Paul Comstock Agnew

3133rd Signal Service Co

ASN#11120272

Born 1923 in NY, Died 1989

County of residence at enlistment: Worcester County, MA

Other residence(s): Chicago area, IL; Plattsburgh, NY

United States Army, European Theatre of Operations

Occupation before the war: foremen, n.e.c.

College education before the war: Williams College 1 year

College education after the war: Williams College; McGill Univ. School of Medicine

Source: 3133rd roster from 10th Mountain Division Museum at Fort Drum; photo courtesy Ancestry® and Plattsburgh High School 1941 yearbook

Paul Agnew was born on September 10, 1923 in Plattsburgh, NY, the younger of two children; his father managed a retail hardware store. He graduated from Plattsburgh High School in 1941—the proverbial "golden boy." He was one of only four students in the senior class to achieve honors every semester, he lettered in three sports (football, basketball, and track), he played in the orchestra and sang in the chorus, he was a class leader and organizer, and he was a handsome blue-eyed blond to complete the picture.

After high school he attended Williams College on scholarship, and was a student there when he registered for the draft on June 27, 1942.

His military career is not entirely clear. He enlisted on December 12, 1942, and was "discharged" on October 24, 1944, officially re-enlisting on the following day. This indicates that he became a commissioned officer, normally after a period of officers' training. He shows up on a 3133 Signal Service Company reunion list as a "former member" of the 3133rd, but we know that several other "former members" on that list did actually serve in the unit during its time in Italy. His obituary says that he "was a commissioned officer in the United States Signal Corps [sounds like the 3133rd] and was in the 10th Mountain Division." 10th Mountain Division records show him listed with the rank of PVT, not as an officer. To further complicate matters, the 10th Mountain Division also served in Italy in 1945 (though they arrived a few months prior to the 3133rd). He was discharged from the Army on April 26, 1946.

Paul returned to Williams where he graduated in 1947. He then went on to study medicine at McGill University in Montreal, PQ, Canada. Jessie Cameron was a Nova Scotia native and a nursing student at the Victoria School of Nursing in Montreal; it's likely that Paul met her in Canada. They married on December 26, 1947.

Paul received his MD from McGill in 1951; he went on to complete his psychiatric residency at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY and at the University of Chicago. He then opened a private psychiatric practice in Highland Park, IL and also served as the chief of the psychiatric service at the VA Research Hospital in Chicago, where he pioneered a work therapy program in conjunction with Disabled American Veterans (DAV).

Paul and Jessie had become the parents of three children: Eleanor, Diana, and Paul. In 1963, the family returned to Plattsburgh, NY. Paul eventually joined the NY State Department of Correctional Services. He served as deputy director of Dannemora State Hospital, and earned a reputation as a progressive in the world of prison hospitals through his design of the Diagnostic Treatment Center at Dannemora—cited as an outstanding rehabilitation program. When Dannemora closed, its remaining 300 patients were transferred to the Matteawan State Hospital (a hospital for the criminally insane) and Paul went with them. He was named director of Matteawan in November, 1972 (only three months after the death of his wife at the age of 49).

He had high hopes to raise the standards at Matteawan, which had never been an accredited medical institution, so that it could achieve psychiatric accreditation. Because of the influx of 300 new patients, he was able to hire 30 new staff members and the majority were women. A 1972 article in the Poughkeepsie Journal quotes Paul: "This is a pioneer area for psychiatry. It's one of the most recent areas of interest, and one in which there is a great need for research. . . . I conceive of correction as a treatment and rehabilitation process. . . . In the past it was a punishment ideology, and the bare fact about this system is that fundamentally it didn't work. . . . My orientation towards people [is] to deal with them in a humanitarian fashion. If they have behavior patterns or attitudes that cause them to be maladapted to their environment, to help them change this."

Because the patients at Matteawan were also prisoners, the hospital was under the direction of the commissioner of corrections in New York, and Paul and he were at odds almost from the beginning. There were grumblings from corrections officers that he had "coddled" patients. Less than two years after he was hired at Matteawan, Paul submitted his resignation under pressure from the commissioner after the controversial death of an inmate. Reports circulated that he had been forced out for attempting to bring charges against two corrections officers in that death, although these reports were denied by the commissioner. A number of Paul's staff resigned in protest as well.

After that he returned to private practice and served on the faculty at the University of Vermont Medical School. He also worked as a consultant in Clinton County courts and at the VA hospitals in Tupper Lake, NY and White River Junction, VT.

Paul's second wife was Marcia Burke Bedell, who brought two sons from her first marriage to the union. Sadly, she also died young, in 1987.

In June of 1988, Paul suffered a stroke and was hospitalized at Burlington Convalescent Center. He contracted pneumonia after 15 months in that institution, and died at the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont on December 22, 1989. Services were held in the United Methodist Church in Plattsburgh, where Paul had been a member. He is buried at Riverside Cemetery in Plattsburgh, NY.