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.” _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
