EL SALVADOR: Benefactor

Near starvation, her face twisted in pain, seven-year-old Maria was brought to San Salvador's Hospital Benjamin Bloom just in time. While her mother, a poor Indian woman, waited outside, the doctors made an examination. Then Chief Surgeon Carlos Chamorro operated, removed an orange-sized ovarian tumor from the child.

Last week, in a sunny ward of the two-story children's hospital, Maria was getting a new look at life. For the first time she slept between sheets, drank milk. For the first time she ate three square meals a day. She had all the medicines she needed; her teeth had been checked and repaired. And everything—for Maria and the rest of the hospital's 125 small patients (aged 2 to 8)—was free.

Maria's benefactor is a dapper millionaire banker from Healdsburg, Calif, named Benjamin Bloom. "Benny," as he is known to everybody in San Salvador, built the hospital 22 years ago, and gave it to the government. His one proviso: that he (and after his death, his wife Aline) should have a free hand in running it.

Daily at 8:30, Benny, with a red rosebud in the lapel of his jauntily cut suit, walks from his home on the fashionable Doble Via to the hospital. He spends at least two hours visiting the children and checking on such details as charcoal for the kitchen stove and nylon sutures for the operating room. Though the government pays the hospital's 22 doctors and 14 nurses, Benny buys what he calls the "extras"—a child-size operating table, modern X-ray equipment, new washing machines for the laundry. All told, he has spent some $500,000—and made the 125-bed hospital just about the best in Central America.

Now 76, Benjamin Bloom landed in El Salvador in 1890 and went into banking. His steadiest business was the financing of coffee crops. When planters dropped in at his office in San Salvador's Banco Occidental, he usually put them at ease with a couple of smoking-car stories. Then he would bury his face in an oversized telephone mouthpiece that masked his lips and prevented his visitors from hearing his conversation with his clerk about their financial standing.

Ten years ago, partly because of his local-associations and partly because he was fed up with U.S. income taxes, Benny became a citizen of El Salvador. Says Benny, whose fortune is estimated at $25 million: "Everything I have I got from El Salvador, and I intend to leave it all here." Last week he proudly noted that the 500,000th patient had been treated at Hospital Benjamin Bloom.