I worked in a psychiatric prison for several years. This was back in the day when the Department of Corrections was a sub unit of the Department of Social Services. Our job title was Mental Health Officer or MHO. This job title is something that only a bureaucrat could think up and led to interesting social situations at party's or out in public if you were asked what you did for living. Needless to say if you said you were a Mental Health Officer people would give you a strange look or lead to questions that you would rather not answer so you just said "I work in a prison."
Most of us worked on psychiatric units West, East or North. There was also a B-unit or the "Hole" that was not usually staffed unless in use. There was also a perimeter unit that was involved with security and monitoring the place with cameras and letting people move about the place by controlling a series of interlocks and sliding doors. It seemed very high tech at the time, but would be considered rather crude today.
There was this dichotomy in the place, the unit officers were called Treatment Officers and the Security Officers were called Perimeter Officers. Most of the Rookies tended to work the treatment units. They tended to be younger and this was good because we tended to be involved in wrestling matches with the patients (inmates) on a daily basis. This hospital was very aggressively involved in what was called adverse therapy and the staff actually outnumbered the inmates 180 or so to 85 or so. There was a price to pay for any little misbehavior and the confrontations were constant thus there were almost daily restraining incidents.
The Perimeter Officers tended to be older. some of them just did not care to work with inmates, but mostly they were just older and it was good they were not involved in the daily fights on the treatment units. Although there was an undercurrent of slight distrust between the two groups of officers, everybody got along remarkably well and were pretty interchangeable. If there was drama on the unit all you had to do was hit a help button and everyone who was not doing something dropped what they were doing and headed for the trouble spot as fast as they could. there would be five people to help in thirty seconds and twenty in a couple of minutes. Even the nurses and social workers would help it was an impressive thing to see. Anyway, both treatment and perimeter people considered themselves Superior to each other in a good natured sort of way. They could work together very well.
Management was aware of this undercurrent however, and on occasion a Treatment Officer would be punished by transferring him (there were no women officers at the time) to the perimeter unit, or transferring perimeter officers to treatment. both groups usually took it as a negative though there always was a good deal of moving around from unit to unit on a day to day basis as people would call in sick or be on vacation, or something. These little exiles from treatment to perimeter or the other way around would typically last a few weeks and when management felt that the officer involved had been sufficiently chastised he was usually transferred back to his original post. One just endured and kept your mouth shut and you did not have to politic much as there was always an innocent party involved who did not want the transfer any More than you did and would do the politicking for you. It was just better to kick back and be philosophic about it, treat it like a little vacation from wrestling with the patients.
It was during a little exile to Perimeter, I do not even recall the reason why probably late again, that I had a very interesting night in the Admin control center, the center that controlled the main interlock into the prison. This was a busy post on the day shift, but this was soul destroying and boring place for a young man on the 4 to 12 shift. sometimes there would be nothing to do for hours that would just drag by. There really was nothing but conversation with your partner, on this night my partner was one Clerance Johnson, an older gentleman whom I knew nothing about other than the fact that his wife was a cook in the kitchen. This night turned out to be a night of small revelations and all from the unlikely Officer Johnson.
I must digress a bit. I had returned from a road trip and was passing through my home town, taking the opportunity to drive around, my boyhood home, the high school and I shagged the drag. After completing a circuit of Central avenue I parked in front of the local newspaper office where my mother had worked. I got out of my car and took a drink from a water fountain just outside the court house and under the watchful eye of a statue of Judge Kenyon. My Father would tell me not to drink from this fountain, he told me that all the old Democrats would spit in this fountain and it was not safe. He was kidding, of course, and I knew this even when I was five. Anyway I took a drink and sat on one of the wooden benches that surrounded the fountain. It was a place I had been many times and I just sort of gazed around at the area and how it had changed in the years since I been there. I noticed a markee over the sidewalk of what had been Gate's Department Store. It was about 15 feet off the sidewalk. How can this be, I thought. When I was four or five I saw a man walk under that markee and he had to bend and stoop to walk under it. I had a vivid memory of seeing this, but how can that be, nobody was ever that tall? I pondered this a few moments and could not reconcile this in my mind, then I forgot about it and drove on home.
So There I was sitting in Admin control with Clerance Johnson who was two generations ahead of me and I was bored out of my head. I made a couple of attempts at casual conversation to no avail, Clerance was not a talkative guy. Finally, I started talking about being in Fort Dodge a couple of days ago and for some reason the man walking under the canopy popped into my head and I made mention of my puzzlement over it. That broke the ice as it turned Clerance was from the town of Stratford, just outside of Fort Dodge. He threw his head back and laughed.
"You saw what you saw," he chortled.
He went on to explain that Fort Dodge was home to several retired circus people including an extremely tall old black man who had worked for Ringling Brothers and was billed as the Tallest man in the World." He was not the tallest man or 15 feet tall, he did dress in western fashion and had a very tall and exaggerated 10-gallon hat. He also wore lifts in his cowboy boots, almost stilts and this accounted for the stalking gate I remembered as he stooped to get under that canopy. I had not remembered he was black as this just does not mean anything to a four or five year old.
Anyway this broke the ice with Clerance in we talked away until the next count. I must digress again, just a little bit. When my Sister and I were very young our parents would visit "shirttail cousins" in the area of our hometown. Our Parents were both from Kansas so we didn't have a lot of relatives in the area. Our family would take Sunday outings to see the Kinsey's on their farm (see watercolors of Kinsey farm by Doris Wood in an earlier blog), the Dutchers on two farms near a place called McGuire Bend and Aunt Jenny in Dayton. I remember I liked going to Aunt Jenny's she got all three networks on her television I recall seeing Elvis on Ed Sullivan at Aunt Jenny's. My Sister and I were told never to mention the Kinseys To the Dutchers or the Dutchers to the Kinseys. I never knew why, but years later I learned why. Aunt Jenny, a very old woman had been married to a legendary guy named Uncle Charlie Hinman who weighed in between 400 and 500 pounds. My father also weighed around 400 pounds. They both had high cheekbones a dark complexion and strait coal black hair. Every time we would visit one of these families somebody would say, "Max your the spitting image of Uncle Charlie." (Max was my Father's middle name and he hated it, but they all called him Max. I never knew why) They would all reminisce about Uncle Charlie and one of the things they would talk about was how much he liked to run. His farm was near a coal minning town called Hardscrabble that was a ghostown when I was a kid and probably no longer exists at all today. Anyway, Charlie's mailbox was a mile from his farmhouse and he would run downhill to get the mail and uphill back. They told us how he would outrun a horse at the County Fair every year. I do not remember if I believed that or not, I was a kid and not paying that much attention. Oh I almost forgot to mention why My Sister and I could not mention these people when at their respective farms. I learned years later that Helen Kinsey was actually Aunt Jenny Hinman's daughter. She had been married to Snoozer Dutcher and apparently it was not a happy marriage. One day a friend of Snoozer's came to see him and and was told by Helen that he was out in the barn, probably dead. When the visitor went down to the barn and sure enough, he had shot himself. Not everybody believed he killed himelf and thought Helen had done him in. This included Helen's Mother, Aunt Jenny. The two women had not been in the same room for over thirty years until the funeral of my Mother after she was killed in a automobile accident.
Well, back to Admin control and Clarence. He had played baseball with the Dutchers when he was a boy and knew all about Snoozer. I asked him about the unlikely County Fair horse story again he laughed and told me it was true. He explained that it was more of a trick. These were not thoroughbreds or even riding horses, they were plow horses or working plugs. Charlie would run the horse would run and get off to a pretty big lead. The trick is to keep going gradually the horse tires, anybody reading this would eventually catch up and overtake a Percheron. It seems in some ways humans are indeed faster than horses. It was only the novelty of seeing a fat man running against a horse that made this an event at the fair for at least a few years. I have since read that the Aztec runners were about a fast as the pony express. I can't attest to the absolute accuracy of all this as I was very young and not paying much attention, but you can't just make this stuff up.
I did learn on that night that sometimes old folks are good resources and you never know who you are sitting next to unless you talk to them.
*all the people I write about in the above are long dead
*the institution I write about does not exist as it did over thirty years ago, I am giving nothing away. Though back in the day of Aversive Therapy there were almost daily scuffles, in the 17 years I worked there I never observed an act of deliberate cruelty.
*I really do not Know why Fort Dodge was such a popular place for circus people to retire. The community was and remains richer for it. Google Karl L. King, it's worth the surf. My Mother played Flute and piccolo in his band for a time. No music has stirred me more than The Fort Dodge Municipal Band's rendition of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" in the Olson Park Band Shell.
