That didn’t happen, but a suitable alternative emerged. I was declared a “dependent child.” This is the category usually reserved for kids who are abused, malnourished, or otherwise not safe living at home. In my case, it seems like it was a question of money. My family could not have me at home, but they couldn’t afford to pay Mrs. McGraw’s rate, so the county declared me a dependent child, and that qualified me, or my family, for assistance. On May 24, 1961, my parents agreed to pay the county of Santa Clara $100 a month for my care. Since Mrs. McGraw was costing them at least $180 a month, that was a healthy reduction. There was more coming. A few months later, while I was still with Mrs. McGraw, the county agreed that the $100 a month was a hardship, and reduced it to $70 a month.
That took care of the financial side. But there was a third problem. Mrs. McGraw was very spiritual. My father said she was a “religious nut.” She had me going to church all the time, and Sunday school. I didn’t mind too much. I liked being away from Lou, and not being in trouble all the time, and it wasn’t hard to stay out of trouble with Mrs. McGraw. If a little church time was part of the bargain, that was okay with me.
Not with my dad. He was complaining to Lou, and she was complaining to Freeman, that Mrs. McGraw was unstable and that she was making it difficult for him to see me. In handwritten notes following visits from Lou that spring, Freeman wrote about a conversation Lou had with my father:
The woman with whom [Howard] has been living is, they feel, a religious “nut,” currently a Baptist, but changing churches whenever her own needs are unsatisfied. Both she and Howard’s home teacher have convinced each other that there’s no reason in the world why Howard can’t return to school. Mr. Dully says it’s getting to be that the woman where Howard is almost demands a court authorization to let him see Howard.
The religious stuff troubled my dad a lot. Even though he had grown up with his mother’s Christian Science, he was very opposed to any other kind of organized religion. Since I was little I could remember him bad-mouthing church people, talking down Catholics and Protestants alike. Forty years later, he would still get huffy when his brother talked to him about going to church. So he certainly wasn’t going to stand by while some woman enrolled his son in a church school, and he wasn’t going to have any Mrs. McGraw tell him when he could or couldn’t see his son.
So he decided he wanted me to come back home.
My condition seemed to be improving. Freeman saw me in June. He wrote:
Howard shows a most gratifying change in his attitude. He’s relaxed and smiling, quite talkative, even to the point where I have to interrupt him when he goes off into long discourses of Danny and Tommy…
There is a lively, graceful inflection of Howard’s talk and the lines of strain are gone. He’s certainly doing wonders under the care of Mrs. McGraw even tho’ he rather objects to the dashing here, dashing there, and insistence on church, when he would like to be doing other things. He seems to get along well with the other boys but rather misses George. Mr. Dully would like to have him back in the family again but knows better than to try this at the present time because Mrs. Dully is not yet accustomed to the idea. Meantime Mr. Dully tells me that his former mother-in-law (Howard’s grandmother) is stirring things up in Oakland and trying to get the Alameda Co. Medical Society interested in my nefarious doings.
This was my grandmother Daisy Patrician, my mom’s mother. She was still living in Oakland. She had not been around much, as far as I know, but when she got word of what had happened to me she got mad. I guess she objected to the idea of someone giving a lobotomy to a twelve-year-old kid—at least if the kid was her grandson.
Daisy started writing letters. She wrote to my father and accused him of concealing my whereaouts from her, and concealing the facts about my surgery. He was conducting “a conspiracy of culpable malpractice and avoidance of parental duty.” She wrote to hospital administrators, saying, “Howard has been removed from school and no longer manifests the natural personality his relatives had known as the human being, Howard Dully, but rather a strange disinterested being, foreign to his youthful age.” She demanded to know who allowed the surgery to go forward. “Who can assume or give moral authority and take responsibility for such an act?”
When she wrote to Freeman, he agreed to see her—but advised her that he would charge twenty-five dollars for the consultation. Daisy was outraged. She wrote to the Santa Clara County Medical Society, demanding to see Freeman’s credentials and threatening to have them taken away.
I don’t know whether my dad and Lou hired a lawyer, but Freeman started consulting with one immediately. It quickly became clear that my dad would back Freeman, who assured the lawyer that my grandmother had been “a disturbing influence” throughout his marriage to June, and that she had not been consulted on the question of my lobotomy, and that he was willing to state on the record that “everything was done for the welfare of the lad.” The correspondence between Freeman and the lawyer concludes, “Mr. Dully says that he is not concerned.”
There was at least one face-to-face meeting in the house between Daisy and my dad. My little brother Brian witnessed it—or at least he witnessed it with his ears. He said there was an argument like nothing he’d ever heard in his life. My dad and Daisy screamed and yelled. My dad was brutal. He told Daisy he knew about her son Gordon’s earlier plan to take me and Brian away from him. He told Daisy he knew Gordon was a homosexual. He called Gordon some names. Daisy fought back, but she was no match. Brian said my father screamed her right out of the house.
Freeman’s notes from later that month support Brian’s memory of that episode. Lou visited with him around that time. Freeman wrote, “Mrs. Dully said that when her husband’s former mother-in-law came down and started reading the riot act about Howard he gave her what-for and shouted louder than she did, so they haven’t heard a peep out of her since.”
It didn’t stay that quiet. Freeman was contacted by his insurance company, which held the policy on his malpractice insurance. They had been contacted by the Alameda-Contra Costa County Medical Association, which had received a complaint and claim of malpractice from a Mrs. Daisy Patrician. The insurance adjuster wanted to meet with Freeman immediately.
I don’t know how or when the situation was resolved. Daisy kept at it for at least the next four years. When she became exasperated, her son Gordon started writing letters, too, demanding information and threatening legal action.
It must have been a nightmare for my father. Daisy was threatening a lawsuit. Mrs. McGraw wanted me to stay with her, but that was still costing my family seventy dollars a month, which they couldn’t afford to spend. Worse, Mrs. McGraw had stated her intention to start me in a church school come September. She was not willing to keep me on otherwise.
In August, I was still living with Mrs. McGraw, but my dad had made his mind up that once the school year started, I had to come back home and start attending Covington again.
Lou didn’t like this one bit. But what could she do? She had tried everything in her power to get rid of me. She had said everything she could say against me. So she used the only weapon she had left: She threatened to move out if I moved back in.
“Mrs. Dully came in today and laid it on the line,” Freeman wrote in August, 1961. “She says the past four months when Howard has been out of the family has been a period of mutual relaxation and friendly feeling. It seems that Mr. Dully has more or less made up his mind that when September arrives and the school year begins, Howard is going to leave Mrs. McGraw and come back home. Mrs. Dully finds it rather unacceptable and wonders whether she would be better out of the way…”
As the month wore on, so did her resolve against having me home. My dad was insisting on having me back in the house. Lou was dead-set against it.
“Mrs. Dully has let her husband know that she won’t tolerate Howard in the house, and bristles at the very thought of it,” Freeman wrote after another visit.
Mr. Dully says that Ho
ward has changed radically in the past few months and that he is no longer surly, preoccupied and teasing, nagging, destructive or critical, but sort of friendly in superficial ways so that his father has a stronger liking for him than ever and has never been called upon to punish the boy for infractions of discipline.
The word…from Mrs. McGraw is that Howard is getting along well with the two boys, but because of the religious fanaticism Mr. Dully is not able to get any exact description. However, Howard seems quite unaware of any tendency to get into arguments or fights. Howard seems to have no particular depth of feeling about anything. He is rather indifferent to looking forward to school.
In his notes, Freeman said there had been conversation about a counterproposal: Maybe my dad’s uncle Frank, who was now living in Centralia, Washington, would be willing to take me on. Frank and his wife had already taken over the care of my little brother Bruce, who was now eight years old. Uncle Frank had been trying to get Bruce accepted at an institution of some kind. Maybe I could move up there once Bruce had been placed in a home.
My dad told Freeman why my uncle wanted me to move up there with him.
“He is fire chief and has a good deal of time on his hands which he devotes to the care of Howard’s younger brother,” Freeman wrote in August. “But he wants a boy that can grow up and fish and hunt and be outdoors with him.”
My dad and Lou were going off on a vacation shortly, a driving tour with George, Brian, and Kirk. They were going to drive as far as Washington State, and my dad was going to have a talk with Uncle Frank. I wasn’t invited. I didn’t go. I stayed with either Mrs. McGraw or my uncle Gene.
The driving trip came and went. The plan to move me failed. My dad reported to Freeman after he got back that his uncle Frank had decided not to invite me to live with him in Washington.
Freeman continued to do what he could to help keep me out of the house. He wrote a letter to my parents in September 1961 that was obviously meant to be read by someone else. It seemed like my dad and Lou were going to submit the letter to some institution or foster home, to show what a good boy I was.
Freeman’s letter said:
I have had the chance on a number of occasions to watch the development of your son Howard from a surly, antagonistic, suspicious, teasing, lying, and generally disagreeable person into a smiling, unselfconscious, alert and cooperative youngster who has become progressively more integrated with others about him…. I attribute [this] to the operation I performed on him eight months ago.
Unfortunately the home situation has been so colored by the reactions to Howard’s presence in the past that I recommend strongly against his going back into your home. I foresee, if that occurs, a relapse into previous irritating and even explosive events which could easily set Howard back…
I don’t know who got the letter, or why I wasn’t put into a foster home. But in the end it was decided that I would move in with my uncle Gene and his family, across town in the city of San Jose, where I would start school, in the seventh grade again, at Herbert Hoover Junior High.
Uncle Gene was my dad’s older brother, the oldest of the three Dully boys. He was a good man. He looked like an Italian—dark and smooth. He liked kids. He worked with the YMCA, and he spent a lot of time with his son Frank, who was about fourteen, and his two stepsons, Dennis and Pinky, who were about thirteen and eleven. Uncle Gene was not a man who would belittle you, like my dad. He showed kids some respect.
I don’t know what he told his sons about what happened to me, or about why I was moving in, and I don’t know what he told the people at Herbert Hoover. It was never discussed with me. I was never teased about it. No one ever asked me what it felt like to have a lobotomy. It never came up. I was treated just like any other kid.
Like my dad, Gene was a schoolteacher. He taught middle school in Los Altos. (Kenny, my dad’s other brother, worked at IBM.) But he wasn’t sick of kids or tired all the time when he got home, or working after school every day, like my dad. He still had time for Little League and stuff like that.
I didn’t get into trouble at Uncle Gene’s. I remember being punished once. I think I was caught in a lie, and I got spanked. But that was it. I went from being in trouble all the time, and being punished all the time, to doing all right at Mrs. McGraw’s, then doing all right with Uncle Gene.
That’s not to say there wasn’t some trouble here and there. According to Freeman, I was having difficulties at school.
“Howard is now living with his father’s older brother, Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Dully,” he wrote in January 1962.
I talked with them for about an hour on the subject of Howard, who is in difficulties with school, not so much because he doesn’t know enough—he is doing ninth grade reading and eighth grade arithmetic—but he forgets his books and his pencils and has failed in all his subjects except one. He has a sympathetic teacher and doesn’t show any of his hostility, but his peculiarities of behavior have gotten him many visits to the principal and have tended to exhaust his teachers. He uses his lunch money to buy candy for the boys, he borrowed a bicycle without permission, he is clumsy, he doesn’t join in games, he has poor posture, yet he is interested in girls and sometimes dances to the radio or TV. He is not inclined to stay too much to himself…
Howard seems to want a lot of attention, and when his father comes to see him, or take him out, he is quite affectionate. Howard is careless about the way he looks, he goes to school sometimes in his play clothes. He doesn’t seem to try to learn, he is not disobedient or defiant, but he does need a paddling once in a while. Howard is really a non-conformist. The Dullys are hopeful that Howard will improve sufficiently so that with the reward of going home again held before him he will behave better. I asked them to bring Howard to see me.
They did, a week later.
Howard is taller every time I see him. He seems to be doing his school work all right, but he gets marked down in deportment so that there is only one class in which he excels. He has a sort of off-hand way of discussing his activities, but whether it is talking in class or slipping notes or shooting darts he must have a disquieting effect on the class. His athletic activities are also hampered by lack of skill and poise. He doesn’t draw well, and is not interested in music. He says he gets along well enough with his cousins, but Mrs. Gene Dully is almost at her wits’ end. Apparently Howard doesn’t realize what a problem he is in his foster home. His father comes to see him every Tuesday, but he doesn’t stay long and apparently isn’t interested in the boy. Howard wants to go to his own home, but is certainly not ready for it.
Gene and his wife, Christine, lived in a little three-bedroom stucco house on a quiet street in San Jose just a few blocks from the junior high school, which was a big two-story Spanish-style building. It was an older school, not like the little bungalow-style school I had been going to, but big and stately. It felt like a real school, for grown-up kids.
Some of them were doing grown-up things. Even though it was just the seventh grade, there were kids “going steady.” By the eighth grade they were “getting pinned,” which meant they were exchanging these things known as “virgin pins.” I never knew exactly what that meant, but the virgin pin was a circular gold pin that you’d wear on your jacket or sweater. It meant “I’m spoken for.”
My cousin Frank got pinned. He came home and sat down at the dinner table wearing it. Uncle Gene came unglued. He said, “What the hell is that thing?” Frank explained what it was, and told him that all the kids at Herbert Hoover were exchanging virgin pins—that it was completely normal.
Uncle Gene didn’t buy that. He was disgusted. He said, “And I suppose if they all started walking around with their peckers out, you’d do that, too? Take it off!”
I didn’t get pinned, and I didn’t have a girlfriend. But I was starting to have some thoughts in that direction.
It was while I was living at Uncle Gene’s that I had my first sexual “accident.” I was lying in bed, sort of fooling around and…Oh
, boy.
At first I didn’t know what I had done. But I knew it felt good. I didn’t want to ask anybody what it meant. I was afraid they’d tell me to stop.
I’m not sure what I was thinking about at the time. It might have been one of my teachers. Her name was Mrs. Goldner, or maybe Miss Goldner. I had a big crush on her. She was tall and slender, and she reminded me of my mom. She dressed like my mom—not like Lou—in nice clothes. She had pretty hair, not dark like my mom’s, but light-colored.
I fantasized a lot about what it would be like to be with her. I don’t know if she was married or not. I didn’t try to find out. I knew it was just a fantasy. It’s not like I told her about it, or asked her out. I never said anything to her about it, or gave her any indication of how I felt, or told anyone else about it. I just imagined what it would be like to be with her.
Around girls my own age I was shy. Too shy. We had some dances at Herbert Hoover, and I’d go with Frank. But I didn’t do anything. I didn’t approach any of the girls. I didn’t know what to say to them. Either they approached me or it didn’t happen.
I had this theory. I figured they knew already whether they wanted to dance with me. So all they had to do was come up and tell me what they decided—yes or no. If it was no, they wouldn’t come up at all. If it was yes, they would. So, I just stood there.
You don’t get a lot of dates that way. You don’t meet a lot of girls. Maybe that’s why Frank got pinned and I didn’t.
But I did get a kiss. While I was living at Uncle Gene’s, I had my first real encounter with a girl. And I liked it.
I had a friend from school named Steve. One Saturday he invited me to come to the movies. He had this girl he was interested in, and she had a friend, so when he invited her to the movies he needed someone to be with the friend. I agreed to go.
My Lobotomy Page 12