Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9407220014
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
These were people that those in power, from social workers to legislators and judges, saw as threats to the nation's gene supply. Vasectomies and tubal ligations were done to some people at elementary school age. Some were put into state hospitals and sterilized. Some never escaped those institutions. Others never knew what had been surgically done to them, or why, and puzzled through long marriages over failure to conceive children. Some were torn forever from illegitimate children they bore as teen-agers.
As early as the 1880s, ``feebleminded'' children in Pennsylvania were being sterilized. In 1907, Indiana was the first state with a compulsory sterilization law, followed over the next decade by 15 states in every region but the South. Ultimately, 32 states in the South and elsewhere enacted sterilization laws. In the 1930s and '40s, California targeted immigrants for sterilization and became the country's most prolific eugenics practitioner, reportedly doing more than 17,000 sterilizations.
Virginia, cradle of the Southern aristocracy and long concerned with white racial purity, was second behind California with 8,300 forced sterilizations. Virginia's 1924 law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark 1927 case Buck vs. Bell. J. David Smith at the University of South Carolina and other scholars have unearthed evidence that young sterilization victim Carrie Buck and her illegitimate daughter were not retarded after all. Yet once Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stingingly declared of them and Carrie Buck's mother that ``three generations of imbeciles are enough,'' other states took Virginia's statute as their prototype.
Virginia's legal model provided the framework for the Nazi sterilization act, under which hundreds of thousands were rendered sterile in the years immediately before the Holocaust. Virginia did not repeal its law until 1974.
As we ponder the whole business of who should and should not have children, we may learn something from a group of Virginians who survived the eugenics movement. They can tell us exactly what happened when a small elite decided their kind was not wanted in the future of the human race.
I was running a one-woman bureau of the Roanoke Times & World-News in Lexington in 1985 when a Legal Aid lawyer told me an elderly client was looking for her long-lost son. The lawyer thought a story might help.
She led me to the small cottage of Sallie Ann Johnson Wilcher in Arnolds Valley near Natural Bridge.
She did not mind my writing about her. People needed to know what the state of Virginia had done to her, she said. Her story ``ought to be told.''
Sallie had grown up in that mountainous terrain, in a world of iron miners, brickyards and bear hunters. When she was 16, a brother-in-law seduced her in a woodshed during a thunderstorm. Sallie delivered a boy from that brief union. People called him illegitimate; Sallie called him William Lee Johnson.
Sexually active unmarried women, especially those in their teens like Sallie, were among the prime targets of Virginia's eugenicists. They believed sexual appetites and an inclination to prostitution were inherited. Women who had sex outside marriage were associated with feeblemindedness and degeneracy. Sterilization, it was thought, would reduce their sex drive and prevent the births of other promiscuous offspring. Sallie Wilcher admitted to a healthy enthusiasm for sex. She said: ``I always did like mens.''
It often was sexual activity outside marriage, especially if there were children to prove it, that led authorities to commit girls and women to Virginia hospitals and to their sterilizations, according to Judy Goldberg Crockett, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who successfully sued Virginia over its failure to tell victims that they had been sterilized. With males, she said, it was family deterioration that most often resulted in boys and men being institutionalized and rendered sterile.
Welfare people had come for Sallie once, but her father protected her. The second time, he was incapacitated and unable to keep them from taking her.
Papers on file at the Rockbridge County Courthouse in Lexington show that Sallie was examined by two physicians in April 1929.
``They asked me what a mud hole was,'' she said. She considered that a particularly ridiculous thing to ask a country girl who had been stepping around puddles all her life. ``I didn't take it seriously,'' she said of the examination. ``I thought it was foolish, was what I thought.''
On a form titled ``Proceeding for Commitment of Feeble-Minded and Epileptic Persons,'' doctors and a social worker recorded that they had found Sallie to be mentally dull and disobedient. They noted her illegitimate son and said Sallie exhibited ``flagrantly guilty moral delinquency.''
They also noted that she was destitute, with ``no home or family able to care for her.'' They observed that she was ``fairly tidy'' and not prone to violence, delusions or hallucinations. They estimated 18-year-old Sallie's mental age at 101/2, her I.Q. at 56. They declared her feebleminded.
Another day in the spring of 1929, two women came to Sallie's house and told her to get into their car. They left with Sallie and Billy, then 2. ``They told me they was taking me to a home,'' she recalled. ``They didn't tell me what kind. I thought the boy would be with me the whole time.'' They deposited Sallie at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded at Madison Heights, near Lynchburg. They drove Billy to Richmond. Sallie never saw him again.
The colony is a collection of handsome brick buildings and expansive lawns and gardens on 200 acres along the James River. It was built as a private hospital for epileptics early this century and became a state institution for epileptics and the ``feebleminded'' in 1914. It looks like a college campus. On the inside, though, life was hell for Sallie.
She remembered sitting in a corner and weeping after her arrival. She was put to work picking strawberries on the farm that fed the colony's patients. She labored in the laundry, a job she said was given only to patients thought to be of the highest mental grade. She did not flee because runaways were hunted down and put in solitary cells lit only by a tiny, barred window. ``They locked you up in the dark if you run away. Give 'em some cornbread and water to drink. They keep 'em in there two or three weeks.'' Girls recaptured were given vaginal douches to ``clean 'em out,'' Sallie said. ``They might have been with a man.''
After a while, Sallie was sterilized.
Her suffering at the hands of the state did not end with her surgery. She and other victims of Virginia's eugenics movement were handed over to prominent families as cheap labor. Sterilized women were especially desired as workers, said Paul Lombardo, an associate professor of law at the University of Virginia who has researched the state's eugenics practices. Not only did they work free, but they could not get pregnant and cause a scandal. Lombardo said some women were used as concubines. Sallie said the people she worked for did not abuse her that way.
She cooked, cleaned and lived in people's homes, earning no pay. ``They just fed me and gave me what clothes I had.'' After a year or so, she was sent home. She thought she was finally free. But once more, she said, someone ``told lies'' to social workers about sexual shenanigans.
Social workers came for her and took her to another family who wanted cheap help. This time it was a Rockbridge County boarding house where Sallie cooked for 17 men building a gas pipeline.
Sallie's final escape was to the only thing society considered acceptable: Matrimony. ``I married to get out of the welfare's hands,'' she said. That marriage lasted 11 months. ``He was brutish,'' she said of her husband. ``I left him.'' A few years later, in her early 30s, she married timber cutter Voyd ``Toad'' Wilcher. She was his wife the rest of her life.
The Wilchers took in homeless children in Arnolds Valley. They reared the daughter of one of Sallie's nieces as their own. In Sallie's old age, neighborhood children called her ``Aunt Sallie'' and flocked to her front porch.
She wondered how her life would have gone if she had been able to have more babies.
For 56 years, Sallie wondered what happened to Billy.
In 1985, her lawyer and I began trying to find Billy. A newspaper story stirred no leads. The lawyer learned that Billy had been adopted by a Raleigh, N.C., couple in 1932 when he was 5. I learned that the adoptive father was a traveling salesman but could find no trace of the family, their neighbors or the father's employers. Then the Social Security Administration divulged that Billy had died in 1973. There was good news, too. Sallie had grandchildren. How many, how old, or where, the bureaucrats would not say. They made one last effort on her behalf in 1986 - they forwarded a short letter to her son's survivors, saying she wanted to make contact. Eleven days later, Sallie's phone rang. It was Billy's widow in Hampton, Va. She told Sallie she had three grandsons.
Sallie's daughter-in-law sent pictures of Billy as a boy and as a man. Gazing at his photograph as a grown-up, Sallie said, amused, ``Looks like his daddy.'' She trimmed pictures of Billy and her grandsons to fit into her billfold. She showed them to any friend who came to call.
Sallie, by then 76, was worn thin by arteriosclerosis and heart disease. Circulation in her legs was poor. They ached day and night. Doctors urged amputation. As the months and the pain rolled on, Sallie thought it might be a good idea to cut her legs off. The touch of a bedsheet or a get-well card that fluttered down to strike her foot would zap rays of pain up her legs. She complained little. ``Just them old feets hurt,'' she'd say, when asked how she was.
Still, she was determined to go across the state and meet her grandsons. ``I'm going,'' she said, ``if it's the last door I walk through.''
Sallie never made the trip. She died of a heart attack in January 1987.
Knowing Sallie made me want to find other eugenics survivors and tell their stories. They were growing old. The history they knew would die with them.
I began a search in 1991 on a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Humanities in Charlottesville and headed south to Amherst County, home of the Virginia Colony. At the county courthouse, commitment papers dating to before 1920 served up hundreds of people declared feebleminded and sent to the colony and other state institutions where sterilizations were done. Social judgments contained in those documents were uniformly damning. The records represented a mountain of devalued lives.
Long before Virginia officially sanctioned compulsory sterilizations, records from around the turn of the century showed a straining to find genetic causes for people's problems. A 25-year-old housewife named Lillian was accused in 1908 of a ``lack of virtue and spells of swearing.'' She roamed public roads, bothering neighbors and exhibiting a ``careless and filthy condition of body and dress and home and children.'' Doctors wrote on her commitment form that she must have inherited her bad behavior. ``... while we can elicit no hereditary taint from the history, we can obtain still we are [of the] opinion that heredity must play chief part.''
Commitment papers on other people mentioned dirty teeth, ``silly conduct'' and ``stupid'' expressions on their faces. Some people clearly had multiple mental and physical difficulties. Others behaved in ways unacceptable at the time. A man declared feebleminded was said to dress and behave effeminately. Others' misfortunes seemed to stem from the death of a parent or the loss of a home.
Unusual physical traits often were flagged as signs of congenital inferiority. A 10-year-old boy named Bernard was described as feebleminded because he was disobedient and kept running away from home. He was described as having an ``elongated skull [and an] asymmetry of face.'' He was called a ``moral imbecile.''
Poverty seemed present in all the files, except with epileptics. Epileptics of the middle and upper classes were sent to the Virginia Colony, one the stepson of a Marine colonel.
Among the commitments, I was surprised to find as many men as women and more whites than blacks. Perhaps the latter was because there was more concern for white racial purity at the time, or because early in the century there was no separate black institution for epileptics and feebleminded in the state. Later, however, Virginia established a colony for blacks at Petersburg. Black Virginians were sterilized there.
Looking for names and clues in Virginia's eugenics history, I walked among the 500 marked graves in the cemetery of the old Virginia Colony. It later was called the Lynchburg Training School and Hospital and now is the Central Virginia Training Center.
In the graveyard, I found people who had died at the colony beginning in 1911. They had been named with affection, reflecting some amount of hope for them at birth. There was Jennie and Emma, Eugenia and Memphis, Homer and Barnie, Julie and Mollie. Some names seemed out of fiction: Harm Rider, Alma Resolute, Creed Doom.
Armed with hundreds of names, dates of birth and other personal data, I hit the back roads searching for eugenics survivors. Many were reluctant to talk about their stays at the colony. Around Lynchburg, the word ``colony'' still evokes shame in the people forced to go there. I found a woman who almost certainly was sent to the colony in 1956. She fit precisely the data of a same-named woman in the commitment papers. But she denied having gone. ``Lord, no,'' she said.
I found records for a girl sent to Madison Heights when she was 16. Her records said her parents were feebleminded. The girl began to walk at 11 months and to talk at 15 months, which is considered normal development. Those who assessed her said she was mentally peculiar and unable to learn. As in many cases, the judgments against the child were expressed with the condemners' own poor grammar and spelling. They wrote, for instance, that the girl had ``week'' eyes.
I found this woman, whom I will call Clara, through marriage records from the 1940s. Her yard was ablaze with the bright reds and pinks of 20 tall camellia bushes in full bloom. Clara, written off as feebleminded so many years ago, explained how she planted her camellias in a configuration to make them least vulnerable to high winds and deep snows. Clara, 74 at the time of our talk, worked in sewing plants before retiring. She recently had been widowed after nearly 50 years of marriage. She fishes with friends, earns extra money making quilts and attends a Baptist church she praises because members are not ``stuck up'' and its minister makes people feel welcome even if they do not wear expensive clothes.
Clara's pride and joy is her 10-year-old dog. She feeds it vanilla ice cream each evening. The dog is obese. Clara insisted that she had no surgery at the colony, yet records revealed that the colony's superintendent completed the paper work to sterilize her shortly after her arrival. She said she did not like to talk about her time there. ``It's been so long ago. I usually let the past go by.''
Mary Frances Corbin Donald remembers a shot to her spine to numb her from the waist down. She recalled what the colony doctors said right before they sterilized her. ``They said, `It's for your health.''' She was 11.
Mary Frances said she nearly died after the operation and was in a coma nearly two weeks. She remembers a doctor saying, ``Well, it's up to God now.''
It was in the 1940s when Mary, two sisters and a brother were sent to the colony. Mary was there 16 years.
She was put to work bathing those she called ``low-grade'' patients, people who were severely disabled, some mentally, some physically. Her punishment for misbehavior was to sleep between two patients, who, she said, would urinate and defecate on her.
She saw other patients shoved into a solitary cell called a ``blind room.'' One woman went in with her arms tied behind her. ``The next morning, she was dead,'' Mary Frances said. ``I don't know what happened to her.''
Eventually, Mary Frances got a job in the colony dining hall cutting the eyes from potatoes and doing kitchen chores. She made $1 a month.
In 1958, they let her go from what was by then called the Lynchburg Training School and Hospital. She got jobs cleaning homes, but her colony past was ever-present. If she failed to do her work as ordered, her employers would threaten to send her back.
She is 59 now and living in Lynchburg, just across a James River bridge from the old colony. She has been out for 30 years, but many of her neighbors and friends were once there. They all talk about it sadly and sometimes angrily.
Some people have spent decades trying to forget the colony. Others waited half a century for someone to ask about it.
Jesse Frank Meadows, 71, is a shy man with a round, fleshy face and blue eyes that register delight in the small pleasures of life - his overprotective chihuahua and the stray cats he feeds outside his government-subsidized apartment in Lynchburg.
He speaks in a soft mumble that is difficult to understand, but once your ears adjust to his speech, you hear quite a story. Since our first meeting in April 1991, he has been eager to talk and write about his life, hoping that laying it out might exorcise the sadness and prevent someone else's mistreatment in the future.
He grew up on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Madison County.
Jesse was the second eldest child of Lula Cave Meadows and Walter Lee Meadows, a farmer and timberman. Jesse said his mother was a Christian so devout she would trudge six miles over the mountains, a child or two in tow, to go to church on Sundays. Jesse said his father was a moonshiner and his mother disapproved of her husband's whiskey-making and his drinking. Jesse said his father would accuse her of informing on him to the revenuers who routinely raided his still, and his father would beat her. Their children tried to shield her. ``We would hide her in a closet to keep him from hurting her.''
Jesse's troubles deepened when his mother died during childbirth in 1935. She was 34. Jesse was 12.
``People said they could hear her hollering from a mile away, she suffered so. When she died, she called all of her children to the bed and told them to be good, and meet her in heaven. Then she called my daddy to the bedside and told him to take care of her children and see that they were brought up right.''
Jesse said his mother's body was barely cold in her mountainside grave when his father began failing to care for her children. He evicted Lula's son from her first marriage. Walter Meadows remarried. His new wife did not want to raise Jesse, his sister and his two brothers.
``After Mama died, life was unbearable,'' Jesse said. ``Didn't know where I would be from one day to the next. Was from place to place for years, sleeping in barns, anywhere we could. My two brothers nearly froze by sleeping on the ground.''
Jesse's sister, Alma, was 2 when her mother died. She first stayed with relatives. Then her father sent her to an orphanage. Jesse's older brother, Ray, went into the Army. When Jesse's brother Alfred was 8, his father sent him to live with and work for a farmer in a neighboring county for $6 a month.
For years, Jesse shuttled between uncles and other kin, filling a flour sack with clothes and hitting the road, but he kept trying to come home. His father didn't want him there.
He and another boy walked 100 miles seeking work. ``Me and my friend walked nearly all the way to Quantico looking for a job. Everybody said we were too young. Had to knock on doors for something to eat.''
Finally, Jesse's father overstated his age and sent him off to a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Jesse ran back home once more. He said his father, pressured by Jesse's stepmother, was trying to think of a way to get rid of Jesse for good. He thought he had found it when Jesse and a friend were playing around and set fire to a small patch of grass near the Shenandoah National Park.
Jesse said the ranger called by Walter Meadows was unimpressed with the tiny, quickly doused blaze. ``They told my daddy to take me home, that the little grass that was burnt didn't amount to anything. He said he didn't want me.'' Jesse was put in a detention home and then a reform school near Richmond. ``After a while, they let us leave. Give us a dollar and a Bible for a year's work.''
Again, he went home. Again, he was not wanted. Jesse was accused of starting another fire. ``My daddy and cousin set the Doubletop Mountain afire. I got the blame. Didn't have anyone to back up my story.'' He spent two years at a Washington, D.C., reform school. ``The people [there] told me I didn't belong in a place like that, [that] I wasn't no criminal. They wanted to parole me back to my father. He didn't want me.'' That's when Jesse was sent to the colony.
It was June 6, 1940. Jesse recites the date with dread.
Attached to his colony admissions card is a small, dark photograph of Jesse. He was 17. Patient #4930.
His earliest records say he was a ``moron,'' with a mental deficiency and psychopathic personality. ``He began school at 6 years of age,'' a report says, ``and stopped at 13 because he was needed at home to work.'' It fails to mention that he was forced to quit school and clear farm fields after his mother died. Jesse was estimated to have a ``mental age'' of 9.
``This boy is a pyromaniac,'' declared a June 1940 colony report. ``He is well physically, but has the typical reformatory boy's sullen, furtive, inimical attitude towards a member of the staff of an institution. He did not initiate conversation except once to ask, `Hey, how long I gotta stay here' and was monosyllabic and vague in his replies to question. He is apparently quite institutionalized, and is of course devoid of insight.''
``No matches! No smoking!'' urged another notation. ``FRISK TWICE A DAY.'' Fears of him, however, dissipated quickly.
Within his first few days: ``The patient is quiet, shy, retiring, cooperative, well behaved. There has been no evidence of pyromania while at this institution. Requires constant supervision and protection.''
After a month: ``He has caused no trouble whatsoever and is friendly. ... and although [he] has a nice appearance is low grade mentally. He will probably never make an adjustment sufficient to get along outside of an institution. He has a rather bad history and apparently cannot differentiate between right and wrong, and will probably stay in trouble as long as he is not under supervision. Sterilization is indicated as he might manage to leave here sometime.''
After six months: ``Patient has been in the institution for six months, and so far has been very quiet and well-behaved, and has caused absolutely no trouble.''
``I was put in there for treatment,'' Jesse said. ``I don't know yet what kind of treatment. Wasn't no treatment to it. It was all work. It was more like a prison than a hospital.''
He lived and worked at first on a locked ward, changing beds and cleaning rooms. He was allowed outside only for meals in a nearby building. His next job was filling coffee cans and washing kettles from 4:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. for 50 cents a month. Back home, they heard about it. One of his mother's brothers went to the governor, then to federal authorities, trying to free him without success.
Most patients Jesse knew were able-bodied and mentally capable. One boy was sent there for stealing chickens; another named Stanley, for taking a three-cent stamp. Stanley told Jesse a judge decided that if he would filch three cents, he might take $100.
Jesse ran away several times; each time he was apprehended and put into one of the dark, solitary ``blind rooms.'' He sometimes stayed there 30 to 60 days with only a pot to contain his waste.
Patients were ``looked down on and treated like wild beasts and locked up like animals,'' he said. ``I used to pray for death when I was locked up for no reason, only to be got rid of at home. They'd cut your hair off and put a dress on you and put you in a little old room, a little round hole in the door, and you'd stay in there. They'd give you a mattress to sleep on at night,'' then take it away in the morning. He would get a tin plate of beans or hash, and watered-down coffee.
For lesser offenses, the punishment was pushing brooms weighted with a 20-pound block of wood.
When Virginia's governors made their annual visits, Jesse said, all evidence of abuse was tucked away.
An attendant once lashed Jesse with a dust brush. ``I got so sore, and the next day I couldn't hardly walk.'' He said the man warned against reporting the beating. ``Said if I told, he'd kill me. And wasn't no way [we] could get no messages out to the head doctors.''
Some patients did get away. One of Jesse's friends, Billy Gauldin, jumped a train and hopped off in front of his home near Martinsville. Jesse said Billy's parents watched in horror from the front porch as Billy stumbled and a train wheel ran over one of his feet. The boy lost the foot. ``Still, they put him back in the place. Wasn't a thing wrong with him.''
In October 1940, when Jesse had been at the colony almost five months, he was given a bilateral vasectomy. He was 17. A medical notation says he was ``admitted for eugenic sterilization, basis feeble-mindedness.'' He stayed in the colony's medical center six days following the operation. Records show there was a hearing before his sterilization. Courthouse documents show a local lawyer was appointed to represent Jesse as legal guardian during the proceeding. Jesse does not remember meeting the man or attending a hearing. He recalls only the doctors explaining why they were sterilizing him: ``Said that would help me. That's what they told me. Wouldn't have to worry about no feebleminded children.''
Jesse watched a few other boys' families hire lawyers to block their sterilizations, but no one came to Jesse's defense. He said his father signed papers authorizing the surgery.
After two years, the colony superintendent let Jesse go. ``The government had asked him about keeping me longer than they were supposed to. Said they meant for me to stay there six months and said they didn't mean for me to stay there all my life. They just wanted to put me there for treatment, and I didn't get no treatment, so they told them to turn me loose at once.''
He got a job as an orderly in the officers' barracks at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, a government ordnance testing site in Maryland. Then, he said, ``the general of the base had found out I had been charged with setting a fire [back home] and if one broke out, then I would be a suspect.'' They laid him off. ``I didn't have nowhere else to go. I didn't have any home and Mother's people wasn't able to keep me. I was so mixed up. ... Because once you've been there, your life ain't the same anymore.''
He voluntarily checked back into the only shelter available, the colony. He mistakenly believed that, because he came on his own, he could leave at will. Unwittingly, he had re-upped for 10 more years of institutionalization. It was, he says, ``the worst mistake of my life.''
He rose at 4 a.m. to work in the kitchen for 50 cents a month. ``Then they put me to painting. Twenty-five cents a week.'' He painted 15 colony buildings, inside and out, while the paid maintenance staff watched him work.
After four paid workers were fired, Jesse was put in charge of all painting. At night, he would work for colony staff, their families and friends for a few dollars.
"Everybody said I was the best painter they ever seen. But still, they fed me outdoors like a cat or dog.''
By the early 1940s, Jesse was praying he would be drafted into military duty. He said a colony doctor stopped it. Jesse was told he was needed more as a painter.
He was granted long furloughs, once to work for a Winchester, Va., fruit company where he lived in a former camp for German prisoners of war. More often, his father would ask for Jesse's release so he could clear fields or help him cut pine pulpwood that Walter Meadows sold to a lumberyard. ``My daddy never came to see me the whole time I was over there.''
For years, Jesse ricocheted between the poverty and alienation back home and an institution that, while it imprisoned him, offered him the only aid he had as a young man.
When finally Jesse left in 1952, he had been at the colony off and on for a dozen years. His discharge papers said he had ``improved.''
Life outside was not much of a liberation. On the street sometimes, Jesse said, ``People would say, `Out of the way, you old colony patient.' People looked down on you around Lynchburg. Acted like you had the plague.''
The low pay and long hours at the colony continued after Jesse's release. In the 1960s, he worked at a trailer court for $5 a day and a free trailer. In the 1970s he painted and tended homes of prominent Lynchburg people for $40 a month. He wouldn't demand more, fearful he would be sent back to the colony. They fed him in the yard, in the basement or on a porch, but rarely at a table. ``I was good enough to paint for them, but not good enough to eat with them.'' Many did not pay for his Social Security. ``That's why I don't get hardly enough to live.''
He fell in love in the 1950s. He was 37. Mamie Gertrude Tyree Catlett was housekeeper at a house he was painting. Her husband had died. She was unable to support her seven children, who went to an orphanage. Jesse and Trudy married in 1960. He helped her regain custody of a daughter and take care of all the children on weekend visits. Finally, Jesse had a home.
Jesse and Trudy lived on a mountainside near Lynchburg. Trudy, who had been crippled by polio at 16 and wore a brace, had fallen once before and waited on the floor for hours until Jesse got home. When one of Jesse's bosses demanded that he leave her and spend two months painting a hotel at Virginia Beach\ , Jesse refused and was fired. Jesse managed to find other work until diabetes and arthritis disabled him in 1982.
Trudy, a chain-smoker, got emphysema. ``She made me promise I wouldn't put her in no nursing home.'' For the last years of her life, Jesse was her home nurse, cleaning her oxygen tank and monitoring her oxygen and medication. She died in 1989. ``God bless Trudy for making my life better for 30 years,'' Jesse says.
Jesse never learned how to drive. He said colony officials did not want him to learn, for fear he would drive away. With no car and no way to get around, he stays alone most of the time now, watching wrestling on television, sending notes and birthday cards to friends and, since I met him, writing sheaves of recollections about his family and his life.
Senior citizens groups have tried to talk him into joining, but he still ``feels funny'' out in public, nervous that he will run into a former colony staffer who will look down on him. ``Right today, I still feel ashamed for being in a place like that.''
He said he hoped that by telling his story, people may finally understand him and perhaps treat other people better.
``If this story will help some poor person, it will all be worth coming out in the open. And I hope and pray to God no one will ever have to go through what I have. May God bless all the others that's been there. May God be with them always. They have had their hell on this earth."
See the story on TV
"The Lynchburg Story," a documentaryu about the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded, will air on The Discovery Channel on Saturday at 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. The program will be repeated on July 9 at 5 p.m. and 2 a.m.; and July 10 at 1 p.m.
by CNB