The matron of the old redbrick, slate-roofed dormitory where I was housed with 30 other boys sent me to the infirmary. I was put to bed for a week. No medical malady was found, so the nurse sent me back with a note. I took a peek at it on the way. It said in part that “what this boy needs is a lot of TLC.” I had no idea what this meant, but whatever the mysterious prescription, it was not filled, for life continued as before: strict. Hard. Regimented. Dispassionately fair.
The orphanage, which housed roughly 300 children from the ages of 3 to 18, existed on meager funds, and was run almost self-sufficiently on the strict Methodist principle that an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop. The matrons who oversaw the Baby Cottage and the eight boys’ and girls’ buildings were mainly kind Methodist widows with no formal training. The superintendent was a Methodist minister named the Rev. Albert Sydney Barnes, a towering silver-haired figure with a W. C. Fieldsian nose and a stem apocalyptic stance against the seductive snares of whisky, sex, dishonesty and sloth.
We arose at 6 a.m., ate breakfast (cornflakes or oatmeal) at 6:30, went to school at 7, to daily chapel at 10, to lunch (vegetables, milk and cornbread) at noon, to work at 1, to sports practice at 5, to supper (mostly peanut butter, molasses, milk and bread) at 6:30 p.m., to study hall at 7:30 and to bed at 9:30.
On the 200-acre orphanage farm out from Raleigh, we boys plowed mules, and planted, cultivated and harvested corn, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, greens and other vegetables. We milked cows, killed and butchered hogs, dug ditches, strung fences, shoveled manure, mowed and baled hay and excavated stumps. On the 60-acre campus, we raked leaves, hauled coal, stoked the furnaces and did maintenance. We swept and scrubbed our floors, made our beds and cleaned our toilets.
The girls washed and ironed clothes in the laundry and cooked and served the food in the dining hall. Overall, the overhead costs were very low.
The sexes were strictly segregated. Mr. Barnes lectured us boys frequently on the evils of masturbation, and patrolled the girls’ dorms at night with a big Eveready flashlight in search of would-be lotharios. “Old Man Barnes” occasionally administered paddlings for petty misdemeanors, but the ultimate threat hanging over our heads, for crimes of the flesh, was being “sent away” to the dreaded Jackson Training School, whose immense paddles were said to engrave JTS on one’s behind.
Underneath the adult governance, it was a “root, hog, or die” world among us boys. I was a shy, sensitive child of 8 at the beginning of my stay. The veteran boys derided me as “Pretty Boy” at first. An older, much bigger boy named Fatty Clark became MY persistent tormentor and bullied me constantly. But there was no appeal to the authorities for in our own code of honor, no crime was so serious as that of informing on anyone.
Still, I survived. There was no alternative. So I established my place, flourished, began to have fun, grew to adolescence, captained my baseball, basketball and football teams, became class president and, in youthful temerity, even kissed a girl before I left to join the navy at 17 just at the end of World War II. Later I went on to have a successful career as a journalist with a passion for fair play – and for the underdog.
Given this history, I naturally had a strong emotional reaction when Newt Gingrich – to angry objections from many – suggested that orphanages be reinvented. My instant, deeply felt reaction: I was skeptical of his motives, but I believed, as I thought about our national epidemic of abused and abandoned children, that his idea had much merit. Orphanages, properly and self-sufficiently run (like ours), with a little TLC thrown in, would be a good thing again.
Despite its shortcomings, the Methodist orphanage was a good place in which to grow up, given the alternatives, and a valuable incubator for adulthood and citizenship. It was strict and by necessity impersonal. But it was not darkly Dickensian, for in our playtime, after we adjusted, we happily climbed trees, swam the creeks naked, invented games, jerry-built toys, played sports, foraged nearby woods for wild plums and hickory nuts, shot rocks with homemade slingshots and made playful contests out of work. We walked with fierce pride and believed ourselves to be superior to the “town” boys.
Into adult life we carried from the orphanage many invaluable tools and lessons. We learned honesty, loyalty, self-discipline, self-sufficiency. We learned to take pride in working hard and doing well even the most menial jobs. We learned to keep our word. We learned fair play and how to work with others. We learned respect for our elders and for rules. We learned good manners, tolerance and generosity. We learned to take our medicine when we did wrong.
The results speak for themselves: of the 2,700 children who came and stayed during the eight decades that the orphanage existed as I knew it, only one, so far as I heard, went to prison. There was not a single unwed teenage mother. Though there is no official data, I know firsthand that the divorce rate is extremely low, as are alcoholism and addiction and joblessness.
The old orphanage as I knew it is no more. The farm has been sold, the campus buildings razed and replaced with condos. Instead, there is The Methodist Home for Children, which offers child and family treatment in community-based foster homes.
There’s an alumni reunion every Easter in a Raleigh hotel, and I go back, always with mixed memories of pleasure and pain. Like my “brothers and sisters,” I am much more grateful than not, because the orphanage gave me the home, the stability, the family and the tools for life that I could not otherwise have had.
PHOTO
