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Woman Gives Birth on Subway During NYC Rush Hour

Oct. 23, 1964 - A 29‐year‐old mother gave birth to a son on a moving subway train during rush hour this morning. It was the fifth birth for Mrs. James Marston, but the subway system’s first.

A Navy medical corpsman, Seaman 2d Cl. Frank Hinton, who was riding in the same car, assisted at the birth. Hinton, who is 27 and a father, once dreamed of being a doctor. He has assisted at many births in 10 years in naval hospitals — “but this was the first time I ever delivered a baby by myself and in the subway,” he said later.

Mrs. Marston, who lives in Brooklyn, was already in labor as she waited for the train at the Bushwick‐Aberdeen Station of the BMT. She was trying to get to the Greenpoint Hospital nine stops away. She sat on a bench moaning, while her sister tried to comfort her.

Hinton, waiting at the same station with his wife Katharine, noticed the woman and began to worry about her. “She was apparently in pain,” he said, “but I didn’t know what it might be.”

The train pulled in, and it was jammed. Hinton and his wife squeezed into the rear of the car. Mrs. Marston and her sister got aboard in the front of the car.

At Wilson Avenue, the next stop, there was enough commotion up front to worry Hinton. He is 5-5 and could not see much over the crowd, but he understood what was happening.

A minute later the train stopped at Halsey Street. Hinton elbowed his way onto the platform, darted up to the front of the car and got aboard again just as the doors were closing. He still could not see Mrs. Marston. He shouldered through the crowd, with his identification card thrust out, telling people to get out of the way.

Birth had already started when Hinton arrived. He sent Mrs. Marston’s sister to tell the conductor to stop the train.

The train was at Montrose Avenue, five stations later, before the sister reached the conductor, Jerome Micele. The train started to pull out of that station, too, and Micele stopped it. He went to the nearest phone — there is a phone every 100 yards along subway tracks.

Micele got orders from the Transit Authority to proceed nonstop to the Bedford Avenue station, four stops away, where an ambulance from Greenpoint Hospital would meet the train.

He cleared most of the passengers from the train, and the nearly empty train thundered out of Montrose Avenue. The baby was born somewhere between Montrose and Bedford Avenues.

Hinton handed the baby to his wife, then turned back to Mrs. Marston.

“Uh-oh,” Mrs. Marston said, “I think it’s twins. I think I’m going to have another.”

“Right there,” said Hinton later, “I started looking around for Ben Casey.” But there was no twin coming, and there were no complications.

The scissors that cut the umbilical cord came out of a bystander’s handbag. They were sterilized over a fire made of trash. Then the baby, squalling loudly over the noise of the train, was wrapped up in newspapers and shown to his beaming mother.

When the train stopped at the Bedford Avenue station, Hinton helped stretcher bearers get mother and child up into the ambulance.

At Greenpoint Hospital, the baby weighed in at eight pounds eight ounces. “Mother and child were fine,” said Dr. Saul Penner, the hospital’s medical superintendent.

Later in the day, Mrs. Marston and her son were transferred to Elmhurst Hospital because Greenpoint was short of beds.

As for Seaman Hinton, he got to work at the Naval Recruiting Station at 207 West 24th Street more than an hour late, and had already been marked A.W.O.L. He told his story. His superior officers found it hard to believe until reporters, photographers, and television crews arrived.



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