THE MISSION
Orientation unsettled me more than I expected. I sat in a small meeting room near the personnel office, surrounded by other summer workers, trying to absorb the stream of rules, warnings, and actual accounts of crises the staff delivered with practiced seriousness. Their words blurred together – do’s and don’ts, what-ifs and never-evers – but one thought pulsed steadily beneath all of it: Please don’t assign me to a men’s ward.
I was nineteen, inexperienced, and certain I wasn’t ready for that level of responsibility. I wanted a women’s ward: a place that felt at least somewhat familiar.
So, of course, they sent me to a men’s ward. C-11.
My heart hammered as I walked down the long, echoing hallway toward the unit – a corridor that seemed to stretch farther the more I wished it wouldn’t. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, and each step felt like a quiet surrender to whatever waited behind that locked door. When I finally knocked, my pulse thudded in my ears as I waited for someone to let me in. It beat even harder when the Nurse Aide – a brisk, non-nonsense woman older than my mother and twice as serious – opened the door and then locked it behind me.
“There are forty men here,” she told me. “I’m the only staff on the unit. She said it without pride or complaint, just the weary matter-of-fact tone of someone who had long since stopped expecting help. She returned to the office, where she dispensed medications, kept records, and conferred with psychiatrists and staff from other departments. I was instructed to sit in the straight chair beside her desk.
She handed me a small metal box filled with index cards. “Read through these,” she said. “It’ll give you an overview.”
I clung to the task gratefully. Staying in the office felt far less threatening than stepping out onto the ward.
Each man had a card: name, birthdate, age, admission date, diagnoses, and a scattering of notes – visitors, incidents, fragments of personal histories. Many cards were yellowed and soft at the edges, handled by decades of staff. The newer ones were typed, with penciled updates trailing beneath. The older cards were handwritten in a dozen different hands, each one a small artifact of someone’s attempt to understand the person behind the diagnosis.
The first card that caught my attention belonged to a man who had spent his twenties in prison before being transferred through several Chicago-area mental hospitals. He arrived at Galesburg State Research Hospital in 1950. It was now 1966, and he was in his early seventies. His history read like a litany of violence, paranoid schizophrenia, outbursts on multiple wards.
Other cards were no less sobering – a man who tried to kill his wife during a home visit; several elderly patients who spoke little or no English except profanity; men who drank Sterno, rubbing alcohol, or aftershave if they could get their hands on it. The Aide refused to acknowledge the men’s requests for Baby Oil or Vaseline, her stoic expression making it clear the subject was off-limits. Many cards documented assaults. Others described self-harm. I felt the weight of those histories pressing against the thin metal box in my lap.
When I finished reading, the Aide led me through the ward. Most of the men didn’t acknowledge us – no words, no eye contact. Their silence felt heavy, as though it had settled over the room long before I arrived.
One small elderly man stood out. He was neatly dressed in brown leather high-top shoes, brown twill pants, a muted plaid shirt, and a brown heather sweater. His eyes were bright, alert. He motioned for me to come closer, repeating “Come heah. Come heah.” His accent sounded Eastern European. He introduced himself as Yanko Damyanoff.
I wanted to linger, but the Aide hurried me along. After we met the last of the patients, she returned to her paperwork and other responsibilities, and I remained on the ward, taking in the physical space.
The room was long and bright, lined with metal-frame beds in four rows of ten. Two rows ran down the center of the room, almost side by side. The others hugged the walls beneath tall windows that stretched nearly the length of the long room. Sunlight poured in from the acres of hospital grounds – fields, trees and farmland as far as you could see – peaceful and serene. One patient approached me, gestured toward the landscape, and announced that he was king of all the land we could see.
I was unsure how to respond. I nodded.
When the Aide left for lunch, my stomach dropped. She and the Aide from the ward directly across the hall went to the Dining Hall together, leaving me responsible for “sitting doors” with an honor patient. The doors of both units were propped open. I sat in the doorway of C-12; the honor patient sat in the doorway of C-11.
Eighty male patients. Me and one honor patient.
His name was Fred – mild-mannered, pleasant, calm. When I met him earlier, he didn’t seem like a patient at all. He told me he helped the Aide with sorting and stacking clean pants and shirts from the hospital laundry on floor-to-ceiling shelves in the storage room. He also helped gather soiled laundry and assisted with the evening routine of showers, shaving and getting patients settled for bed.
The hour passed without incident, but seemed to last forever.
By the time I walked to the Dining Hall for my own lunch, I was exhausted. The hospital was enormous – dozens of buildings connected by long, long hallways. Patients and staff could access almost the entire facility without ever stepping outside. My parents had once occupied these same corridors, though under very different circumstances. In 1945, this had been Mayo General Hospital, an Army hospital. My father arrived by train at the depot on hospital grounds to be treated for injuries and then released from service. My mother worked there as a secretary. Their first meeting had taken place somewhere in these hallways.
In the Dining Hall I spotted a few other college students. I envied the ones assigned to women’s wards – until I learned what had happened to a girl I knew from High schoopl. A female patient had thrown her to the floor, ripped out a handful of her hair, and raked fingernails down her face. The girl resigned immediately after seeking medical treatment.
The Aide on C-11 explained that male patients, no matter how ill, retained a small measure of respect for female staff. Female patients did not.
I realized how wrong my assumptions had been.
It was considered prestigious to be hired as a Summer Worker at Research Hospital, but as I walked back through those long halls, I wondered whether I might have made a serious mistake in accepting this position.
THE NITTY GRITTY
On my second day, I was present for the entire morning routine. Breakfast began shortly after I arrived at 7am. All 40 patients lined up two by two in the hallway, Fred at the front, the Aide and me at the back. Most of the men assembled quickly, except for Robert, a tall lanky young Black man who moved at his own unhurried pace. I remembered him only vaguely from the day before: the only Black patient on the ward, reclining on his bed instead of sitting up like the others.
Belts and shoelaces were not allowed, so Robert walk on the backs of his brown canvas crepe-soled shoes, turning them into makeshift slides. His pants were too loose on his thin frame, causing him to constantly hitch them up. Though many of the men were decades older, Robert was by far the slowest of them all. He lagged behind the group on the long walk to the Dining Hall. Our repeated attempts at cajoling and encouraging him were completely ineffective. The only other patient who stood out from the rest on our trek was Nicky – a tiny man who spoke no English, and carried a dirty, once-white, sock which he waved along windowsills as we made our way down the halls.
After breakfast, we lined up again – Fred in front, the Aide and me at the back. Robert still trailed behind. Nicky continued his “dusting.”
Back on the ward, the men lined up at the Dutch door of the office for their medications. Then came the daily cleaning. The patients pushed all the beds on the left side of the ward to the center and dust-mopped the floor. Nicky and another small elderly man moved most of the beds, with some occasional help from a few others. They repeated the process with the other beds.
When it came time to moved the right-side beds, Robert continued reclining on his mattress, letting the two little old men push his bed – with him still on it – around the room. My nineteen-year-old self was shy and introverted, but this crossed a line. I marched over and demanded he get up. He ignored me completely. I couldn’t make him help, but I refused to let the older, smaller men push him around like cargo. I persisted, and he finally stood up. As soon as his bed was back in place, Robert resumed his reclining position, feet propped on the foot of the bed, arms folded behind his head, content to contribute nothing further.
aAfter cleaning, I tried speaking with some of the patients. I didn’t get far. Yanko’s bed was the second one back on the left side, and he immediately waved me over, calling “Come heah. Come heah.” His accent was thick, his English fractured. I caught maybe one word in five – Chicago, tall buildings, elevators, Baby Ruth candy bars, railroad trains. Most of these words were greatly assisted by gestures. I was not sure of anything he said beyond those words. After about fifteen minutes, I managed to move on.
Most of the men didn’t converse, but I greeted each one, told them my name, and hoped my smile conveyed something gentle, human and encouraging. Each day they began to seem a bit more accustomed to me. Every encounter left me with more questions.
Fred was my main source of information. I was stunned to learn that summer workers were the only additional staff ever assigned to the wards. I had assumed there must be others during the rest of the year. The Aides were overwhelmed – paperwork, supplies, medications, consultations with psychiatrists and other departments. There was no time for individual attention or activities.
Few patients had money in an account for treats or toiletries. Only four or five ever received visitors. Many had never had a visitor at all.
The hospital was a world unto itself: barbershop, beauty salon, kitchen, dining hall, movie theater, auditorium, gymnasium, chapel, laundry, tennis court, handball court, picnic area. When I was four or five years old, I tap-danced with my dancing partner to entertain the patients in the Auditorium. I have a vivid memory of a woman with bright rouge and wild eyes running toward me in the hallway, sweeping me into a big hug. I was terrified. Only much later did I understand that she was a mental patient.
On one of our marches to the Dining Hall, I noticed an older man walking in the opposite direction. He was tall, mustached, bearded, and wearing six or seven colorful newsboy caps stacked on his head. Fred told me later this was “Sam the Hat Man,” a former Chicago hat maker. Staff and volunteers donated fabric scraps so he could continue making hats, which he sold or gave away to people who admired them. He also wore a wide smile as he walked the halls.
Once a week, we visited the barbershop and five or six of the men would get a haircut. Yanko somehow always managed to sit next to me, talking nonstop. One day, when I had lost focus due to understanding such a small portion of what was being said, I realized he was describing an injury to his lower left leg from the railroad. His story included a brother, money owed, and a visit to someone’s office – perhaps a lawyer or railroad official. Then, with a gesture and a few unmistakable words, he said he had pulled out a gun and shot the man.
I sat frozen, stunned. No one else seemed to notice.
For days I thought about Yanko. I reread his card: violence, paranoid schizophrenia, outbursts, prison, then mental institutions, confined since his twenties. He must have arrived in this country speaking no English. Laws and customs unfamiliar to him, misunderstandings piled upon misunderstandings. His story had never been clearly heard.
Over time, my appreciation for Yanko’s cleverness deepened. Each morning he pulled a flattened, single-serve cereal box from his shirt pocked and marked off the day on a hand-drawn calendar. After events in the Auditorium, he used the information on the back of the printed program. He spent hours drafting letters to the Illinois State Director of Mental Health Programs, pleading for his situation to be reviewed and that he be released.
His letters were never answered.
One afternoon, when I was cleaning out a small storage closet, I found a ball. It was eight or ten inches in diameter. I gathered six of the more active men into a circle at the far end of the ward. Three of the men caught the ball easily. One man let the ball bounce off his chest. Another ignored it entirely. Jerry the one who ignored the ball, stood motionless, arms at his sides, never reaching for the ball or looking at it – no matter who threw the ball toward him.
We played the game five or six times over the next few days. Everyone improved – except Jerry. He remained still, expressionless.
Then, one day, after we had been playing for awhile, I tossed the ball toward Jerry. He reached out and caught it. His face didn’t change, but mine did. I smiled, big and wide.
From then on, Jerry played.
Next chapter: UNEXPECTED LESSONS