Blood Center to Display Award-Winning Articles About WWII Blood Donations

Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about blood donations will be on display this week at a Stanford blood center, Stanford officials announced.

From Tuesday through Friday, journalist Jack McDowell's series of articles from 1944, which followed the path of a shipment of blood donated for wounded World War II soldiers, will be on display at the Stanford Blood Center at 3373 Hillview Ave. in Palo Alto, a blood center spokeswoman said.

The articles, which McDowell wrote while working for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, are on loan from his daughter, Judy McDowell.          

McDowell received the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for reporting after following the shipment of blood from donor Chelsea O'Brien as it went from a San Francisco blood center through the Navy Air Transport Service into the Pacific during World War II, the spokeswoman said.

An excerpt from one of the articles reads, "As the Navy doctors rigged tubing from the bottle of Miss O'Brien's blood to (the injured soldier's) arm, I sat beside his cot. He turned a pair of brave blue eyes toward me and asked if I knew the donor. 'I saw her at the blood center in San Francisco a couple of days ago,' I told him."

—Bay City News Service