Howard: Orchard Place’s First Admission

Stability. Love. Home. Family. Four necessities, all missing from the young life of Howard Deever. Again and again, he felt the wrenching pain of their loss. Living in 15 places in six years, his life was wrought with emptiness and a heart that ached so badly he thought it would never mend.

Howard Deever CAP

Howard Deever (fifth from left) stands with Civil Air Patrol cadets at Offutt Air Force Base in Sarpy County, Nebraska. His son Daniel (far left) is the Cadet Deputy Commander.

On February 12, 1965, 12-year-old Howard arrived at Orchard Place, the first admission to the fledging psychiatric facility on Des Moines’ southwest side. Howard’s father — his hero — had died several years earlier in an automobile accident. The oldest of five children, Howard’s mother secured the blessings of a priest to put young Howard out of her home. Howard was guilty of occasionally playing hookey from school and other juvenile mischief, and his mother wanted him gone. And so he was. To save face, she said that Howard had been sent away to attend a private boarding school.

In reality, Howard had been sent to live with friends of hers in Wisconsin, a move that he despised. He ran away and then was sent to a Franciscan orphanage in Dubuque. In dismay, Howard ran away again, and again. He terribly missed his brother and sisters and didn’t understand why his mother didn’t love him.

Today, Howard has long since accepted the rejection of his mother. From a wealthy background, she came to loathe his dad, who despite his business success could never measure up to her expectations. She was ashamed of him and ridiculed him repeatedly in front of Howard and his siblings. He couldn’t do anything right. Howard adored his dad. He had been an Air Force pilot in WWII, later flew jets in the Iowa Air Guard, and Howard dreamt of doing the same. His death devastated the son who was not yet 11 years old.

“I’ll always remember Orchard Place as a haven in an unstable sea of adolescent life.” —Howard Deever, First Orchard Place resident

From the Franciscan orphanage Howard was sent by Catholic Charities to the University of Iowa Children’s Psychiatric Hospital for a 90-day evaluation. The evaluation came back with a simple finding: all Howard needed was love and discipline. He had neither. He lost them in the death of his father and the rejection of his mother. And so it was with little hope in his heart that Howard arrived at Orchard Place on that cold winter day. But surprisingly, it was unlike anywhere he’d ever been.

“Orchard Place was a refuge. When a child experiences one unstable situation after another, anything that appears to offer emotional stability is a great refuge. Orchard Place was just that. The staff was kind and it was obvious they loved us. They didn’t take our juvenile crap and we couldn’t manipulate them. They gave us a sense of security. They cared about us as people. We weren’t viewed as specimens, some type of lab rats like we were in other places.”

At Orchard Place Howard quickly became fond of Grant Jordan, the activity director assigned to work with the boys. If they misbehaved Grant, a former “All Marine” boxing champ, would take them to the basement where they boxed out their frustrations. He introduced them to classical music, painting and pottery, and taught them that cultural activities were not unmanly. He took them out to the yet-to-be-developed Saylorville area to tear down abandoned houses and barns with sledge hammers. It was hard work, but the boys immensely looked forward to these treks, and others for things like camping or river rafting. It got their aggressions out and it was great just being boys!

At that time, the Orchard Place program was quite different from today. The organization was transitioning to a psychiatric facility, and in its early days few of the children had severe mental health issues. They were referred to Orchard Place by families and different sources that were required to participate in their care. If parents were considered “unredeemable” kids were sent by their referring agency to foster homes upon discharge. Many of the youth admitted were belligerent, mischevious and wrapped up in the growing chaos of the 1960s. Most of them attended Kurtz Junior High across the street. They were often bullied and called names for living at Orchard Place and not having a “real” home. Fights would erupt.

A typical day included going to school, doing homework, eating together and regularly meeting with Grant for individual time that meant the world to Howard. “Everywhere I’ve been, even in the worst of situations, there’s always been one person who has connected with me and loved me. I’ve found this true in life so many times. Grant Jordan was that person at Orchard Place. He was an amazing guy.”

After a year and a half Howard was discharged to a foster home in Des Moines. At the time, it was felt that there was less stigma living in a foster home than at institutions such as Orchard Place. “It was in a more real sense a home. You weren’t quite as much an oddball. You were more like the rest of the kids with parents, even though they weren’t your own.”

His first foster home after Orchard Place proved to be yet another nightmare. His foster mother was mentally ill and eventually committed violent suicide. Howard’s caseworker moved him to a “foster farm,” a home with four foster children near Roosevelt High School. Howard’s new foster mom was verbally abusive and after six months, he ran away again.

One bright spot in his life at the time was Babe Bisignano, a renowned Des Moines restaurateur whom Howard met while hitchhiking downtown. He told Babe he didn’t have any money and really wanted a job. Although “legally” too young for restaurant work, Howard was hired by Babe to bus tables at $1.25 an hour. He paid him in cash. When the restaurant closed on Saturday nights the waitresses would pool their tip money and give Howard $10. He felt rich. He could buy his own clothes and dress like the other kids. And he had spare change in his pocket to boot.

Howard ended up in Eldora Training School. He vividly recalls being sent to solitary confinement for three days for an infraction of the rules. He was put in an eight-by-ten-foot cell and left there with only his underwear and a blanket for clothing. A UNI social work class toured the facility, a tour which included the full class gawking at an embarrassed and humiliated Howard in his underwear. He recalls the pain of that day 40 years ago as if it were yesterday. He wonders what the students learned from his humiliation.

In early 1969 Howard was given a choice: join the military or go to college. With the Vietnam war raging on, Howard chose college. He was offered a full scholarship in Journalism at the University of Iowa but wanted to go back home to Sioux City, so he enrolled at Briar Cliff College, majoring in Liberal Arts. Eventually, “by the grace of God,” Howard found a measure of normalcy in his life. He moved to Colorado, Oregon and then to Omaha where he lives today.

Howard and his wife, Kathryn, have four children, ages 17–22. He works as the risk manager for Hansen Mueller, an international grain commodities and distribution company. Life is good. His kids have excelled in school and in life. Howard’s volunteer service has included Scouting, working with cadets and serving as an Emergency Services Training Officer with the U.S. Civil Air Patrol.

A measure of adversity in his life has given Howard a keen sense of empathy and compassion for people who have been damaged. He unabashedly values family, stability, love, and home life with his wife and children, all the things he missed in his own young life. And while he did learn to fly light airplanes over 30 years ago, Howard self-effacingly says, “I still want to be a fighter pilot when I grow up!”

Jennifer Kramer’s Advice: “Don’t Give Up Hope”

Jennifer

By age 14 Jennifer had been hospitalized five times and made several suicide attempts. She cut and burned herself to distract from her internal pain. She burst a blood vessel in her eye from laxative-induced vomiting. Death had to be better than life. Life just didn’t seem worth the trouble.

Today, life is quite different for Jennifer Kramer. She’s a farm mother of four children. She helps to run the family’s sorghum business, the largest sorghum producer in the United States. She’s active in her church. And she mentors a child at Orchard Place…the place that gave her hope and life back to her.

Jennifer doesn’t know what triggered her depression or the long cycle of self-mutilation that nearly took her life. Her parents divorced when she was five. Her three siblings went to live with their dad and she stayed with her mother. Living in a small town, she was often alone as her mother commuted back and forth to her job in Des Moines. She did all right in school and had several friends. But she deeply hurt inside, and so she physically hurt herself to hide the mental pain.

After being hospitalized in an adult psychiatric unit and attempting suicide several times, Jennifer was finally referred to Orchard Place in January 1992. Even then, she tried to continue her cycle of cutting herself, often making multiple attempts in a single day. She remembers being under one-on-one surveillance after she tried to hurt herself with anything she could get her hands on, including staples, thumb tacks, glass, and paper clips.

Jennifer’s last attempt at suicide occurred in May 1992. She required stitches for the deep gouges she’d cut into her skin with glass from a picture frame. She hurt herself so badly that she thought she’d die. She vowed never to do it again. The counselors at Orchard Place gave her the skills and knowledge to succeed.

By January of 1993 Jennifer was able to go to school off campus. She enrolled at Lincoln High School, played on the golf team and graduated that spring. She returned home and lived with her parents temporarily. Soon after, Jennifer met John, her husband to be, at a church outing. They married in February 1996.

More than 15 years after her discharge from Orchard Place, Jennifer still has a coping skills chart that a counselor at Kenyon House developed to help her cope on a daily basis. “Every day of the month was listed on the chart. I checked off the number of urges I had to hurt myself each day, as well as the strength of that urge—weak, medium, strong, etc. I noted on the chart the coping skill I used to deal with each impulse and kept a daily record for about 4 months. The chart helped me to decide what coping options worked the best for me when I experienced different impulses to hurt myself. It’s fascinating to go back and review it and see the progress I made. I attribute a lot of my success to that simple chart. It was a life-saver.”

Today, Jennifer enjoys life. Her work with her family’s seven-generation sorghum business is fulfilling and rewarding. Its success garnered the attention of feature writers with Country Woman magazine last fall which published a story about Jennifer and the business. Jennifer golfs with one of her former counselors and speaks at staff training meetings at Orchard Place, helping new staff understand the self-hurting behaviors that consumed several years of her life. And recently Jennifer began mentoring a 15-year-old girl troubled with the same self-abuse issues that plagued her at that age.

Jennifer reflects on the year and a half she lived at Orchard Place Campus. “Orchard Place saved my life. Looking back, I’m glad I got the help I needed. I would’ve committed suicide either purposely or accidentally without it.” And her advice to the children of Orchard Place? “Tell the kids never to give up hope.”

Sean and David

A success story

David

David was a smart 13-year-old who came from difficult circumstances. Sean Hubner was a supervisor at Orchard Place’s PACE Juvenile Center. Who knew that their lives would intersect in a profound way at PACE, and David would not only find the help he needed to get his life on course but also would find a loving foster family?

David’s life was at a turning point in 2003. David’s family did not put much care or attention into his well-being, and David ended up living with a family friend who couldn’t parent him as bad habits such as drug use and poor academics escalated. David was basically homeless, earned poor grades and rarely attended school, and was into marijuana. David also had a lack of maturity, respect and responsibility, all things which would have led to more severe trouble in the future.

David was a child in need of assistance, and in 2003 the Iowa Department of Human Services (DHS) brought him to the attention of a PACE caseworker. David was in eighth grade at the time. PACE Juvenile Center often works with juvenile delinquents like David—angry kids from difficult family and social backgrounds. Many are juvenile delinquents handled by Juvenile Court; others have mental illnesses. Some, like David, are referred by the Iowa Department of Human Services. Whatever their path to PACE may be, these children receive the care and attention needed to put their lives back on the right course.

“Blanket effect”

Sean was the supervisor for David’s caseworker, and he was struck by David’s intelligence. “I knew he could be an excellent student and had smarts,” says Sean, “but he needed direction that his situation wasn’t providing.” Sean knew academic excellence and strong male role models would be the keys to David’s success. David related to male role models at PACE including Sean, John Spinks (Vice-President at PACE) and others. A “sense of belonging” helped David realize he could succeed at PACE.

David began to conform to the center’s rules and improve his grades and study habits. PACE staff also helped David resolve his past issues, including drug use and a disrespect to female authority figures. Sean says the plan was to “surround David with as much care as we could,” creating a “blanket effect” that gave David a chance to replace bad habits with good habits. David spent a year within the PACE program. During this time David’s family also received regular check-ups from PACE staff to help improve David’s family life.

David’s gifts emerge

David not only improved his grades and study habits, but he also learned he had a knack for computers, technology and engineering. While at Des Moines North High School, David attended engineering classes at Central Campus and designed three homes that are planned to be built in Des Moines in 2009. The Des Moines School Board commended him for his outstanding performance and David is now enrolled at Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa, with a bright future in computer engineering or another computer-related field.

Sean says David’s main goal right now is to graduate college, and his plans after school are not yet decided upon. Sean is convinced that David would not have graduated high school, let alone attended college, if PACE had not intervened. “He would have been moving from house to house, an outcast, continued using pot — college would not have been an option,” Sean says. “Another statistic on the street. Ended up in jail — or real trouble.”

“I took advantage of everything that was provided,” David says.

David becomes a part of Sean’s family

The DHS caseworker who initially brought David to PACE was also the person who recommended Sean be his foster father. Sean and his wife, Michon, had received their foster care license just a year before and he knew it would be a big undertaking, but he and David had developed a strong bond during David’s time at PACE. Sean and Michon were both excited to take David in, but it was also David’s decision too. It must have been an easy decision for David to make, because he accepted in just ten minutes and within three days he had moved into Sean and Michon’s home in Des Moines.

The transition was rough for David at first, but it has now been four years since he moved in with Sean and Michon and he calls them “Mom and Dad.” “When we hear that we know we did everything we could,” Sean says. Sean and Michon did not give up on David, and this made all the difference: once David understood he would not be abandoned and had a loving family much different than what he had, things turned around. Early on David never told Sean and Michon he loved them, but a couple years ago Michon was doing work around the house and David spontaneously hugged her and said he loved her. Before then David had not given Michon much respect so this was a major breakthrough. Even today David continues to strengthen his social and family bonds thanks to a stable family life at home.

Sean and Michon also have an adopted four-year-old son, Jake, and Jake and David are best friends. David has proven to be a great role model for Jake and the two watch out for one another. “David would lay down his life for him,” says Sean. The idea of Sean and Michon adopting David has been brought up, but David has decided against it for now.

Sean, Michon, and the staff at PACE have had a tremendous impact on David’s life. The care and support David got at PACE helped open his eyes to what is important: education, family, friendships and character. “You need education in this crazy world, set goals, reach limits, build relationships and don’t worry about abandonment,” says Sean. Sean and Michon often tell David they love him and are proud of his accomplishments, and David, with his typical sense of humor, replies, “I’m proud of you guys too!”