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SPEAKER_04: That's reporter Katie Thornton.
SPEAKER_08: I started digging through old newspapers and I found out why it's there. That building is the last remnant of an early 1900s amusement park. It was called Wonderland.
SPEAKER_04: A friend of a friend named Hillary lives there now and she gave me a tour. We are at my apartment building. It's on the corner of 31st and 31st in South Minneapolis. As I understand it, there was an amusement park here.
SPEAKER_10: The park had a roller coaster and a dance hall and a log flume, but the biggest attraction was something much stranger.
SPEAKER_08: A bizarre sideshow that used to fill the apartment complex where Hillary lives now. When she signed the lease, her landlord told her the building used to be called the Infantorium.
SPEAKER_04: What he said at the time was like they had premature babies like living in this building and being taken care of in the building as part of the attraction of the park.
SPEAKER_08: Visitors to the Infantorium would pay 10 cents to enter a spacious room full of glass boxes. They were incubators with tiny premature babies on display. And this wasn't the only place this was happening.
SPEAKER_06: The fact that there was a pavilion for incubator babies at Wonderland is not an isolated incident.
SPEAKER_04: Lauren Mabinovitz is an amusement park historian. Incubators for premature babies were oddly enough a phenomenon at the turn of the century that was available at state and county fairs and amusement parks rather than hospitals.
SPEAKER_08: At this moment in history, if you wanted your at-risk premature baby to survive, you pretty much had to bring them to an amusement park. These incubator shows cropped up across America. They were the main source of healthcare for premature babies for over 40 years.
SPEAKER_04: When the incubator attraction started in the late 1800s, the world was a lot deadlier. Almost one in five babies in the United States died before childhood, and that was an improvement from the previous decades.
SPEAKER_08: At the turn of the century, 19 of 20 births were still happening at home, which isn't a problem if your baby is healthy, but not all of them were. Like today, a lot of babies were born too early. The majority of American hospitals had nothing to help them. No technology, no special skills. There was no central heating to keep them warm. Doctors would place heated bricks in cribs and cross their fingers.
SPEAKER_08: In private, people tried everything to keep premature babies alive. They put these infants in boxes stuffed with feathers to keep them warm. They rubbed oil on the babies and kept them near fireplaces. But more than three-quarters of premature babies were dying. And in America, no one in the medical community was trying to solve this problem.
SPEAKER_04: But things looked different over in France. French doctors stole an idea from the poultry industry, which used incubators to hatch chicken eggs. They designed a human version. Basically, it was a warm box, heated by a hot water tank below. In the 1890s, a Frenchman named Alexander Lyon modernized the whole thing. The air in Lyon's incubator was heated by a pipe flowing with hot water. The temperature was pretty consistent, and the box was ventilated. But Lyon's real innovation was to put a big glass window on the box. And then he filled the box with a baby. He built a better machine, and he displayed it at the Berlin Industrial Exposition in 1896.
SPEAKER_04: Don Raffel is the author of a new book about the unexpected origins of modern incubation.
SPEAKER_07: He showed the new machine with preemies inside, and it was a sensation. There were drinking hall songs about it. He called it Die Kinder Brutenstalt, which was literally child hatchery. And so it took on the environment of a sideshow. Some carnival showmen bought knockoff machines and started charging entry to their own premature baby shows. But keeping a baby alive is more complicated than putting them in a box and flipping a switch. So most of them got out of the business pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_04: But one showman was hooked on this idea. In 1897, Dr. Martin Cooney put on his first incubator baby show in London. Somehow he may have just gotten onto the idea of this is kind of a cool way to make money in the beginning. So he went with this show.
SPEAKER_08: Unlike other showmen, Cooney hired nurses to hold the babies and feed them breast milk. The babies were healthier and survived at higher rates. The public loved it. So Dr. Cooney decided to try it out in the United States at the Omaha World's Fair.
SPEAKER_04: Details were always a little vague when Cooney told his life story to Americans, but a few points stayed consistent. He was from Europe and he was trained in Germany and France, which were decades ahead of the U.S. in terms of medical education. He called himself Dr. Martin Cooney, though his given name was actually Michael Cohen. And he said he'd just arrived in the U.S. for the first time, though he'd actually immigrated from Poland about a decade earlier. As a good showman, he had a knack for exaggeration. Sometimes he said he invented the incubators. He didn't.
SPEAKER_04: Dr. Cooney beckoned people to his show with bold hand-painted signs that said things like, Wonderful Invention and Infant Incubators with Living Infants. Lots of spectators came and so did parents of premature babies who handed them over to Dr. Cooney, hoping for a miracle.
SPEAKER_08: Cooney perfected his sideshow at the 1901 World's Fair in Buffalo, New York. That fair has gone down in infamy as the place where President Wayne McKinley was shot and later died of gangrene. But aside from that, people had a really good time at the fair.
SPEAKER_04: Dr. Cooney was set up on the Midway. It's the section filled with carnival rides and sideshows. And in Buffalo, it was popping off with attractions like House Upside Down and Jerusalem on the Morning of the Crucifixion. Thousands of people paid 10 cents each to see Dr. Cooney's incubator show. They had barkers outside saying, Don't forget to see the babies. Maybe the future president is inside.
SPEAKER_07: He knew how to be a showman. He knew how to talk to people and he loved talking to people.
SPEAKER_08: Dr. Cooney greeted thousands of people on the Midway. His exhibit was full of futuristic glass incubators. One reporter wrote in Cosmopolitan that Cooney's incubator babies were more exciting than Niagara Falls. Newspapers as far away as Hawaii reported on the survival of the infants. It was like a reality TV show in some ways where there were people who would come every week to look at the babies and they'd have a favorite that they'd be rooting for.
SPEAKER_04: A local medical journal reported that 48 of the 52 babies delivered to Cooney that summer had survived. But even so, American doctors were not banging down Cooney's door for his machines. This life-saving technology was stuck on the Midway.
SPEAKER_08: Despite the big crowds and the good press, Cooney was still spending more money than he was bringing in.
SPEAKER_07: To build an exhibit for a World's Fair was a tremendous amount of work. Safety, points of entrance and egress, ventilation, electricity, you basically had to build a NICU. And then when the whole thing is over, you have to tear it all down.
SPEAKER_08: Luckily for Cooney, a new fad was sweeping the country in the early 1900s.
SPEAKER_04: Amusement parks took all the excitement of the fair Midways and made them permanent. In the early 1900s, amusement parks were popping up all over the country. Like, all over the country. In 1909, a reporter from Pittsburgh apologized on behalf of the city. He wrote, We regret that we are possibly the only city in the country of any consequence that will go through the coming summer season with only three amusement parks. By 1910, every U.S. city with at least 20,000 people had their own park. People wanted to have fun, and amusement parks were all about unbridled pleasure. It's not an intellectual thing at all. It's just a kind of giddy, physical amusement.
SPEAKER_06: The attendance figures for these parks are phenomenal. You could get things like a quarter of the population of a medium-sized city on a weekend. Most of the early parks were owned by electric trolley companies, who used the parks to get passengers on their trains.
SPEAKER_08: The trolley lines would also end at the amusement park, and the electric cables from the train would be hooked up to power the roller coasters.
SPEAKER_04: The parks were places where new technology was smuggled into American society under the guise of entertainment. At the time, there was a lot of uneasiness about new technology. Electric trains, lights, and motors weren't always safe. But in amusement parks, technology wasn't something to be feared or mistrusted.
SPEAKER_06: Playing with these things, making them part of leisure and recreation, acclimated people to them physically with their bodies, but also made them pleasurable. Made them pleasurable at a time when there might be some anxiety about these new technologies.
SPEAKER_04: When people got on thrill rides or watched firework displays, they saw that technology could be fun and safe. In a way, Dr. Cooney's incubator babies were the essence of amusement parks. And Cooney's exhibit in Buffalo caught the eye of two businessmen who were planning to build a brand new park in Coney Island. They saw this is a really cool show. It's as interesting as a ride. This would work at an amusement park.
SPEAKER_08: Coney Island already had two other self-contained amusement parks. And until it burned down in 1896, a seven-story hotel shaped like an elephant. But these businessmen were taking it to the next level. Their new endeavor would be called Luna Park. It featured a ride imported from Buffalo called A Trip to the Moon.
SPEAKER_04: It brought passengers into a paper mache fantasy world full of scientifically incorrect foliage and 200 actors playing moon people. And among Luna Park's flagship attractions was Dr. Cooney's incubator babies. When the sun set on May 16th, 1903, Luna Park switched on 250,000 electric light bulbs and opened their gates to 60,000 people who gathered outside.
SPEAKER_08: Many of them made a beeline for the babies.
SPEAKER_04: Coney Island was the start of something big for Dr. Cooney.
SPEAKER_08: In the spring of 1905, he traveled to Chicago, Denver, and Minneapolis to set up new exhibits. His incubators captivated audiences across the country, and he became stinking rich. Cooney bought a nice house near the shore on Coney Island, where he was known to host extravagant dinners.
SPEAKER_04: If Dr. Cooney was in it for the money, he got what he wanted. But the thing is, he made a lot of choices that weren't driven by profit. He really wanted to save babies and to get the incubators into hospitals. In his travels, Cooney would wine and dine doctors and give them demonstrations of the incubators.
SPEAKER_08: On multiple occasions, he tried to get health departments to use his incubators after the local fair season was over. He even tried to donate his incubators to the city of San Francisco. But no one would take them. Doctors had all sorts of reasons for rejecting the technology.
SPEAKER_04: One reason was the disgraceful influence of the eugenics movement. In 1901, an anonymous editorial made the rounds in medical journals, asking if the incubators should be shut down. The author wrote that the human race suffered by keeping alive babies who would quote, transmit their deficiencies, deformities, and vices to the next generation. Eugenics was a hateful and racist pseudoscience. And it was not a fringe movement. A lot of the fairs where Cooney showed his babies also had eugenics exhibits.
SPEAKER_08: There were lots of other concerns about Cooney's approach. Like maybe amusement parks weren't the best place for fragile infants.
SPEAKER_06: I think of them primarily as an assault on your senses. The noise, the bright lights, the smells of food. They were somewhat seedy.
SPEAKER_04: Amusement parks were noisy, and a lot of them served alcohol and had gambling. And they became known as places where young people of all different backgrounds bumped a little more than elbows. You could make out in the tunnel of love or flirt on the dance floor, and then you would head over to the babies. This juxtaposition made some people uneasy.
SPEAKER_08: And the midways could be incredibly dangerous. Many of the parks were built quickly, were pretty shoddy, and prone to fire. One time in 1911, a Coney Island park with one of Cooney's incubator shows went up in flames.
SPEAKER_07: The New York Times stopped the press and reported on the front page that all the babies had died. That was actually not true. It was an error. All the babies had in fact survived.
SPEAKER_08: And beyond the safety concerns, there was something deeply unsettling about the incubator shows. Today, it's clear that putting babies on display and profiting off them is unquestionably exploitative. In many ways, Cooney's exhibits were in line with the worst parts of amusement parks and world's fairs.
SPEAKER_04: In addition to the rides, many fairs and parks had ethnological villages, where Native Americans or people from faraway nations would live on site in stereotyped caricatures of their homes. Some people were literally caged and incarcerated on the grounds with no record of payment. On a lot of midways, there was a despicable willingness to exploit human life for the entertainment of the privileged. And charging money to see struggling infants was another manifestation of this unethical practice. And while we're talking about our discomfort with incubator shows, there's one more thing that should make you uncomfortable with Dr. Cooney.
SPEAKER_07: He wasn't a real doctor. There is no medical license on record for him in this country. In the cities where he said he attended medical school in Germany, there's no record of his matriculation in any of those schools.
SPEAKER_08: This was not common knowledge. Even Cooney's obituary said he was a doctor. Cooney always told his staff that he had a license to practice in Europe, but it just hadn't transferred to the US, or something like that.
SPEAKER_04: They followed his instructions, the babies lived, and he worked magic with the media and passers-by.
SPEAKER_08: So Dr. Cooney was a fraud. But that doesn't mean his contribution to medicine wasn't real. The babies in his care were more than four times as likely to survive into childhood.
SPEAKER_04: Saving the babies became Martin Cooney's mission. He liked to say he was making propaganda for preemies. His staff took care in nurturing the babies, even feeding those too weak to suckle through the nose with a dropper. He took babies of all races and classes, and he never once charged the families. Everything was funded by admissions.
SPEAKER_08: After 35 years of Cooney's incubator exhibits, his sideshow was still the best place to keep a premature baby alive. By the 1930s, most hospitals hadn't created alternatives to the Inventorium, so people kept bringing their newborns to the Midway.
SPEAKER_04: But in the depths of the Great Depression, incubators finally made a breakthrough when Martin Cooney teamed up with a sympathetic doctor in Chicago.
SPEAKER_07: That's where he met Dr. Julius Hess, who was everything Martin Cooney wasn't. He was a real doctor. He had absolutely stellar credentials. And Hess was very impressed with what Martin Cooney was doing, and Hess really learned a lot of what he knew from Dr. Cooney.
SPEAKER_04: Hess was a respected physician with a passion for infant care. And over the years, he saw how Cooney's system was saving a lot of people. But Hess had to be careful with his associations. Like Cooney, he was also up against a medical system that didn't seem to care if these babies lived or died. Hess wanted his cause to be taken seriously, and being the doctor that endorsed the medical sideshow at the local amusement park wasn't a good look.
SPEAKER_08: Hess designed his own incubator, and in the 1920s, he'd gotten a little bit of funding to open an infant wing at his Chicago hospital. But it couldn't keep up with demand.
SPEAKER_07: Julius Hess had been struggling within the system to try to get publicity and funding and just couldn't get enough. He was turning away patients because he didn't have the resources. He needed a publicity machine, and Martin Cooney at that point needed respectability.
SPEAKER_08: When Chicago hosted the World's Fair in 1933, Cooney's exhibit had the explicit support of Julius Hess, and that carried a lot of weight. Even Chicago's health commissioner got on board. The fair ran for two summers, and in the second summer, they held an incubator baby reunion event. Joyous mothers carried their one-year-old babies and strolled down the midway. Each baby had been saved by the incubators just one year before.
SPEAKER_04: After the fair, Chicago became the first city in America to create a public health policy specifically for premature infants. Dr. Julius Hess became known as the father of American neonatology. And with the blessing of the Chicago medical community, other cities started putting incubators in their hospitals, too.
SPEAKER_08: As doctors got on board, Cooney's infantorium started shutting down across the country. By the 1940s, Coney Island was the last of his exhibitions taking babies. And some of those babies are still alive today.
SPEAKER_02: Beth Allen, This is Beth Allen, born in Brooklyn in 1941.
SPEAKER_04: Yes, well, I was one of the last group of babies that he took care of. He was not a young man then.
SPEAKER_04: 78 years ago, Beth's mother was rushed to a hospital near her house. She had been pregnant just six months. She pushed out two painfully tiny twins. One died shortly after childbirth. Beth was a mere shadow of an infant. At just over a pound and a half, she weighed less than a third of what she should have weighed. The hospital staff had no choice but to tell Beth's mother to take her tiny, struggling child to Coney Island. She was totally against it. When the doctor said that she had to send me, let me go to Dr. Cooney, she was, no, I'm not, my baby is not a freak, she's not going to a sideshow, no way.
SPEAKER_02: And it took a personal visit from Dr. Cooney to convince her to let him take me.
SPEAKER_08: By now, Cooney was in his 70s. He knew this child would not survive without his help. He pleaded with Beth's mother. And finally, she agreed. Beth says it's the only reason she's alive today.
SPEAKER_02: The doctors didn't want it. They felt that the babies were weaklings, either they lived or they died, and nobody made any great effort to save them.
SPEAKER_04: Beth was an attraction. The nursing staff would take a wedding band and put it around her wrist just to show how tiny she was, as though it wasn't obvious. There wasn't any clothing that fit her, so she literally wore dolls' clothes. But if you ask Beth, she considers herself lucky. Her parents visited her every day, and they grew to trust and respect the same showman who convinced them to turn their daughter into a sideshow attraction.
SPEAKER_02: My parents took me to visit him every Father's Day until he passed away, because that's how they felt about him.
SPEAKER_08: In 1943, a Brooklyn hospital opened the city's first department for premature infants, and Martin Cooney closed up shop at Coney Island. He told his family his work was finished. Cooney had blown all of his savings keeping his incubator shows operating in New York. He lived off checks from sympathetic donors like Julius Hess. But seven years after his last show, Martin Cooney died penniless. Beth Allen's parents were at his funeral. I'm so proud to be an incubator baby because there are so few of us now who are left to tell the story and make sure that Dr. Cooney gets all the praise he deserves.
SPEAKER_04: And what do you have to say to the people who think that this was exploitative or wrong?
SPEAKER_02: I say, look at me. Here I am.
SPEAKER_08: Beth is just one of the amusement park babies to come out of Cooney's 45-year tenure as the Sideshow Doctor.
SPEAKER_04: Despite everything, Martin Cooney's attraction saved nearly 7,000 babies, kept alive for our amusement.
SPEAKER_08: Up next, more of the consequences of putting babies on display. The story of the Dionne Quintuplets. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Cachava SuperBlend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But, I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A, and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava.com slash invisible. What's more important? Making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow. You can actually do both at the same time. With annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial, you're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility. And their life insurance policies not only provide your family with a death benefit, but some can even give you immediate access to funds in case of an emergency. Go to lincolnfinancial.com slash get started now to learn how to plan, protect, and retire. Lincoln annuities and life insurance are issued by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Products sold in New York are issued by Lincoln Life and Annuity Company of New York, Syracuse, New York, distributed by Lincoln Financial Distributors, Inc., a broker dealer.
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SPEAKER_04: Yeah, totally. So I mean, the whole thing is super conflicting, but definitely talking with Beth and talking with Don, they all met other babies of Dr. Cooney's and they all kind of said the same thing that Beth said, which is that just that they felt saved and they knew they wouldn't have survived otherwise. But I did come across a story from the 1930s and took place in rural Ontario. It's like more than 200 miles north of Toronto, outside of a town called Calendar. And basically in the 1930s, it was during the depression, this guy contacted his local newspaper and he's basically like, hey, is it more expensive for me to announce like five babies being born rather than just one because my sister-in-law just had five babies?
SPEAKER_08: Whoa, that's amazing that that was his concern. Right. The cost of the announcement in the newspaper, but that's great. And then like classic small town paper,
SPEAKER_04: the person who's placing the birth announcements is like the ad guy, but he's also a staff reporter. So he's like, no way, you're full of it. And so he goes out there, the uncle was like, no, I swear that she had five babies. Cause at the time there was no quintuplets that were known to have survived. So the staff reporter goes out there and he's like, yes, there's actually quintuplets. And then it just gets picked up like all over the US and all over Canada.
SPEAKER_08: And so did they end up surviving?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, all five of them survived. And as you mentioned, it was because of an incubator. So basically I remember how we were talking about the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 and 1934, where they did the reunion. So the quintuplets were born, they were called the Deons and they were born two days after the fair started. And it was actually William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who was like, get Cooney up there, get him up to calendar, outside of calendar, really far Northern Ontario. And Cooney said, no, but Hearst sent up a reporter and with the reporter, he sent them an incubator because they knew that the babies would need an incubator to survive. They didn't have electricity in the house. So they sent up this gas powered incubator. And I guess it was this whole fiasco at the border because they were like, we have no idea what that is. But basically it wasn't Cooney, but some other people from that same World's Fair from a different attraction on the Midway flew to Ontario and they asked the father to bring the babies down so they could feature them in their attraction. And they gave him a really big check, which was super tempting because he already had five kids and now he had five more and it was the middle of the depression.
SPEAKER_08: So did he take the money?
SPEAKER_04: He did take the money, which is kind of where the story takes a pretty dark turn. First, before he took the money, he went to the local priest and the priest was like, yeah, you should take it. And then while you're at it, why don't you give some of that money to the church? Because the church is responsible for miracles and this whole birth is a miracle, yada yada, all this stuff. And so then everybody is like furious that he took the money and felt like the parents were exploiting the children that they shouldn't be raising them. And so within two days, the dad was like, nevermind. He gave back the check, but everybody was already super angry, the public was outraged and they put a bunch of pressure on the Ontario government not to let the parents raise the kids. Oh my.
SPEAKER_08: So what did the Ontario government end up doing?
SPEAKER_04: They did end up getting a legal order to take the quintuplets away from their parents. And then they passed the Dionne Quintuplets Guardianship Act, which made the quintuplets wards of the crown. So basically removed all authority from the parents and made them the responsibility of the government. And then they realized, hey, there's a lot of interest in this, we can make a lot of money off of this. And they built this sort of like hospital slash nursery for them to grow up in. And it basically became a theme park. They called it Quintland and people would travel up to Northern Ontario to go to Quintland.
SPEAKER_08: Oh my God, this is so grim. So did people end up coming to Quintland?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they totally came to Quintland. I mean, the quintuplets were supposedly taken to prevent their exploitation, but then they absolutely are exploited by this guardianship board. They were super, super popular. They were in a bunch of American newsreels. So all these Americans knew about them. Actually, there's still some of those newsreels available. So maybe we can watch one together.
SPEAKER_08: Cool, okay, I have one here. Let me get it started. Okay, so it says the Dionne triplets at Calendar Ontario.
SPEAKER_01: Nowadays selling Dionne souvenirs is a thriving trade. But while they wait outside, we go in to find the two and a half year old little girls enjoying the final dip of the season in their own private bathing pool. That's Yvonne with the ribbon in her hair. She's generous. But then they're all generous. In the play yard, Yvonne takes the center of the stage. And already she's got that. This is Ms. Marisa.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's terrible because like, you know how terrible their story is. And yet it's just so cute. It's like a nightmare.
SPEAKER_04: Like she's wearing a cowboy hat. Yeah, she's wearing a cowboy hat. I can't handle it.
SPEAKER_08: And they're just surrounded by this little fence. It's a little zoo for babies. Totally, yeah, it was absolutely a zoo for babies.
SPEAKER_04: And that's really how people treated it. Like they came to Northern Ontario. They would watch the girls as they grew up for years and years of their childhood through like one way glass. But obviously the girls knew that they were there because they could hear them. And it was just like pretty bleak.
SPEAKER_08: And in addition to the zoo aspect of just watching the girls who are adorable walking around and interacting the way toddlers do, there was this huge gift shop associated with it. Out front, they're like souvenirs and stuff. I mean this became such a market.
SPEAKER_04: There was such a cottage industry around it. Like they had these dolls and their dolls outsold Shirley Temple dolls five to one. Like that's wild. I've heard of Shirley Temple, but I'd never heard of the Dionne Quintuplets before this story. People would just take random rocks from the area and sell them as fertility rocks because people would go there because they thought there was something magical about the soil there. Amelia Earhart came to visit like just a few weeks before she went missing. And kind of in the same way that we started the story with that building in Minneapolis, you could really do the same thing with Quintland because you could say like there's a six lane highway in the middle of nowhere in Northern Ontario because they built all this infrastructure to get all the tourists out there. And they were in all these ads. I mean, there was a lot of money made off these young girls.
SPEAKER_08: And I mean, that's a lot of pressure to put on a bunch of kids who probably don't know any different, but how did they cope under that sort of pressure?
SPEAKER_04: It didn't end when they were children, of course. Like they never got to learn normal social skills. They never got to learn normal life skills. I don't remember exactly what the story was, but I think one of them when she was 18 and she was out on her own, like she had never handled cash before. So she didn't know how to spend money. And it's all really twisted because the Ontario government, like you said, they supposedly took over their guardianship to keep the quintuplets from being exploited. But instead the Ontario government did a lot of exploitation. They spent all this money that was supposed to go to a trust fund for the quintuplets. They spent it all on like security for their amusement park and salaries for staff. And so later on in their lives, they ended up having a lot of financial troubles.
SPEAKER_08: So what ended up happening with the quintuplets as they grew up?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, like eventually they went back to their parents after kind of a long drawn out legal battle. So they were nine and a half years old when they went back to their parents, but their family life was just super painfully rocky. Like they never got to learn how to be a family. Their father was abusive. It was really, really painful. And when they turned 18, all the quintuplets left and they tried to just find a quiet life elsewhere. One, maybe even two of them went on to be a librarian. So much quieter life. And it was just really tough. And then in the 90s, the surviving quintuplets decided to come forward about their exploitation. And that's where this person named Carlo Turini comes in. He is a friend of the Deons now, but at the time he was working in PR. And I'll just let him tell the story.
SPEAKER_00: A book editor who's a client calls me up and he says, Carlo, we need your help. We have a book. It's about the Dion quintuplets. I said, oh, the Dion quintuplets. I know that story very well. How are the sisters doing today? And he told me, well, this is exactly where we're putting out a book. I said, well, what's going on? He says, well, the three surviving sisters are living in the same house with a leaking roof. And they wanted to put out a book in order to help to pay for the groceries and to fix the roof. And I said, how can this be? I was flabbergasted. That's tragic.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's heavy. And Carlo, something, just a little bit of background about Carlo, when he was a kid and he started school, he didn't speak any English. And he goes to the library and the first English language book he ever pulled out from the library was about the Dion quintuplets. And so when he got to work on this project, he got super emotionally invested, not just in the book. He did a bunch of research and he paid lawyers and forensic accountants out of his own pocket to prove that the sisters had been terribly exploited when they were young. And he ended up getting them a bunch of media attention. This is back in the 90s and all of these senior citizens of Canada start writing to the Ontario government. And they say, hey, this is wrong. You should pay some reparations. And after years of work, he finally got them a settlement, which was pretty awesome. So it was about $3 million US. Oh, that's so good.
SPEAKER_08: The story is horrible, but I'm glad there's a little bit of justice in the end. All credit to Carlo. I mean, what a saint. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_04: Totally. Yeah, he's a really good friend. And obviously, money can never undo what happened to them. But two of the sisters are still alive. They're super close friends. They don't really talk to the media. They still want to live a quiet life. They have some friends. They got their house fixed up. It's a museum now. So those are somewhat positive outcomes.
SPEAKER_08: Well, they're amazing stories. Thank you so much for reporting them and working with us again on this. It's been fantastic.
SPEAKER_04: Well, thanks.
SPEAKER_08: And we'll see you next time. Special thanks to KFAI Community Radio in Minneapolis and Don Rainle, who wrote the book The Strange Case of Dr. Cooney. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Support them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But Katie collected some amazing pictures of amusement park incubator shows, and you can see them at 99pi.org. Radio Topia from PRX.
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