But it did affect me. Deeply. Walter Freeman’s operation was supposed to relieve suffering. In my case, it did just the opposite.
Ever since my lobotomy I’ve felt like a freak—ashamed. But sitting in the room with Rebecca Welch and her mom, I know that my suffering is over.
I know my lobotomy didn’t touch my soul. For the first time, I feel no shame. I am, at last, at peace.
The end credits come on, with that piano music again. Then the program ends.
There was total silence in the room. The audience seemed to be in shock. Then they began to applaud. There was a lot of applause.
Dave Isay got up and made some remarks, and then introduced me and a few other people who were going to take questions from the audience. I was in a kind of daze. I was overwhelmed. And I was scared. The program had been very emotional for me. I had never heard it with the music in. I’d also never been in a crowd like this, with all eyes on me. And all of those people were applauding me. It was very powerful. And now I was going to have to answer questions from the audience, or maybe even the press.
Most of them were more like comments than questions. People wanted to talk about how the program made them feel. It was easy. I was afraid we’d get some hostile remarks, or hostile questions.
There was only one. Some person insinuated there was something dishonest about the way the show was written—that I was obviously not smart enough to have written my own lines, and that I didn’t talk the way they made me talk on the broadcast. A person with a lobotomy couldn’t be that creative or that artistic.
That wasn’t true, but it was upsetting to hear someone say it. What did they know about what I was capable of saying or writing?
Luckily Dave took the question. He said that the whole program was a collaboration, and that many people had contributed to every aspect of it.
In fact, I think every word I say in the broadcast is something I had a hand in writing, or at least in choosing the words. I didn’t do the research on Dr. Freeman’s early experiments with prefrontal lobotomy. I’m not a scientist, or a historian. But I helped write the words I would say about that, once I had the information.
The following day we traveled down to Washington, D.C. It was the first time I’d been there since we got my archives. It wasn’t snowy now. The city looked different. We rested in the hotel, and waited for the broadcast.
I called my dad to tell him the broadcast was scheduled for that Wednesday. All he said was, “Oh, okay. Good luck.”
Later on, I had a call from my younger brother Brian. It was pure coincidence. I hadn’t heard from him in a long, long time. He was calling to say he had some pictures to send me, pictures from our childhood that he had come across in his house.
I thanked him and said, “You know where I am, don’t you?”
He said he didn’t.
“I’m in Washington. They’re about to broadcast my story on NPR.”
He said he’d listen.
We went over to the NPR studio for the actual broadcast. I sat in the control room with Dave, Piya, Barbara, and Rodney. We listened. There were lots of high-fives when the program ended. There was a feeling of exhilaration, and of relief. It was over, finally. It had happened.
But it wasn’t over. After the show, Dave and Piya and the rest of us were standing around on the street outside the studio. We had given up our badges and IDs, and were getting ready to go back to the hotel. Someone came running down and said, “We crashed the server!”
There were so many e-mails coming in, so fast, that the National Public Radio Internet server collapsed under the weight of them. They had something like four thousand e-mails come in all at once, just at the end of the show. Dave said that the Sound Portraits server had crashed, too. Since it was a small one, that was no big deal. But the NPR server crashing—that was a huge deal. The NPR server had never before crashed in its history, someone told us. They had more e-mail on the lobotomy story than on anything they’d ever done.
Because of that response, someone quickly organized a show for the next day. I was scheduled as a guest on the NPR call-in radio show called Talk of the Nation. Dr. Valenstein was also on, by telephone, from his home. We took calls from people who wanted to talk about lobotomy, or share their opinions, or ask questions. The most common question was “How could this happen?”
We stayed that night in Washington. Barb flew home the next day. Then Rodney and I got on the train and began the long ride home.
My father never really told me what he thought of the broadcast. Neither did Brian. I know they both heard it. Brian didn’t have anything to say about it. My father’s only remark was that they had taken his comments out of context. He didn’t say he was angry, and he didn’t say he was unhappy with the way it came out. The comment about World War I, he said, wasn’t fair.
By the time I got back to San Jose, the reader e-mails were being forwarded to me. Someone from NPR printed out a whole batch and sent them to me. It was overwhelming. A lot of it was applause for the documentary itself.
“Yesterday’s show must go down as one of the greatest and most moving pieces I have ever heard on the radio,” one listener wrote. “That is the most powerful piece I have ever heard on radio,” another said. There were lots of letters like that.
A lot of other writers said they had never written to NPR before. “I have been a dedicated listener for more than 25 years, but in all that time, I have never taken a moment to write to you about any story,” one woman said. Another person said, “After 25 years of listening [to NPR] and never writing to express how many stories have deeply affected me, I have to say that ‘My Lobotomy’ may be the finest piece of storytelling I have ever heard.”
Some of the letters were from physicians. One of them said, “As a doctor I find it sad that lobotomy was welcomed by ‘traditional’ medicine…. I know we must always watch out for ‘quacks,’ however most people do not realize that many of the most dangerous, outrageous therapies are the ones approved by the ‘traditional’ medical establishment.”
A lot of other letters were written by people who identified with how I felt and how I was treated as a boy. Some of them said they were lucky not to have had a lobotomy themselves. “As a person who suffers from depression and anxiety, I might have been a patient of Dr. Freeman,” one listener wrote.
In many of the letters, people talked about crying during the broadcast. They said they cried in their kitchens, in their cars, caught in traffic, or in their offices. One man said he had to fight back tears while he was working out at the gym. Another said that she and her two children were all crying. One man said he had listened to the story twice. “Cried both times,” he wrote. “Will most likely listen to the story again online. Will cry, again.”
Almost all of the letters talked about how honest I was, how brave I had been, what courage I had, or what a hero I was. (A lot of them also said I had a “wonderful radio voice,” and several urged NPR to hire me as a full-time correspondent. Memo to NPR: I am still available.) Many of them wanted to commend me personally for having survived my journey. I was really surprised by how people wanted to congratulate me for doing what I had to do to survive.
To my amazement, I got a letter from a woman named Nancy Greene, who said she had worked in the Santa Clara County Probation Department at the time I was made a ward of the court and sent to Agnews. “I am so happy you have a good life,” she wrote. She said that she was sorry about what happened to me, and that she’d do anything she could to help me put together the “puzzle pieces” of my life.
Even more surprising, I got a letter from Linda Pickering, the daughter of Lou’s sister Virginia. She’s the one who, according to her mother, said I gave her “the creeps.” She wrote to tell me how moved she was by the broadcast. She must have seen People, too.
“I want you to know how happy I am for you,” she wrote. “You are truly a miracle. I was only 17 when this travesty happened to you. All I remember is the face of a lost
little boy. I remember that my parents were dead set against this happening to you, and I know they told my Aunt Lou exactly how they felt. It was the wrong thing to do.”
Linda went on to congratulate me for what I had made of my life, against the odds. “You have turned out to be a very successful citizen, good husband and great commercial bus driver,” she wrote. “Handsome, too!”
In her letter, she put in a kind word for Lou. “I do want you to know that [Lou] didn’t stay the way she was in those days. People mellow as they age. They also want to atone for all the wrong things that they did during their lives. I have to believe that she regretted what she did to you before she died. She became a soft-spoken, gentle woman. You have a wonderful gift of compassion and forgiveness, and I hope that you can forgive her.”
Wow.
I had said in the radio broadcast that, sitting with Rebecca Welch, I was at last at peace. I felt a lot more of that reading those letters. I had sometimes been bothered by ideas that I had during the recording and interviewing of the show that I was doing something wrong. Was I sensationalizing my tragedy? Was I cheapening it?
Back when he was trying to get me to agree to use my own name, to build the show around my experience, and to interview my father, Dave Isay had offered to make me a financial partner in the broadcast, and to share the earnings from the show with me.
Was I going to be criticized for making money off the misery I had experienced? Did I have the right to do that? It was my story, after all. It was my misery. I wasn’t taking anything from anyone. I thought I was doing something noble.
The e-mails confirmed that for me. They made me feel noble again—not because I had these experiences and survived them, but because I came forward and told the truth about them, and, in doing that, helped people.
In the meantime, I went back to driving the bus for Durham.
Not long after the broadcast, I was contacted by some publishing people and asked to think about writing this book. I got excited about that. There were so many things that had to be left out of the radio show. We had recorded more than a hundred hours of tape, and we had only twenty-two minutes of radio time. This would be a chance to really get to the bottom of the whole story.
The book might also mean a little money. And I needed money. My son, Rodney, had lost his job, and he had to move in with me and Barb in our new place. Then my stepson, Justin, had similar problems. He was a husband now, and a father. So he and his wife and child moved in with us, too.
It’s a one-bedroom, one-bathroom place. We were all over each other. No one had any privacy. I wished I had enough money to get an apartment for them. But I was having trouble keeping my own head above water. My cell phone got turned off, because I ran up such a huge bill on the train trip to New York and Washington and back and I couldn’t afford to pay it. The bank was threatening to repossess my car. I had complaints from the people who ran our mobile-home park, saying that kids were not allowed to stay there, even as overnight visitors. If I didn’t hurry up and find my sons a place to live, I was going to be looking for someplace to live myself.
That spring, I was invited to a high school reunion. The folks from Los Altos High School, who would have been my classmates if I had stayed in school, invited me to come to a Friday night party and a Saturday night reunion. After some hesitation, Barbara and I decided to go.
It was the right thing to do. I made a few contacts. I got to spend a little time with my brother George and his wife. I got to renew a few acquaintances with guys I knew in junior high school.
But when it was over, I felt left out. I felt left behind. I had nothing in common with these people. My life had been interrupted in ways they could never understand. Their lives had gone forward in ways that would never include me. I left the reunion feeling discouraged and alone.
Then something changed. I was offered a speaking engagement.
In the middle of the year I was contacted by someone representing the National Guardianship Association. This was a group of professional guardians, the people who are hired or appointed by the court to watch out for people who can’t watch out for themselves. They were holding their annual conference in Newport Beach, California. One of them had heard the NPR show. They wanted me to come talk to their members.
I prepared a presentation for them, a package that combined the radio broadcast and a CD slideshow of pictures of me, Dr. Freeman, Lou, my dad, and so on. I made some notes on things I would want to say to people who worked as guardians. Mostly I wanted to tell them what happened to me, and how it might not have happened if someone had been looking out for my interests.
Barbara and I drove down. We stayed one night in Hollywood, and the next day drove to Newport and checked into the hotel.
The event was held in a huge ballroom. I was the keynote speaker. My talk would be the last event before the awards luncheon. It would be attended by all of the conference attendees. I got to the ballroom, and almost fainted when one of the conference aides told me the room was set up for four hundred people.
The room filled up. I tried not to look, or count how many people were sitting there. Then a woman with the NGA took the stage. She said, “We are now going to hear from Howard Dully, who has an extraordinary story to tell. When he was twelve years old, he was given a transorbital lobotomy. He spent the next forty years finding out why. Please help me welcome Howard Dully.”
There was warm applause. Everyone watched the stage. But I didn’t walk to the front of the room. Instead, I waited until the room got dark, then started the radio broadcast. As the sound of my voice filled the room, I started the CD. People could hear me saying “My name is Howard Dully” just as they were seeing a photo of me as a child.
The audience was very quiet. At certain points during the twenty-two-minute broadcast, they got even quieter. At the point when I’m reading from Freeman’s archives and I say, “December 3, 1960: Mr. and Mrs. Dully have apparently decided to have Howard operated on,” the room was totally still.
The radio broadcast ended. The lights came up. I walked to the stage. The applause thundered like a wave breaking over me. I was choked up. I was in tears by the time I got to the front of the room. So were several women in the front row. There was a lot of applause.
I talked for a few minutes, telling them some more details about my dad, Lou, Freeman, and the others. Then members of the audience had questions.
“Wasn’t there any governmental control of lobotomies?” one man asked. “Was anyone ever helped by them?” another wanted to know. “How did you feel, mentally, after the operation?”
I answered as best I could. I said I also wondered about the authorities who might have protected me. I told them I thought some people had been helped by lobotomies, but far, far more had been hurt. I told them that after the operation I felt drunk, and not quite there. “I still feel, today, like I had one too many jolts of electroshock.”
One person asked how I thought the lobotomy had affected my brain, and another wanted to know how it had affected my life. I said that I didn’t know what had happened, organically, to my brain. “But I’ve had a terrible, disastrous life,” I said. “Not because of the operation, but because of what happened after. I didn’t learn how to live. It wasn’t because I was a bad guy, or because society was wrong, but because I didn’t know how to live.”
I answered questions for about thirty minutes before the NGA hostess told the audience we needed to wrap up and move on to the awards luncheon. But there were still ten people holding their hands up, so I took a few more questions. One woman wanted to know how I got along with my father today. Another person wanted me to talk more about being locked up at Agnews. A couple of people didn’t have questions at all—they just wanted to thank me for coming and telling my story.
“I want to thank you,” I said. “I have spent a lot of my life trying to turn something that was very negative into something that’s a little positive. Coming here, and talking to you—it helps me. Havin
g the opportunity to talk to people about my lobotomy has made it possible for me to understand, at last, that there’s really nothing wrong with me. I’m just human.”
The NGA representative finally had to tell us to stop. The awards luncheon was scheduled to start, but all four hundred of her attendees were sitting and listening to me talk. So I thanked her, and thanked the audience, and we concluded. I was rushed at the stage by another ten or twenty people. I spent the next fifteen minutes being thanked by them, individually, for coming out and telling my story.
When it was over, walking toward the luncheon, holding Barbara’s hand, I realized that I did feel, at last, truly at peace. I felt useful. I had found my place. I was no longer ashamed.
I am at the end of my journey now. I started wondering what was wrong with me more than forty years ago. I started asking what happened to me in 2000. Now I am finished.
The center of all the wondering and questioning was “Why me?” For a long, long time I was afraid that I had done something terrible. I was afraid I deserved what had been done to me.
Freeman’s archives, and the research for this book, showed me that was wrong. My father, during the interviews, told me that was wrong. I now know that my stepmother had told Freeman lies. Freeman, more interested in performing the lobotomy than treating a patient, believed them.
When it was all over, I knew what had happened, and I knew how it had happened.
But I still didn’t know why. Why did Lou hate me so much? Why did she and Freeman insist on lobotomizing me? Why was my father willing to go along with them?
My childhood was crazy. I feel like I grew up in a nuthouse. I had a crazy, scary stepmother, and for some reason I got the worst of her craziness. I wasn’t locked in a closet, but I was systematically tortured, at least mentally. It was like I was trapped in some sort of play. My part was to always be in trouble. I was the bad guy who was always sent to his room.
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