Thomas Joseph Sugrue
Thomas Joseph Sugrue was an American writer. He is best known today as the writer of There Is a River, the only biography of Edgar Cayce written during Cayce’s lifetime and the book that made the psychic a household name in 1942. He also lent his writing talents to the Edgar Cayce Association for Research and Enlightenment for numerous articles and news items.
Life
Thomas Sugrue was born in a house on Ward Street in Naugatuck, Connecticut, in 1907 to Michael and Mary Sugrue. He grew up in a staunch Irish Catholic background. His father worked as a mail carrier. His early memories of life in the borough's Irish section were captured in a 1940 autobiographical novel, Such Is the Kingdom, which was recast as the fictional "Kelly Hill".After graduating in 1924 from Naugatuck High School where dancing was "his favorite pastime" according to a yearbook, Sugrue worked briefly as a teller for the Naugatuck Savings Bank, before attending Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where he graduated with bachelor's and master's degrees in English.
It was there he was introduced to classmate Hugh Lynn Cayce, the eldest son of Edgar and Gertrude Cayce. Edgar Cayce had the strange gift of going into a trance-like state and providing answers to questions. The subjects included diagnosis and treatment of illness, finding hidden items, universal laws, karma, and even past lives.
Sugrue made the five-hour trip from Lexington to Virginia Beach with Hugh Lynn, thinking that he would debunk a fraud. After meeting Edgar Cayce, he decided that there was no deception. His first reading was given in Virginia Beach on June 7, 1927, at the request of Hugh Lynn.
Sugrue worked as a reporter at the former Naugatuck Daily News, before being hired by the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. In 1934, he joined the staff of The American Magazine and wrote articles covering Athens, Egypt, Palestine, England, and more as he traveled the world. Copies of every issue of The American Magazine between 1934 and 1938 are available for view at the reference desk of the Whittemore Memorial Library in Naugatuck, Connecticut.
At this point, he was taken ill from a rare arthritis disease. Innovatively treated in a clinic for weeks, he left it as a dying person with a few weeks to live. After seeking relief for his condition in Florida, Sugrue moved to Virginia Beach in June 1939 and lived at the Cayces' home until October 1941. With Hugh Lynn Cayce as his nurse, he received readings from Edgar Cayce and treatments for his condition.
On file at Edgar Cayce's A.R.E. headquarters in Virginia Beach are a total of 76 documented psychic readings given specifically for Sugrue by Cayce and a collection of Sugrue's writings. It was during this time that he wrote There Is a River, the biography of Edgar Cayce.
During his lifetime, he wrote seven books, including Starling of the White House, with and for Edmund Starling, the man who protected all U.S. presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hosted a New York City radio show Conversations at Eight, and explored the nation of Israel.
"We called it music" - A generation of Jazz, written with and about jazz musician Eddie Condon, is an account of the birth of that musical genre, stretching from lively descriptions of Eddie Condon's life to deep philosophical interpretations.
Watch for the Morning is a report on the events which led to the creation of the State of Israel. With the many questions on esoteric themes he would ask to Arab, Jew and Druze circles he would meet in this process, Watch for the Morning phrases an answer that still has to be put in shared sentences nowadays.
With his 1952 A Catholic Speaks His Mind, his shortest and last book, he puts Christianity in the perspective of religion seen as a universal, structural part of the human civilization.
He died at the age of 45 in 1953 in New York, during a hip replacement meant to help him walk again.
A letter dated July 15, 1954, from Hugh Lynn Cayce to members of A.R.E. announced the establishment of the Thomas Sugrue Memorial Library at Wainwright House, in Rye, New York. It contains a collection of Sugrue's work.
''There is a River''
Sugrue's book tells the story of Cayce's life. It relates that Edgar Cayce was born on March 18, 1877, near Beverly, south of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. As a child he played with the 'little folk' and was alleged to have seen his deceased grandfather. He regarded them all as incorporeal because he could see through them if he looked hard enough. However, he found it very difficult to keep his mind on his lessons at school.He was taken to church when he was 10, and from then he read the Bible, becoming engrossed, and completing a dozen readings by the time he was 12. In May 1889, while reading the Bible in his hut in the woods, he 'saw' a woman with wings who told him that his prayers were answered, and asked him what he wanted most of all. He was frightened, but he said that most of all he wanted to help others, especially sick children. He decided he would like to be a missionary.
The next night, after a complaint from the school teacher, his father ruthlessly tested him for spelling, eventually knocking him out of his chair with exasperation. At that point, Cayce 'heard' the voice of the lady who had appeared the day before. She told him that if he could sleep a little 'they' could help him. He begged for a rest and put his head on the spelling book. When his father came back into the room and woke him up, he knew all the answers. In fact, he could repeat anything in the book. His father thought he had been fooling before and knocked him out of the chair again. Eventually, Cayce used all his school books that way.
By 1892, the teacher regarded Cayce as his best student. On being questioned, Cayce told the teacher that he saw pictures of the pages in the books. His father became proud of this accomplishment and spread it around, resulting in Cayce becoming "different" from his peers.
Shortly after this, Cayce exhibited an ability to diagnose in his sleep. He was struck on the base of the spine by a ball in a school game, after which he began to act very strangely, and eventually was put to bed. He went to sleep and diagnosed the cure, which his family prepared and which cured him as he slept. His father boasted that his son was, "the greatest fellow in the world when he's asleep." However, this ability was not demonstrated again for several years.
Cayce's uncommon personality is also shown in an unusual incident in which he rode a certain mule back to the farmhouse at the end of a work day. This stunned everyone there, as the mule could not be ridden. The owner, thinking it may be time to break the animal in again, attempted to mount it but was immediately thrown off. Cayce left for his family in the city that evening.
1877 to 1912: Kentucky period
In December 1893, the Cayce family moved to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and occupied 705 West Seventh on the southeast corner of Seventh and Young Streets. A ninth-grade education was often considered more than sufficient for working-class children. Much of the remainder of Cayce's younger years would be characterized by a search for both employment and money.Throughout his life, Cayce was drawn to church as a member of the Disciples of Christ. He read the Bible once a year every year, taught at Sunday school, and recruited missionaries. He said he could see auras around people, spoke to angels, and heard voices of departed relatives. In his early years, he agonized over whether these psychic abilities were spiritually delivered from the highest source.
In 1900, Cayce formed a business partnership with his father to sell Woodmen of the World Insurance; however, in March he was struck by severe laryngitis that resulted in a complete loss of speech. Unable to work, he lived at home with his parents for almost a year. He then decided to take up the trade of photography, an occupation that would exert less strain on his voice. He began an apprenticeship at the photography studio of W. R. Bowles in Hopkinsville, and eventually became quite talented in his trade.
In 1901, a traveling stage hypnotist and entertainer named Hart, who referred to himself as "The Laugh Man", was performing at the Hopkinsville Opera House. Hart heard about Cayce's condition and offered to attempt a cure. Cayce accepted his offer, and the experiment was conducted in the office of Manning Brown, the local throat specialist. Cayce's voice allegedly returned while in a hypnotic trance but disappeared on awakening. Hart tried a posthypnotic suggestion that the voice would continue to function after the trance, but this proved unsuccessful.
Since Hart had appointments at other cities, he could not continue his hypnotic treatments of Cayce, but admitted he had failed because Cayce would not go into the third stage of hypnosis to take a suggestion. A New York hypnotist, Dr Quackenboss, found the same impediment but, after returning to New York, suggested that Cayce should be prompted to take over his own case while in the second stage of hypnosis. The only local hypnotist, Al Layne, offered to help Cayce restore his voice. Layne suggested that Cayce describe the nature of his condition and cure while in a hypnotic trance. Cayce described his own ailment from a first-person plural point of view: "we" instead of the singular "I". In subsequent sessions, when Cayce wanted to indicate that the connection was made to the "entity" of the person that was requesting the reading, he would generally start off with, "We have the body." According to the reading for the "entity" of Cayce, his voice loss was due to psychological paralysis, and could be corrected by increasing the blood flow to the voice box. Layne suggested that the blood flow be increased and Cayce's face supposedly became flushed with blood, and both his chest and throat turned bright red. After 20 minutes, Cayce, still in a trance, declared the treatment over. On awakening, his voice was alleged to have remained normal. Apparently, relapses occurred, but were said to have been corrected by Layne in the same way, and eventually the cure was said to be permanent.
Layne had read of similar hypnotic cures by the Marquis de Puységur, a follower of Franz Mesmer, and was keen to explore the limits of the healing knowledge involved with the trance voice. He asked Cayce to describe Layne's own ailments and suggest cures, and reportedly found the results both accurate and effective. Layne regarded the ability as clairvoyance. Layne suggested that Cayce offer his trance healing to the public. Cayce was reluctant as he had no idea what he was prescribing while asleep, and whether the remedies were safe. He also told Layne he himself did not want to know anything about the patient as it was not relevant. He finally agreed, on the condition that readings would be free. He began, with Layne's help, to offer free treatments to the townspeople. Layne described Cayce's method as, "...a self-imposed hypnotic trance which induces clairvoyance." Reports of Cayce's work appeared in the newspapers, which inspired many postal inquiries. Cayce stated he could work just as effectively using a letter from the individual as with the person being present in the room. Given only the person's name and location, Cayce said he could diagnose the physical and mental conditions of what he termed "the entity," and then provide a remedy. Cayce was still reticent and worried, as "one dead patient was all he needed to become a murderer". His fiancée, Gertrude Evans, agreed with him. Few people knew what he was up to. There was a common belief at the time that subjects of hypnosis eventually went insane, or at least that their health suffered. Cayce soon became famous, and people from around the world sought his advice through correspondence.
In May 1902 he got a bookshop job in the town of Bowling Green where he boarded with some young professionals, two of whom were doctors. He lost his voice while there and Layne came to help effect the normal cure, finally visiting every week. Cayce, still worried, kept the meetings secret, and continued to refuse money for his readings. He invented a card game called Pit or Board of Trade, simulating wheat market trading, that became popular, but when he sent the idea to a game company they copyrighted it and he got no returns. He still refused to give readings for money.
He and Gertrude Evans married on June 17, 1903, and Gertrude came to Bowling Green. She still disapproved of the readings, and Cayce still agonized over the morality of them. A few days later Layne revealed the activity to the professionals at the boarding house, one of whom was a magistrate and journalist, after which state medical authorities forced Layne to close his practice. He left to acquire osteopathic qualifications in Franklin. Cayce and Gertrude accepted the resulting publicity as best they could, greatly aided by the diplomacy of the young doctors.
Cayce and a relative opened a photographic studio in Bowling Green, while the doctors formed a committee with some colleagues to investigate the phenomenon, with Cayce’s co-operation. All the experiments confirmed the accuracy of the readings. However, Cayce refused a lucrative offer to go into business. After a violent examination by doctors while in a trance, Cayce refused any more investigations, declaring that he would only do readings for those who needed help and believed in the readings.
In 1906 and 1907 fires burned down his two photographic studios, leading to bankruptcy. Between the two fires, his first son was born March 16, 1907. He became debt free by 1909, although completely broke, and ready to start again. In 1907, outstanding diagnostic successes in the family helped his confidence. He again refused an offer to go into business, this time with homeopath Wesley H. Ketchum from Hopkinsville, who was introduced by his father. He found a job at the H. P. Tresslar photography firm.
However, Ketchum was persistent, spread information in various medical circles, and in October 1910 got written up in the press. When a reporter contacted Cayce, he explained to the reporter that he somehow had the ability to easily go into the intuitive sleep when he wanted to, and this was different from how he went to sleep normally like everyone else. When asked the mechanism of the readings via the sleep method, they were told that it happened via the capabilities of the subconscious mind.
Ketchum again urged Cayce to join a business company. After soul searching the whole night, Cayce finally accepted the offer under certain conditions, including that he did not take money for the readings. Instead the company was to furnish him with a photographic studio for his livelihood, and build a separate office for the readings. The contract was modified to give 50% of the earnings to Cayce and his father. Cayce read the back readings, but they contained so many technical terms that he gained no more understanding of what he was doing. He preferred to put the readings on a more scientific basis, but only the doctors in Hopkinsville would cooperate, whereas most of the patients were not in that locality. Also, doctors from all specialties were needed as the treatments prescribed varied widely.
Edgar Cayce, and especially Gertrude, still did not give therapeutic priority to the readings and supposedly lost their second child due to this reticence. When Gertrude became fatally ill with tuberculosis, they used the readings after the doctor had given up. Miraculously, the treatment cured her. Shortly after this, in 1912, Cayce, whose everyday conscious mind was not aware during the readings, discovered that Ketchum had not been honest about them, and had also used them to gamble for finance. He argued in defense that the medical profession were not backing them. Cayce quit the company immediately and went back to the Tresslar photography firm in Selma, Alabama.