Laura
09-18-2007, 12:01 PM
The "paper" version in this past Sunday's Advance, had very good new and historical file photos to go with the story. Unfortunately, they do not have them online.
http://www.silive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/1189935969130860.xml&coll=1
Reacalling the shame of Willowbrook
Nona Brathwaite:An unimaginably brutal childhood
Sunday, September 16, 2007
By JUDY L. RANDALL
STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- "They called me monkey, ugly, one-ear, gorilla," said Nona Brathwaite. "They called me one-half side."
"They" were staff at the old Willowbrook State School, located on the grounds of today's College of Staten Island. Nona was placed at Willowbrook in 1956, at the of age 2-and-a-half, after a medical treatment gone horribly wrong left the right side of her face and body deeply scarred and her mother full of despair.
She would live there for the next 23 years.
"They said I was mentally retarded," said Ms. Brathwaite. "I would ask them why did they use that term, mentally retarded, for people like me? I think it was so they could get money from the state for me being there. That term makes me feel very low. It makes me feel degraded."
Nor has she ever thought of herself as "learning disabled," another term that has been applied to her perhaps, if for no other reason, than because of the facial disfigurement she suffered as an infant.
Growing up in Willowbrook, during the 1950s and '60s and well into the 1970s, as Ms. Brathwaite did, was "horrible" beyond measure: She was beaten with a broomstick, made to kneel on the floor for hours on end, left naked in a dark room and injected with powerful drugs to keep her in a state of submission.
All, she said, for "misbehaving ... for standing up for myself, for saying the way they treated us wasn't right."
Also, for asking to go home.
Three years before Ms. Brathwaite's journey began at Willowbrook, she had been born with a large cyst on her face. Doctors in a Brooklyn hospital told her mother it was probably cancerous and needed to be removed through a radiation treatment. She was just 3 weeks old.
"My mother said I screamed very loud," said Ms. Brathwaite. "They over-radiated my face. It took off the outside of my right ear. It damaged the ear, but I can hear. It damaged my eye; I'm blind in my right eye. It damaged my stomach, my leg, my lung. My whole right side."
She was transported to the burn unit of a Manhattan hospital, where she spent the next two years of her life, much of it "wrapped like a mummy."
"They gave me treatments and they also gave me tests to see if I had any type of retardation, or if I had lost anything developmentally," she said. "But there was no sign."
Nor was there any evidence that she ever had cancer.
"They should have done a biopsy, but they didn't," said Ms. Brathwaite. "What they told my mother was, 'There's been an error.' They told her, 'Don't worry, we will take care of her all of her life.' That the hospital and the state had gotten together."
It was at that point that she was taken to Willowbrook, where her mother would come to see her on visitation days, on Wednesdays and Sundays.
"Even though I was young, I always knew that my surroundings were different; different from what they should have been," said Ms. Brathwaite. "I knew it wasn't home because of the color of the walls. I knew that none of the people taking care of me were my parents."
"After I saw myself, I asked someone, 'What happened to me?' I must have been 5 or 6. I knew that I looked different from the other kids. They all had both ears. She took me by my hair and she said, 'Oh, don't worry about it; you're ugly anyway.' I told her, 'I want to go home,' and she said, 'This is your home.'"
"We girls were dressed in thick dresses; the boys in overalls," Ms. Brathwaite said. "You'd have the same underwear on for a week. If your toothbrush went missing, they'd want you to use someone else's toothbrush. You couldn't have anything of your own, because someone was always taking it. You'd sleep in a dormitory and you'd all shower in one big shower. The food was disgusting, but if you didn't eat it right away they'd take it from you and say, 'I guess you're not hungry.'"
She cried frequently.
HARSH TREATMENT
"I got hit if they thought I misbehaved," said Ms. Brathwaite, "or if I said I wanted to go home. One time I got hit across the face with a broomstick. It was like my face was a ball and the broom was a bat. Once in the winter time they put me in a dark room. They left the windows open. I was naked; just the way I came into this world. When they came in, they said, 'Why did you wet the floor?' I said, 'Because you wouldn't let me go to the bathroom.' They beat me with a belt."
"Sometimes I couldn't stand up, they would have me so heavy on sedatives," she added. "They would give me Thorazine to calm me down; Mellaril to keep me knocked out."
"I always had a willingness to learn," said Ms. Brathwaite. "They taught me to read, but I read just enough to get by. The state promised my mother I would get sent to a school off the grounds, but that never happened. My spelling is poor. I know basic math. I would love to learn computers."
In 1977, she landed a day job with an employment guidance service, returning to Willowbrook in the evenings. She left Willowbrook for good in 1979 when the building she had been living in was closed under the state decree that phased out the "warehousing" of persons with developmental disabilities.
She moved to a group home, but had to give up her job to battle a myriad of medical issues, all stemming, she believes, from her exposure to radiation and her life at Willowbrook.
"I have asthma, lung disease, high blood pressure, multiple things," said Ms. Brathwaite, who will be 54 next month. For years she has lived on her own in West Brighton, making ends meet on Social Security. She attends Mount Sinai United Christian Church in Tompkinsville, likes to cook, especially breakfast, loves to crochet and thinks she would enjoy taking a knitting class. Also, she has been dating a "very nice" man for the last three years.
"He wants to marry me," said Ms. Brathwaite. "He does not like to argue or fight and he doesn't drink. But I'm not ready for marriage."
Said Ms. Brathwaite: "If I hadn't been in Willowbrook, my life would have been very different. I would have liked to have gone to college, and learned to read better than I do, so that I could get myself a nice professional job. People have asked me, 'Why didn't your mother sue the hospital?' But she wasn't strong enough. For years she told me I was in a fire, to explain the way I look, before I was able to get ahold of my file and read it -- which you weren't supposed to do.
"When I was younger, and I would go home sometimes on the weekend, when we would walk down the street, she would either walk way out in front of me, or behind me, or to one side or the other. When I got older, a year before she died, I told her, 'We need to talk about this.' I told her, 'Don't be ashamed of me; I am your child.' I told her, 'You did the best you could.' When I said that to her, I could tell that something lifted inside her."
Judy L. Randall is a news reporter for the Advance. She may be reached at randall@siadvance.com.
© 2007 Staten Island Advance
© 2007 SILive.com All Rights Reserved.
http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2007/09/reacalling_the_shame_of_willow_1.html
Recalling the shame of Willowbrook
by JUDY L. RANDALL
Sunday September 16, 2007, 7:49 AM
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Willowbrook State School was officially closed in 1987, after abuses at the school were revealed in the 1970s by Advance reporter Jane Kurtin and others, including Geraldo Rivera . The school's former grounds were redeveloped extensively to serve as the campus of the College of Staten Island, which opened at the site in 1993.
Diane Buglioli:Comfort and concern for the afflicted
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Diane Buglioli was just an 18-year-old college student when she started working at the former Willowbrook State School, taking a position as a recreational worker.
"I had always been into athletics," she explained. "It seemed like it would be a good job."
During her years there, from 1969 to 1980, she worked as a case manager and program director in the recreation department.
And while Ms. Buglioli said there is no denying that abuses of patients occurred -- although she said she did not witness mistreatment -- she said there is a wider story that needs to be remembered.
"I had no training when I started, but you have to remember that it really wasn't a field of study at that time," said Ms. Buglioli, who today is deputy executive director of A Very Special Place in Dongan Hills, an organization that works with people with developmental disabilities, including a number of her former Willowbrook clients.
"It was a beautiful campus," Ms. Buglioli said of Willowbrook, which was located on the grounds of what is now the College of Staten Island.
"It was very immense. There were all of these big brick structures. At first I worked with infants and young children. It was like a pre-school; I would hold them, sing to them, help them with movement," she said.
Still, she said, "The cribs were close; it felt very tight. And I remember the distinct smell of urine."
Yet, she added: "After you worked there for around three weeks, you never smelled it any more. It wasn't something you were sensitive to after awhile ... It's not something you remember; what you remember is the people you worked with."
"We had some kids who were just learning to walk," she said. "There was a 'Friend to Patient' program, and you could apply to be able to take home a child, for a night or a weekend."
Off and on, for the next seven years, Ms. Buglioli took a boy named Josh home to her family's house, beginning from the time he was 6 until he was sent to an institution upstate after the state decreed that great numbers of children who had been housed in Willowbrook had to be dispursed to other facilities.
Josh had been diagnosed with Down syndrome, said Ms. Buglioli. His parents, both teachers in Manhattan, had placed him in Willowbrook and, as far as she knew, were not part of their son's life.
Â
SUB: A DIFFERENT ERA Â
Â
"Think of the times," said Ms. Buglioli. "It was the mid-'60s and doctors told parents, 'The best you can do is to place them with other Mongoloids.' That is what they were called then. The families made the best decisions they could. Doctors told them their children would have limited intellectual capacity and a complicated medical condition. That was the body of knowledge you had at that time."
But looking at the photos of Josh in a scrapbook Ms. Buglioli has kept -- gleeful in a bathtub taking his first bath; handsome and proud standing in front of a Christmas tree in a new outfit she bought him -- the positive affect of her one-on-one attention is evident.
While Ms. Buglioli said there is no denying the stories in the Advance at the time, and the televised reports later about the abuses that occurred at Willowbrook, she said she never witnessed such behavior.
"Did I personally see anyone being abused? No. Did I hear stories when I was there? Yes. Would I have tried to stop it if I had seen it? Of course."
"Not to detoxify it -- because those things were going on -- but there were other things going on as well, connections were being made," she said. "There were a group of people who worked as hard as they could, and a group of people who never should have been working there."
That "never should have been there" group, she said, represented 10 percent of the Willowbrook workforce.
While Ms. Buglioli said Willowbrook "was equally as institutionalizing for the people who worked there" as those who lived there, the institutionalization for those who were housed at the facility was evident in the form of what she said described as "mass showers."
With just a few shower spigots available, she said, the children "were lined up, naked, and wands with water" held by the staff were passed over the youngsters.
"Who grows up that way?" she said.
Â
Â
SUB: SEVERE OVERCROWDING Â
"There was overcrowding in the day rooms and the wards," said Ms. Buglioli. "There were something like 6,000 people living there and there should have been 2,000. It was hard to keep it as sanitary as it should have been. The staffing was not a lot. It could be one woman for 35 to 40 people in a ward. It was not always easy. In many ways it became more custodial than doing a lot of activities" with the children.
"But there were teachers for children who were educable," she added. "Kids received recreation. Others received occupational and physical therapy, but it was limited."
Still, Ms. Buglioli remembers two sisters who were left at Willowbrook by their parents after an apartment fire fractured the family. While it was supposed to have been a short-term stay for the girls, they ended up spending their adolescence in Willowbrook. This despite the fact that they did not appear to have any discernible disabilities -- something their records later revealed.
"Their schooling was predicated on their having a disability," she said. "Environmentally, they were affected by where they were living."
Ms. Buglioli remembers other boys and girls she brought home for overnight stays being amazed that they were permitted to turn the lights of the room they were in on and off -- light switches were not accessible to the children of Willowbrook.
One girl, having eaten broccoli at Ms. Buglioli's home, later described the vegetable as "little trees" because the food at Willowbrook was pureed.
While Ms. Buglioli said "it is hard to project how things would have been different for people" who grew up in Willowbrook, had they not lived there, she said, "Being cared for on a more individualized basis would have benefited anyone. The fact that most were able to survive it is a hallmark to the human spirit. Those of us who stayed there to work did so because we were trying to do the right thing."
http://www.silive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/1189935969130860.xml&coll=1
Reacalling the shame of Willowbrook
Nona Brathwaite:An unimaginably brutal childhood
Sunday, September 16, 2007
By JUDY L. RANDALL
STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- "They called me monkey, ugly, one-ear, gorilla," said Nona Brathwaite. "They called me one-half side."
"They" were staff at the old Willowbrook State School, located on the grounds of today's College of Staten Island. Nona was placed at Willowbrook in 1956, at the of age 2-and-a-half, after a medical treatment gone horribly wrong left the right side of her face and body deeply scarred and her mother full of despair.
She would live there for the next 23 years.
"They said I was mentally retarded," said Ms. Brathwaite. "I would ask them why did they use that term, mentally retarded, for people like me? I think it was so they could get money from the state for me being there. That term makes me feel very low. It makes me feel degraded."
Nor has she ever thought of herself as "learning disabled," another term that has been applied to her perhaps, if for no other reason, than because of the facial disfigurement she suffered as an infant.
Growing up in Willowbrook, during the 1950s and '60s and well into the 1970s, as Ms. Brathwaite did, was "horrible" beyond measure: She was beaten with a broomstick, made to kneel on the floor for hours on end, left naked in a dark room and injected with powerful drugs to keep her in a state of submission.
All, she said, for "misbehaving ... for standing up for myself, for saying the way they treated us wasn't right."
Also, for asking to go home.
Three years before Ms. Brathwaite's journey began at Willowbrook, she had been born with a large cyst on her face. Doctors in a Brooklyn hospital told her mother it was probably cancerous and needed to be removed through a radiation treatment. She was just 3 weeks old.
"My mother said I screamed very loud," said Ms. Brathwaite. "They over-radiated my face. It took off the outside of my right ear. It damaged the ear, but I can hear. It damaged my eye; I'm blind in my right eye. It damaged my stomach, my leg, my lung. My whole right side."
She was transported to the burn unit of a Manhattan hospital, where she spent the next two years of her life, much of it "wrapped like a mummy."
"They gave me treatments and they also gave me tests to see if I had any type of retardation, or if I had lost anything developmentally," she said. "But there was no sign."
Nor was there any evidence that she ever had cancer.
"They should have done a biopsy, but they didn't," said Ms. Brathwaite. "What they told my mother was, 'There's been an error.' They told her, 'Don't worry, we will take care of her all of her life.' That the hospital and the state had gotten together."
It was at that point that she was taken to Willowbrook, where her mother would come to see her on visitation days, on Wednesdays and Sundays.
"Even though I was young, I always knew that my surroundings were different; different from what they should have been," said Ms. Brathwaite. "I knew it wasn't home because of the color of the walls. I knew that none of the people taking care of me were my parents."
"After I saw myself, I asked someone, 'What happened to me?' I must have been 5 or 6. I knew that I looked different from the other kids. They all had both ears. She took me by my hair and she said, 'Oh, don't worry about it; you're ugly anyway.' I told her, 'I want to go home,' and she said, 'This is your home.'"
"We girls were dressed in thick dresses; the boys in overalls," Ms. Brathwaite said. "You'd have the same underwear on for a week. If your toothbrush went missing, they'd want you to use someone else's toothbrush. You couldn't have anything of your own, because someone was always taking it. You'd sleep in a dormitory and you'd all shower in one big shower. The food was disgusting, but if you didn't eat it right away they'd take it from you and say, 'I guess you're not hungry.'"
She cried frequently.
HARSH TREATMENT
"I got hit if they thought I misbehaved," said Ms. Brathwaite, "or if I said I wanted to go home. One time I got hit across the face with a broomstick. It was like my face was a ball and the broom was a bat. Once in the winter time they put me in a dark room. They left the windows open. I was naked; just the way I came into this world. When they came in, they said, 'Why did you wet the floor?' I said, 'Because you wouldn't let me go to the bathroom.' They beat me with a belt."
"Sometimes I couldn't stand up, they would have me so heavy on sedatives," she added. "They would give me Thorazine to calm me down; Mellaril to keep me knocked out."
"I always had a willingness to learn," said Ms. Brathwaite. "They taught me to read, but I read just enough to get by. The state promised my mother I would get sent to a school off the grounds, but that never happened. My spelling is poor. I know basic math. I would love to learn computers."
In 1977, she landed a day job with an employment guidance service, returning to Willowbrook in the evenings. She left Willowbrook for good in 1979 when the building she had been living in was closed under the state decree that phased out the "warehousing" of persons with developmental disabilities.
She moved to a group home, but had to give up her job to battle a myriad of medical issues, all stemming, she believes, from her exposure to radiation and her life at Willowbrook.
"I have asthma, lung disease, high blood pressure, multiple things," said Ms. Brathwaite, who will be 54 next month. For years she has lived on her own in West Brighton, making ends meet on Social Security. She attends Mount Sinai United Christian Church in Tompkinsville, likes to cook, especially breakfast, loves to crochet and thinks she would enjoy taking a knitting class. Also, she has been dating a "very nice" man for the last three years.
"He wants to marry me," said Ms. Brathwaite. "He does not like to argue or fight and he doesn't drink. But I'm not ready for marriage."
Said Ms. Brathwaite: "If I hadn't been in Willowbrook, my life would have been very different. I would have liked to have gone to college, and learned to read better than I do, so that I could get myself a nice professional job. People have asked me, 'Why didn't your mother sue the hospital?' But she wasn't strong enough. For years she told me I was in a fire, to explain the way I look, before I was able to get ahold of my file and read it -- which you weren't supposed to do.
"When I was younger, and I would go home sometimes on the weekend, when we would walk down the street, she would either walk way out in front of me, or behind me, or to one side or the other. When I got older, a year before she died, I told her, 'We need to talk about this.' I told her, 'Don't be ashamed of me; I am your child.' I told her, 'You did the best you could.' When I said that to her, I could tell that something lifted inside her."
Judy L. Randall is a news reporter for the Advance. She may be reached at randall@siadvance.com.
© 2007 Staten Island Advance
© 2007 SILive.com All Rights Reserved.
http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2007/09/reacalling_the_shame_of_willow_1.html
Recalling the shame of Willowbrook
by JUDY L. RANDALL
Sunday September 16, 2007, 7:49 AM
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Willowbrook State School was officially closed in 1987, after abuses at the school were revealed in the 1970s by Advance reporter Jane Kurtin and others, including Geraldo Rivera . The school's former grounds were redeveloped extensively to serve as the campus of the College of Staten Island, which opened at the site in 1993.
Diane Buglioli:Comfort and concern for the afflicted
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Diane Buglioli was just an 18-year-old college student when she started working at the former Willowbrook State School, taking a position as a recreational worker.
"I had always been into athletics," she explained. "It seemed like it would be a good job."
During her years there, from 1969 to 1980, she worked as a case manager and program director in the recreation department.
And while Ms. Buglioli said there is no denying that abuses of patients occurred -- although she said she did not witness mistreatment -- she said there is a wider story that needs to be remembered.
"I had no training when I started, but you have to remember that it really wasn't a field of study at that time," said Ms. Buglioli, who today is deputy executive director of A Very Special Place in Dongan Hills, an organization that works with people with developmental disabilities, including a number of her former Willowbrook clients.
"It was a beautiful campus," Ms. Buglioli said of Willowbrook, which was located on the grounds of what is now the College of Staten Island.
"It was very immense. There were all of these big brick structures. At first I worked with infants and young children. It was like a pre-school; I would hold them, sing to them, help them with movement," she said.
Still, she said, "The cribs were close; it felt very tight. And I remember the distinct smell of urine."
Yet, she added: "After you worked there for around three weeks, you never smelled it any more. It wasn't something you were sensitive to after awhile ... It's not something you remember; what you remember is the people you worked with."
"We had some kids who were just learning to walk," she said. "There was a 'Friend to Patient' program, and you could apply to be able to take home a child, for a night or a weekend."
Off and on, for the next seven years, Ms. Buglioli took a boy named Josh home to her family's house, beginning from the time he was 6 until he was sent to an institution upstate after the state decreed that great numbers of children who had been housed in Willowbrook had to be dispursed to other facilities.
Josh had been diagnosed with Down syndrome, said Ms. Buglioli. His parents, both teachers in Manhattan, had placed him in Willowbrook and, as far as she knew, were not part of their son's life.
Â
SUB: A DIFFERENT ERA Â
Â
"Think of the times," said Ms. Buglioli. "It was the mid-'60s and doctors told parents, 'The best you can do is to place them with other Mongoloids.' That is what they were called then. The families made the best decisions they could. Doctors told them their children would have limited intellectual capacity and a complicated medical condition. That was the body of knowledge you had at that time."
But looking at the photos of Josh in a scrapbook Ms. Buglioli has kept -- gleeful in a bathtub taking his first bath; handsome and proud standing in front of a Christmas tree in a new outfit she bought him -- the positive affect of her one-on-one attention is evident.
While Ms. Buglioli said there is no denying the stories in the Advance at the time, and the televised reports later about the abuses that occurred at Willowbrook, she said she never witnessed such behavior.
"Did I personally see anyone being abused? No. Did I hear stories when I was there? Yes. Would I have tried to stop it if I had seen it? Of course."
"Not to detoxify it -- because those things were going on -- but there were other things going on as well, connections were being made," she said. "There were a group of people who worked as hard as they could, and a group of people who never should have been working there."
That "never should have been there" group, she said, represented 10 percent of the Willowbrook workforce.
While Ms. Buglioli said Willowbrook "was equally as institutionalizing for the people who worked there" as those who lived there, the institutionalization for those who were housed at the facility was evident in the form of what she said described as "mass showers."
With just a few shower spigots available, she said, the children "were lined up, naked, and wands with water" held by the staff were passed over the youngsters.
"Who grows up that way?" she said.
Â
Â
SUB: SEVERE OVERCROWDING Â
"There was overcrowding in the day rooms and the wards," said Ms. Buglioli. "There were something like 6,000 people living there and there should have been 2,000. It was hard to keep it as sanitary as it should have been. The staffing was not a lot. It could be one woman for 35 to 40 people in a ward. It was not always easy. In many ways it became more custodial than doing a lot of activities" with the children.
"But there were teachers for children who were educable," she added. "Kids received recreation. Others received occupational and physical therapy, but it was limited."
Still, Ms. Buglioli remembers two sisters who were left at Willowbrook by their parents after an apartment fire fractured the family. While it was supposed to have been a short-term stay for the girls, they ended up spending their adolescence in Willowbrook. This despite the fact that they did not appear to have any discernible disabilities -- something their records later revealed.
"Their schooling was predicated on their having a disability," she said. "Environmentally, they were affected by where they were living."
Ms. Buglioli remembers other boys and girls she brought home for overnight stays being amazed that they were permitted to turn the lights of the room they were in on and off -- light switches were not accessible to the children of Willowbrook.
One girl, having eaten broccoli at Ms. Buglioli's home, later described the vegetable as "little trees" because the food at Willowbrook was pureed.
While Ms. Buglioli said "it is hard to project how things would have been different for people" who grew up in Willowbrook, had they not lived there, she said, "Being cared for on a more individualized basis would have benefited anyone. The fact that most were able to survive it is a hallmark to the human spirit. Those of us who stayed there to work did so because we were trying to do the right thing."