The following essay serves as Chapter 8 of One Grew Up in the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The previous chapter, highlighting the1967 fire that destroyed the main barn of Medfield State Hospital, enlightened me to a new point of view about the permanency of the Hospital. The large campus of mental healthcare tens of thousands of people had experienced the past hundred years, would soon be gone. Extinct! The boarded up buildings found today are just skeletal fossils of their former selves. Chapter 8 is my attempt to leave you, the reader, with an album of images in your mind’s eye. Kodak snippets of words, snapshots of my memories worthy of a paragraph or two.
Going to the Chapel…….for Movies?
Recollected and Written
by
Mark R Ellsworth
Living in state housing on the State Hospital grounds in Medfield Massachusetts afforded me and my pre-teenage neighborhood friends opportunities to entertain ourselves and to be entertained. One such opportunity was the Friday evening movies shown at, of all places, the main chapel. I believe this large brick church is still standing all-be-it boarded up and vacant. The chapel had a main floor with a large draped stage on that floor. On most days it hosted Catholic and Protestant services. But on Friday nights it was transformed into a movie theater. The alters and other religious artifacts melted into the shadows of the curtains replaced by a large white movie screen.
Many Friday evenings my brother and I were freed to join our friends who also lived on the grounds. Together, some six or eight of us would run up the main drive, mostly on the sidewalks, to the top of the hill. We circumvented around the Administration Building crossed a street and entered the Chapel located directly behind that Administration Building. The church had double large wooden doors positioned directly under the spire. Those doors opened only for the patients who had privileges to leave their wards. We kids, some adults and off duty staff entered via the two side doors. One door on the right and the other door on the left of the building. Both opened to side stairwells that climbed to a balcony. The balcony crossed the the structure’s width connecting to the other stairwell. The rows of chairs had a slight incline to the back wall. My memory is not clear about where the movie projector was located. I do know if it was behind us in the balcony it would have been too enticing for us to shadow the beams of light preempting the movie scenes playing on the screen. No memories of that so I believe the projector was located on the main floor. I do remember the balcony half wall was man arm rest as we watched the patients slowly file in and take their seats. As soon as the lights dimmed we settled back into our selected seat for the evening. Two movies that I remember from that time period in my life were Reptilicus and the Guns of Navarone. I believe the former was too inappropriate to show that population and the latter was too first run to be on the Chapel’s play list. Actually as I write this I do believe a few of my friends and I saw those two movies in a theater in Framingham.
I didn’t realize until many years had passed and the internet had replaced the rabbit ears of my youth, other families, (not living on the grounds of the State Hospital), had memories of attending Friday nite movies at the chapel too.
The Hospital’s infrastructure included dozens of buildings housing thousands of patients and multiple buildings supporting deliveries of health care as evidenced by a large laundry building. Other buildings focused on the maintenance of state vehicles. These trucks could be seen transporting the laundry, carrying the meals to the wards, moving the trash or plowing the streets. Farm buildings housed the tractors, the heavy harvesting equipment, the livestock and the vegetable trailers. The five hundred acres supported greenhouses. They helped seed the colorful landscaping that added to the college like atmosphere. Also this infrastructure supported neighborhoods of family housing for the doctors and nurses along with administrative staff. This included my family’s home.
Two buildings located across from each other on the hospital campus were the women’s dorm and the men’s dorm. Male attendants and other single male employees populated one. The other building housed single female employees and most importantly (to me) the student nurses from nursing schools such as the Deaconess and Children’s Hospital to mention two. ( One of my most important life events occurred when I met the future mother of my three oldest children. She was a student nurse working on her residency in mental health and I was an attendant working on the wards that fateful summer.)
Picture, if you will, the underground infrastructure needed for this institutional endeavor of mental heath care. The tunnels needed to run the electrical lines, transport services, water and heat to the buildings. Not to mention the sewer lines built to take away the waste. The wells dug for water. The treatment fields needed to clean the waste water. Each building was heated by steam radiators. I grew up living with a radiator that came alive with bumps and whistles that had better rhythm than any metronome I used while practicing on my clarinet. Where did that steam come from and, as a matter of fact, where did the electricity come from that powered the lights allowing me to read the sheet music?
One building I have not mentioned was known as the Power Plant. It was a huge building with at least one tall chimney, may be more. It was located down a sloping road past the laundry building near the Charles River. As you faced the State Hospital from the main entrance on Hospital Road it was on the back left quadrant of the hospital grounds. Traveling further along old Route 27 down the hill a road intersected to the right. That road also led to the power plant, about a half mile in the woods. Located along side this road was a spur of railroad tracks that had switched off the main freight line as it crossed Route 27. Never gave that track or the Power Plant much thought as a young pre-teen. That changed on November 9th 1965.
November 9th 1965 was a Tuesday. At approximately 5:15 pm a large transmission line in Ontario Canada failed. This caused a cascading event of failing power grids in western New York. As the electric grids in western New York shut down, power surged overwhelming the other transmission lines producing power failures for the entire Northeast Grid. Eight US states along with the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec went dark. Thirty million people affected. History.com has an excellent article about this. The article states that it was the largest black out in history and it lasted most of the night. ( I believe we are experiencing weather related and aging infrastructure black outs more often now.) In any case, I couldn’t believe the news as I learned it from our black and white rabbit eared television!
What? The world was power-less yet our home, the street lights and buildings of this institution were lit up bright against the ink black horizon surrounding Medfield State Hospital? The night of November 9th, 1965 I realized what an off grid powerhouse Medfield had energizing this mecca of mental health care! The immediate takeaway for me was not that, though. My immediate realization was the parental vocal reminder that I had no excuse NOT to do my homework!
Another memory was of the old cigarette machine located down in the farm house. It shared a large room with an old pool table of with leather pockets. The hardest part of sneaking a pack of cigarettes was finding thirty five cents needed to pull the knob that released the nicotine prize! Just too expensive for me until I was in college and learned how to get into debt.
The following story is not a memory of mine, nor is it a memory of my sister who allegedly is the focus of this anecdote. A few years ago my mother, (who has since passed on), shared the following. This event happened when my sister was pre-kindergarten age. My sister can only confirm that our mother had told her the following story too, but she doesn’t remember it.
Each week a state truck made the rounds of all the buildings and homes picking up trash. Our home was the next to the last home on the state grounds. Our side yard abutted the neighbor’s garage and driveway. As my mother tells the story my sister was playing in the yard when the trash truck made it’s weekly visit. This truck had a patient that rode on the back of the truck. At each stop he would jump off and pick up the trash cans. Well he evidently took an interest in my sister. No not in the dramatic way we read too much about in the news today. He was a non-communicative man who muttered one word over and over again. As my mother told it, one day my sister decided to walk with him across our side yard while he picked up the neighbors’ trash cans. That accomplished both of them would walk back to the state truck, idling in our driveway. Now my mother, being protective or so I was told, went down our back stairs out to the driveway and watched her daughter walking along side the man, no words being spoken between them. The only sounds was his muted repetitive chant. This happened another week when my sister was not playing in the back yard and the man stood rocking slightly back and forth not moving until mom brought my sister down stairs. Off they went to get the neighbor’s trash can. Finally after watching these two walk together a few times the chant was finally heard. As my mother tells it she finally heard him repeating the word f**k, f**k, f**k, over and over. Well, that night my mother told my father. Dick, the patient that walks with our daughter while picking up the trash, chants the word f**k, over and over. You heard that?, dad asked. Mom thought she did hear that word, but it was softly chanted. Continuing the story she told me that dad replied, let’s ask her. My sister answered our parents question. What word is he saying? I know he likes ducks. He is saying duck, duck duck! The walks ended that night. My sister has many memories of her time living on the grounds of the state hospital but no memory of that duck loving patient.
As I conclude this essay I share my late mother’s story about my sister to include another point of view. It is not my memory. One Grew Up in the Cuckoo’s Nest is mostly about my memories, my point of view. It is important to realize that there are so many other points of view, so many memories of other people who grew up in this Nest and other similar Nests. To totally understand these former grand institutions of mental health care it is imperative to become familiar with other points of view. To be sure the patients, the professionals, the staff and the neighborhood children would draw a more complete picture of institutional care. Institutions that were born in the late 1800’s and died in the early 1970’s.
The last essay in this series is titled, What Else was Found on the Sidewalk of Life?
Thank you for reading.
Be in peace and joy.
Mark