Memories

Yesterday I needed to be in Waco for an appointment and took the liberty of stopping by the Methodist Children’s Home to visit with the president of that organization. When I arrived, no cars were parked in front of the stately two-story administration building.

My Miata parked in front of the building was quite a contrast. The grandeur of the building was a noticeable contrast to the very small car parked in front.

I remembered feeling intimidated by the size of the building when I made my first visit to Methodist Children’s Home as their newly assigned residential child care licensing representative. The year was 1972.

Before I got out of my car, I used my fingers to count how many years ago that had been. Are you ready for this?  I first walked into that administrative office building half a century earlier. I smiled knowing that the president of the organization wasn’t even born when I made my first visit to Methodist Children’s Home.

The following year came to be known as the long hot summer of 1973. An adolescent age girl in a treatment center in liberty country ingested rat poisoning. Giving second thought to her actions, she notified the head of the agency to tell him what she had done. Knowing how manipulative adolescent age girls can be, the director did not believe her. Her subsequent death came as a complete surprise.

The story of the atrocity resulting in the girl’s death was highlighted in the Dallas Morning News. It served as a wake-up call for the state of Texas to be more pro-active in the licensure and oversight of out-of-home resources for children.  Texas legislators visited every facility caring for children across the state and what they found was cause for concern.

At the time, there was no requirement that any program serving children ages fourteen and older needed to be licensed. Consequently, treatment centers for youth were scattered all over the state. Many were serving emotionally disturbed children from the state of Illinois.  It was big business and inadequate care.

Texas Monthly wrote this in 1982: “By the early seventies there were more than three hundred private child care institutions operating in Texas, not including state schools, church schools, and reputable non-profit homes.

The boom turned into a bust in 1973 when the public learned of Artesia Hall, an isolated hellhole fourteen miles east of Cleveland in Liberty County, where the administrator was charged with murder after a seventeen-year-old girl swallowed rat poison and was denied immediate medical treatment (he was never tried).

The revelations about Artesia Hall blew the lid off of the child care industry. Law makers who had consistently turned their backs on the Department of Public Welfare (which is now the Department of Human Resources in1977) requests for tougher licensing laws and more funds to enforce them elbowed up front, sometimes conducting their own unannounced inspections of child care institutions, always accompanied by TV cameras. Throughout the spring and summer of 1973 there were almost daily revelations – children drowned, children hit by cars, children locked in cages.  It was discovered that a kid at the Austin State Hospital had been trampled to death and another had suffocated when other children poured down his throat.  Both deaths had been covered up for more than a year. In cities and small towns all over Texas, investigations were launched…”

I remember those years well. Places like Methodist Children Home always displayed the highest level of professionalism in providing for the needs of children in contrast to those who didn’t.

All My Best!

Don