Based on the memories of Justine Haselbauer Vallee
In the late 1920s, medicine in the hamlet of Bohemia was a quiet collaboration between American practicality and Old World tradition. Doctors here didn’t always work out of sterile offices with gleaming instruments; sometimes they worked out of their own homes, mixing teas and unwrapping packets of earth shipped from across the Atlantic. One such practitioner lingered long in the memory of young Justine Haselbauer Vallee, who wrote about him decades later in her memoir, An Early Doctor in Bohemia. His name was Dr. Vokalek, and according to Justine, he “did wonders.”
A Grandmother in Need
The patient was Justine’s grandmother, a woman the family called “Babi” — Czech for grandma — and known more formally as Grandma Rut. By her early sixties, Babi’s mobility had failed her badly. She crept through her own home gripping the furniture, leaned on a cane outdoors, and had to be carried up and down the stairs. After much persuasion from the family, she finally agreed to a course of treatment: three visits a week to Dr. Vokalek.
The House on Locust Avenue
For a child, the trips to the doctor were an adventure. Dr. Vokalek lived and practiced in a red-shingled house on the northeast corner of Locust Avenue and Karshick Street. The home sat so far back from the road that the front walk, in Justine’s memory, “seemed miles long.” Catalpa trees shaded the path, and stone benches were placed at intervals along it — a “welcomed rest stop for Babi” as she made her slow way to the door.
While her grandmother disappeared into the examination room, Justine had the run of a child’s paradise. Mrs. Vokalek’s “collection of glass and china displayed everywhere” was open for quiet inspection, and out behind the house stood a “big red barn with a hay mow” waiting to be explored.
Soil from the Old Country
Justine assumed Dr. Vokalek was “a chiropractor or physiotherapist” — she never knew for certain — but his methods left a vivid impression. Each evening at home, Babi sipped “a special dark herbal tea, sweetened with honey,” brewed to the doctor’s recipe.
The main event, though, was what Justine called “the fun time.” A wash tub was filled with warm water, and two heavy cloth packets were lowered in to soak. Inside those packets was something far more precious than mud: “soil from the famous spa, Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) in what is now the Czech Republic.” Once thoroughly saturated, the warm earth was wrapped around Babi’s aching legs — a small, steady piece of the homeland pressed against her body three times a week.
A Waltz at Fifty Years
The treatments worked. Slowly, then unmistakably. Babi improved enough to leave her family’s care and return to her own home, and the proof of Dr. Vokalek’s success came in the spring of 1933. On her 50th wedding anniversary, Babi’s husband “proudly danced with her at the JCD hall in East Islip” — a waltz made possible, in Justine’s telling, by a Bohemia doctor, his herbal tea, and a little bit of soil from home.