April 19, 2017 at 5:52 p.m.
Volunteering taught great lessons
Back in the Saddle
It was Christmas vacation, and I was looking forward to a break from college. It would be good to get home and hang out with friends and just goof off.
My father had other ideas.
The family had moved to Richmond so Dad could take on duties as the vice president for development for Earlham College. I was a student there, but my connections were still mostly in Jay County.
The family had relocated, but home had not.
In that era, roughly an hour after the last Ice Age, the college had a nice long Christmas break. I figured on spending it in the least productive way possible.
The economy was experiencing one of its periodic recessions, so there wasn’t much available in terms of short-term, holiday season employment opportunities.
That worked to my benefit as a slacker college student, but my father wasn’t having any of it.
Word came down from the mountaintop that if I was going to be hanging around for three weeks and there were no jobs available, then there was a ready alternative: Volunteer.
That, in summary, is how I found myself at Richmond State Hospital.
I hasten to point out that I was not a patient. I wasn’t even sent there for observation, though that might not have been a bad idea at the time. Instead, I was there as a volunteer.
If you have three weeks, you give three weeks. That was my dad’s thinking.
And while I chafed at it at the time, I know now he was right.
Just the same, being a volunteer in a state mental hospital isn’t quite the same as being a volunteer for Meals on Wheels or the Boys Club.
It’s different. Sometimes it’s very different.
I can’t remember who was in charge of handling sudden volunteers like me. All I know is that they gave me a singular task.
It seemed that many of the patients at the mental hospital had a problem misplacing things. (No, that is not a straight line. Let’s move on.)
Eyeglasses often got lost, and it was tough to get the right pair of glasses back to the right patient.
The solution, the coordinator of volunteers decided, was to have me visit every ward in the hospital, gather up the glasses under professional supervision, then use a little vibrating engraving tool to mark the patient’s number into the inside of the part of the eyeglasses that rested over the ear.
The fact that this would be a permanent and humiliating reminder of the patients’ time at Richmond didn’t seem to occur to anyone. It certainly didn’t occur to me.
I was too busy encountering the reality of a state mental institution in Indiana in the late 1960s.
Sent from ward to ward, I encountered humanity at every level imaginable, all within the course of a little over a week.
Sometimes it was easy; the patients could have been anyone you’d meet on the street.
Sometimes it was heart-breaking; individuals who today might be living in group homes or even independently had obviously been warehoused by the state.
That was the norm. That was the policy.
The fact that it was wrong or dehumanizing never seemed to occur to anyone.
And sometimes the wards were scary.
Most of the time I’d do my little job with the engraving tool out in the ward itself. Not so in the ward for violent patients, There, I’d be sequestered in a small space and the glasses would be passed out to me. I’d do the engraving while listening to the shrieks and cries within the ward.
Eyeglasses done, I moved on to dentures.
Yes, mental patients often lose their dentures.
For that task, I didn’t make the round of the wards. Instead, they were brought to me at a little table in the corner of a dental lab.
My chore was to grind out a little groove in the part of the denture that was hidden from view, then insert a little piece of paper on which I had typed the patient’s number, then use a clear chemical bonding agent to fill in the groove, and finally to smooth everything down so that my work didn’t irritate the patient’s mouth for the rest of his or her life.
To say it was not fun would be an understatement.
To say it was not educational would be an understatement as well.
Still I made it through Christmas break, and though I never thanked my father I will always be grateful for the lessons learned that winter.
My father had other ideas.
The family had moved to Richmond so Dad could take on duties as the vice president for development for Earlham College. I was a student there, but my connections were still mostly in Jay County.
The family had relocated, but home had not.
In that era, roughly an hour after the last Ice Age, the college had a nice long Christmas break. I figured on spending it in the least productive way possible.
The economy was experiencing one of its periodic recessions, so there wasn’t much available in terms of short-term, holiday season employment opportunities.
That worked to my benefit as a slacker college student, but my father wasn’t having any of it.
Word came down from the mountaintop that if I was going to be hanging around for three weeks and there were no jobs available, then there was a ready alternative: Volunteer.
That, in summary, is how I found myself at Richmond State Hospital.
I hasten to point out that I was not a patient. I wasn’t even sent there for observation, though that might not have been a bad idea at the time. Instead, I was there as a volunteer.
If you have three weeks, you give three weeks. That was my dad’s thinking.
And while I chafed at it at the time, I know now he was right.
Just the same, being a volunteer in a state mental hospital isn’t quite the same as being a volunteer for Meals on Wheels or the Boys Club.
It’s different. Sometimes it’s very different.
I can’t remember who was in charge of handling sudden volunteers like me. All I know is that they gave me a singular task.
It seemed that many of the patients at the mental hospital had a problem misplacing things. (No, that is not a straight line. Let’s move on.)
Eyeglasses often got lost, and it was tough to get the right pair of glasses back to the right patient.
The solution, the coordinator of volunteers decided, was to have me visit every ward in the hospital, gather up the glasses under professional supervision, then use a little vibrating engraving tool to mark the patient’s number into the inside of the part of the eyeglasses that rested over the ear.
The fact that this would be a permanent and humiliating reminder of the patients’ time at Richmond didn’t seem to occur to anyone. It certainly didn’t occur to me.
I was too busy encountering the reality of a state mental institution in Indiana in the late 1960s.
Sent from ward to ward, I encountered humanity at every level imaginable, all within the course of a little over a week.
Sometimes it was easy; the patients could have been anyone you’d meet on the street.
Sometimes it was heart-breaking; individuals who today might be living in group homes or even independently had obviously been warehoused by the state.
That was the norm. That was the policy.
The fact that it was wrong or dehumanizing never seemed to occur to anyone.
And sometimes the wards were scary.
Most of the time I’d do my little job with the engraving tool out in the ward itself. Not so in the ward for violent patients, There, I’d be sequestered in a small space and the glasses would be passed out to me. I’d do the engraving while listening to the shrieks and cries within the ward.
Eyeglasses done, I moved on to dentures.
Yes, mental patients often lose their dentures.
For that task, I didn’t make the round of the wards. Instead, they were brought to me at a little table in the corner of a dental lab.
My chore was to grind out a little groove in the part of the denture that was hidden from view, then insert a little piece of paper on which I had typed the patient’s number, then use a clear chemical bonding agent to fill in the groove, and finally to smooth everything down so that my work didn’t irritate the patient’s mouth for the rest of his or her life.
To say it was not fun would be an understatement.
To say it was not educational would be an understatement as well.
Still I made it through Christmas break, and though I never thanked my father I will always be grateful for the lessons learned that winter.
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