Riverview Hospital for Children and Youth. Richard J. Wiseman

pipe. The dining room was in Paige Hall. It was huge, and served many of the chronic adult patients. It was very noisy. Worst of all the boys had to walk to it through a second-story walkway, which had wooden sides, but the roof was wire mesh and there was pigeon shit everywhere. Years later I watched this building and walkway demolished, and I cried with joy at the sight.

      The school and recreation areas were equally in poor shape; the floors literally undulated from room to room. Overall the girls’ ward was in better, brighter condition, having light beige walls and cleaner windows, bedrooms for three or four girls, a more modern, sanitary bathroom, and access to the outdoors, being on the ground floor. There were usually about twenty-five girls at any one time. The girls’ ward was more violent than the boys’ ward, and at times I was physically afraid of both the girls and the staff. These children, all crowded together, ranged in age from four to sixteen, and ranged diagnostically from autism to schizophrenia to conduct disorder to sociopath to traumatized to simply in no need of hospitalization at all.²²

      In 1964 a blue ribbon committee recommended that the children’s services be moved to the Silvermine Building. In that same year, the state appropriated $1,000,000 to begin construction of a children’s ward.

      [ CHAPTER 3 ]

      A NEW HOME

      …

      In 1965 staff moved the children to a relatively new building, Merritt Hall, where they occupied two wards, the boys’ and the girls’. A third room, a large hydrotherapy room tiled from floor to ceiling, was utilized first as an extension for older boys. It eventually became the Autistic Unit.¹

      In April 1965 state legislator Marjorie Farmer sent the members of the Children’s Task Force a plan for the organization and operation of the Children’s Unit. Farmer suggested hiring both an administrator and a separate clinical director to enhance the program and to foster a statewide continuum of services. She also recommended short-term inpatient therapy, long-term inpatient treatment, a treatment program for autistic children, a small closed unit for emergency admissions, bed space for evaluations, a day treatment program, and outpatient services. Additionally, she urged that there be a separation administratively and clinically from CVH.²

      Finally, in 1966, an architectural firm, Lee Crabtree Associates, was hired to draw up plans for the proposed Children’s Unit. Once again the Yale Child Study Center, according to a report by Melvin Lewis, showed support for the development of a high-quality program for children, emphasizing the need for “a degree of autonomy within the administrative arrangements in the hospital; a full time psychiatrist, improved training, and more suitable facilities.”³

      During these years, twenty-five new staff members appeared in the growing Children’s Unit. Some of those hired remained for many years.

      Judith Raczkowski McCain started as a summer employee, served as a nurse, returned to school for her master’s degree as a nurse clinician, worked as a cottage coordinator, clinician, and director of group living and, upon retirement in the 1990s, returned as a part-time volunteer through the mid-2000s.

      Jerold Langlois, a childcare worker, later became the cottage coordinator and was a “natural.” Wonderfully skilled at working with kids, he was usually called upon to train new employees.

      Carl Sundell started as a summer recreation worker. His career spanned more than thirty-five years in a variety of capacities in the Department of Children and Families. He returned as superintendent of Riverview from 1991 to 1997. After retirement, he helped write policy and procedure for the Connecticut Juvenile Training Center.

      Sylvia Gracon eventually became the first full-time intake worker. Sylvia specialized in recognizing those children who could best be served in less restrictive settings and elsewhere in the community.

      Margery Stahl was one of the first nurses to be assigned to the Children’s Unit. She became nurse supervisor, then director of group living, assistant superintendent, superintendent of Altobello Adolescent Hospital, and finally, superintendent of Riverview following my retirement in 1989. Marge talks about her early days as head nurse on the boys’ unit (Ward 92 in Merritt Hall):

      I was hired as the head nurse on the boys’ unit…. There was no training about how to handle these boys programmatically. We walked them to school, but many of the kids never made it to school because of their behavior. The census hovered around thirty, and we slept kids off the wards when we ran out of beds. Many mornings I was alone with the whole crowd. They lined up for meds and walked in a line to breakfast. When the other scheduled staff didn’t show up for work I was offered help from the adult ward staff, but I usually turned it down as [the boys] didn’t want [adult staff] to be there.⁴

      In 1967 Mehaden Arafeh accepted the job as superintendent of CVH. Arafeh took a keen interest in improving children’s services. Also in that year, Suzanne Peplow became acting director of the Children’s Unit. Peplow’s quarterly report summary, April 1967, states:

      [One] advantage … we have during this quarter is the allocation of specific positions to the unit so that we no longer are unclear as to how many positions we have available to us. Considering the entire year since July 1st, we have made progress in nearly all areas: staffing; programming; structuring and treatment. We still need to continually refine all our programs so that they will more nearly meet patient needs and we most assuredly need to begin research projects, which will help us to chart our future course more effectively on the basis of past experience.⁵

      A memo from Peplow to Arafeh questions whether the admission age should be reduced from sixteen to thirteen or fourteen, since there was talk of developing an adolescent unit. There was no reported response to this memo.⁶

      In October 1967 the site for the Children’s Unit was dedicated, and the quarterly report indicated that the architectural plans were almost complete and bids would be announced early in 1968. All admitted children were assigned a social worker. It wasn’t unusual for a social worker to carry a caseload of more than twenty children. And then each child was placed on one of four teams, or groups. The psychiatric staff consisted of one half-time psychiatrist and one resident from CVH on a three-month rotation. Most children attended school on the hospital grounds.

      In 1968 Margery Stahl became director of residential care when Joyce Aksu resigned. Marcia Pease-Grant acted as senior psychiatric social worker. During these formative years, the clinical staff consisted of a full-time social worker and a few caseworkers. Interns from the CVH Psychology Department would often volunteer part of their time, and psychiatric residents would rotate through the service during their last semester of training. Caseworker Susan Reale describes her experience during these years:

      I started in the Children’s Unit as a summer worker in 1965 and 1966 and, along with Carl Sundell, went to Camp Quinebaug when the children were invited out there for two weeks. Upon graduating from college I came back to the Children’s Unit as a caseworker. There were so many kids on the boys’ ward. At one time we had forty kids, and the ward was built for twenty—retarded, emotionally disturbed, conduct disorders, brain damaged, autistic, and so on. All admissions would come through adult services. There were serious language problems because many of the residents were foreign trainees with little English language. It was very scary. As a caseworker I had to try and help communicate. We would be asked what kind of meds to give. When kids got sick we had to send them to the [only] infirmary—along with all the chronic geriatric patients. It was terrifying. In spite of this, however, all the inadequate facilities and challenges, we had a great team. Working together, we did some good things for kids. I remember when I first started. There were pictures of the proposed new Children’s Unit on Suzanne Peplow’s wall [Peplow was the acting director at the time]. That gave us hope.

      The philosophy in those times was to rescue kids from their families, but we tried to work with the families and get the kids back home. I remember a girl I was working with. She hadn’t seen her family in several years, so I took her to the address we had. I knocked on the door—no answer. Next door, the neighbor answered. There were a lot of kids there. Someone told me the family had been evicted and was living in a hotel in Hartford. So