse.
“When you were around them, you became very, very secure about whatever illness you had,” a patient and family friend said. “You also became dependent on them. It became almost like a love affair.”
Dr. Klenner’s patients became dependent for one simple reason: they were convinced that he was making them well. “He helped just about everybody he treated,” said his friend Phil Link. “If he hadn’t helped them, they wouldn’t’ve come back.”
Most of them came back. And kept coming. They not only trusted Dr. Klenner, they adored him with utter devotion.
“To belittle Dr. Klenner to his patients is like slandering motherhood or the American flag to the Daughters of the American Revolution,” Bill Davis wrote in his tribute. “His patients vie avidly to outdo each other in praising him.”