The BeginningWritten -- January 1, 1997
I sometimes wonder if my father hadn't died what my life would have been like. Would I have grown up in Ames, Iowa where I was born? Gone to school and married there in Ames? Would I, like my father, follow my father's footsteps and work for the City of Ames? I often wonder what my attitude would be towards some things that I now find I have some very strong feelings about. What would my attitude be about orphans, orphanages, juvenile homes and reform schools. Would I know they existed or would I even care? Above all, would I be the type of person I feel I am today?
I know this book leaves many questions unanswered. The book only tells what happened not why it happened nor does it tell how it effected my adult life. Maybe in this commentary I can supply some of those answers.
I can not excuse anyone for what happened nor can I excuse myself for anything I did. I can only try to find reasons as to why it happened. All of my life I have always blamed myself for everything that happened to me, mainly because that is what I was told. They were right and I was wrong it was as simple as that. Today I know different.
There were many actors on the stage of my life, each in their own way must share the blame for what happened to me. What happened should never have happened but for the sum of a lot of reasons it did.
Today I am not angry nor bitter about what happened nor have I ever been. Any anger I may of had I turned inward where it became hurt and was hard for me to deal with. I did not write this book out of anger nor vengeance but because I felt that it was one of many stories that had to be told. If how I had been treated had caused me to have a more positive attitude towards life as I grew up then I would not have felt that this book had to be written.
Though I was somewhat of a rarity as I grew up in institutions, there were many others like me. Their stories may have been somewhat different. Some may have slid though a little bit easier, some a little bit harder, some never made it at all, those you never hear about and probably never will for their death certificates will most likely say, "Cause of death. Heat Stroke," as Ronald Miller's death certificate had originally stated. And that makes me wonder how many Ronald Millers there really were. Or "Suicide, jumped from a bridge." "Case closed."
After my father died, when I was four years old, my brother and I were able to stay with our mother for another eighteen months before we were taken from her. "Just long enough to get on your feet again." Is what she was told by a man named H. H. Ver Ney of the Story County, Iowa Welfare Office, who was a short time later to make out commitment papers to have my brother and I put up for adoption through the Iowa Solders' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa , a state institution.
Prior to my brother and I being placed in the orphanage and put up for adoption my paternal grandmother, aunts and uncles, my maternal grandparents and uncles were all notified due to lack of any other alternative we were going to be institutionalized and placed up for adoption yet none of them had stepped forward to help us. A few years ago I was to ask some of them why this had been so. The answer from all of those I had asked, as though it had been rehearsed among themselves many years before, "We were poor people, there wasn't much we could do." In most cases I was sitting in an immaculate home, a new car or two sitting in the driveway. They had come a long ways. I have tried to understand and see with their eyes during those trying times. After all it is only human nature not to want to become involved thinking that someone else would. I have hindsight they didn't have foresight to perceive what I would have to endure just to survive nor what it would do to me for the rest of my life.
I suppose that it is only natural that you try and find reasons more for your mother than anyone else. To find those reasons I have had to search clear back to my mother's childhood and even beyond to my maternal grandmother's childhood for I have found it too had an effect on my life.
My grandmother, though she was born in the late nineteenth century, was a typical teen-ager. She was a farm girl in central Iowa, who had a boy friend (my grandfather) who was seven years older than she was, who her parents disapproved of. So she would simply slipped out the window at night and go meet him. They got married when my grandmother was sixteen, sort of had to. They had several children prior to my mother's birth, three to be exact the forth one a girl was stillborn. By the time my mother was born, my grandmother, who was now twenty-eight, didn't want any more children. So strike one against Mom and her younger brother.
My grandmother had made it pretty obvious to my mother and her little brother that they were unwanted. Hand-me-down clothes, nothing new. My mother's clothes coming from some of her cousins seeing she had no sisters. Though she was disciplined quite extensive I don't know if it could be called abuse in those times. She was her father's favorite which didn't sit too well with my grandmother. Then there were those problems with her older brothers that started when she was twelve years old. When my mother had told her mother, her mother was suppose to have said, "What are you complaining about, that is what girls are made for."
I suppose like most girls faced with the problems she was enduring she wanted to get out of the house is why she married her first husband when she was seventeen. Well anyway that is what my mother has told me, "Just so I could get out of the house." That marriage ended not more than a couple of months after it was consummated not knowing she was pregnant with my sister.
When my sister was born my grandmother literally took my sister from my mother a week later. I suppose my grandmother didn't have faith in my mother raising her own baby. Sort of upset my mother at first but she was subordinate to her mother. As time passed, my mother losing my sister to her mother became a convenience to my mother, which was to set up the stage of events unforeseen. This convenience was to allow my mother to date boys and to eventually meet my father, couldn't have done that with the millstone of my sister about her neck.
So when my mother was twenty-eight and my brother and I were taken from her, it may have upset her for several days but then it was a convenience, she could now go on with her life dating etc. she was still single. It was out of her hands, there was nothing she could do about it. A few years later when I was twelve she had tried to get me back but her request had been denied when my grandmother wouldn't watch over me when my mother was at work. She had taken the denial as final and had not aggressively perused the matter. She had tried but failed so it was again out of her hands and went on with her life style. It wasn't as though I was suffering or anything like that. She knew I was being well fed, had clean clothes and a clean place to stay and if I needed medical attention it would be provided. So would be her line of thought or reasoning. She no longer had two small boys to hold her down. This is not to say anything against my mother as though she knowingly felt she had two choices, her life style or the happiness of her two boys but only the reasoning behind my line of thought. My mother was also very naive about her rights and very trusting of others when she was told that it would only be for a short time, not realizing it was a lot easier to lose us than it was to get us back.
When I was twelve years old, when my mother had married my first stepfather, there was an opportunity then to have taken me home why she didn't I can only assume based on what later I was to find out about my stepfather's attitude on the matter.
How did we get into the welfare system to start with? It was the biggest mistake my mother made in those months after my dad had died. My dad's oldest brother got involved, he suggested to and helped my mother get Aid to Dependent Children. To those that don't know it, there are a lot of restrictions placed on getting that money. Like the mother is not to work even though the aid money is not enough to support the whole family, it is only there to help support the children. So she worked and after several warnings not to she was charged with neglect. Which by the way a charge that was supported by my grandmother, my mother's own mother.
Previously my mother had been charged with, "Drunk and disorderly conduct." I had just turned six then and I remember that night well. She had been drinking. Drunk? I think that could be argumentative. Disorderly? I'll bet she was, she had a temper that she would easily let go at any man. This I was to learn years later.
There was some sort of a problem between this Ver Ney and my mother that had nothing to do with my brother and me. According to my mother he eventually wound up in the state penitentiary for crimes I can't relate here.
It was eighteen months after my dad had died when my brother and I were taken from my mother and placed in a foster home. The first of three I would be in before being committed to The Iowa Solder's Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa at the age of seven, my brother being five, nineteen months after being taken from our mother. I had adjusted to each foster home then moved on only to have to readjust to an institution.
The forms made out for our commitment to the orphanage are somewhat confusing to me. At one point they state, "Dr. Habenicht stated, "that both [of] these children are badly in need of long term routinized training such as given in an institution. It has been a long and difficult task to correct these children--when they entered their foster homes they were completely untrained in habits of cleanliness and eating habits." Yet a few days later I was classified by the orphanage as "normal or average and mentally suited for good average adoptive home." "Above average reasoning." No mention of long term institutional care. That poses a question as to why we were actually sent to the orphanage per request of this person H. H. Ver Ney of the Story County Welfare Office who at the time was having some personal problems with my mother.
Five months after entering the orphans' home my brother and I had been separated. I was told at that time, I was a big boy and I belonged with the big boys on the boys' side of institution away from the girls. To an eight year old boy that had sounded good. Not only was I now a big boy but I would be able to get away from those pesky girls. So I had taken my transfer from the girls' side to my new cottage (Cottage 2) in stride. My brother still in his familiar surroundings was not too concerned either for we would still be able to see each other. We soon found out that I was no longer allowed on the girls side and he wasn't allowed on the boys' side, though from time to time we did manage to slip back and forth.
Though we were two years different in age it is very obvious to me at this time why they had separate us to the point of not allowing us to see each other. On the surface it didn't seem to mean much other than what they said, I was too old to be around girls and my brother was too young to be around older boys. But when I look closer I can see that they wanted us to adjust to being separated from each other for reasons of adoption. It is very rare that a set of brothers can readily be placed for adoption. As an eight year old boy I didn't realize the implications, I am sure that if I had known what the ramifications were and if I had been asked I would have strongly objected to being placed for adoption without my brother.
As it was, one year after entering the orphanage I was placed for adoption. Reading the adoption application I find it difficult to understand why the application was ever approved or even given much consideration. According to the application my adoptive father was 58 (Actually 60.) years old, my mother 50 years old, quite old to be raising an eight year old boy. They had a fifteen acre farm, not hardly big enough to support a family considering the only thing they had for market was the stock they raised. All of the land they had, other than the garden for the family use, was utilized for growing feed for the stock. From their point of view they had a need that needed to be fulfilled, they were up in age with no children.
I can only assume what the Children's Division of the Board of Control were rationalizing when they granted my placement with my adoptive parents. They may have had many children to be placed and all too few qualified prospective adoptive parents so they approved any that they thought may have a chance, no matter how small they felt that chance may be.
As I mentioned in my book my adoptive mother had died a few months after I was placed for adoption. By then I had come to view my adoptive mother as my real mother so her passing had hurt me but I still had my "dad" so I was to take her death as any boy that had lost his mother but still had his father.
When I was taken from my "dad" I didn't act up and cry, not feeling I was being taken from him and that I was losing him. I had his promise he would soon come for me. So I had gone peacefully with the state agent, back to the orphanage not knowing that the next few months were to become the most critical period of many critical times in my life. It was to become the period in my life where I could no longer adjust nor conform to being just another orphan boy in an institution. Unconsciously, I could no longer wait for others to guide my life, I more or less took matters into my own hands. I became what they were to come to call "A chronic Runaway."
Why did I run away? That is a question that has plagued me all of my life. I always said and felt that it was because of the physical pain I was enduring. It wasn't until in the last five years, as I researched and wrote this book, was I to begin to understand the real reasons as to why I ran away. I found that it wasn't simple reasons but very complex ones.
To me at nine, ten, eleven years old my world was a very small one. Everything in my world was in my memories and that which was directly around me. I lived with my memories of what was, not understanding what was happening and what could be in the future for me. Tomorrow, next week, next month were too hard for me to comprehend, I could only see and feel today. I would always be the age I was, those people that were hurting me would always be there. Even after I was eleven and well beyond, I always viewed myself as though I was still nine years old, as I felt and thought then. Emotionally I stopped growing when I was returned to the orphanage.
As I sit and review the data that is spread out before me and as I sit here and think of that period of time so long ago, I know that it wasn't the physical abuse that caused me to run away. I now realize that other boys, most of them never ran away, also were whipped, slapped, scolded, had to darn socks, miss movies and had other forms of restrictions placed on them. Those razor straps, boards etc. were not just for me. If that was the case (Since most of them did not become chronic runaways.) then there was another reason as to why I ran away so much. That caused me to be so much different than most of the boys.
Though abuse never stopped me from running away it did create other problems as I grew up and throughout my adult years. It was in part to help form a psychosis, "a depressed outlook on life" (from a letter in my records dated May 28, '47 when I was thirteen years old) that was to progressively worsen over the years. I was to develop a low self-esteem, an uneasiness, a fear of all authoritarian figures. I was to find it difficult to handle normal emotional feelings of grief, fear and anger. My grief and fear were to be extremely amplified beyond all reality, my feelings of anger was to be suppressed to such a point that I was to very seldom show it and when I did show anger I became very despondent from it. If someone today was to try and make me angry, I would get a very uncomfortable feeling as though I was afraid. I would make light of it and maybe even nervously laugh about it but I would feel afraid.
The physical abuse caused only part of my emotional problems, that was the easy part to trace back through the years and see what effect it had on me. But it didn't explain all of my problems and those problems were to seem insurmountable, until I was to realize it was the total sum of many events in my childhood that was to cause some of the most indescribable emotional feelings I experienced as I passed through my teens, entered my adulthood and the following years.
Why Me Lord MIDI By the courtesy of the MIDI Picking Harry Todd The best on the NET. Section Two