A Little History #4 - A Boy from Shrewsbury : Tom McDermott

Spurgeon from Shrewsbury

Spurgeon was born in 1893 to a Pennsylvania Dutch family in the small borough of Shrewsbury, Pa. The name 'Spurgeon' was at the time an English name with a Nordic origin.  It means 'little branch'.  That 'little branch' must have been a heavy log of a name for a small boy to carry around school and his neighborhood.  In any case, school did not last for long.  He quit at age 12 and went to work as a common laborer.

Despite those years out of school, Spurgeon managed to enroll in college and in 1914 graduated 'summa cum laude' from Gettysburg College (the same college from which Carol Bellamy would later graduate in 1963).

A Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University was in his hands even before graduation. 1914, however, was not a good year to arrive for university studies in Britain. WWI had begun in July and most of his fellow students were soon marching off to war. He found Oxford to be ‘dead’ that year.

A few months later Spurgeon suspended his scholarship and signed up as a non-combatant with the YMCA to support British troops in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and was sent to Basra. As he put it, “in company with a shipment of mules and … (despite the heat) most of the mules and I survived.”

Towards the end of the war the YMCA sent him off to Siberia to help European prisoners return to Europe. This work later took him from Vladivostok to Poland, Estonia, and Czechoslovakia where he worked on repatriation of Russian POWs. 

Famine followed soon after the end of Russia’s civil war. Flu and typhus were soon killing millions.  He was quickly back at work - this time with his new bride, Amelia, spending their ‘honeymoon year’ running a delousing and quarantine clinic in a small Polish town amid the typhus epidemic. Then he joined Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (the ARA), distributing aid throughout Russia.

When the famine ended, Spurgeon returned to Oxford long enough to finish his degree before finally returning to the US in 1924. He planned “finally to settle down” in the US and became a book publisher. This plan worked - for a while, but when WWII broke, Spurgeon volunteered and found himself back in Europe in 1943 - this time working as the Chief of Mission for UNRRA in Italy.  

When the war ended and UNRRA handed over its remaining funds and offices to UNICEF, Spurgeon transferred to Paris where he spent two years setting up UNICEF’s Supply Division in what had previously been UNRRA's office for Europe. Funds were limited, so his main task was in figuring out how to turn myriad ‘soft’ currencies left over from UNRRA - Polish zlotys, Czech crowns, and so forth - into supplies for children.

In case you are still wondering, 'Spurgeon from Shrewsbury' was known to everyone he worked with in UNRRA and UNICEF simply as 'Sam' Keeny. 

Also working in Paris in those years was Dr. John Grant (Jim Grant's father), who had arrived there in 1948 to head the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division.  At the end of WWII the Rockefeller Foundation and the newly founded UNICEF clearly had much work to do together on public health.  The record does not make clear whether John Grant and Sam Keeny knew each other in Paris during those years, but it seems very likely.  In any event they ended up working closely together over future years in south and south-east Asia.

When he arrived in Paris, Grant had just completed an 8 year period in Calcutta as director of the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health. Before his work in India, John Grant had been the key force in establishing China’s early public health system, as well as the School of Public Health in Beijing.  It was John Grant who had invited Ludwik Rajchman to make his first visit to China in 1925. One of Grant's most famous projects had been the primary health care programme that later became Chairman Mao’s barefoot doctor initiative. Yet when the Communists won China's civil war, Grant like most foreigners was pushed out of China in 1939. 

Meanwhile, Maurice Pate and his small team were busy pushing UNICEF beyond its original focus on relief supplies for children in Europe. A small but powerful public health team was sent out to visit 13 Asian countries to determine needs UNICEF could best address given its limited resources.

Based partly on the team's recommendations that UNICEF assistance to Asia should focus on health, Pate initially appointed the retired director of health services in New Zealand, Dr. Michael Watt, to join UNICEF as the first regional director for Asia. 

Dr. Watt established the regional office in Bangkok and traveled extensively to establish programmes in countries of the region. Tragically, after a year of hard travel, Watt learned that his UN entry medical exam indicated that he was suffering from leukemia. Watt then reluctantly informed Pate late in 1949 that he could not continue in his post.

Maurice Pate needed someone in Asia quickly. Programmes had begun, albeit with limited funds and only a skeleton staff. Sam Keeny had no experience in Asia, but he had a solid track record in managing UNRRA in Italy and UNICEF's supply operations in Paris.  During his time in Russia and eastern Europe he also had 'hands-on' experience with epidemics and public health campaigns. So Pate asked and after some hesitation Sam accepted.  Thus Sam Keeny arrived in Bangkok in 1950 as UNICEF’s second regional director for Asia.

One of Sam’s earliest visits was in June 1950 to Saigon and Haiphong in what was then, French Indo-China. His companion on the trip was none other than Dr. John Grant.

The reports of Keeny and Grant became important in Pate’s efforts in the Executive Board to swing UNICEF funding to Asia from 1951 onwards, and thus key also to the 1953 decision to make UNICEF a global and permanent UN agency.

Keeny continued to visit New York twice each year and his reports to the Board kept up interest in that global mission. Wah Wong in his 1988 monograph, ‘UNICEF in Asia’, writes that Keeny, was "the right man at the right time. This was due to the happy juxtaposition of two things: 

* Asia at that moment in history needed someone capable of pulling together national and international resources to launch large mass campaigns against some major public health diseases, largely affecting children, in the region. …. 

* Keeny had another talent: the ability to write, and speak simply and compellingly. His easy, readable style and story-telling skills were a hallmark of his stewardship of UNICEF in Asia. He wrote a monthly report which was widely circulated and read, and which remains unsurpassed for its graphic description of life in the Asian village, and of UNICEF’s efforts on behalf of needy children and mothers. ”

The great chronicler of UNICEF's history, Maggie Black, adds that Keeny “...had that “particular style of leadership and inspiration that was specially suited to the era of the mass disease campaign.”

Judith Spiegelman in her book, ‘We Are the Children', calls Keeny, “...certainly the “right man in the right place at the right time.... 

Some say Sam Keeny ‘made a greater contribution to UNICEF’s practical work than any other single person in its history”.

Sam Keeny, himself, is well known for the book he wrote in 1957, ‘Half the World’s Children’. In the book’s foreward Maurice Pate writes that “you will find (here)...the revelation of the character of a man who firmly believes that under privileged children should have a better break in this now close-knit world in which we live.”

Danny Kaye wrote the preface to the same book that “He (Keeny) is devoting his life to see that the children of the world have a chance to grow to some kind of useful and healthy maturity. I’ve met a lot of Sam Keenys - in Morocco, Nigeria, India, Burma, Korea - and they make up a group of the most wonderful, most dedicated people one could meet...an army without uniform that is engaged in the great fight against sickness and malnutrition in our children. Sam has never lost his sense of humor about the vastness of his task. Nor has he lost sight of the fact that you can’t bring health and happiness to a million children by signing a paper or waving a wand. It has to be done child by child, and that’s the way Sam works.”

At age 70 and after 13 years heading UNICEF in Asia Sam Keeny ‘retired’ from UNICEF and went on to another career as the Asia Representative of the Population Council.   At age 83 he retired once again - although no one, including himself, quite believed that he could ever retire.  Perhaps he never did.  

Sam at the Population Council
Surrounded by birth control pills

Sam passed away in 1988 at age 95. He left a legacy throughout Asia and throughout UNICEF. Sam’s wife died in 1959. His son became a senior US official in nuclear arms control and passed away in 2012,

Historic Marker in Shrewsbury Pennsylvania

Sam's obituary in the NY Times and the Washington Post

Read previous articles on UNICEF's history