Capt. Russell Hart, 102, made state healthier

Capt. Russell Hart drained swamps, lobbied for privies and battled dairy farmers to make Georgia a healthier place.

Then he set out to make the country healthier, too.

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Russell Hart (in gray suit) observes his 100th birthday in a party at his home, Brighton Gardens of Dunwoody. The party was attended by four officers of the U.S. Public Health Service who are stationed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With him, from left, are officers Kathleen McDuffie, Hugh Mainzer, Daniel Cline and Jeff Bosshart.

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Hart was a commissioned office with the U.S. Public Health Service for nearly 30 years.

Capt. Hart, a civil engineer from Cincinnati, moved to his wife’s hometown of Albany during the Depression where he played baseball, peddled Singer sewing machines and ran crews for the Works Progress Administration. While with the WPA, he confronted a public-health disaster: malaria.

“I’d go out and visit these various units that were working, and every now and then I would see a man leave the job and disappear, and I thought what is going on here,” Capt. Hart said in a podcast for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nearly three years ago. “[I was told,] ‘He is having a chill, a malaria chill and he is going over to the woods to sit there until the chill is over.’ …”

“This was a very debilitating problem for them, see. They lost a lot of time and money and some of them would get very sick with it.”

Capt. Hart became close to the official who oversaw public health and malaria control in Dougherty County and started supervising 2,000 men who drained ponds, which bred the mosquito that carried and spread the disease. He ran education campaigns to get people to screen their windows.

By 1951, the disease had been eradicated from the United States. But pond water wasn’t the only issue causing an epidemic. Hookworms were breeding in outhouses and entering children through their bare feet, and much of the problem was caused by privy design.

“In most cities in Georgia at that time, they didn’t have running water and as a result they had to have an outdoor privy,” Hart told his CDC interviewer, Capt. Kathleen McDuffie.

Capt. Hart got the mayor of Thomasville to buy into his plan to build thousands of outhouses for the city residents that would have a deeper pit which they could pay for on an installment basis. The mayor saw the value in part because he was in the lumber business, Capt. Hart said.

His daughter Nancy Battaglia said he had so much success in South Georgia that the state gave him a grant to study sanitation engineering at the University of Michigan, where he earned a degree in 1938.

He was assigned as Atlanta milk sanitation engineer — where he managed to get ordinances passed that required more sanitary production of milk at dairies. He soon found that the dairy farmers had more clout than the hookworm or the mosquito.

In 1941, Gov. Eugene Talmadge had him replaced — four months before new laws were to go in place, according to an article that year in The Atlanta Constitution.

Capt. Hart had wanted to require the milk to be pasteurized. He also told farmers they couldn’t use the same buckets for milk as they used to slop hogs, Ms. Battaglia said.

“My father went on a campaign and the dairy farmers were furious,” Ms. Battaglia said. “They called Gov. Eugene Talmadge.

Shortly after the dismissal, the U.S. Public Health Service hired him. “Daddy said I don’t think you want me, I just got fired from my job,” Ms. Battaglia said. “But the man knew the whole story and about daddy’s work in South Georgia and said, ‘You are exactly the man we want.’ “

Russell W. Hart, 102, died Tuesday of congestive heart failure. He had a 27-year career with the public health service, retiring in 1969 at the rank of captain, and spent the next 40 years golfing, playing the stock market and tending his yard, his daughter said. In 1965, he was awarded the prestigious Meritorious Service Medal by the Surgeon General of the United States.

He was married to his wife, Goldie Kelleher Hart, for 74 years until she died in 2005. Besides Ms. Battaglia, he is survived by his daughter Betsy Prewette, a grandson and two great grandchildren.

Visitation is Saturday from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. and the funeral is Sunday at the Arlington Chapel of H.M. Patterson & Son funeral home in Sandy Springs.