In The Presence Of The Sacred: Of My Father and My Family, and Related Notes: Wherein I suggest that the misconduct of medical and administrative staff at the Arizona State Hospital insults the very life blood/heritage of its many patients

My mother, Dolores Sharon, passed away on my birthday in 2005, following a series of strokes and related complications, and my father, Jackson Reed, died in a single car accident in 1970.

I never knew my father well, my parents separated before I was 5 years old and I have no clear memories of him whatsoever, which is sad, because I know that he loved his children. On my father's side, I am half Chickasaw, and my father was born on the reservation in Oklahoma in 1924 to Jackson Reed, SR., and Jewell Maulsey Baker. Immediately following high school, he played triple A baseball for two years in the New York Yankee's farm program. Due to an issue with his throwing arm, he left professional ball and entered the United States Naval Academy, where he starred on the baseball team and once appeared in a photograph with Willy Mays following an historic game against Army.  He served in the navy for over 20 years, attaining the rank of Lt. Commander in a very rich and active career that included administrative duty in relation to the Amphibious Force Seventh Fleet/Expeditionary Strike Force early in the Viet Nam, command of several amphibious fleets, and extensive aircraft/pilot service, as follows:

• 1954 - CTF 76 participated in Passage to Freedom, the largest operation of its kind in history. Operation evacuated 310,000 people from communist-controlled North Vietnam to South Vietnam and carried 58,000 tons of cargo and humanitarian aid.
• 1965- Participated in amphibious landings, assaults and demonstrations off the eastern coast of the Republic of Vietnam. Also cleared mines off the Vietnamese coast toward the end of the conflict.

..... as well as assistant command of the USS Tallahatchie County, as follows:


- On 3 February, 1962 the TALLAHATCHIE COUNTY was redesignated AVB-2, with CMDR Courtland Babcock and LT CMDR Jack Pickens in command. She now had a complement of 265 and quarters for 180 men of an aircraft squadron. Her mission was to be able to beach anywhere that an airfield existed, unload her 14 mobile support vans, and be operational in 4 hours. The vans contained spare parts and equipment for weather forecasting, aircraft repairs, electronic repairs, and communications.

- On 15 May, 1962 TALLAHATCHIE COUNTY got underway for the Mediterranean and arrived at Naples, Italy, her new home port on 8 June 1962. One 25 June she relieved from duty the USS Alameda County AVB-1 (formerly USS LST-32) which was sold to the Italian navy was renamed ANTIO.

- During the next 17 months, she conducted advanced aviation base maneuvers at Souda Bay, Crete, and Cagliari, Sardinia. From 1 November to 15 December 1963, she made a 4800 mile cruise of the eastern Mediterranean in support of the naval Oceanographic Office.

- During September 1964, she participated in an advanced aviation base exercise in conjunction with NATO operation FALLEX. IN February 1965, the TALLAHATCHIE COUNTY was called upon to salvage a jet aircraft that had splashed into the waters off the coast of Libya. She then returned to Naples to prepare for her longest advance aviation base operation to that time. Patrol Squadron 24 operated from TALLAHATCHIE's advance base in Souda Bay from July through September while the runways at the Naval Air Facility, Sigonella, were being repaired.

- During the summer of 1967 the TALLAHATCHIE COUNTY underwent and overhaul at the Socieata Escercizio Bocini Napoletani and then returned to operation in support of the Sixth Fleet. 

- On 9 February, 1968 the TALLAHATCHIE COUNTY responded to an SOS form the Portuguese freighter DIAS which was sinking off the coast of Spain; and rescued her captain and crew of seven.

- TALLAHATCHIE COUNTY operated out of Naples until 15 January, 1970 when she was decommissioned and struck from the Navy list. She was sold for scrap to Contieri Navali Santa Maria, Genoa, in July 1970.

I also know that my father dealt with the effects of chronic depression in the latter part of his life, as well as alcoholism, and the only clear memory that I have of my him is from a day when I was taken to visit him in a sanitarium of some kind not long before his death; he had two gloves and a ball with him that day, which we tossed back and forth in a grassy area under the looming presence of that hospital.

            Live it, send it all the way
            to the woods, my father
            smelled leather and oil,
           Oklahoma summers;

            saw just that shade of light, those
           fern laden briar horizons
           with the odd colored weather
           of summer, thunder
           storming. Throw, son!

           Keep throwing,     
           you are going, now
           to play big league ball,
           no shadow of ours or theirs
           will suck you from the sun.
                                                                    (December 2010)

     

My mother was born in Peoria, Illinois, to first generation Irish and German immigrants; her parents, my grandmother Margaret Ann Mahoney, and my grandfather, Fritz Saurs, were the only extended family I really had for most of my childhood, but I recall a number of people, albeit vaguely, with respect for various other relations on both sides of my family. My mother raised me by herself from the year 1972, and struggled in her own right with alcoholism for many years, which had its detrimental impacts on me, particularly during my adolescence. But in time, she did acquire sobriety, and established a lucrative business that allowed her to retire in comfort. 

My parents married in 1946 or '47, and my oldest sister, Sharon, was born in 1949 in Pearl Harbor. My oldest brother, Reed, was born in 1951 in Naples, Italy, and my other brother, Calhoun, was born there, too, in 1954. These dates are not firm, I have never been 100% certain of my siblings birth dates, or the history of my parent's relationship; due to the fact that my oldest brother died in 1974, and that I have been estranged from the other two for many years, I have had to piece together this information. It is close enough.

I was born at Jackson Naval Air Base Oceana Hospital in 1961, and my family lived in Bermuda until I was 2 years old, or so; we later resided on Oceanfront Drive in Virginia Beach, VA. After my parents divorced, my mother and I settled in New Mexico. My oldest brother died shortly later of complications from a drug overdose. Alcohol, drugs, and related mental-emotional health issues play heavily into the history of my immediate family, as well as my own life, in general. It is fair to say that my depressive traits and alcoholic tendencies flow from both of my parents, as well as in terms of my early relationships with all three of my siblings. I never graduated high school, and had effectively home by the time I was 17. By the age 25, I had lost contact with both of my living siblings. I spent much of my time during my twenties skiing and racing bicycles, and generally carved out a reasonably satisfying lifestyle for myself, given my circumstances. In time, I found my way into college, where I attained good enough grades for a BA (1996, Magna Cum Laude, University of New Mexico), an MA (2000, University of Arizona), and a full ride scholarship to law school (2001-2003, UA). And although I stayed away from my mother for a number of years, we rekindled a reasonably healthy relationship in the last 20 years of her life, during which time to she was sober.

It genuinely angers me to know that I, the youngest child in my family, was abused at the hands of mental health providers at the Arizona State Hospital. I find this odd, the anger (because I am not, by nature, an angry person), but I believe I've identified where it comes from. My maternal grandmother, Margaret, volunteered for many years during the 1940s  and 1950s in Illinois hospital settings for the "mentally retarded" and "insane," and I know that many of things she witnessed at those hospitals greatly disturbed her. Her dedication turned slightly activist in her later years, when she became actively involved with mental health care reform in the state of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s; while I was not aware of any of this at the time, I had opportunities to hear some of her stories after my grandfather, Fritz, died in 1984, and she moved to live with my mother in New Mexico.

I am also aware that my own deep resentment towards abuse of authority and discrimination flows from my American Indian heritage and directly related feelings that arise through knowledge about my father, who had to cloak his Chickasaw identity in order to avoid racial discrimination when he was growing up. That he went to excel in all capacities of the expression in his own personal life pursuits despite the pitfalls of being an American Indian in a nation built upon racial conflict is evidence enough when I look inward to my own heart and soul in terms of trying understand why I have come to abhor the perpetrators of patient abuse at the Arizona State Hospital.  

My own anger at the notion that I became victimized by the malfeasant conduct of the doctors and nurses technicians at ASH, is selfish however, and narrow minded. Each and every patient at ASH is somebodies child, and so on, and I am not one of those who will have to spend out the greater years of my life there.

       How dare the administrators, doctors, nurses and technicians at the Arizona State Hospital abuse these children, these human beings! How dare the Arizona Department of Health Services condone these things! Where is the humanity in this? Who the hell are you people?

    
            Me.... This...
            Is not about me.
            This is about you.
            But it relates to me
            subjectively,
            and to every other one of us,
            we who came to you
            because we felt we could rely
            on you.

            I... This....
            I come from a long family line
            of high achievers,
            but I realize now,  today
            as though for the first time,
            that mental illness runs, too,
            so be it.

            You... This...
            is about you,
            all of you as dirty
            as a dead hobo's underwear,
            and you know it.

            You... This...
            I will burn you down,
            I intend to smoke you out, all of
           You... This... It is so large, it is...

            You wound up with
            the wrong patient,
            and you picked the wrong century
            to write shit on the wall,
            and you are not going to get away with it.
                                                                             (September 2011)

It is clear to me now, that beyond my basic need to do whatever I had to try and survive the abuse at ASH while I was hospitalized there by advocating for my own rights and protections, my willingness to maintain a dedication to addressing the wrongdoing at ASH has its roots in the history of my family, and I am actively engaged in directing whatever anger I have in relation to these things immediately upon the welfare of the patients still in ASH. For I know today that at least some/most of the abusive nurses, doctors and technicians I encountered are victimizing the patients at ASH even as I write. In thinking about the relative horrors that my grandmother must have witnessed in her time, I am reminded of the staff at ASH who sometimes commented to me about how much "better" things are today. I would hear this, knowing, too, that I was a witness and victim of wrongdoing that I know for a fact  is unlawful and inhumane in contemporary term. They seem to use that as an excuse, that things today are "better."

      Again: Anybody willing, or even interested in learning more about the conditions at ASH, please. All it takes is consideration of simple facts. The patients as the Arizona State Hospital need our help.

paoloreed@gmail.com