A new novel uses one of the most infamous residents in Eureka Springs history as a springboard. Norman Baker was a fraudulent promoter of alternative medicine who set up shop at the Crescent Hotel in the 1930s.
Through radio broadcasts, he pushed alleged cancer cures. He turned the Crescent into a hospital and bilked dying patients and their families out of great amounts of money.
Jocelyn Cullity’s latest novel, “The Nurse at Baker Hospital,” places the fictional Della King at the Crescent at the time of Norman Baker. Cullity is associate professor and director of creative writing and director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.
She’ll read from her novel and answer questions about it Friday night at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs. It’s a fitting location for the book launch, since it’s where she first heard about Norman Baker.
Cullity: I went to the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, which is a writer retreat center, a really wonderful place, while I was living in Columbia, Missouri, and I needed to find time away from a busy household. And while I was there, the owner of the Crescent Hotel, Elise Roenigk, came down. She was on the board at the Writers’ Colony, and she was eating dinner with the writers who were in residence there. And she told us the story of Norman Baker.
And none of us were from Eureka Springs or the surrounding area. And so this was a new story to us, and I was totally fascinated by it. And so I immediately got in contact with Keith Scales, who was the tour guide, manager and resident historian at the hotel for 10 years, and asked if I could interview him about it. And he let me. And so it went from there, really.
Kellams: So for people who might not be familiar, this is just a lurid story of someone who is taking advantage of people. And it has all these sorts of gothic surroundings, it seems to me.
Cullity: Yes. Well, Norman Baker was from Iowa, and it came out later that he had been pretty well chased out of Iowa. And he came down to Eureka Springs and really found what he thought was an ideal location. You remember, many of your listeners would know that Eureka Springs had been thought of as a healing center in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, for its miraculous springs.
And by the 1930s, that was fading because of science and the Depression that sort of chased tourists away. And I’m sure this has not been documented, but he must have thought, “Wow, this is a perfect place for someone to come in and say, ‘I’ve got another healing sort of thing for you.’” And in this case, it’s “I can cure cancer.”
Kellams: So tell me about Della King, who is the nurse at Baker Hospital, the titular character. What brings her to Eureka Springs and Dr. Baker?
Cullity: She is from Kansas City, and she’s a newly graduated nurse. And her mother has died a long time ago, and she has watched her father die of cancer. And her father is an avid listener on the radio of Norman Baker. Norman Baker was on the radio a lot in the late ’30s and really entranced many people, including Della’s father.
And she hears on the show, which is true from the radio transcripts, that they were looking for nurses. And so she is interviewed over the telephone and takes the job at Baker Hospital.
And in those days, getting a job at a hospital during the Depression would have been very difficult to find, number one. And number two, he actually made it very attractive to work there as a nurse. For instance, usually nurses in the ’30s had 12-hour shifts. He gave them eight-hour shifts. He gave them room and board. So as one nurse wrote in a letter that I found, “We don’t have to steal soap from our patients.” So it was an attractive offer to be able to be a nurse at the hospital.
Kellams: What work did you have to do to put in this Depression-era Eureka Springs, North Arkansas? What sort of research did you do or feel like you needed to do for this fictional account?
Cullity: Well, first of all, I am an outsider to Eureka Springs, and I felt that very acutely. Who was I to come in and write about this town? And boy, a lot of great historians have written beautifully about Eureka Springs. Rebecca Becker and Keith Scales and John Cross at the Bank of Eureka Springs are all historians and were incredibly generous with their time. And Rebecca read the manuscript three times for me, and Keith read it twice. So this sort of help by historians who know the town inside and out was absolutely invaluable.
I also felt it was really important to go to the American Medical Association archives in Chicago and read their thousands of pages of transcripts from the court and letters from people protesting against Norman Baker. And so that was also incredibly invaluable to the book, because I was able then to check things that I had.
Historical fiction rests on being as accurate as you can about history. And then you allow the fiction to fill in the gaps, but you want it to fill in the gaps in as plausible ways as possible. You’re really getting at an emotional truth with the fiction, and you hope that you have hit the emotional truth by all the research that you’ve done.
Kellams: Yeah. And it’s interesting because on one hand, you have Della King, who is someone that has come from your skill, your imagination. Then you have Norman Baker, who was a real figure. What’s it like to write this historical fiction with someone who is yours and someone who is history’s?
Cullity: Well, I think probably historical fiction may be more difficult to write because you’ve got to be balancing the two, the history that you can’t wear on your sleeve. You can’t wear the research on your sleeve in a manuscript, but it’s got to be there. And at the same time, you’re imagining, but you can’t let your imagination take you too far from what might have been plausible. And people like, again, especially Rebecca Becker kept me in line. She is a stickler for the truth, and that was really helpful for me to have her alongside me all the way.
But Della is a composite from the nurses that were on the stand in the Norman Baker trial and a ghost that people have seen at the Crescent Hotel, or reportedly have seen at the Crescent Hotel. And that’s just a vision of a nurse coming down the hallway with a squeaking gurney after midnight. So it’s an imaginative composite, as you will.
Kellams: So you went to the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow because you were looking for, as writers and creatives do at a retreat, you were looking for a respite from maybe a busy life. I imagine you had a project you were working on then. Did you expect that you would have the third novel revealed unto you?
Cullity: Not at all. I was working on a book, a historical fiction novel set in 1856 India. And part of my family is from India, so India is very close to me. But when Elise talked about this, it just stayed in my mind. I just found it such a fascinating account.
And I really wanted to make my next book something that was closer to home, something where the setting I could get to know Missouri and Arkansas through what I was writing about, because I was also new to Missouri at the time. So it was important to me to write something that felt closer to home. And this just felt totally it.
Kellams: Of course, it was a horrific thing. I mean, people died because Norman Baker was a fraud. Are you thinking about that as you’re writing? I mean, there is real-life tragedy that was involved.
Cullity: Oh, yes. They like to state that there was never any deaths at the hospital. And the fact that people were dying and it was being covered up, it made me feel really, really sad all the time, because these weren’t foolish people who came to the hospital. They were people who had been given perhaps the last months or weeks to live, and they wanted to find a cure. Of course they did. We all would if somebody...
And so they believed in hope, and they were being offered hope and wanted to receive something. And so it just made it even more awful that they were giving up money and they were dying at the same time. So reading some of the letters from the patients is very poignant and very sad. And of course, the court case is very sad.
But it also feels great to read the court case, because there were real doctors there who were just as angry that this was happening. And it felt like a relief to read the court case.
Kellams: The launch will be at Dairy Hollow, so you’ll be around Eureka, in Northwest Arkansas, Arkansans who know the story. But so many of the people who pick up this novel and read it will have no idea about Norman Baker and what happened at the Crescent.
Cullity: Yes. And of course, it is fiction as well as history, but I hope that what I’ve given them is a solid sense of who that man was and how he conned people. I mean, he was one of the first radio... He did what we do as social media now. He contacted people directly. He didn’t need to... He could go straight to them through his radio reach, which apparently was large. Apparently he could reach people in Alaska and all across the country, for sure. So what he did is, he was a demagogue, and what he did is, it mirrors some of what we’re seeing today.
Kellams: What does it mean for a writer or a poet or whomever might be at a place like Dairy Hollow? What does it mean to have that opportunity to write at a place like Dairy Hollow?
Cullity: Oh, boy. I’m an Australian Canadian American citizen, and so I have lived in other countries. And I’m telling you, this is one of the gifts that we have in the United States. The literary community here is bolstered by places like Dairy Hollow.
It is something just so wonderful for writers to be able to go to a place to retreat with other artists at a place that costs less than a hotel, given wonderful food by a wonderful cook named Diana, and be able to meet in the evenings and talk about the literary life. There is nothing like it in other countries, and it’s something that we seem to forget here sometimes about how well this country has built such literary communities, because we have places like Dairy Hollow. Writers’ colonies like Dairy Hollow all over the country.
And this one is just a tremendous boon. I feel like it’s a second home. It is a second home to me. I’ve been there probably 30 times by now. And it’s a place where I’ve written three books. And I know many, many writers have also benefited like I have.
Jocelyn Cullity’s new novel is “The Nurse at Baker Hospital.” She’ll discuss the book and read from it at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow House in Eureka Springs Friday night from 6 until 8. She is associate professor and director of creative writing and director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.
The reading is free, but seating is limited. Registration available at writerscolony.org. We spoke yesterday.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
