In Ladd's final days, some exemplary care

Many residents of the Ladd Center, Rhode Island's now-closed institution for the developmentally disabled, suffered cruelly through years of abuse and neglect. But toward the end, as the state moved aggressively to move everyone onto what was then, the 1990s, a model community system (and now is under intense scrutiny for alleged abuse and neglect), conditions had improved significantly. I witnessed this personally during the week 26 years ago that I was allowed to live on one of the last wards for a Providence Journal story.

Here is that story, the story of Lorraine Jean Bessette.

Lorraine's world As Ladd Center prepares to close, a new day dawns for the profoundly disabled
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: July 29, 1990  Page: A-01  Section: NEWS  Edition: ALL  

SHE WAS given ID No. 2774. She was labeled an "idiot," one step below "imbecile" on the mental scale. She had blue eyes, perfect features, beautiful hair and skin, curvature of the spine. She was 18 months old.

"The child is a great burden on the mother," read the paperwork. "There are four older children, the oldest of whom is only eight. Mother is expecting a sixth child in another month. The baby, Lorraine, is very heavy, is unresponsive and takes a great deal of mother's time. She is exhausted. Lorraine is also a feeding problem."

Four days after Christmas, 1948, Lorraine Jean Bessette, born with severe cerebral palsy, was committed to the Ladd Center.

She's still there.

But only for a little longer.

Lorraine's headed for a home in the community.

And Ladd is going out of business, probably next year. Closing Rhode Island's only institution for the retarded will bring down the curtain on an era whose first act was compassion, whose long-running second act was degradation and despair, and whose finale is resplendent with a chorus of new dignity for some of society's most vulnerable - and needy - people, people like Lorraine.

Lorraine's 43 now, all grown up.

She loves babies, hugs, thumbing through women's magazines. She hates vegetables, particularly squash. She favors pink fingernail polish, ribbons in her hair, dresses she orders herself from the Sears catalogue, coffee with cream and sugar, chocolate cake, barbecued chicken - provided it is ground to a consistency she can swallow. Her best friend is Diane, who spent years at Ladd and is in a group home now. Diane telephones about once a week. Her picture's on Lorraine's dresser. When she can, she has Lorraine over for dinner.

On this summer Sunday, Lorraine is in her wheelchair, custom-built at a cost of almost $4,000 to accommodate her 88-pound body, which is permanently twisted in ways unique to her. On her tray is one of her sign boards. Lorraine cannot utter a word, but she is a masterful - and, sometimes, sly - communicator. With no more than facial expressions and her signature giggle, Lorraine can tease, flirt, plead and display anger or disgust or great joy.

Her sign boards expand the possibilities. This one, the small everyday one, has pictures of her doll, her bed, a TV, a toilet, orange juice and a three-layer chocolate cake. All day, she's been pointing to the cake with her left hand, the only one with any use in it. A huge smile has been overspreading her face. Those big blue eyes have been twinkling.

"What've you been wanting?" says Linda Hussey, principal attendant on Lorraine's ward, Rehab 1. On her supper break, Linda slipped off grounds on a secret errand. Now she's back.

"Tell me. What've you been wanting?"

Lorraine points to her sign-board cake.

"Ta-da]" Linda places a hunk of fudge cake on Lorraine's tray.

"See it? Just like the picture."

Lorraine shakes her head, the very image of disappointment.

"What do you mean, no?"

Lorraine's face brightens.

She laughs.

Her head is going up and down now, yes] yes] yes]

"You're teasing again, woman," Linda says. "As much as you nagged me about that cake, you're going to eat it]"

Lorraine, never one to pass on a prank, is convulsed. When she's calmed down some, she struggles to get her fingers around the cake, but the slice is too big. Linda breaks it into bits.

"There," she says. "All bite-size pieces so you can pick it up. Looks like we're going to have to wash our hands after that. Goo city."

Later, Linda will muse. "I wonder sometimes what they dream. I wonder what they'd say if they woke up one morning and could talk."

Lorraine and me, 26 years ago.

Most born 'fragile'

Living with Lorraine are 26 men and women ranging in age from 23 to 68. All are profoundly retarded. All have some sort of physical disability. Most are what the physicians call medically fragile: prone to epileptic fits, digestive difficulties, heart problems, limb contractures, muscular atrophy.

Some can trace their disabilities to early-childhood accidents, but most came into the world with something wrong, a reminder of just how delicate human procreation is.

All but a handful have been at Ladd for years. Because of their multiple handicaps, which make placement in group homes more of a challenge than those less dependent, they are the last to go. They are the Final 200, members of a class that in Ladd's heyday, the mid-1960s, numbered more than 1,000.

Lorraine's world is a cinder block and brick building. It has three stories. Two have bedrooms, day rooms, bathrooms and dining areas. The basement has treatment centers for exercising and learning skills - putting pegs in boards, for example, or introducing new symbols onto Lorraine's most sophisticated board, which is up to 48 pictures now. On steamy summer days, there are enough air conditioners and fans on Rehab 1 to make things tolerable.

Aesthetics, a concept once alien to institutions, count.

Walls are painted pleasant shades of green and blue. Curtains and prints have been hung, fake potted plants put about, color TVs and VCRs and tape decks brought in. Every resident has a chest of drawers, a closet, his own shampoo, deodorant and soap. Beds have pillows and spreads and are made every morning.

It's a far cry from the days of Ladd's infamous back wards - days, not much more than a decade ago, when Lorraine slept in a crib, always wore a hospital johnny and spent her waking hours alone in a "vegetable cart," a wheelbarrowlike contraption inspired by what old-time peanut vendors pushed around. These were the days of isolation chambers and personal hygiene that consisted of herding excrement-covered people into cavernous tiled rooms and hosing them down.

Today, everyone has his or her own wardrobe, purchased with Social Security money. One man sports a Playboy T-shirt. Another wears one that proclaims: Professional Beach Bum. Red Sox, Patriots and Special Olympics motifs are standard. Lorraine likes dresses and skirts, typically in bright colors. But her most beloved dress is checkered gray.

"Her preppie look," Linda says.

The care-givers

As conditions at Ladd have slowly improved, the work load inevitably has increased.

From 7 a.m. until the day's over, frequently at 10 p.m. or later, the attendants - who often must work shorthanded - barely have time for the cigarettes most of them seem to smoke. They spoon-feed those residents, a majority, who cannot lift a fork. They change diapers. They do the laundry. They groom, shave, dish out ice cream treats, comfort, amuse, brush teeth, hold hands, dress, undress, tuck into bed. They keep incessant records: positioning charts, defecation charts, med and hygiene charts.

"All my life, I've found someone to take care of," says Chris Eidam, another attendant on Rehab 1. If Lorraine could speak, Chris believes, "she'd probably say, 'Thank you.' She's such a grateful person."

Today, Chris has dinner duty in one of Rehab 1's small dining rooms. Four residents are here. Only Lorraine can feed herself. Chris dishes her dinner - ground steak, mashed potatoes, pureed butternut squash - onto her plate. Lorraine starts to eat with a Teflon-coated spoon, which is easy on the teeth. Lorraine has a special handle and cup for drinking, but she doesn't like them. She prefers sandwiching a regular cup between lips and the back of her hand, even if the spill rate is significantly higher.

Chris's little sister was 4 when she collapsed, the victim of a rare blood disease. "I remember holding her in my lap, my mother trying to call an ambulance," Chris says. "She kept saying, 'My head] My head]' They tried surgery. She didn't make it. She was buried on my 13th birthday.

"Had she made it, she probably would have been here."

Lorraine is crying. She's gotten a taste of squash.

"Squash isn't anything to cry about," Chris says, but her reasoning doesn't impress Lorraine.

"What about those roses in your cheeks?" That's Chris's little ploy, telling Lorraine vegetables bring out good color.

Lorraine won't be persuaded.

"Okay." Chris scrapes the squash away.

"There. Now there isn't any."

Lorraine grins and gets back to work - more quickly, now that dessert, some sort of pudding, is that much nearer.

"She likes to read beauty magazines," Chris says. "I tell her those girls are so pretty because they eat their vegetables. She laughs. But only sometimes does it work."

Opened in 1908

The Exeter School for the Feeble-Minded opened in January 1908, when Dr. Joseph H. Ladd (for whom the institution would later be renamed) and eight "boys" moved into an old farmhouse on property that was about as far away from it all as one could get in turn-of-the-century Rhode Island.

The motivation was compassion - and, purportedly, protection. Exeter gave all its residents asylum and, for the "high grades," employment on a farm. The School for the Feeble-Minded gave greater Rhode Island a dumping ground.

Within 20 years, 430 people were "enrolled." Many were retarded. Many were not. Prostitutes, paupers, immigrants, thieves, "undesirables" of all stripes wound up in Exeter. Typically, their ticket was a form requiring only the signature of two doctors. More often than not, the ticket was one-way.

As early as the 1920s, accounts of abuse began circulating about Exeter, which the automobile was bringing closer to populated Rhode Island. Buildings were fire hazards. Wards were overcrowded. Health care was primitive. Sanitation was lacking. Residents were being beaten, some to death. Decades passed. The stories, many verified in Journal-Bulletin investigations, only got worse.

"You'd see people in feces and urine, lying in it," says Ed Brown, who began work at Ladd in 1962 and is still there, on Lorraine's ward.

"I remember a client who would bite. He was in a detention room 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. He'd been there for years. He had no wearing apparel, only a mattress and two sheets. One day, they let him out. They had a rope around his waist. He was out maybe half an hour and they brought him back."

Says Walter Kirk, 77, who was shipped off to Ladd in 1925 and is still there: "Danforth beat me with a rubber hose. I don't know why, myself. He was the boss. He's dead now."

The only option

In 1948, there was no help for a family such as the Bessettes. If a family couldn't make a go of it with their disabled newborn, Exeter was the only option.

"Due to present high cost of living, family having a difficult time to get along, although the father is employed steadily," one of Lorraine's pre-admission records states. "They are attached to the child but realize that it is for the best to have her institutionalized."

On Dec. 29, 1948, she was.

Lorraine's siblings, who lived in northern Rhode Island, were told by their father that their baby sister had died, according to Ladd officials. Lacking anyone to pay any attention to her, Lorraine would pass the next four decades in her crib and vegetable cart, with little but the walls to amuse her.

There is no test to tell how much of Lorraine's situation results from birth defects, how much is the inevitable product of so much numbness. One can only speculate where she might be if, like today's handicapped babies, she'd had intensive help - and been able to stay home.

"If she'd been given the benefit of early intervention," says Chris Eidam, "she would have gone so far. How far? I don't doubt that she could read."

(Two years ago, Lorraine's social worker managed to track down a sister, who was stunned to learn Lorraine was alive. There has been limited contact since, despite several overtures from Ladd.)

The larger picture

While Lorraine and hundreds like her were almost literally rotting, someone was beginning to pay attention, at least to the larger picture.

By the 1970s, newspapers were turning up the heat on Ladd. A federal lawsuit was filed by an advocacy group, the Rhode Island Association for Retarded Citizens. Aggressive young bureaucrats took over at the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, which runs Ladd. Governors and the General Assembly agreed on a new mission. So did voters, who supported development of a community system by approving tens of millions in bonds.

As group homes sprouted all over Rhode Island, the population of Ladd slowly shrank from its mid-1960s peak of more than 1,000. By 1986, fewer than 300 were left.

The monster was dying. And Rhode Island, which had risen from a vegetable-cart mentality to become a national leader in the dignified treatment of the disabled, was on its way to becoming the first state not to have an institution for the retarded.

Four years ago, Governor DiPrete made it official. DiPrete, whose commitment to handicapped people has been unwavering despite his political ups and downs, announced that Ladd would close in 1991 - a target date that remains feasible, although it could be into 1992 before the last light goes off forever. Closing Ladd, DiPrete said, would be accomplished by accelerating the development of group homes, including specialized facilities for people with multiple physical, medical and mental handicaps.

"What have we learned?" says James V. Healey, head of the Rhode Island Association for Retarded Citizens. "We've learned we can't segregate ever again."

A better place

Tuesday evening.

The phone on Rehab 1 rings. Debbie Sheldon, an attendant, answers. It's Diane. She's calling from her group home, in Johnston.

Lorraine has visited Diane enough to know that's just the kind of place she wants to live in. For one thing, with a lower resident-to-staff ratio than Ladd and better transportation possibilities, the home's five residents get out a lot. They go shopping, to the movies, to Rocky Point Park, to the beach, to restaurants, to sheltered workshops and jobs.

For another thing, there's chocolate cake and barbecued chicken and a whole bunch of good stuff like that. At the group home, residents help prepare their meals. They have a say in the menu. They can smell dinner in the oven. Except for swallowing, residents of Ladd hardly ever get involved in these most basic - and delightful - of human pursuits.

"The homes are beautiful," says Linda Hussey, the attendant. "No matter how many pictures you hang on a wall or how many plants, it will always look like an institution at Ladd."

Goodbye Ladd: Lorraine's new home.

Lorraine's wildest dream is to live with Diane. What she doesn't know yet is that, within a few days, arrangements will be completed to make her dream come true.

Debbie Sheldon wheels Lorraine to the phone.

"It's for you," she says.

Lorraine lights up. Debbie holds the phone to her ear. Lorraine giggles. On the other end, Diane is saying hello.

"Ask when she's coming to a cookout," Debbie says, loud enough so that her voice carries over the line.

Lorraine giggles.

On the other end, Diane can be heard.

"I think she's saying, 'I love you,' " Debbie says. "Ask her when she's coming over. For a cookout and a sleepover."

Laughter.

"Is she telling you a dirty joke?"

Giggles.

"Tell her you love her."

More giggles.

On the other end, a group home worker's voice is heard. "Lorraine, do you want to come over and see Diane? Would you like to come for dinner?"

Lorraine's head is going up and down, yes] yes] yes]

"Yeah? You might be interested? How about Sunday?"

Lorraine is laughing so hard she's crying.

'The beast is dead.' Or so we thought, 22 years ago...

The state of Rhode Island 22 years ago this March closed the human warehouse known as the Ladd Center, an institution in Exeter, R.I., for people then labeled "retarded" -- people we today know as developmentally or intellectually disabled. Vulnerable people frequently without voice who, with some exceptions, particularly toward the end, were brutally mistreated for decades at Ladd.

The story below is the one I wrote for The Providence Journal on that triumphal day.

As you will read, after decades of abuse and neglect -- and following Providence Journal exposes, a federal lawsuit, and tireless advocacy -- one of the leaders of the movement could declare: "The beast is dead... Nobody will ever be able to throw away a human being again."

An enlightened state legislature with the determination of compassionate departmental leaders and taxpayers who supported millions of dollars in bonds to build a model system of community group homes and programs had prevailed. The powerless had found power; the voiceless, a voice. And we were all the better for it.

And now, in March 2016, comes word of Barbara A. Annis, a 70-year-old developmentally disabled woman in a state-run group home who died after a broken leg became infected and staff did not get her to a hospital until days later, when it was too late; when surely she had suffered as the infection that killed her intensified. A cruel history, tragically repeated; a system that has been allowed to fragment and decay. How wrong. Did we learn nothing? Do we now, again, believe some lives matter more than others? Read about the woman's death in the story I wrote. Read further developments, and of another investigation of alleged patient abuse at the state-run Zambarano Hospital.

So read, below, the story I wrote on the very final day of Ladd, 22 years ago this early spring, when triumph prevailed and the hope was that no person would ever again have to suffer the indignities of a heartless system... or die because of its neglect and abuse.

The Ladd Center in the 1970s. Residents spent hours like this, warehoused. What the camera didn't capture was worse.

The Ladd Center in the 1950s, when first Journal expose was published. You are welcome to compare to 1930s Germany.

FINAL DAY Ladd Center shuts down quietly
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: March 26, 1994  Page: A-01  Section: NEWS  Edition: ALL

At 12:35 p.m. yesterday, the last of five men was helped into a van outside a building at the Ladd Center, Rhode Island's institution for the retarded. It drove off, its passengers never to make Ladd home again.

After 86 years, Ladd was closed.

"The beast is dead," said Robert L. Carl Jr., the state official responsible as much as anyone for slaying it.

It was the end of an era that began in 1908 with hope for society's most vulnerable people - hope that had given way, by the 1960s and '70s, to scandal and shame. More than 4,500 people lived at Ladd over the course of its existence. No one will ever know how many suffered.

There was no ceremony for Ladd's last hours - no speeches, no champagne, only a quiet, emotional gathering of some two dozen people who battled for decades to build a better life for those who could not do it themselves.

Together, Ladd's final five residents spent 206 years in the institution. Now, like hundreds who left before them, they will shop on Saturdays, not lie naked in their own feces, as many did during the years of worst abuse. They will have their own rooms in their own homes, not be packed 50 to a back ward. They will bathe, not be hosed down.

"Nazi Germany killed these people," said Carl, who heads the Division of Developmental Disabilities, a branch of the state Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, which ran Ladd. "Rhode Island made a commitment to treat them with dignity and respect."

"How do you find a word for this?" said James V. Healey, executive director of the Rhode Island Arc, which four decades ago began the battle to find alternatives to Ladd. Like Carl, Healey had tears in his eyes at 12:35 p.m. yesterday.

"I never lost faith," said Ladd's superintendent, George W. Gunther Jr., who left a lucrative career as an insurance executive 24 years ago to work for change from within, and who had vowed, on his promotion to the top job, to one day close the place. Gunther's daughter, Nancy, was at Ladd for many years.

Rhode Island joins New Hampshire and Vermont, which recently shut institutions, as the only states to serve people with developmental disabilities entirely in the community.

But Rhode Island declared its intention first: In July 1986, when former Gov. Edward D. DiPrete announced Ladd would be out of business within five years. Construction of group homes and centers for Ladd's remaining residents, more disabled than those who'd already left, took longer than expected.

Promises not kept

In 1907, when the fate of the retarded was prison and the poorhouse, a Massachusetts physician came south to try something more humane. Softspoken and generous, Dr. Joseph H. Ladd opened the Rhode Island School for the Feeble-Minded on a farm - where, he believed, his charges could lead satisfying lives in safety. In January 1908, eight retarded men moved in with him and his wife into an old farmhouse.

By 1913, more than 100 men and women lived at the institution. Men who were capable worked the farm, while women sewed and did housework, and children did what they could. In his annual report that year, Ladd outlined his plan to build a laundry, power plant, hospital and more dorms.

In 1925, the population of the institution, by then known euphemistically as the Exeter School, passed 500. Not all were retarded: Many were epileptic, sexually promiscuous or unemployed, sent away by doctors or judges seeking solutions to people they considered nuisances. Ladd believed that with the right treatment, some of Exeter's "high-grades" could be discharged, and a small number, less than 10 percent a year, were. For the rest, passage through life was marked only by the change of seasons.

Overcrowding, understaffing and insufficient funds contributed to worsening conditions in the 1950s and '60s, when the institution's population peaked at slightly more than 1,000. The parents who founded RIARC demanded that their retarded children be served in their communities, mostly in Greater Providence, not behind bars in the middle of 550 acres miles from where they lived. By the '70s, many believed Ladd had to close.

None had more conviction than Healey.

One day in 1976 while touring a back ward, he saw a woman naked on the floor with what he thought was a red ball against her naked bottom. It wasn't a ball, but her rectum - protruding out.

"That's just a prolapse," the supervisor said. "It falls out and we just push it back."

Healey's eyes met the woman's. She couldn't speak, but Healey imagined what she would have said if she could: "If you're an advocate, why do you let them do this to me?"

"It's a snakepit there," Healey said at a news conference he called a short while later.

But little happened for a year, until September 1977, when the Journal-Bulletin began a series of investigative pieces documenting neglect and abuse at Ladd. The paper found that fire protection was inadequate, residents routinely had teeth extracted without proper anesthetic, and doctors failed to diagnose broken arms, infections and diabetes. Because of bad care, the paper reported, some had died.

A state was shocked. Ladd had many dedicated employees, but their quiet contributions were lost in the ensuing controversy, which led to a federal suit by RIARC and the firing of the superintendent, Dr. John G. Smith, who had succeeded Dr. Ladd in 1956. In a short time, Gunther was promoted and Carl hired from Ohio, where he was known as an administrator who meant business, and who believed the future was in the community, not behind brick walls.

Even before the scandals of the '70s, Rhode Island had been moving away from Ladd. Voters in 1967 approved a $1.5 million bond for community centers, and in years to come would approve tens of millions more for group homes and other programs. As Gunther and Carl improved conditions for Ladd's remaining residents, they accelerated community development.

Last year, for the first time since 1913, the institution's population dropped below 100.

Yesterday, it hit zero.

Last day on ward

Jimmy Lassiter was up early on his last day at Ladd, which came a half-century after his first. Staff washed him, combed his hair, brushed his teeth, dressed him in black trousers, Notre Dame T-shirt and basketball shoes, and gave him his medications. Breakfast was Tang and oatmeal with sliced bananas. He ate with a spoon, and a Ladd pillowcase for a bib.

Lassiter was 9 years old when he was sent to Exeter, in January 1940. His mother had died in childbirth the summer before, leaving six children 8 and under. Jimmy was profoundly retarded and had a temper. He spoke only when angry, and only a word or two then. His father couldn't handle him.

A working farm had little use for a "low-grade," and so Jimmy spent much of his life on back wards. In recent years, as Ladd improved, he was prepared for life in a group home. After breakfast yesterday, he went to his classroom. His clothes were packed and an attendant mopped his old room. He ate lunch with his four friends and they were gone. Their new home is a group home in Hope Valley.

Many uses have been proposed for Ladd, including as the site of a corporate park, but no decision has been made for disposition of its more than 300 acres and 42 buildings, some beyond rehabilitation. (Ladd's farmhouse has been demolished, but the site where it stood is being preserved as a memorial, to be dedicated later this spring.)

All officials would promise yesterday is that Ladd will not be forgotten, nor will it ever come back.

As they reminisced about how long it took to get there, Gunther, Healey, Carl and others praised Ladd's employees, who rather than fight the closing, as colleagues in other states have, agreed to transfer to community homes run by the state. They also praised former Ladd residents, who proved to an initially skeptical public that they could live in neighborhoods, just like anyone else.

"Nobody," said Carl, "will ever be able to throw away a human being again."

* * *

CAPTION: LAST MEAL: With the aid of an attendant, two of the remaining five residents of the Ladd Center, Raymond Guarnieri, left, and Anthony Stanton, have breakfast before leaving for a group home.

Journal-Bulletin / KATHY BORCHERS

* * *

CAPTION: THE WAY IT WAS: A ward in the Ladd Center, jam-packed with beds, in 1973. The center was closed yesterday.

Journal-Bulletin files


No Linked Objects

CAR CRAZY featured in AAA's Home and Away Magazine

Home and Away, the magazine of AAA chapters in Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and South Dakota, featured a short excerpt from car Crazy in the March/April issue. Thanks, AAA!

And if you would like to read an excerpt, visit the book site.

Scenes from an antique auto convention in Philadelphia

Spent three days in Philadelphia at the 80th annual convention of the Antique Automobile Club of America, foremost such group in the world, signing copies of CAR CRAZY: The Battle for Supremacy Between Ford and Olds and the Dawn of the Automobile Age, presenting a seminar, and meeting a lot of great people. Totally enjoyable!

The AACA is a class organization, and they ran this thing as smooth as velvet. A special shout-out to AACA executive director Steve Moskowitz and communications and marketing director Stacy Zimmerman for keeping the trains -- cars?! -- running on time. Thanks again to Steve Chris Ritter and others at the AACA for their help in writing Car Crazy.

My trip coincided with an op-ed piece, "Time, Again, for Electric Cars to Take Center Stage," that I wrote for the Friday, February 12, 2016, Philadelphia Inquirer. Worth a read.

Herewith some photos from the convention and the city:

1935 Buick. Sweet.

'35 Chevy. Look at that mirror shine.

Chris Ritter and crew from AACA Library. Great guys, great help on the book.

Yes, folks in Philly were Car Crazy!

Cars across America.

1934 Pierce Arrow.

Vintage car clothing.

Today: A 2016 Corvette. Wanted to leave in this one!

Dain King presents a judging seminar. Dain has led a most interesting life.

The light fades as night nears in a city in winter.

Philadelphia 30th Street train station.

A cold sparrow.

A colder platform.

The city recedes. Heading home to Providence - and Valentine's Day!

Hardy Hendren, legendary children's surgeon, turns 90

I was delighted to join many good friends of Eleanor and Hardy Hendren on Sunday, February 7, at their Duxbury home to celebrate Hardy's 90th birthday. Ninety! And this now-retired giant of surgery is still going strong, if no longer picking up the scalpel at Boston Children's Hospital, where he was Chief of Surgery for many years, while also holding a surgery professorship at Harvard Medical School, among many other titles. He is emeritus at both institutions.

Eleanor asked me to say a few words, and I was honored to pay tribute to a man who has done "more good for more people over more years," as I phrased it, than anyone I have ever known. In the tens of thousands of patients he healed, in the countless young doctors he trained and mentored and who went on to heal so many more, and quietly with his generous contributions to individuals and causes, this is demonstrably true.

I met Hardy more than a quarter of a century ago, and his invitation to immerse myself in his world without precondition or limitation was not just a stroke of luck -- it was a watershed in my non-fiction writing career. For some two years, I followed him outside and inside Children's, during office visits and lectures and Grand Rounds and hundreds of hours in his operating room, where surgery on his most complicated cases -- separating conjoined twins, for example -- often lasted for more than 24 hours. I had my own Children's ID and locker in the surgeons' quarters. I received signed permission for every adult patient and the guardians of children whose operations I observed, but still, this would not be possible today with contemporary privacy-patient rules.

The resulting 1991 Providence Journal newspaper series, "Working Wonders," and the 1993 book THE WORK OF HUMAN HANDS: Hardy Hendren and Surgical Wonder at Children's Hospital (since updated and republished in several editions), launched me into my non-fiction book-writing career. Interestingly, THE WORK OF HUMAN HANDS was the very first book purchased by a then-junior editor at Random House, Jon Karp. I did three more books with Jon: COMING OF AGE, TOY WARS and KING OF HEARTS, which began when I met open-heart pioneer Dr. C. Walton Lillehei at a lecture and dinner sponsored by Hardy at Children's. Jon is now president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, where a couple of years ago he published my co-written book, TOP BRAIN, BOTTOM BRAIN.

But I digress. The point is, Hardy helped make all this possible, and I am deeply indebted. He has been a dear friend for all these many years, and I am grateful for that, too. He and the lovely Eleanor have welcomed me into their family. What more could a writer -- and friend -- want?! Thanks Hardy and Eleanor. Here's to many more.

Hardy and Eleanor at start of the party.

Surgical humor!

Hardy, Eleanor and me.

He blew 'em all out in one breath!

Hardy's son David, center, and his dad.

WATCH A VIDEO OF HARDY'S 90th-BIRTHDAY REMARKS:

A later edition of the book.

Join me on another visit to Hardy's, three years ago.

KING OF HEARTS: Still standing after all these years

Sixteen years after publication, my fifth book, KING OF HEARTS: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery, continues to be read, sold, and receive reader acclaim on Amazon, with a 4.8 of 5 stars rating.  This, in addition to the extensive praise by critics when it was published. I thank them all! KING OF HEARTS remains, shall we say, very dear to my heart. I was privileged to be able to tell this story.

I regularly receive email from readers, most recently from a high school student in Minneapolis who is writing a History Day project on the invention of open-heart surgery, chronicled in KING OF HEARTS. This is a tribute to the late Dr. C. Walton Lillehei -- and his courage and conviction.

The student who reached out to me asked several spot-on questions, and here are two, with my answers:

1. How do you think Lillehei’s discoveries transformed Minnesota’s medical industry and the world? What was the reaction like from people at the time?

Here was a man who with surgical genius, iron will, extraordinary perseverance and an inability to take no for an answer conquered the last great surgical frontier of that time – one could argue, of all time. Truly, open-heart surgery was the Wild West when he began, and it was a civilized place, if you’ll pardon the metaphor, when he was done. The transformation was revolutionary, far-reaching, and the root of many industries and professions we now take for granted.
 Reaction? Some though he was crazy, even murderous (I get into this in King of Hearts in some detail). Others – the parents of dying and previously doomed kids – thought him a savior, even God, almost literally. Some colleagues envied him, others tried to thwart him and the smart ones wanted to be on his team, or at least study with him. The media? Went wild. I chose the chapter 10 title deliberately: “Lourdes in Minneapolis.”

 5. How did he deal with pressure from the medical community and the pressure of when he ran into deaths of patients?

Having faced death himself – first, during combat in the Second World War and then with his own cancer – Walt was fearless. He really was. He knew that the road he had chosen would be filled with danger and loss, but he had to travel it to get to a time, a set of techniques and a technology where millions of lives would be saved. So, he just kept going. Got up every morning and fought the dragon, as it were. Eventually, it was slain.

'It could have been any one of us'

A shorter version of this ran on the op-ed pages of the January 10, 2016, Providence Journal.

UPDATE, July 18, 2019: 
The man I describe further into this essay as "another brother who lived among them in one dorm – and they told stories of him inviting them to his room for illicit cigarettes and requests to shower naked with him in his private bathroom" has been publicly identified as being credibly accused of sexually abusing minors abuse. So I now have more to say. To read, jump to the end.

Watching Spotlight, the Oscar-bound movie about The Boston Globe’s investigation of Massachusetts clergy who raped children, and reading about employees of St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island, who sexually abused students has prompted memories of my 1960s and ‘70s childhood.

Only luck, I have concluded, spared me and my friends the fate of these many victims here in New England and others like them across America.

Back then, we were youngsters in a world where authority was accepted without question, and where certain authorities with sanctioned access to children – clergy, teachers, coaches and scout leaders among them – were almost god-like in stature. In the case of priests, they may as well have been God, at least in the view of adults like my mother, a daughter of Irish immigrants who was born and raised in Boston and who brought up her children with the Baltimore Catechism. You won’t find a hint that clergy could be anything but pure in that book.

It was a world of blind obedience and absolute trust of elders. And it was a world where monsters cloaked in authority roamed free, although no grownup warned us of that.

A resident of Wakefield, Mass., a suburb of Boston, from birth until college, I spent eight years at Saint Joseph parochial school and was an altar boy during much of that time at the parish church, which was under the control of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The priests I knew best at St. Joseph were good stewards, and one remained an acquaintance for decades. But another, William F. Maloney, who I saw only at Mass, was later publicly accused of sexually abusing someone in the late ‘60s at another parish in North Reading, four miles from my home.

A ten-minute drive would have brought me to another church, St. Patrick’s in neighboring Stoneham, where my parents could just as easily have settled when buying their first house outside the city. I would have been an altar boy there -- with Bryan Schultz, who was repeatedly and grotesquely abused by Paul R. Shanley, one of the worst serial pedophile priests, assigned to St. Patrick’s for seven years in the 1960s. Father James R. Porter, another monster, was briefly with Shanley at the Stoneham parish in 1967.

As the investigative reporter played by Mark Ruffalo declares in Spotlight: “It could have been you! It could have been me! It could have been any one of us!”

We did not need religion to be near an apparent molester. A local journalist who regularly visited schools, the YMCA, youth athletics and other places was said to have a creepy interest in boys, touching them inappropriately and sneaking into their tents after nightfall on scouting trips. Neither I nor my close friends were scouts, but we heard these stories so frequently we held them to be true. We never told an adult, for who would have believed a kid with such a story?

In eighth grade, I won a scholarship to St. John’s Prep, in Danvers, Mass., an all-boys school run the the Xaverian Brothers where I would receive a superb education. I remember meeting with headmaster Brother Ricardo before I enrolled; he wanted to personally share his delight at my good fortune with me and my parents. He seemed a warm, charming man who was devoted to God and the well-being of children. And that remained my perception during my years at St. John’s.

I was a day student, and thus never saw Brother Ricardo outside the classroom context. But boarders did. They saw also another brother who lived among them in one dorm – and they told stories of him inviting them to his room for illicit cigarettes and requests to shower naked with him in his private bathroom. To my knowledge, this man was never formally accused of sexually abusing a student. [UPDATE, July 19, 2019: He now has been, and his name was Brother Rudolph, born Thomas Holihan; for more, jump to end.] But Brother Ricardo, whose given name was Richard Kerressey, was.

In 1994, a former student accused Kerressey of sodomizing him in the school infirmary in 1966, after the headmaster had brought him back to campus following hospital treatment for injuries sustained when another student bullied and beat him. After the rape, according to the former student, Kerressey threatened to keep him, a senior, from graduating if he told anyone. The grown man claimed his life had been ruined, with suffering from “…depression, affective disorder, rage attacks, sleep apnea… attention/concentration deficit… is unable to hold a job or even at this point work… has a poor self-image, and has been through three divorces,” according to a Sept. 22, 1994, letter by the law firm of Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, which represented victims of Porter and Shanley.

From the 1969 St. John's Prep yearbook

Did Kerressey have more victims? The letter, available on bishopaccountability.org, states: “Mr. [redacted] informs us that it was well known among the students at St. John’s that Br. Ricardo favored certain people. Br. Ricardo’s favoritism was based upon the student’s availability to be sexually abused by Br. Ricardo. If one succumbed to Br. Ricardo’s abuses, one was more successful at St. John’s.”

I look very differently now at Brother Ricardo’s smiling face in my Prep yearbooks.

As with other cases, we likely will never know the full truth, since some of an abuser’s victims take their secrets with them to the grave. Indeed, it is possible that some of my childhood friends and classmates were abused but have never disclosed it. If so, I hope they, together with all victims, can find peace in their later years, and if their healing involves reporting long-ago abuse to law enforcement, I encourage them to do so. It is never too late.


The record is unclear on what action, if any, was taken against Kerressey, who left St. John’s in 1971 after my junior year and died 26 years later. To its credit, St. John’s in a more recent time moved responsibly against another brother and a priest chaplain who were accused of abusing students. And the Archdiocese of Boston -- headed now by a holy man, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who succeeded the unholy and unrepentant Cardinal Bernard Law, in charge when many of the more than 800 known victims allege they were abused -- has apologized, paid damages, sought justice and enacted real protections.

We say this must never happen again. One way toward that goal is never forgetting what happened, and what didn’t. Luck is not enough to protect children.

POSTSCRIPT: In August 2018, Xaverian Brother Robert Flaherty was placed on indefinite administrative leave from St. John's after allegations he abused a child in Baltimore years ago. This follows the release of the grand jury report showing the horrific abuse in Pennsylvania of more than 1,000 victims by more than 300 priests and the church-wide cover up for decades.

UPDATE, July 19, 2019:

The late Brother Rudolph, born Thomas Holihan, is the person I referred to without name in my original essay. Among my classmates, he was held to be “creepy,” in the way adolescents describe someone they do not trust and who they suspect -- with a child's sixth sense of such things -- might use adult authority for ill purpose. Inviting boys to come up to his residential suite for an illicit cigarette, which Holihan might follow with a request to get naked and shower with him, for example.

Brother Rudolph, born Thomas Holihan.

I was a day student, not a resident, but I did once visit in his room. In 1971-72, Holihan was the faculty adviser for a small group of seniors, including me, who would be spending the spring semester off-campus (I as an intern in a microbiology lab near Harvard Medical School). In the late fall of 1971, I, like the others, had to meet with him to go over my spring plans.

He could have conducted this session in an office, but he did not; he told me to meet him in his suite, in Ryken Hall, which, according to the prep history, “housed 150 students both in private rooms and in an open dormitory.” A paradise for a predator such as him.

I remember vividly being anxious climbing the stairs to his suite, being let in, and then sitting facing him, the smell of old cigarettes filling the room. I had already formulated a plan were he to try to touch me or more: I would run for the door, hoping he could not stop me and that the door did not have a double lock.

And of course, this being almost a half century ago, I would have told no one but perhaps a close friend.  I certainly would have told no school official, nor made a report to police.

I can only imagine the horror of those boys who were sexually molested. I hope now, as always, that they have been able to heal and find peace. And I believe naming this monster may help in that regard, if only to confirm what they could not then tell the authorities. For Brother Rudolph, superficially, was revered: a so-called man of the cloth and longtime legendary campus figure, at St. John’s already some three decades when I arrived.

And in that, lay the sick power of these despicable people.

In a posting long before the Xaverian Brothers last week to their credit publicized Thomas Holihan’s true nature, St. John’s quoted him from his own writing:

“I tried to remember, sometimes desperately, that the boy is more important than the student; learned to realize that most college professors of adolescent psychology never had to teach adolescents; felt compensated for all teaching traumas by the glimmer of wonder I was lucky enough to awaken in a few students’ eyes; fell in love with most of the poetry I taught, both English and Latin; reached a point as the years went by when the sound of the bell in September that signaled the beginning of another school year was a joyous sound that spoke of happy hours and happy days to come.”

I have read and re-read that passage, taking in every word. They speak, hypocritically and diabolically, of evil.

To its credit, St. John’s with the revelation of Holihan and others at the school in years past, sent a message to the large and far-flung prep community. Below is what headmaster Ed Hardiman, a good man with whom I have an acquaintance, wrote. My hope is that opening the windows and letting in the fresh air will be cleansing, so that in the future, other children will not be victimized at any school, church, or anywhere.

I was one of the lucky ones: I received a wonderful education at St. John’s, and it instilled values I still hold and launched me to a long and successful career. My life would have been very different had I been unlucky.

"As a school community, we humbly acknowledge the pain this information may cause for victims of abuse as well as for the larger Prep community as we continue to grapple with feelings of betrayal, anger, and grief about the suffering of victims of sexual abuse and the cover-up by members of the church hierarchy, clergy, and religious orders," Ed Hardiman wrote. "We are grateful for the transparency and efforts to promote healing by the Xaverian Brothers."

The Boston Globe published a story listing Holihan and other brothers at Xaverian Brothers schools in Massachusetts: http://bit.ly/2XZOYwJ

Providence Journal staff writer and author G. Wayne Miller graduated from St. John’s Prep in 1972 and Harvard College in 1976. 

Read Horror at St. Georges, a Providence journal editorial on the unfolding scandal at that school.

More media, a giveaway, & another Amazon spike for #CarCrazy!

The holiday season was kind to Car Crazy: The Battle for Supremacy Between Ford and Olds and the Dawn of the Automobile Age.

-- On January 2, 2016, CSPAN rebroadcast my remarks, and audience question-and-answer, on writing and automobiles at the launch party, at the Pell Center in Newport, Rhode Island.

-- Rhode Island Monthly in its January 2016 issue named Car Crazy a "Rhody Read."

-- The Australian motoring bookshop Pitstop featured the book on its home page.

-- On January 1, 2016, we began an Amazon giveaway for the book!

--  And on January 3, 2016, Car Crazy spiked -- again -- on Amazon Kindle.

CAR CRAZY Appearances: National and Regional, Right Now and Upcoming...

Opportunities abounding now and in the future for media and in-person appearances for CAR CRAZY. 

To wit:

This weekend, Dec. 19 and 20, C-SPAN2 Book TV re-broadcast my talk about writing and the early days of the auto industry that was first broadcast on December 14. The broadcast was from the taping of the book launch party to a full house at the Pell Center in Newport, Rhode Island, last month. View the broadcast.


Also this weekend, the national PBS show White House Chronicle aired my discussion of the birth of the automobile, the revolutionary nature of Henry Ford's Model T, and more with host LLewellyn King. The episode was also on Voice of America Television and Sirius XM Radio's Channel 124. King said, and I thank him: "Absolutely extraordinary... Get this book! Fascinating."


Coming soon: a podcast about the cultural & economic impact of the motor vehicle, with Pell Center head Jim Ludes asking the questions. I am a center fellow & director of the Story in the Public Square program.


I will sign books and present a seminar, "Barney Oldfield, Henry Ford and the Birth of American Auto Racing," at the annual meeting of the Antique Automobile Club of America, the nation's leading classic- and vintage-car group. The meeting will be held in Philadelphia the weekend of Feb. 11, 2016. Come join us!

There is much more to come, of course, as we continue to schedule events. Among the places we have been already:

-- Drive Thru Radio, AM-790, Providence, with the Zangari brothers.

-- Barrington Books Retold, a signing; Barrington Public Library, a presentation. Details here.

-- Steve Klamkin's Saturday show on WPRO-630 am and 99.7-FM.

-- The launch party in Newport, R.I., where we had four classic cars, each more than 100 years old, running and giving rides. Watch great video of the cars in action.

My Dad and Airplanes

Author's Note: I wrote this three years ago, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of my father's death. Like his memory, it has withstood the test of time. I have slightly updated it for today, December 11, 2015, the 13th anniversary of his death. Read the original here.
  

Roger L. Miller as a boy, early 1920s.

My Dad and Airplanes

by G. Wayne Miller

I live near an airport. Depending on wind direction and other variables, planes sometimes pass directly over my house as they climb into the sky. If I’m outside, I always look up, marveling at the wonder of flight. I’ve witnessed many amazing developments -- the end of the Cold War, the advent of the digital world, for example -- but except perhaps for space travel, which of course is rooted at Kitty Hawk, none can compare.

I also always think of my father, Roger L. Miller, who died 13 years ago today.

Dad was a boy on May 20, 1927, when Charles Lindbergh took off in a single-engine plane from a field near New York City. Thirty-three-and-a-half hours later, he landed in Paris. That boy from a small Massachusetts town who became my father was astounded, like people all over the world. Lindbergh’s pioneering Atlantic crossing inspired him to get into aviation, and he wanted to do big things, maybe captain a plane or even head an airline. But the Great Depression, which forced him from college, diminished that dream. He drove a school bus to pay for trade school, where he became an airplane mechanic, which was his job as a wartime Navy enlisted man and during his entire civilian career. On this modest salary, he and my mother raised a family, sacrificing material things they surely desired.

My father was a smart and gentle man, not prone to harsh judgment, fond of a joke, a lover of newspapers and gardening and birds, chickadees especially. He was robust until a stroke in his 80s sent him to a nursing home, but I never heard him complain during those final, decrepit years. The last time I saw him conscious, he was reading his beloved Boston Globe, his old reading glasses uneven on his nose, from a hospital bed. The morning sun was shining through the window and for a moment, I held the unrealistic hope that he would make it through this latest distress. He died four days later, quietly, I am told. I was not there.

Like others who have lost loved ones, there are conversations I never had with my Dad that I probably should have. But near the end, we did say we loved each other, which was rare (he was, after all, a Yankee). I smoothed his brow and kissed him goodbye.

So on this 13th anniversary, I have no deep regrets. But I do have two impossible wishes.

My first is that Dad could have heard my eulogy, which I began writing that morning by his hospital bed. It spoke of quiet wisdom he imparted to his children, and of the respect and affection family and others held for him. In his modest way, he would have liked to hear it, I bet, for such praise was scarce when he was alive. But that is not how the story goes. We die and leave only memories, a strictly one-way experience. 

My second wish would be to tell Dad how his only son has fared in the last 13 years. I know he would have empathy for some bad times I went through and be proud that I made it. He would be happy that I found a woman I love, Yolanda, my wife now: someone, like him, who loves gardening and birds. He would be pleased that my three children are making their way in the world, and that he now has three great-granddaughters, wonderful girls all. In his humble way, he would be honored to know how frequently I, my sister and my children remember and miss him. He would be saddened to learn that my other sister, his younger daughter, Lynda, died this year. But that is not how the story goes, either. We send thoughts to the dead, but the experience is one-way. We treasure photographs, but they do not speak.

Lately, I have been poring through boxes of black-and-white prints handed down from Dad’s side of my family. I am lucky to have them, more so that they were taken in the pre-digital age -- for I can touch them, as the people captured in them surely themselves did so long ago. I can imagine what they might say, if in fact they could speak.

Some of the scenes are unfamiliar to me: sailboats on a bay, a stream in winter, a couple posing on a hill, the woman dressed in fur-trimmed coat. But I recognize the house, which my grandfather, for whom I am named, built with his farmer’s hands; the coal stove that still heated the kitchen when I visited as a child; the birdhouses and flower gardens, which my sweet grandmother lovingly tended. I recognize my father, my uncle and my aunts, just children then in the 1920s. I peer at Dad in these portraits (he seems always to be smiling!), and the resemblance to photos of me at that age is startling, though I suppose it should not be.

A plane will fly over my house today, I am certain. When it does, I will go outside and think of young Dad, amazed that someone had taken the controls of an airplane in America and stepped out in France. A boy with a smile, his life all ahead of him.

VIDEO: More classic cars in action. PLUS: another great review by a car lover!

At the bottom of this post, you will find links to more classic cars, including 1 1904 Oldsmobile and a 1912 Packard, running at the launch party for CAR CRAZY. Fun stuff!



First though, a glowing endorsement from Just a Car Guy, aka Jesse Bowers, who writes, in part that CAR CRAZY “Does the best job of teaching you everything about the 1st decade of American car-making (1900 – 1910) that I think we are ever likely to get. If you want to learn how the Ford, Olds, Reo, Chevrolet, Buick and GM got started, this book is indispensable. It’s really that good.”

READ THE FULL REVIEW!




And here are the videos -- quick views, definitely worth the quick clicks!

-- 1904 Olds drivin' by!

-- 1912 Packard!

-- The '04 Olds heading out!

-- Starting an '04 Olds was NEVER easy!