September 3, 1935- The Dionnes Crawl, Squeal and Smile Like All Other Babies
The Washington Daily News — Tuesday, September 3, 1935
The Dionnes Crawl, Squeal and Smile Like All Other Babies
By Ernie Pyle
CALLENDER, Ont. — The Dionne quintuplets are in the two-a-day vaudeville now, altho it’s sort of amateur vaudeville, because it doesn’t cost anything and they don’t get any pay.
But they make “personal appearances” before the world at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. every day, rain or shine. And, altho they’re only 15 months old, they really act as if they knew they were putting on a show.
An average of 5000 people a day are seeing the quintuplets this summer. The record day was 7000. Three-fourths of them are Americans. Anybody who wants to come up here can see them, and there is no charge. The only thing that ever holds up the show is when the babies are asleep, and then the crowd has to wait.
Here is how it is done. You don’t go in a room with them, and you don’t file by and look at them thru a window, or thru mirrors, or anything like that. You simply stand still outside a fence about 20 feet from the hospital porch, and nurses bring the babies out, one at a time, and hold them up for you to see.
In the early part of the summer, the babies were being shown to the public five and six times a day. But they began to get nervous, and wouldn’t eat or sleep, so the shows were cut down to two, and now the babies are fine. They seem to enjoy it, and Dr. Allen Dafoe says it is really good for them; just the right amount of stimulation.
I arrived at the famous spot in the wilderness about a quarter before 10, an hour and 15 minutes before “show” time. Already there were more than 100 cars parked there, and a large knot of people crowding the outer gate.
By 11 o’clock there were three lines of cars parked along the road as far as you could see over the hill in each direction. There must have been between 300 and 400.
At five minutes before 11 the policeman inside the gate made a little speech, warning people to put their cameras in their cars, as no picture-taking of the babies is allowed.
Then promptly at 11, he opened the gates. The people jammed and fought thru, as at a prize fight. They ran across the yard and formed in front of the inner fence, on the west side of the hospital, and back in a semi-circle in each direction.
The policeman stood on one end of the porch. A nurse came out with a box full of cards, about two feet square, with each baby’s name printed in large letters on a separate card.
Thru the windows you could see a nurse lifting a baby out of a crib. Then she came thru the screen door onto the porch, picked out the baby’s name and put it in the front of the box, then held the baby up for the people to see.
The first one was Annette. The crowd “ah’ed” at the first sight. Annette had on a white coat, pink cap on the back of her head, and soft leather moccasins. Her legs were bare. The day was chilly.
Annette leaned out toward the people as the nurse held her, reached out her arms, opened her mouth big, clapped her hands and then smiled. The people ate it up. The nurse kept her out between 30 seconds and a minute.
The same performance was repeated with each of the babies. The nurses jounce them up and down in their arms, and talk to them, and smile at the people.
Nearly all the babies have learned to clap their hands at the crowd. One of them gave a big squeal and clapped at the policeman, a dignified British statesman-like fellow in a fancy uniform, who smiled and clapped back.
One of them didn’t want to do it, so while the nurse was trying to coax it, the crowd itself started clapping lightly. So the baby took the hint, smiled, and clapped, too.
They were all exceedingly good-natured, and seemed to enjoy their performance. While the crowd was waiting before the show, you could hear some of them crying clear out to the road. But during the show they were all good as pie. One of them toddled a few steps along the porch while the nurse held her hand.
These children are a lovely sight; even to one whose interest in babies is, at very best, purely academic. They are so alive, and fresh, and colorful. They have been publicized so much, that you think of them as an institution, like a statue or a building, and it is almost a shock to realize suddenly that they’re really human, and that they crawl and squeal and smile like all other babies.
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