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When George Maty became a friend of Cardinal Glennon’s Children’s Hospital, the building was still just a dream in the mind of one of the St. Louis area’s most prominent pediatricians. Planning for the hospital began in 1949, two years after Eve Maria Maty, the oldest daughter of George and wife Agatha, was stricken with meningitis. She was just two years old. The family’s doctor sent her to St. Mary’s Hospital in Clayton, Mo., which then had a pediatrics unit. There the family met a young physician, Peter G. Danis, M.D. Meningitis, an infection of the tissues and fluids that surround the brain and spinal cord, can be fatal or cause permanent neurological injuries. “They told us that Maria had just a 50-percent chance of living, and if she did live she would suffer very bad effects from the illness,” recalled Mr. Maty, who still becomes emotional when he recalls the devastation of hearing that prognosis from Dr. Danis 55 years ago. But new antibiotic drugs were becoming available to treat infectious diseases such as meningitis, and Maria’s treatments began just in time. “Dr. Danis saved our daughter’s life,” Mr. Maty said firmly. “She was in the hospital about a week. After she went home she had to learn how to walk all over again. She was very weak and couldn’t keep her balance well. Actually, she recovered quite rapidly. She was back to normal in about six months.” George and Agatha would have four more children, and Dr. Danis would be their pediatrician while they were growing up. “He was pretty much all business. There was not idle conversation with him. Maybe he was a little bit on the quick side,” Mr. Maty said with a smile. “But he was very, very skilled in his profession.” Dr. Danis also was one of the guiding forces in the development of Cardinal Glennon, which opened in 1956.
Mr. Maty attended a one-room country school for the first seven grades, starting at age five in the spring after a severe winter. He was moved from the fourth grade to the fifth because there were no other fourth-graders. As a result, he was enrolled in St. Peter’s Cathedral Grade School in Belleville for the eighth grade and graduated at age 11. He had never had any contact with Catholic nuns in habits and was placed in a class of 35 boys, many of whom he recalls as “big bruisers who were not too well behaved.” He was two years younger than most of them and was small and frail. He said he was too scared to even think of daring not to study. His study habits were so ingrained that, after four years in Cathedral High School and with the help of the Brother of Mary principal, young George was granted a scholarship to the School of Commerce and Finance at St. Louis University. He graduated Cum Laude in 1941 at the age of 19. Upon graduation, he began work for the financing unit of General Motors as the rumblings of World War II were being heard in Europe. As his draft number approached, Mr. Maty enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Initially he was trained to work as a weatherman, then known as an “aerologist,” with the rank of Third-Class Petty Officer. He was stationed in Kodiak, Alaska. Because he had a college degree, a fellow petty officer talked him into applying for an officer’s commission. Mr. Maty received a commission and was assigned to Harvard Supply School in Boston to learn about serving as an aviation supply officer. While he worked for General Motors in East St. Louis, Mr. Maty became friends with Agatha Holthaus, who also worked in the office. He thinks he fell in love with Agatha on Good Friday, 1942, when a few Catholic employees asked for permission to attend “Tre Ore” together at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in downtown East St. Louis. Their relationship blossomed through correspondence and visits to Belleville, and George asked her to move to Boston while he was in school. She found a job there and stayed with one of the many families who provided rooms for military wives. “Midway through my course we decided to get married. It was April 22, 1944,” he said. As an aviation supply officer, Mr. Maty was assigned to bases in Florida, Oklahoma and finally Saipan. After the war ended, he was discharged from the Navy and returned to the St. Louis area in time for Christmas 1945. He sought work as an accountant, but all the accounting firms were already staffed up for the coming busy season. An employment agency placed him in a bookkeeper’s job with an automobile agency. By accident, Mr. Maty began a long and distinguished career with the most prominent Cadillac dealership in the St. Louis area. Mr. Maty found that he was not only the dealership’s bookkeeper, but sometimes the janitor and parts man, too. He learned about the cars and started selling them.
“By nature I was a timid guy. I never had any desire to sell anything. I wanted to be an accountant!” he said. But his quiet, dignified and gentlemanly manner made him the perfect person to sell Cadillacs to the most successful businessmen in St. Louis. Arthur Lindburg made him the general manager of East Side Motors Inc., of East St. Louis, then Lindburg Cadillac. He was placed on a profit-sharing plan that allowed him to buy stock in the business. By the time the dealership was sold decades later, Mr. Maty owned about one-third of the business. He became a transition representative to Plaza Cadillac in Creve Coeur, Mo., and continued to sell and lease cars to his devoted customers. (One family acquired more than 75 Cadillacs from Mr. Maty during his career.) Over the years George and Agatha welcomed 14 grandchildren into their lives. Maria, now 57, raised four boys. Mrs. Maty, who passed away in 1999, volunteered at Glennon for many years. After many years of semi-retirement, Mr. Maty has nearly gotten himself out of the car business. He spends much of his time manicuring the neat landscaping around his home and tending to the azaleas lining his wooded lot. His wife planted more than 100 of the bushes herself, raising most of them from cuttings. In recent years Mr. Maty has been carrying out the estate plans that he and his wife had made. He has been placing gift annuities with several charities, including Cardinal Glennon. “My wife and I planned that when the last of us would die, one-fourth of our remaining money would go to charities,” he said. “I like gift annuities. While you are still living you can see where your money is going. Also, the return on a gift annuity is better than the return on the finest, mostsecure municipal bonds, and there are some tax deductions connected with them. “Agatha worked in the hospital gift shop for many years. She was very fond of children,” Mr. Maty said. “They do many great things there, and we always had kindly feelings for the hospital because we knew Dr. Danis was part of it.”
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Copyright © 1997-2007 Cardinal Glennon Children's Foundation. All Rights Reserved. |
Mr. Maty had been born in North Dakota. His parents,
together with two older brothers and an older sister, left
southern Illinois with the plan to homestead in North
Dakota following World War I. Instead of homesteading,
they purchased on time payments a very fertile and
productive farm and enjoyed prosperity until the
combination of the dust storms, stock market crash and
depression caused them to lose the farm and move back to
southern Illinois. They settled in Belleville.
