Except for that memory and other general recollections of him as a gloomy, unwelcome presence at our house, my memory bank of Ronnie as a boy is empty. It was only through my conversations with him, decades later, that I filled in the blanks.
When Mom and Daddy took us anywhere in the farm pickup, I, the little princess, rode up front with them. Ronnie rode in back. He said I was a mean little shit to him. Deep in my mind is a filmy recollection of sticking my tongue out at him. He had to have been jealous and resentful, and how he acted that out toward me, I don’t know. I still sleep with my hands protecting my throat, and for no reason I know, I imagine that somebody’s peering in the window at me. I fear waking up to find an intruder by my bed. Ronnie told me that he spied on other people in Keswick. Why wouldn’t he have spied on my cozy life as a child basking in the adoration he’d once had from Polly and Roy?
Daddy told me that Ronnie’s and Mom’s personalities clashed and that Ronnie was rebellious. My folks were stumped as to what to do. When he was twelve and I was two, they enrolled him at Miller School, then a private boarding school for poor white boys in the Blue Ridge Mountains twenty-five miles from Keswick. It was a cross between an orphanage and a reformatory. For Ronnie, it was Boys’ Home all over again—mandatory farm labor, rigorous academics, vocational training, this time with a more military regimen. In an undated photo taken by our front porch, Ronnie wears a grayish-blue wool cadet-style uniform with black stripes running down the sides of his pants and on his jacket.
At the annual Miller School reunion in June 2015, I learned that Ronnie’s nickname was Slim Idaho. Classmates couldn’t remember why the “Idaho.” (Did Ronnie like potatoes?) But Ronnie called himself Slim for the rest of his life. Right before their picnic that day, in the shadow of the brick buildings where Ronnie labored and studied, the sweet old alums of Miller School christened me Sister Slim.
Except for two pairs of bibbed overalls issued each year, the boys produced their own necessities. They even bent the rails of their iron bed frames over the anvils in the school’s forge. On the school’s fifteen-hundred-acre farm, they milked the cows, picked the lima beans, shucked the corn, baked the bread.
Ronnie and the other boys slept in the unheated top-floor dormitories of Old Main, the Victorian building that’s still the heart of the school. When it snowed, the boys were forced to clamber out the windows to the high roof and sweep it clean to prevent leaks when it melted. The alums said the roof was slick, and it’s a wonder none of them fell off. As temperatures dipped, the school issued each boy three blankets—one in October, one in November, one in December. A glass of water left in the dorm froze overnight.
Each boy’s first year, he was declared a New Boy and forced to submit to the wishes of all who’d been there longer, the Old Boys. Ronnie shined their shoes, brought them water, and absorbed without lip the punches to his arms that any Old Boy might throw in a hallway. If he whined, they’d punch again, harder.
I asked Ronnie’s classmates how he reacted to this Lord of the Flies hierarchy. How aggressively did he lord it over the next wave of New Boys when he had his chance during his second year? They didn’t recall, yet one of them did offer this: “If I remember right, he kept to himself. Some guys just didn’t fit in.”
At first, Ronnie bought into Miller School’s promise that if he behaved himself, he’d be rewarded with a decent job after graduation. Less cooperative boys warned him that the school was a crock. “They were right,” Ronnie told me. “It turned them into professional shoeshine boys.” Actually, quite a few of his classmates became school principals, career military men, construction contractors, and well-respected businessmen.
In the spring of 1949, the school’s superintendent expelled thirteen-year-old Ronnie, then in the eighth grade. The record says only that Ronnie had shown a “disregard for rules.” Alums said that the superintendent was stern. They remembered the rubber paddle he flayed on their rear ends and the patterns its cut-out holes left in their hides.
Ronnie came back home to Bridlespur that spring but rarely approached our house, mostly sleeping in the barn. He went to work as a bag boy at the A&P grocery in Charlottesville, then as a caddy at Farmington Country Club in town. He set up an account at Morris’ Store at Keswick, where he bought potted meat, Vienna sausages, saltines, and when golf tips were good, strawberry ripple ice cream.
Ronnie insisted to me that our mother didn’t want him at our house and that she denied him food. I don’t know the truth about that, but I have no recollection of him eating with us or sleeping in the house, although he must have slept inside before I was born and when I was too young to remember. After his stint in the barn, early in his teens, he and friends from nearby farms, including preteen Buddy McIntyre, built a two-story log cabin up on the mountain for him to sleep in.
Daddy helped with construction of the pine-log hut. He contributed long barked slabs from trees he milled for fence boards, and he joined the young guys in nailing the steep roof together. The cabin was only eight by ten feet but tall enough that Ronnie, already six feet of his eventual six foot four, could stand up straight even on the second floor. With its steep roof, it looked more like a chapel than a house.
The cabin sat near the property line between Bridlespur and the nineteenth-century estate next door, Ben Coolyn, Scottish for “breezy mountain.” Charlie Hallock and his family moved into Ben Coolyn’s manor house on Charlie’s eleventh birthday in 1950. Ronnie, then fourteen, was a wonder to Charlie and his three brothers. He was the rare kid who answered to no adult. Charlie didn’t learn until years later who Ronnie really was.
A free agent, irreverent, Ronnie came and went as he pleased. He provided the Hallock boys with their first cigarettes and soft-core porn called blue books—pulp magazines featuring racy pictures, stories of derring-do, and science fiction.
Ronnie roamed Keswick like an undercover agent. He crept around the houses and peered in at the rich people in their dining rooms and in their bedrooms. For all its high-class charm, Keswick, to Ronnie, was a vulgar, craven place.
With all his prowling and peering, he was tweaking the monster’s tail. Keswick’s servant class customarily looked the other way at wild behavior by the rich, but here was Ronnie trespassing on Keswick’s most precious commodity: the freedom of the elite to do as they pleased, safe from prying eyes.
Ronnie had been stealing food from the estates for years. From his mountain refuge, he could wander an array of bountiful farms from their unprotected back acres. They were his buffet. He sampled fresh food from gardens, orchards, meat houses, and kitchens. With pride, Ronnie bragged to me how he pilfered figs, grapes, and peaches. He itemized, with the gusto of a gourmand, his early scores as a hungry boy: a head of cabbage, a jar of homegrown fruit, a pint of preserves, and cartons of frozen peaches. He broke into smokehouses, sliced meat off the hanging hams, and cooked it over an open fire.
The kitchen at Ben Coolyn was Ronnie’s greatest temptation. The Hallock boys occasionally spirited him into their house against the wishes of their parents. Ronnie knew that the boys’ mother kept her pantry fully stocked for her sons. In the middle of the night, Ronnie would unscrew the window screen in the Hallocks’ kitchen and climb inside. His most cherished booty was two angel food cakes. He’d fumble around in the darkness for canned goods. Often he’d get back to his campfire and curse his rotten luck that he’d bagged only cans of tomato paste, unpalatable even to a starving boy. The Hallocks came to expect Ronnie’s food burglaries, one of them told me. “Something would be missing, and we’d say, ‘That was probably Ronnie.’”
By the early fifties, when I was an oblivious first grader and Ronnie was sixteen, he was ramping up his thievery. Ronnie admitted to me later that he stole a sword, a gun, and a woman’s purse containing forty dollars.
On the other side of Ben Coolyn, middle-aged Leon Sebring Dure Jr. had moved into East Belmont Farm, an expansive estate with a Federal-style house built early in the nineteenth cen
tury. Dure, former White House correspondent for the Washington Post and managing editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, would soon become a key player in Virginia white leaders’ search for a way around court-mandated school desegregation. Dure invented “freedom of choice” as a way to keep most schools racially exclusive. Under his plan, white families received state grants for their children to attend all-white private schools. His system was struck down by federal courts in the late sixties.
When Ronnie filched weapons from East Belmont, he would learn for himself that Leon Dure was not a man to be toyed with. Ronnie hid one of Dure’s .22 rifles in a hay bale on another farm. A farmer discovered it when he went to feed his cows. I remember Mr. Dure—all rich people were “Mr.” or “Mrs.” to us—and he was an austere, formidable figure. He and the other powerful men and women of Keswick began to compare their notes on Ronnie Overstreet. They’d all been had by this renegade boy. They vowed to rein him in, and Mom and Daddy were targets too.
* * *
IN THE FALL of 1952, Leon Dure and his wife convened a summit of Keswick landowners fed up with Ronnie’s intrusions. They called in county sheriff’s deputies and summoned Mom to the library at the McIntyres’ house, where New Yorker magazines lay askew on the coffee table and horse show ribbons adorned the pine-paneled walls. Buddy McIntyre Sr. sat behind his desk. The Dures and other neighbors sat on the oxblood leather sofa and chairs.
Before Ronnie’s nocturnal prowling, these estate owners had never felt the need to lock their doors. Now, for the first time, they were locking them, and they didn’t like it. They told Mom that she’d better do something about Ronnie, or else. She took it to mean that she, Daddy, Ronnie, and I would be kicked off the farm. For Daddy to lose his job and our home would throw us into peril just as we were getting established—and it all would be because Mom gave birth to that illegitimate kid way back when. Years later, she would remember her humiliation that day. “Those old buzzards,” she said of the men, and perhaps women too, who called her on the carpet. Left to choose between her first child and her new family—Daddy and me—she chose us. In some sense, she had already chosen by leaving Ronnie to fend for himself.
I don’t know where I was when she faced that day’s ultimatum. For decades I had no clue what went down. I was seven years old. It was a Saturday. My folks must have given me strict orders to stay in the house, or else they sent me to somebody else’s house, which was a rarity.
I don’t know if my parents tricked Ronnie into being captured, but if they did, he would have smelled a rat. At least three deputies were present. Knowing what I do now about Ronnie’s lifelong defiance of authority figures, I doubt he calmly turned himself in. I imagine that his long legs carried him across the fields and into the woods, and when they caught him, that he fought like a wildcat.
He was seventeen years old, already six foot two, and underweight at 128 pounds. Ronnie told me he was jammed between two deputies in the back of a squad car as they roared out of Bridlespur’s farm road, headed for the highway. Destination: Western State Hospital, a notorious mental institution in Staunton, forty miles west of Charlottesville.
* * *
I DON’T KNOW who suggested Ronnie go there. Mom and Daddy, they both told me later, believed a mental hospital was a better place for him than a home for delinquents, where Ronnie would fall in with other bad boys. They weren’t sure what to do. But they were certain about one thing: They had to obey the farm owners’ orders to stop his stealing.
Since opening as the Western State Lunatic Asylum in 1828, the sprawling hospital was known throughout Virginia as a dismal, punishing place. Whenever I or any of my kid friends acted up, our mothers were sure to warn, “You’d better watch out or they’ll send you to Staunton.” Ronnie must have heard it too. Just like me, he never thought it would actually happen.
For most of the first half of the twentieth century, Western State was run by Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, one of the nation’s most maniacal eugenicists. In 1947, when he retired at age eighty, he was still urging Virginia to quadruple its sterilizations of sick, poor, and socially disfavored people. He himself claimed to have personally sterilized six hundred men.
Ronnie assured me that he wasn’t sterilized at Western State, and his name does not appear on the Virginia Hospital Board’s list of individuals compelled to be sterilized during the period he was there.
In 2009, I filed a request for Ronnie’s records at Western State. It had been so long since he was there and that institution had changed so much, I doubted those records still existed. A few weeks later, I found a large envelope in my mailbox, return address: Western State Hospital. I took it to a quiet place in my house and opened it. Inside I found twenty-six heartbreaking pages that brought to life the drama that was playing out at home when I was too young to understand.
It was October 4, 1952, when the deputies brought Ronnie to Western State. Documents completed during his first days there threw many preliminary diagnoses at him. They stated that he was mentally ill—and mentally retarded—and that he suffered from delusions of persecution. A doctor examined him at five thirty that evening. Ronnie had a watch and thirty-five cents in his pocket. A social worker summed up his recent history: “Home environment good. Resents being corrected by mother. Threatens to injure mother by force. Patient wanders, threatens others and steals guns.”
The most disturbing pages for me were that social worker’s notes from October 22, 1952, eighteen days after Ronnie’s arrival, when my parents went in for a visit—I must have been left with friends of theirs. The pain of all the parties, even my own, is vivid. It was difficult to read my mother’s self-serving account of Ronnie’s behavior.
Patient’s mother and step-father came to the office today as requested for a history interview. Mrs. Bishop was a large, young appearing woman, neatly but cheaply dressed. She and Mr. Bishop seemed about the same age. They were pleasant and cooperative, answered questions readily and gave some spontaneous information. Mrs. Bishop expressed a desire to help the patient in any way she could, but showed little real warmth when speaking of him. Her husband came to the patient’s defense several times with the remark that several accusations had not been proven against the boy.
Mom, then thirty-six, told the social worker that from early childhood on, Ronnie had a “very high temper.” She noted also that he’d had an asthma attack the night before he was picked up on the farm and brought to the hospital. The social worker continued:
His half sister, age seven, seemed to like him although he would frighten her at times. He has for the last year threatened his mother, called her names, drawn pictures in which he would be shooting or stabbing her. He stole various articles in the community—axes, guns, knives and liquor, and the sheriff warned them that something would have to be done. Informants refused to permit him to bring stolen articles into the house, so he hid them in a cabin he and some boys built in the woods. He frequently wore a long dagger in his belt.
Recently Mrs. Bishop has been very much afraid of the patient. He has threatened her many times, but has not actually tried to hurt her physically. However, informants had no control over him. He stayed out the better part of the night. Often, when he came in in the early morning hours, his eyes would look “glassey” [sic] and his mother believes he was either drinking or taking dope. She has seen him drink on only one occasion, but empty whiskey bottles have been found in his room.
As far as it is known, patient has never actually had a date. Last year he went to a neighbor’s house nearly every night, possibly to see the neighbor’s daughter. The daughter was about 25 years old. The neighbor asked patient not to come so often, since the daughter had other boy friends. Shortly after this, patient let all of the air out of the neighbor’s tires and it is reported that he damaged other property around her home. He reads a number of “sexy” magazines.
Patient is very particular to keep his face and hands clean, to wear a clean shirt, shine his shoes and comb his hair. H
owever, he refused to take a bath and seldom has his hair cut.
In a separate interview, Ronnie had his say. He asserted that Mom and Daddy had rejected him and made him feel unwanted. They gave all their attention to me and wouldn’t even help him with schoolwork. They treated him like a baby. Though Ronnie admitted to me later that he stole at least one gun, he denied it when questioned at the hospital. He acknowledged that he had few friends. “There’s just a bunch of rich boys at Keswick where I live. I’ve always stayed more or less to myself.”
During a mental test, when Ronnie failed to name four types of fish, his interviewer wrote that he exploded: “Jesus Christ, much as I fish and I can’t think of the names of them.”
A psychologist observed marked feelings of inferiority in Ronnie, who made a reference to “someone dumb like me.” She found his references to rich Keswick boys “wistful” and noted that his ambition was to attend night school and to get an “important” office job. She found his responses to her questions normal, although she said, “Anxiety and anger, sometimes well concealed, seemed to be the predominant reactions.” She came to the conclusion that he was of normal intelligence.
Three weeks after his arrival, Western State began administering electroshock treatments to Ronnie. I still don’t know why. In all, he would undergo at least five of them in less than a month. Because Ronnie was still a minor, I assume Mom gave her consent, although no such permission was mentioned in his records.
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