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Archiver > ARKANSAS > 2001-12 > 1009855244


From: "Jackie Morgan" <>
Subject: RE: [ARKANSAS] More FYI---PERSONAL TIME CAPSULES
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001 21:20:44 -0600
In-Reply-To: <01c701c19237$5f714580$4dcd5ecc@cei.net>


This bothered me in that the article doesn't mention that the families of
the people didn't seem to be searched for before the items were given to
this museum.
Seems kind of strange and sad.
J

-----Original Message-----
From: Diana Boothe [mailto:]
Sent: Monday, December 31, 2001 2:12 PM
To:
Subject: [ARKANSAS] More FYI---PERSONAL TIME CAPSULES


Since the discovery of 400 long-abandoned suitcases at a former asylum,
researchers have been piecing together the owners' stories
--------------------

By Michael Hill
ASSOCIATED PRESS

December 27, 2001

Willard, N.Y.

SHE CAME to the asylum in the summer of 1930, sent with a suitcase stuffed
with hand-stitched baby booties and quilts.

She was worn out. At age 40, she had endured a miscarriage, the death of two
of her four children and a broken marriage.

The cloistered grounds of the Willard Psychiatric Center in the Finger Lakes

would be her home for the rest of her long life. By the time Willard closed
down in 1995, her story was forgotten, like those of thousands of other
patients here.

Then they found her suitcase.

Workers combing through the center in its last days found the alligator-
skin
bag 65 years after it was packed, sitting in a filthy attic jammed with some

400 other old trunks and suitcases that had been brought with patients.

The dingy cases turned out to be leather-bound time capsules packed with a
cornucopia of intimate items: letters, wedding photos, a dog figurine, a
windup alarm clock, a school cap, a diary, ice skates, dog tags, a curling
iron.

Researchers are piecing together the lives of the owners for a New York
State Museum exhibit that would tell their stories. It's a bedeviling task.
They know the patients' names, but cannot reveal them because of
confidentiality laws. How can the researchers capture the essence of people
who endured so much using only the likes of booties and trinkets? "It's like
a jigsaw puzzle but you don't have a clue what the picture is," says museum
curator Craig Williams.

Willard Asylum for the Insane opened in 1869 on the eastern shore of Seneca
Lake. Its mission: Treat the chronically insane with "gentle and kindly
understanding." At first blush, Willard looked like a bucolic world apart,
complete with sloping lawns, tall trees, a steamboat landing and a rail
connection (station stop "Asylum").

Patients took part in plays, parades, social dances and calisthenics. At
Christmas, a patient choir would wend its way through wards, singing carols.

They worked on Willard's farm, or in the tin shop or laundry.

Willard dropped "Asylum" from its name in 1890, being called in turn a
hospital and a psychiatric center. But it remained the sort of
mega-institution that was viewed as a dinosaur with the rise of
community-based mental health care and psychotropic drugs in the latter part
of the 20th century.

In a wave of institutional closings, New York handed over Willard to state
prison officials in 1995 for a drug treatment center, its current use.

That's when the suitcases were discovered.

Beverly Courtwright found them with a Willard co-worker as she rushed to
complete a final inventory of the center. The attic of an old workshop
building was a last stop. Nothing much was up there, but the women did find
a metal-clad door sealing off one end of the attic.

They pulled the door open with a whoosh and saw it: a vista of neatly racked
cases and trunks, coated with dust and pigeon droppings. Shafts of light
from the attic windows shone through, and Courtwright swears she felt some
kind of energy under the rafters that day.

"It felt sacred and hallowed to me," she says. "I didn't want to disturb it.

I didn't want anyone to disturb it. It was all that was left of them. I was
like: 'Let them rest.'" Courtwright told Williams, who was there to save
pieces of Willard's history.

An ad hoc rescue squad - many of them about to be laid off from Willard -
performed a sort of suitcase triage. They put on spare surgical masks and
gloves to bag up the dusty relics and seal them with surgical tape. Williams

recalls seeing the people dressed like surgeons and thinking: "They're
operating on people's memories." The suitcases were trucked to the State
Museum's hangar-sized collections warehouse near Albany - stored alongside
Shaker chairs, switchboard equipment, an iron lung and other historical
relics.

State Mental Health Commissioner James Stone gave the OK for a study of the
Willard suitcases in 1997. Williams was joined by Peter Stastny, a
psychiatrist at the Bronx Psychiatric Center and a documentary maker.

Of the 400 suitcases, about half were empty and another 100 contained maybe
just shoes or a coat. The last 100 were full.

Twenty were chosen for study.

Most had been packed between 80 and 50 years ago, by the patients or someone
else. They were probably carried up to the attic upon admission after some
choice items were plucked out.

Since Willard handled long-term cases, many trunks stayed there into their
owner's old age and beyond.

"These were the people who ended up in the bottom drawer," Stastny says.
"Willard was the last stop." Who were these people? A World War I veteran. A
photographer. A nun. An Italian immigrant. An amateur boxer. A World War II
refugee.

Old case files reveal that the woman with the baby booties was a seamstress.
She was born near Ithaca in 1889 and was married at 18 to a plumber - a man
she said drank too much and ran with other women.

The years before her institutionalization in 1930 were marred by sickness,
the deaths of two of her children and finally, according to case files,
psychotic episodes.

"My stars and garters, I was sick!" she told one doctor. "My daughter was
going to be married and I was just all tired out and had had just one thing
after another." The seamstress died at Willard in 1973. She was 83.



ONE SUITCASE with worn shoes and little else led researchers to a letter
written at mid-century by the case's owner, a German immigrant who dug the
graves at Willard's cemetery. The man asked administrators if he could leave
and be paid for the 400 graves he dug. He was denied. He went on to dig
graves for another 20 years until his death. (Altogether, almost 6,000
graves, most unmarked, cover a hillside by a lake at Willard.)

Another suitcase packed a bit of everything - pressed flowers, a little
metal
Washington Monument thermometer, an English-German translation book,
pictures of people in traditional Ukrainian garb - and told the tale of a
talented artist with a troubled life.

Born in Poland in 1916, he endured labor on a farm in Nazi-occupied Austria
and life in a postwar displaced-persons camp before making it to the United
States in 1949 with his wife. After getting a job and a home, things fell
apart for him in 1951 when his wife died after a miscarriage.

Arriving at Willard in 1953, he eventually started painting a picture a day.

Williams found one of these paintings showing a Ukrainian village with a
church in the center - the use of color and perspective made him seem like a
kind of eastern European Grandma Moses.

These inanimate items have a powerful, almost haunting, effect on the people
studying them. Williams says he has trouble distancing himself from the work
at the end of the day. He has even dreamed about the Ukrainian artist.
Stastny likens the old attic where the suitcases were found to a spiritual
space.

"There is this level of intimacy and closeness to these people - albeit
they're dead - because you're touching and working with very personal items,
Stastny says. "You feel a presence, a very close presence, of the person
through these items." The fact that many - if not most - of these people
would not face long-term institutionalization today adds to the sense of
poignancy. Some of the patients, like the seamstress, passed up chances to
leave Willard.

One man, institutionalized since 1917, was told in the '60s that he could
leave Willard.

He replied: "Where am I to go?"

Precisely how these lives will be presented when the exhibit opens in 2003
is still being worked out. Williams says the challenge of the exhibit -
which
will include items from the suitcases, and possibly patients' photos - will
be to let the people speak for themselves, finally.

Copyright (c) 2001, Newsday, Inc.

--------------------

This article originally appeared at:
http://www.newsday.com/features/printedition/ny-p2cover2525156dec27.story

Visit Newsday online at http://www.newsday.com


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