I asked in last Wednesday’s column if we in Hamilton are still the kind of people who can light the Cross of Lorraine, and I know we are, but you proved it emphatically with your overwhelming response.

Emails, phone calls, conversations. You poured out your feelings about the old sanatorium, about the scope of this city’s compassion, the measure of its heart, throwing itself open to some of the world’s most ill and shunned, the tubercular, at some risk with contagion a constant threat.

Our Mountain brow was some of the most scenic, salubrious land in the country, fresh winds blowing across it, and Hamilton chose to give over large tracts of it, not to the private pleasures of the wealthy, not to shopping developments or golf courses, but to the welfare of the sick, the property selflessly donated by two wool merchants, Long and Bisby.

The Cross of Lorraine, standing at the edge of those tracts, is a symbol of that spirit.

Hamilton’s sanatorium was one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world. First World War soldiers recuperated here. Inuit, many of them children, arrived from the Far North, where epidemic levels of affliction threatened to wipe out communities.

This was Hamilton. And it was to Hamilton that Doris Ursul came after a most inauspicious childhood. When she was scarcely two, with the First World War raging, Doris and her mother were taken out of Austria on a Doctor Zhivago freight train to Siberia, of all places, where they lived for a time in a mud-covered hut underground, with tiny windows at ground level.

The ethnic Mongolian people who lived in the area would look into the windows, fascinated by these strange transplants. For Doris, it was surreal and frightening.

Still, she says, one of the strangest things she ever saw was her father, whom she met for the first time in 1925, when she and her mother, having survived the war and the journey back to Austria, immigrated to Canada.

“He was bald,” says Doris, laughing even now. “I’d never seen a bald man.”

Five years later, in 1930, Doris contracted tuberculosis. She lived at the San, as it was known, for almost four years in two stays, much of it in a “cold bed.”

Near the end, writes Doris’s son Robert Ursul in a beautiful column in the Mountain News calling for the relighting of the Cross of Lorraine, “she was moved to a dim room.”

Dim room. That meant she was being left to die.

“Instead,” writes Robert, “a kindly nurse stroked her back, and death passed.”

Doris still wonders at it. She’s 99. Never thought she’d see 35, let alone 100. She shows me some linen with inset lace she made at the San 80 years ago. It’s pristine. While there, she also learned Esperanto and read hundreds of books, including her first Bible. She became a devout Christian.

Robert, 67 and immobilized by muscular dystrophy, lives with Doris now, and remembers they’d take hikes when he was a teenager to the San on Good Friday.

“Our eyes blurred with tears. The Inuit were there, faces pressed flat against windows, as if pleading to escape.”

Robert wants the cross lit again. He wrote a letter to Mayor Bob Bratina. He was disappointed to find its light extinguished when he returned to Hamilton several years ago after living for decades in the Pacific tropics, where he was a script doctor for such TV shows as Hawaii Five-O.

Robert’s not sure how to push ahead his campaign. But we’ll be following up in these pages. In the meantime, call city hall. I’ll be making inquiries.

Look here soon for updates, and also for the fascinating story and picture of Jeanette Steedman, married at the sanatorium in 1958.

For tickets to the MacNab Circle Feb. 19 dinner and War of 1812 talk by James Elliott mentioned in Monday’s column, call 905-385-8729. Tickets must be reserved by Feb. 10.

jmahoney@thespec.com

905-526-3306