My Summer Vacation at the Alton State Hospital
by
John J. Dunphy
(originally published in The [Alton, IL] Telegraph, 6.13.10 edition)
The activism of the 1960s carried over into the early 1970s. During the summer of 1972, some idealistic River Bend young people — including this columnist — chose to work as volunteers at the old Alton State Hospital. Decades later, I still recall my experiences.
Shortly after graduating from high school that June, I received a letter from the hospital’s volunteer service coordinator inviting me to lend a hand at the facility. Evidently, such letters had been sent only to area students who ranked high in their graduating classes, so I was flattered and decided to accept this unique challenge. I was 18, eligible to vote and college-bound, so surely I was mature enough to handle such a venture, I thought. That belief would be severely tested several times during the ensuing months.
After two orientation sessions for new volunteers, I was assigned to Redwood Cottage at the hospital and directed to work with a severely retarded man. I use the term “retarded” because that was the accepted terminology in 1972, even among mental health professionals, and was employed during our orientation sessions. Political correctness was in its infancy at the time, although we were admonished to refer to our charges as “residents” rather than patients. I asked several Redwood Cottage residents whether they found it offensive to be called patients and all said no. One man laughed and replied, “Hey, when you’re in a hospital, you’re a patient, for God’s sake!”
The man to whom I had been assigned possessed limited speech and social skills. I discovered that, just like most members of the human race, he generally responded to kindness, so I always made a point of asking him how he was and saying that he looked well. His vocabulary included “good” and “thanks,” with the former as an answer to my question and the latter as a reply to my compliment.
My charge typically ate with his hands, and one day I decided to change that. I sat across from him at lunch and demonstrated the proper use of a spoon. Lo and behold, he picked up his previously-neglected spoon and began eating with it! My ego immediately zoomed into the stratosphere as I silently congratulated myself for accomplishing in just a few minutes what the hospital’s physicians, psychologists and psychiatrists had not been able to achieve in who knows how many years. I saw a brilliant career for myself in the field of mental health.
My vision of future greatness came to an abrupt end when my charge suddenly stopped eating, put down his spoon, grabbed a handful of food and threw it in my face. Fortunately, hospital food was only lukewarm at best, so I wasn’t burned. The damage to my young ego, however, was irreparable.
Since I wasn’t making too much progress with this man, I was reassigned to general companionship therapy for the patients of Redwood Cottage. I soon established a good rapport with them, since they found it easy to trust and open up to this long-haired teenager who wasn’t even a member of the hospital staff. For me, they weren’t “residents” or “patients.” They were people in pain who wanted to share their stories.
I met a World War II veteran who had boxed Joe Louis at an Army exhibition match that was set up to boost morale. I befriended a young couple who had met at the hospital, fell in love and made a baby behind the bushes on the hospital grounds. The baby had been placed in foster care, but the couple treasured their photo of him. One man at Redwood had spent time in any number of mental hospitals. His experiences had made him something of a connoisseur regarding such institutions, and he enjoyed ranking them on the basis of food, activities and the overall friendliness of their respective staffs.
There was a babbling, mindless patient at Redwood whose image remains burned into my memory. I thought he had been born that way and was horrified to learn that years of alcoholism had all but destroyed his brain. When he was taken to the hospital infirmary and left temporarily unattended, he assaulted another patient by gouging out one of her eyes and then eating it. Upon his return to Redwood, everyone — staff and patients — remained wary of him. He was kept in a restraint chair.
One afternoon, when I was the only non-patient in the dayroom, this man managed to seize another patient and tried to pull the patient toward him. I quickly recruited the veteran who had boxed Joe Louis to help me free the patient before another tragedy occurred. I had chosen to volunteer at the hospital to make a difference. Well, I knew that I had made a very big difference that day.
It was a memorable summer during which I learned many things that I had never been taught in a classroom. Activists, I now knew, need to be a great deal tougher than the society they inhabit if they want to succeed. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten.
John J. Dunphy is the author of “Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois,” “Lewis and Clark’s Illinois Volunteers,” and “From Christmas to Twelfth Night in Southern Illinois.” His latest book, “Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials,” will be published this winter by McFarland.