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Saved by science, the Harbaugh twins displayed in incubators at Chicago's 2nd World's Fair are now 85 and nestled happily in the suburbs

By HEIDI STEVENS BALANCING ACT | AUG 30, 2018 | 11:55 AM

Twin sisters Jane Harbaugh Umbarger and Jean Harbaugh Harrison, both now 85, were placed in incubators as babies and were put on display during the World's Fair in 1934. Tucked alongside exhibits celebrating science, industry and commerce, not far from Sally Rand and her famous fan dances, in and among the carnival fare and art deco buildings that summoned millions of visitors to A Century of Progress, Chicago’s second World’s Fair, appeared a sign advertising a quiet sideshow: “INFANT INCUBATORS WITH LIVING BABIES...”

Tiny babies, most born prematurely, were being kept alive using incubators, before hospitals were doing such a thing, and the public was invited to peer in on them for a quarter. Among those babies were Jean and Jane Harbaugh, twin sisters born Aug. 17, 1934.

“We didn’t know a thing about it,” Jean, whose last name is now Harrison, told me this week. “For years, no one even told us we were in incubators.” Jean Harrison lives in a tidy subdivision in northwest suburban Algonquin. Jane, whose last name is now Umbarger, lives in nearby McHenry. They’re mentioned in Dawn Raffel’s captivating new book, “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies,” which my colleague Rick Kogan wrote about Sunday. On Tuesday, I drove to Algonquin to meet them. “Our aunt ...” Umbarger began. “Aunt Olive ...” Harrison added.

“Aunt Olive worked at Michael Reese Hospital at the time,” Umbarger continued. “We think somehow she got connected with somebody who knew about the incubators and the fair.” They’re mentioned in Dawn Raffel’s new book, “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies.” The Harbaugh sisters had been born about six weeks early, they said, weighing under 4 pounds each. “My dad said after Jean was born, they brought her out and then they brought me out,” Umbarger recalled. “And he said, ‘Please don’t go in there and get another one.’” “They didn’t know they were having twins,” Harrison said.

The Dionne quintuplets, five identical girls, had been born just three months earlier in northern Ontario, Canada, and Harrison said that must have been fresh on her dad’s mind. “And this was during the Depression,” she added. Their parents did everything in their power to keep their twin babies alive, including entrusting them to this mysterious Dr. Couney with his impressive track record of saving premature babies. “My mother saved her breast milk and gave it to our dad, and they came and picked it up,” Umbarger said. “He worked at First National Bank. Every morning he’d drive from Lombard to Chicago, and someone from the fair would come to the bank and pick up the milk.” Their mother, meanwhile, stayed home to care for their older sister, Geraldine. Martin Couney, a doctor and entrepreneur, employed a team of nurses to care for the babies he was keeping alive using incubators. For decades, he set up baby-saving exhibits at fairs and amusement parks around the country, saving, Raffel estimates, around 7,000 lives. He never charged the families for the babies’ care, earning his living through the admission fees he charged the public to behold the tiny humans. At A Century of Progress, the babies were a hit.

“The incubator show was among the most popular attractions of the entire fair,” Raffel writes in “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney.” “Who wouldn’t want to view the inheritors of the Century of Progress baking in their ovens? Given the chance, I’d have done it myself.” As it turns out, Jean and Jane’s future husbands were among the curious onlookers. Lawrence Harrison was 4 years old in 1934, and his parents brought him to A Century of Progress. In 1953, he would marry Jean in a double wedding alongside Jane and her fiance. Jean and Lawrence Harrison went on to have three sons, nine grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. Lawrence passed away in February, just a few months shy of the couple’s 65th wedding anniversary. Jane’s half of the double wedding was not as blissfully fated. “That marriage, for me, only lasted eight years,” Umbarger said. “I couldn’t stand the guy.” In 1962, she remarried, and this time it stuck.

“My mother took me to the World’s Fair when I was 9 months old,” Jim Umbarger, Jane’s second husband, told me. “Holding me in her arms high enough, I could probably have seen Jane.” A little more than two decades later, Jim and Jane met at the roller rink in McHenry. “I was there all the time — I took dance lessons, racing,” Jim Umbarger said. “She came in with her girlfriend one day, and I was with a friend, a taller fellow. I said, ‘You take the tall one. I’ll take the short one.’” I asked Jane whether she was the short one. “Still am,” she laughed. Jim and Jane each had two kids from their first marriages. They went on to have two more together after they were married. Now they have 14 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. The sisters said they suffered no health complications from being born prematurely. Their parents never mentioned those early incubator weeks to them, they said, although as mothers themselves, they said they can only imagine what sort of emotional roller coaster that time period was. “We had the greatest parents a person could ever ask for,” Umbarger said.

Harrison has searched high and low for other babies kept alive by Couney’s incubators. She once wrote a letter to Reminisce, a semimonthly nostalgia magazine, explaining her family’s story and inviting other incubator babies to write her letters. “I got hundreds of letters,” she said. But not one was from a Couney baby. “I got two letters from a man who was in jail,” she said. “He was just lonely. My kids said, ‘You’re grounded if you write back to him,’ but now that I’ve gone back and reread his letters, I kind of feel bad. I almost wish I would have written to him.”

Jane Umbarger, left, is helped down the stairs by her twin sister, Jean Harrison, at Harrison's home Aug. 28, 2018, in Algonquin. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)

Harrison spent years working as a typesetter at the Cardunal Free Press, a precursor to the Northwest Herald newspaper whose name was a mashup of Carpentersville, Dundee and Algonquin. “That was the best job I ever had in my whole life,” she said. “It was so much fun.”

Umbarger worked in the nursery at Elgin’s Sherman Hospital, feeding, bathing and holding newborn babies. Later, after their six kids were grown, she would join her husband in his boat-building business.

Neither sister ever met Dr. Couney, who died penniless and widowed at age 70. They both feel immense gratitude toward him. They long to meet other people connected to, saved by, him. Eighty-four years is a long time to observe humanity and all its progress and pitfalls, I told the sisters. What are some of the changes that have surprised them most, I wondered. “The hatred,” Harrison said. “Yes,” Umbarger said. “People don’t respect each other anymore.”

And the technology. “The tweeting,” Umbarger said. “I think that’s just ridiculous.” “We were 15 years old before we first had a TV,” Harrison said. “Before that, it was the radio.”

They would spend Saturday mornings cleaning their room and listening to “Let’s Pretend,” a radio program of fairy tales, followed by “Inner Sanctum,” a mystery series. “‘Inner Sanctum’ was scary,” Harrison said. “You’d hear a squeaky door slowly opening, and that was the beginning of the show.” “Made you put your feet up on the couch,” Umbarger said. “We had a very good, happy childhood,” Harrison said. “Those were the good old days,” she continued. “The way I feel, I don’t care if I don’t remember what I did yesterday or five minutes ago. Just don’t let me forget the good old days.” “And that’s sort of what happens,” Umbarger said. “That’s the stuff you do remember.”