Christopher C. Thurber †

Christopher Carson Thurber graduated from Trinity College in 1903 and spent seven years in industrial work for the Young Men's Christian Association and seven more as superintendent of an industrial school for homeless boys in Virginia. He was assistant director of military relief for the Southern Division of the American Red Cross in 1918 and directed a United States Public Health Service hospital from 1919 to 1921. Near East Relief sent him to Sivas in October 1921 to take over the unit from Mary Graffam, who had died two months earlier. He caught typhus there in the spring of 1922, working among the Greek deportees driven west from the Pontus on the Black Sea coast, and recovered.

In 1923 he brought the orphans out of Sivas. At Scutari (Üsküdar), across the water from Constantinople (Istanbul), he tried to stop gendarmes beating a refugee woman and was flogged for it, which permanently damaged his feet. He walked with a cane afterward. He then volunteered to live inside the Selimieh barracks at Scutari, where typhus was killing refugees by the hundred, and directed the effort to stop it. He came home to convalesce, returned to Greece in 1926, and opened homes in Athens for boys leaving the orphanages.

He was planning a tuberculosis pavilion for children when he suffered a stroke. He died in Athens on 31 May 1930, aged fifty. The Greek cabinet met that morning, voted him the funeral honors of a retired general and paid the costs.