When Bryon Fitzsimmons was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1912, the Fitzsimmons family was already wealthy and prestigious. The sixth of six sons at the time, Bryon grew disillusioned with the pursuit of wealth that consumed the rest of his family and refused to become part of the family's commercial enterprises. His father, a strict disciplinarian and somewhat abusive father, chose not to accept Bryon's decision and actually had him briefly committed to a mental hospital as a means of persuading Bryon to change his mind. Horrified by what he experienced there, Bryon quickly agreed to follow his father's wishes and was released after just a brief stay. But, only a week later, at the age of 18, Bryon ran away from Philadelphia and the Fitzsimmons family to make his own way in the world.
An early advocate of womens' and workers' rights, Bryon Fitzsimmons headed to San Francisco where an atmosphere of social consciousness and expose journalism had just begun to take shape. He took a menial job at the San Francisco Chronicle, the premier California newspaper of the time, to pay his bills and to try and get in the door and pursue his dream of becoming a writer and journalist.
While working at the Chronicle, Bryon was befriended by one of the more important and successful reporters, Royce Brier, who was to go on to win the Pulitzer Prize a few years later for his eye-witness report of San Francisco's "Bloody Thursday" in July 1934. Brier was critical in getting the Chronicle's management to give Bryon a chance as a reporter.
In just over a year, Bryon's accounts of corruption and dishonesty in California's governmental and business structures started to gain him both serious praise and dangerous attention.
Pressured by the Chronicle's editorial staff and anonymously received threats, Bryon publicly backed off of his expose reporting for a while, but, secretly, he began his most controversial and ambitious project yet, an expose of terrible conditions inside the nation's mental hospitals and asylums.
Driven by his own experience inside a mental hospital, Bryon, along with his girlfriend Ann Starling, came up with the idea to have Ann enter an insane asylum anonymously, as a "Jane Doe", to see first hand and document what was really happening.
Bryon would continue working and writing for the Chronicle on less controversial topics, to protect both himself and his and Ann's "secret" project. To maintain the illusion that Ann was alone and abandoned, they couldn't have Bryon stop in and check on her, so they developed a scheme where Ann would write a note for him and leave it with the staff when she had found out enough and was ready to get out. The asylum patients couldn't send mail or anything back then, but they were allowed to leave letters and postcards for their families to pick up.
To prevent the doctors and administrators from catching on, Bryon and Ann used a simple code on these postcards and notes, to make it appear they were meaningless and rambling. Once he received the proper message from her, Bryon would show up at the facility and identify Ann. Announcing himself as her caretaker, he would then have her released.
Ann stayed in the asylum a little over two weeks and was horrified at the conditions and abuse she saw. But the stay did two things for her and Bryon. First, it made them more determined than ever that there was a real expose to be done on the conditions inside these mental hospitals, and it introduced them to a certain doctor's name, whom patients and staff alike linked in whispers to a great deal of the truly horrible abuse that had gone on there.
Read PART 2 of this section by clicking on the Link to the left.
NOTE: Much of this information has come from personal effects of Bryon Fitzsimmons that have come into my possession during my research, including some of the actual postcards from Ann to Bryon while she was in various institutions, as well as letters between the two from the same time frame.
