Senator-elect Harry Cain and Washington State piano virtuoso Dorothy Helen Eustis. Miss Eustis tickles the keyboards while former Tacoma mayor Harry P. Cain grins in this November 16, 1946, photograph. Miss Eustis was scheduled to give a recital at the Lakewood Theater on Monday, November 18th, but the show had to be canceled due to a heavy snowstorm. She had visited Madigan Hospital on the day of her arrival in Tacoma, November 16th, and played for hospital patients. Her Lakewood concert would have been her only Northwest appearance of the year. Miss Eustis would have a storied career, performing with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, pianist Jose Iturbi, and conductor Leopold Stokowski, and appearing in several movies. By the mid-1990's, she was a bedridden patient in a Venice, Italy, hospital where her nearly mute condition made identification of her past difficult. According to a March 22, 1995, Los Angeles Times article, she was a mystery patient with no known family, ignored by the American government and championed only by an Italian friend and the doctors who refused to evict her from her unpaid hospital bed. The American consulate finally offered to repatriate her nineteen months after she had arrived at the hospital but she would end her days in a Little Sisters of the Poor convent nursing home in Florence. Miss Eustis died on May 20, 2001. ALBUM 13. (TNT 11-18-46, p. 1) {Additional information on Miss Eustis provided by her niece, Barbara E. Cooper}
Cain, Harry P., 1906-1979; Mayors--Tacoma--1940-1950; Eustis, Dorothy Helen; Pianos;