Lighthouse Reflected XLIV

ONE GREW UP IN THE CUCKOO’S NEST

Recollected and Written

by

Mark R. Ellsworth

The ghost standing before me vanished as I closed my eyes. It was replaced with a vision of my early life reborn from a play of my memories. Opening my eyes again, I focused on the weed filled crevices, cracks in time, traveling along the road I was on. I was standing at the main entrance to the grounds of the former Medfield State Hospital, located off Hospital Road in Medfield Massachusetts. The town is a bedroom community located about twenty miles to the west, southwest of the city of Boston.

I was shadowed by two curved stone walls with turret like stone structures on each end. To my right was the boarded up house of the assistant superintendent of the hospital. His family’s sons were the main core of our sandlot baseball teams. They and others formed our sledding, ice-skating and bus stop companions, too. My childhood home, once located across the street, was consumed by fire approximately twenty years earlier. Vacant, thank goodness. No footprints of the driveway or the garage remained either. A stately pine tree, half again taller since my last days living there, was a lonely sentinel to my yesterdays. Other houses flanked outward on my right. A once stately brick home, now boarded up, remained. There, a financial administrator and his family of girls and a son were part of our posse of friends. Together we always found new ways to explore our huge nest of a neighborhood.

As I traveled up this long entrance road, once lined with stately maple trees, I closed my eyes again. Sightless, I clearly envisioned countless feet of patients, delivery trucks and other hospital vehicles traveling along this pavement during my youth. At the end of the road, after a slight rise in elevation, the road split to my left and to my right. I had walked past the driveway branching off to the left about a hundred yards farther back. It led to the Clark Building. A little farther up, off to the right, there remained a driveway winding towards the former superintendent’s house. The superintendent’s home, viewed in my yesterdays’ memories, was stately and worthy of any small college president’s home. Indeed Medfield State Hospital presented itself as a college campus. The lawns so manicured, the landscaping so perfect to my proud youthful eyes. Proud? Why of course! I was the son of the head farmer, superintendent of the farms and grounds, Dick Ellsworth! Growing up I knew he was important as he carried countless keys. Keys in mass, so heavy, he needed a large soup spoon flattened and bent into an “S” shaped hook allowing them to hang from his belt each work day. Keys were the visible cue to the importance of one’s position at the hospital. Even as a 16, 17,18 or19 year old farm hand, housekeeper, or nurses attendant, I was given a key or two. The night nurses supervisor “tripping” the wards at two or three in the morning, announced her arrival by the jingle of her keys as she approached our station. We, (usually a nurse and two attendants alerted by the key jingles), were afforded a minute to hastily stash our nightly Yahtzee game or wipe a midnight cobweb from our eyes.

My family moved to Medfield into a house on these grounds in 1959. I came kicking and whining as I did not want to move from the town I was born in, Danvers Massachusetts. Of course it wasn’t a coincidence that our home in Danvers was on the grounds of another state hospital, Danvers State Hospital. There Dad was the assistant head farmer and like Medfield State Hospital it too was a self contained community supported by approximately 500 acres of farmland producing vegetables, milk, meat, and pork. Each state hospital had its own power plant that produced steam. A steam that drummed its way through our radiators adding percussion to my daily practice on my 1st clarinet. Laundry services, mail services and even a central phone system supported by switch board operators were part of the state hospital environment. Unknown to me, at the ripe old age of ten, was the fact that Danvers and Medfield State Hospitals were part of a system of care in mental health. That system repeated itself throughout this State and indeed the Country. Danvers’ main building had been built on a hill. An imposing gothic structure that looked like a giant bat. A multi-story structure, the Kirkbride Building had two wings spreading out from that main building. It housed thousands of patients. I learned as an adult that the sickest patients were in wards at the end of the wings and as a patient became “better” they moved closer and closer to the main administrative building before possible discharge back into society. I also knew many patients in this hospital and Medfield had lived most of their lives institutionalized. At Danvers’ Kirkbride Building and Medfield’s campus of buildings such as the Clark Building, there were rooms where operations and therapies, such as electroshock, were performed. Sandwiched between wards, group therapy areas, and nurses stations, seclusion rooms and morgues existed also. Underground tunnels connected most buildings enabling the transport of supplies and food. These tunnels housed the massive infrastructure of pipes, electrical cables along with water and sewerage pipes needed to service the patients and staff. Each hospital had it’s own treatment field and plant needed to attend to waste. I believe the tunnels were also used to transport the recently deceased patients at Danvers State Hospital Some to be buried in the cemetery located on the hospital’s grounds.

Back to the ghost before me. I was standing before a large brick building with vacant eyes for windows. I was 54 years of age. (Now as I publish these essays of my youth I am 72 years old.) A few startled pigeons annoyed by the crunch of dry leaves under my feet, the only sign of life. Long gone from these windows were their iron grates, bars that had framed the haunting faces staring back at me as if I was on display. Eyes closed, I recall the forlorn cry or angry voice reaching out to me from my youthful memory. Boy, come here, just you walk over to me now, BOY!

I feel obliged to publish the following chapters or essays of my young life living on the grounds of these two former state hospitals. My brother, sister and I, along with our neighborhood companions, are part of the last generation that lived and grew up there. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s large state hospitals were becoming victims of a changing health care philosophy and state budget concerns. Many institutions morphed from large conglomerate mental health care to systems of smaller scattered units of care. Built mostly in the mid 1800’s they were part of society’s answer for anybody deemed different. Asylums for the insane, poor farms for the destitute, both products of exclusion! Well surprise, surprise, as one of the last generations to have been raised and to have lived and worked in one of these asylums for the insane, I know I am blessed. I learned inclusion, I was touched by the life found behind the vacant look. I grew up with children, whose parents were young doctors from all over the world. They came to Medfield and also found themselves touched by the lives and hearts of countless people in need of evolving mental health care. Young professionals from Germany, Pakistan, Norway, Canada, and England emigrated to immerse themselves in mental health care. For me, inclusion was a tree sprouted from the seeds of open acceptance by these neighbors who displayed courage and patience to accept me and my family. Exclusion grows from fear, inclusion grows from positiveness with no room for fear. I was blessed to have the opportunities to learn that at a young age. I hope the sharing of my recollections living, working and growing up on the grounds of a former state hospital will bring a unique point of view, not covered by the art and literature of movies and books such as Shutter Island, The Snake Pit, Session 9, The Lives They Left Behind and others.

The essays that follow highlight snap shots of my time growing up surrounded by so many unique people. I grew up in a nest. After all these decades I am not sure what kind of bird built that nest!

Chapters and essays to follow are titled A Mobile Home, The Autopsy, My Cow and Me, The Ice Rink and The Hill, Seclusion, ( A room with a view), Friday Nite Movies, Hanging With the Men, The ’64 Blackout That Wasn’t, Eleven to Seven, Duck Duck Duck Duck! The Morning My Father Cried!

Stay tuned and thank you for reading.

Be in peace and joy!

Mark