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NY Times, July 31 2014
From Schoolhouse, to Symbol of Servitude, to Dust
by Dan Barry
Go to
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/us/from-schoolhouse-to-symbol-of-servitude-to-dust.html
to play 36 minute video on "The Men of Atalissa"
ATALISSA, Iowa — The old schoolhouse on the hill had announced the farm
town of Atalissa to the Iowa flatness for more than a century. But a
couple of weeks ago, the prehistoric claw of a John Deere excavator took
its first swipe, and soon the building existed only in the landscape of
memory.
It was just bricks and mortar in the heartland, and yet also a rare
landmark of conflicted emotions. In its final years, the schoolhouse had
devolved into a squalid dormitory for dozens of Texas men with
intellectual disabilities who spent decades here, eviscerating turkeys
for exploitative wages at a nearby plant, enduring abuse, growing old.
The turquoise schoolhouse came to represent the men’s plight and figured
in various news accounts. It appeared in a front-page photograph in The
New York Times on March 9, as well as in an online documentary, to
illustrate a detailed “This Land” report about the case.
While many in this town of 300 simply thought that the schoolhouse had
outlived its usefulness, a few did not want their horizon darkened by
this reminder of unsettling things. It had to go.
Carol O’Neill, a member of the Atalissa City Council, said that the
empty building had fallen into an almost enticing disrepair. “And you
know kids,” she said. “They’ll say, ‘Let’s go see if it’s haunted.’ ”
So grunting machines have been smoothing out the hilltop while sighing
trucks cart off the telltale debris, including old mattresses, stray
belongings and chunks of wall painted that odd turquoise.
For generations after its construction in 1911, the building on the hill
was as much a community center as a schoolhouse. Here, the boys’ and
girls’ basketball teams earned the second-place trophies now on display
in the volunteer firehouse. Here, townspeople watched a production of
the 1923 play “Betty, ‘The Girl o’ My Heart’ ” and listened as the Class
of 1945’s graduation speaker expounded on the “highways of the mind.”
Here, graduating classes might have numbered 10, or they might have
numbered one. And the same local names were always read out: Spilger,
and Blick, and McKillip.
When the last class graduated in 1957, the building was left with little
purpose — until 1974, when the town rented it, cheap, to a Texas company
called Henry’s Turkey Service. Soon, the out-of-towners had converted it
into housing for dozens of men with intellectual disabilities, most of
them recruited from Texas institutions.
The men worked long days at a turkey-processing plant, receiving just
$65 a month in pay after deductions for room, board and occasional
outings. But they spent their nights and weekends here, watching
television in the gymnasium, sharing bedrooms carved from classrooms,
and entertaining townspeople invited up for Christmas parties and barbecues.
The men became familiar residents of Atalissa, seen at church services,
at community suppers and at the local bars, where they danced the Texas
two-step. “I don’t think there’s a one of them that I didn’t dance
with,” Ms. O’Neill said.
Elsewhere in the country, the rights of people with disabilities were
being asserted and exercised — but not in Atalissa, where, for decades,
these men continued to collect just $65 a month and were denied
“privileges” such as watching television if they were thought not to be
working hard enough.
Theirs was a “Groundhog Day” existence, kept static by the general
failure of state officials to act on tips about things amiss. Often
disconnected from their families back in Texas, they lived in forced
segregation, forbidden in the later years even to own cellphones.
As the years passed, the schoolhouse became off-limits to outsiders. It
slipped into squalor: its windows boarded up, its boiler broken down,
its environment one of neglect and abuse.
Here, according to interviews and public records, a man ran away during
a January snowstorm in 1987. His body was found in a nearby field months
later, during the spring thaw.
Here, the roach infestation was so bad that they could be heard within
the walls; so bad that the men routinely covered their food with their
hands. Here, men like Willie Levi were kicked and made to carry weights
as punishment, and a man named Tommy Johnson was handcuffed to his bed
overnight to keep him from wandering.
Finally, in February 2009, a sister of one of the men learned that he
had saved only $80 after 30 years of toil. Outraged, she contacted a
reporter at The Des Moines Register, whose inquiries spurred belated
state action.
Social workers and law-enforcement officials descended on the
schoolhouse to find 21 vulnerable men living in uninhabitable conditions
and needing medical, dental and psychological attention. They were
evacuated, never to return.
The revelations prompted various reforms and several civil judgments
against Henry’s Turkey Service, including the largest jury verdict in
the history of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although the
$240 million judgment was later reduced to about $1.7 million, the case
has since become a touchstone for disability rights advocates.
Many of the men, but not all, are now living the lives long denied them,
though they have yet to receive any of the money they are owed. A dozen
of them live as a part of, and not apart from, their community in
Waterloo, 100 miles northwest of Atalissa.
Yet the ghostly building continued to loom above the town as a symbol of
— something. Of schoolhouse days, perhaps, or of good times with the men
affectionately called “the boys.” Or maybe of things not always being as
they seem.
But it had to go. Dennis Hepker, a former mayor, strongly advocated
demolition. This year, he told The Times that people were still coming
to take pictures and ask questions.
“Out of sight, out of mind, maybe,” he said.
After putting the job out to bid, the town hired Travis Perry, a general
contractor and child of Atalissa, to take down the building. Standing a
few yards from where a front-end loader was eating at the foundation,
Mr. Perry said that sure, he knew the men — everyone did.
The excavator clawed away, trucks pulled in and out, and flies teemed.
Here, in the piles, was an old dartboard; a broken television remote;
pieces of walls painted bright reds, greens and yellows.
Mr. Perry said that salvageable items, including the metal roof, most of
the copper pipes and the front gate, had been taken even before the
demolition began. And, every now and then, someone asks for a souvenir.
“People are coming up and saying, ‘Hey, mind if I take a brick?’ ” the
demolition man said, his face masked in schoolhouse dust. “I don’t mind,
because once this goes, it’ll be gone forever.”
Up in Waterloo, though, several of the men who once lived in the
schoolhouse have no desire for mementos. One of them, Mr. Levi, now 67,
spoke for many of his former housemates as he sat in a Burger King, far
from Atalissa.
“I’m glad,” he said, his beard now white. “I don’t want to see it no more.”
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