In the early spring of 1930, Dad bought a new Model A Ford. That summer, between my junior and senior high school years, we went to see Mom. When we got to the hospital at Warm Springs, we had to wait two hours to get to see her. They said she was busy. When we did get to see Mom she was not very talkative. Thinking back on it, she acted like she had been sedated or drugged. Anyway, it developed some years later that there was a big scandal about the Warm Springs mental health hospital. The upshot of it was that the management and some of the hierarchy in the state offices in Helena were in cahoots. They didn’t treat any of the patients to try and make them better. They made them work hard. This Warm Springs Hospital received from the state budget so many dollars per person–per inmate, as they called them–for the management and the operation of the place. The management was not interested in sending anyone home. They just kept on expanding. It also developed in the hearings that the management had a set of books which showed a lot of employees and personnel of all classes of labor that they were paying every month, year after year, to operate the place. In the hearings it developed that this was a false set of books and the people who were sent there were doing all the work. This, apparently, was why we couldn’t get to see Mom and why anyone who ever went to visit her always found her in a sort of a dazed state. They’d make you wait until they could dope her up and then no one would ask to take her home. Any how, after this scandal broke, Aunt Mayme Munker and Aunt Edna Krause went to Warm Springs and they got Mom out. This was in late spring of 1950.
Chapter 1.4 - Warm Springs (T1.05)
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