Less than a week earlier, the museum had received an email from a man named John Ruggiero and his sister, Rosemarie. Their 75-year-old father, Donato “Dan” Ruggiero, had died in September 2021 and left an extensive collection of tuberculosis history ephemera. The siblings asked if HSL would be interested in housing his father’s collection.

Monks-Kelly, the museum’s archivist and curator, said she was hesitant about the offer. But after John gave her a virtual tour of the collection and sent over Dan’s “meticulously” kept records for each item — a more than 1,000-line Excel spreadsheet — she knew this was not a casual collector.

Dan was born in Italy. His family lived in Canada for more than a decade before they could immigrate to the U.S., where his cousin helped him land a job in tuberculosis control at the New York City Public Department of Health. He didn’t have a background in tuberculosis control before getting into the field, according to John, but Dan was the type of person to take ownership of an opportunity and build it into a passion. Dan ultimately spent 23 years in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Tuberculosis Elimination Division.

He was a public health administrator, orchestrating programs that advocated for tuberculosis treatment and prevention. A big part of those public health program was visual campaigns — posters that encouraged kids to get preventative rest or to cover their mouths when coughing; colorful buttons for TB-tested individuals dubbing them as “health crusaders”; and “Christmas seals,” stamps for holiday cards that were purchased as a donation to TB research. Dan became enamored with these items and collected any TB-related materials he could find over the course of 40 years.

Seen here is an anti-tuberculosis button dubbing their wearer — often someone who’s been tested for TB — a “health crusader.” These buttons were part of the public health campaign to fight TB and are now part of a new tuberculosis collection obtained by Historic Saranac Lake from Donato “Dan” Ruggiero. (Enterprise photo — Lauren Yates)

John remembers being a kid, trailing behind his father as he scoured thrift stores for TB posters, pamphlets and pins. Dan poked around for TB-related correspondence and books on eBay just as eBay “was becoming a thing,” John said. His father collected a lot of other stuff, like U.S. quarters, but John said that tuberculosis history items made up his most prized and extensive collection.

In fact, the collection was slightly outside of HSL’s usual scope, Monks-Kelly said – the museum mostly boasts U.S. and Saranac Lake-centric items, and Dan had collected thousands of historical items spanning more than 200 years – from the 1800s to today – from more than a dozen countries. He collected Christmas seals from Japan, Korea, Zimbabwe. But Banach, the HSL museum specialist, said Dan’s collection brings to the museum a better representation of TB’s longstanding, worldwide impact and the fluctuating movements to beat it, and Monks-Kelly said they didn’t want to split his collection up.

“I think, when people come here, we sort of get stuck in the thing of like, ‘This happened here,'” Banach said, pointing to the floor of the Saranac Laboratory Museum. “Some people don’t think about the fact that it was everywhere.”

When Monks-Kelly convened HSL’s Collections Committee, they gave her and Banach the green light to grab a flight to Dan’s estate in Georgia. They just needed around $2,000 for travel expenses. HSL put out a fundraising campaign for the trip, and HSL board President Amy Heckethorn-Jones and her husband Peter matched the first $1,000 donated.

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Historic Saranac Lake Archivist and Curator Chessie Monks-Kelly, right, teaches John Ruggiero and his wife Jennifer about the Tuberculosis collection at the Saranac Laboratory Museum. John and his sister, Rosemarie, donated their late father’s collection of around 1,300 Tuberculosis history items to HSL earlier this year. (Enterprise photo — Lauren Yates)

Packing it up

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Monks-Kelly and Banach spent three days in Georgia surveying, documenting and packing up Dan’s collection with the help of his daughter Rosemarie — who was nearing the end of her pregnancy at the time — and her children. They flipped through binders of buttons, turned out desk drawers and searched through bookshelves. Much of Dan’s collection was displayed on shelves, but more of it was tucked away in boxes.

“You name it, we looked through it,” Monks-Kelly said.

As they searched through the collection, Monks-Kelly gave Rosemarie’s kids an impromptu lesson about HSL, tuberculosis and the items scattered around their grandfather’s house. Though many of Dan’s old books and Christmas seals were familiar to Monks-Kelly, she and Banach came across plenty of items they’d never seen before — including a pair of plastic arms used by tuberculosis testers when practicing how to administer tuberculosis skin tests.

John Ruggiero and his daughter Bernadette look at a display of Tuberculosis history items at the Saranac Laboratory Museum this past weekend. The items were collected by John’s late father, Donato “Dan” Ruggiero, and donated as part of an around 1,300-item collection to Historic Saranac Lake earlier this year. (Enterprise photo — Lauren Yates)

“Hey Chessie, need a hand?” Banach joked.

They also found a lot of material on “quack treatments” for TB, including “Piso’s Cure for Consumption,” which was known to include ingredients like opium, cannabis and alcohol across its surprisingly-long lifetime. Monks-Kelly said people could order variations of the treatment from a catalog into the 1940s.

“And like, you’d feel better — because you’d be on heroin — but it would not cure tuberculosis,” Monks-Kelly said.

Monks-Kelly and Banach ended up filling more than 20 liquor store boxes with around 1,300 tuberculosis history items from Dan’s collection, which covered the floor of the U-Haul they used to drive the more than 1,100 miles back to Saranac Lake. With the help of a Waffle House visit and many murder mystery audiobook hours, Monks-Kelly and Banach arrived home three days later — just in time to prepare for Winter Carnival.

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Unpacking

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HSL staff and volunteers have spent much of this year carefully unpacking, repacking and cataloging each item in Dan’s collection, much of which is now packed away in the Saranac Laboratory Museum. Volunteers Mary Hotaling, Suzanne Samuels and Donna Fulkerson spent hours numbering, transcribing and describing postcards and helping to inventory a new collection of more than 60 books.

Now that construction is underway at the Trudeau Building next door, which HSL is using to expand its museum into a two-building campus, Monks-Kelly said HSL is already thinking of ways to display Dan’s collection in the new space. She said she wouldn’t be surprised if posters and other materials from Dan’s collection ended up in every room of the “new” building.

“Graphic things like that – they were intended to catch your eye, and they still do,” Monks-Kelly said. “Like those posters about washing your hands and stuff, we plan to put those in the bathrooms in the expanded museum space.”

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Dad’s collection

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John said he’s spent his whole life dreaming of traveling to the Adirondacks — mostly because of the stories he heard from his dad. Dan mentioned Saranac Lake a few times because of its TB history, John said. That’s why, when John started looking for a place to donate his father’s collection, he started by googling this village.

This past weekend, John finally traveled to Saranac Lake with his wife Jennifer and their four children. A handful of items from his father’s collection was already on display, and his kids leaned over the glass to closely examine tuberculosis pamphlets and posters while their father told them about their grandfather, the items’ collector.

John said it felt good to see his father’s collection on display for others to see. And thanks to online cataloging, tuberculosis researchers from across the world can access Dan’s collection of items, too.

“To me, that’s the most I could ask for,” John said.

The Donato “Dan” Ruggiero Tuberculosis History Collection is now available to access through HSL and online at historicsaranaclake.pastperfectonline.com.