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.
It was awkward. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know the girl’s name. But somehow we wound up necking in the movie theater—right there in the Town Theater in downtown San Jose. I don’t remember what the movie was, but I remember it was sort of crowded. It was crowded enough, anyway, that the girl was too shy to keep kissing with everyone looking. So I took off my jacket and put it over our heads. Steve and his girl did the same thing. We were all shy, I guess.
It was during this period that I began to disappear from the family photos. Back through the years there were snapshots taken of us, at holiday time, in the mountains at Easter time, and for birthdays and other occasions. Once my dad married Lou, the casual snapshots disappeared and the formally arranged photographs began. My dad was working at Kodak, and he always had a camera and film in the house. He would take the pictures, but Lou would set them up. She usually had us line up by height, Bink at the far left and Brian at the far right, with me next to Bink and George next to Brian. In all of them, we look miserable. There’s one of us standing in pajamas that Lou had hand-sewn for us, dated June 1956. We look like we’re lined up for a firing squad. There’s another from a year later, April 1957, taken at Uncle Ross’s cabin. We’re arranged by height again, with the newly arrived baby Kirk being held by Bink—who looks just a little bit more unhappy than the rest of us. Another picture from three years later includes Lou standing between Bink and me. Everyone has a forced smile on except me. I have my eyes closed, a grimace on my face and my hands shoved into my pockets. The picture is dated March 1959.
Starting a year later, there are pictures from the house, from the cabin, and at holiday time, but I’m not there. A whole set from the summer of 1961—the summer after my lobotomy, the summer they went to Washington to visit my dad’s uncle Frank, doesn’t show me at all.
The next family photo I’m in is a holiday photo from several years later. George and Kirk are seated in front next to Lou, who’s wearing a formal coat. Standing behind are Brian, wearing a cardigan, on the right, and my dad, wearing a suit and tie, on the left. I’m in the middle, wearing one of those hated corduroy jackets and a necktie. My dad has his characteristic family photo grin, and he looks like David Seville, the father figure from Alvin and the Chipmunks, or like the guy who played the dad on the TV show Dennis the Menace. The rest of us are almost completely expressionless. No one is smiling. George, Kirk, and Brian are looking at the camera steadily, like they don’t trust it. I have a slightly demented smirk on my face, like I don’t trust anybody.
I stayed at Uncle Gene’s for the entire school year. I remember it being pretty good. The family was nice to me. My cousin Frank was okay. The kids at Herbert Hoover were okay. I know I missed George, and I know I missed being at home, but being at home meant being around Lou, and that was difficult for me.
Difficult for her, too, I guess. Freeman wrote in his notes that Lou saw me only two times during the six months I stayed with Mrs. McGraw. I don’t think she saw me at all during the time I was at Uncle Gene’s.
I continued to see Freeman from time to time, as did my uncle Gene and my Dad.
“Howard thinks he is doing pretty well in mathematics, mechanics and spelling,” Freeman wrote in March 1962.
He is at ease and smiling, but his aunt says that he acts as if he were under a permanent tranquilizer. The boy has not learned how to tie his neckties and his uncle is rather resentful about this, nevertheless Howard grooms himself better and never gets mad. He is careless about books, pencils and so on, he has left jackets at school and also T-shirts in his locker, he is not doing his assignments [but] if Mr. Dully is sufficiently foresighted to remind him in time of what has to be done, he seems to get it done. He is getting along better with Mrs. Dully’s boys and she did not suggest moving him out.
That last part changed. By June, I was wearing out my welcome. Freeman wrote after meeting with my aunt, “She is of the opinion that she has done as much as she can for the boy. She says he is no more trouble than the other 3 boys that she has, but is different from them in that he is aloof.”
My dad was reporting all kinds of progress. He ran into Freeman at the Whitecliff Market, where he was still working in the afternoons, and told him I was doing well. “Howard is giving up, one by one, his disagreeable traits,” Freeman wrote. “He seems more considerate of others and while still careless with a good many faults yet to overcome, is improving all the time.”
But there was new trouble at home. It had nothing to do with me. Lou had been sick.
After bumping into my father outside Whitecliff, Freeman wrote, “Later on I talked with Mrs. Dully, who has had a hysterectomy for cervical cancer and found that the home is always a quieter and pleasanter place after Howard has left, although he is so much better than he was a year ago that there is no comparison.”
For Brian, this was the second time he was sent away from the house without really being told why. This time he was sent to live with Lou’s mother, known as Granny, and the occasion was Lou’s hysterectomy. Like me, he didn’t know until he was an adult what the surgery was.
Much later I would wonder about Lou’s headaches, her raging temper, and the other problems Freeman’s notes said were “psychosomatic.” Could these have been part of a larger medical problem? Could her difficulties with me have been part of that, too? My cousin Linda told me Lou was “a pharmacy in and of herself. She had a pill for everything. She was always on something.” Could that have been the explanation for her treatment of me?
Despite my improvement, and Lou’s recovery, I still wasn’t welcome at home. It was still being talked about like it was a dangerous thing. But my father must have convinced Lou that it was necessary. When summer came and the school year at Hoover ended, I moved back home again. Freeman’s notes from that August contain a new series of complaints against me from, of course, Lou. The notes indicate Freeman had a visit with both of us early that summer.
Howard has been home since the end of school and, according to Mrs. Dully, is much the same. He tyrannizes over the 2 little boys, Bryan and Kirk…Mrs. Dully says that Howard is liberal with the truth, that the two boys are frequently upset because Howard uses bad language, tells stories, messes up their rooms and seems to take some malicious pleasure in having them run to Mamma. Meantime, Mr. Dully has a job at Kodak; he is going to San Jose State and works on the garden over the weekends. Mrs. Dully thinks her husband is getting more upset with the passage of time and that she can’t reach him anymore to sit down and talk over their problems. Mr. Dully is remarkably bad with Howard, criticizing him, yelling at him and seldom giving him a word of praise.
Howard says his mind is full of ideas but he hasn’t set any of them down on paper, either in drawings or in stories. He is not athletic, and doesn’t seem to pay much attention to girls. He is rather casual with his boy friends, spends a good deal of time in his room and keeps out of the way of his father. On the whole he is much the same.
I wasn’t much the same. I was growing up. I was standing up to my father—Freeman reports that when we were doing yard work my father threw a pitchfork full of horse manure on me, so I threw a pitchforkful right back at him. I was using rougher language, maybe what I’d picked up hanging around the kids at Herbert Hoover.
Again they began discussing ways to get me out of the house. In August 1962, according to Freeman’s notes, they started hunting for another foster home. They didn’t find one. In January 1963, I was still at home, and Lou was still complaining.
“Mrs. Dully gave me the picture as she sees it with Howard,” Freeman’s notes read for January 30.
The boy is “just what he used to be.” He contributes nothing, he won’t bathe, and the only difference she sees in him now is that he no longer plays with feces and is not vicious. He seems to take things and is getting worse and worse at school, so that the principal at Covington has suggested that, though he is in the 8th grade, he be shifted to the mental retardation group or altogether removed from school.
Mr. Dully does not take kindly to this and seems to believe that physical punishment will bring the boy around. [He] is quite punitive with the boy, saying he will whip him to death if necessary.
Mrs. Dully is fed up with the situation and is planning a separation unless Howard is removed from the family. She says her husband is losing his health and his sense of proportion and yet won’t admit that there is any reason to eject Howard.
The tension between them must have been horrible. Lou wanted me out of the house and was threatening to leave the marriage if I didn’t go. My dad still insisted he could get me into line with physical punishment. Freeman wrote that I spent a lot of time in my room trying to stay away from my father. I guess I would have. I remember those beatings.
I remember Lou exploding at me only once. She got angry at me over something. We were standing in the kitchen. All of a sudden she started screaming at me. “This is why we had you operated on! And you still won’t behave! Go to your room!”
By February, the situation had become impossible for everyone. My dad was worn out. I was six feet tall now, and almost as big as my father, according to Freeman’s files. Even though my father had “taken a stick” to me on several occasions, Freeman wrote, “the punishments have had no lasting effect, except to make Howard sore.”
My size seems to have impressed everyone more than my age did. Freeman wrote in his notes about a meeting he had with my parents in which they all decided it was time for me to move into my own place.
With Howard and Mr. Dully present I said that Howard would have to leave his home, and that he was “big enough and ugly enough” to be established in a room of his own and with an allowance that he would have to get along on somehow, that he could no longer remain at home, would have to be rejected by the family in order to keep Mrs. Dully at home with the other boys. If Howard was unable to make the grade he would have to go to an institution.
The date on that entry is February 2, 1963. I might have been big enough and ugly enough in someone’s mind. But I was just fourteen years old. I was having trouble in school. Freeman wrote that I got an A in spelling but a D in reading, and that I didn’t seem to be able to apply myself. I contributed nothing in the home and didn’t even bathe properly. But their solution was for me to move out and get a room of my own and start taking care of myself like a grown-up.
Freeman had left out or not been informed of some developments at home and at school. Things had taken a turn for the worse.
In September 1962 I had returned to Covington. There were a lot of teachers there I didn’t like, and I especially didn’t like Mr. Proctor, the civics teacher. So one day I designed a little weapon, and I shot him—using a rubber band and a paper clip. I ditched the weapon in the desk next to mine, an empty desk that no one used, so Proctor wouldn’t know who did it.
He knew anyway. He didn’t see me do it. He didn’t find the weapon in my desk. There was no way he could know for sure who attacked him. But he knew. I guess I had a history with him. So he started asking for witnesses and taking statements. He conducted a mock trial right there in the classroom. No one would testify against me, but when it was over Proctor pronounced me guilty just the same. He marched me down to the principal’s office and told him what I had done. I was suspended until the following Monday. I was told to get my things from the classroom and go home.
Well, I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t face Lou. She’d kill me for getting suspended. I knew my dad would find out soon enough about my being dismissed for the day. But that was no reason to go home early and get punished by Lou now.
I had this girlfriend at the time named Lori. We’d talk and hold hands. I felt safe with her. She lived near Hillview Elementary, which is not far from Covington. So I talked her into letting me have the key to her house. She lived alone with her mom, and her mom worked during the day, so the house would be empty. I could hang out there until school ended. Lori told me to just be very careful not to “disturb” anything. If her mom found out about me staying there during school time, she’d get into trouble.
I wasn’t planning on disturbing anything, but I disturbed things plenty. I hung out for a while. I watched a little TV. I ate a snack and drank a soda. I got bored and started wandering around the house. There was nothing interesting about that. So I went to check out the backyard. The back door slammed shut, and I discovered I had locked myself out of the house.
There was a high fence around the whole yard—too high for me to climb over. I was tall, but I wasn’t that tall. I couldn’t hide in the backyard all day. Lori would be home soon. Her mother would be home soon. I had promised I wouldn’t disturb anything, and now look what had happened.
I decided the best thing to do was get back into the house, straighten things up, and then leave through the front door. But I had locked myself out. The only way to get back in was to break a window. So I broke a window and let myself back in. But now there was a broken window. I put the key where Lori had told me to put it and I snuck out.
Did I think I wouldn’t get caught? I don’t know. I don’t remember. But of course I got caught. Lori came home. Her mother came home. There was that broken window. Lori told her mother about letting me have the key. Lori’s mom called my house and talked to Lou. My dad came home and Lou talked to him. All hell broke loose.
I don’t know exactly what happened, but I didn’t go back to school the following Monday. I couldn’t. I was expelled. My father had spoken to the principal of the school that Friday afternoon. Somehow, their conversation got me thrown out of school. I was told not to return on Monday. I never went back.
It was the beginning of December. School would be out for winter break within two weeks. I figured, what the heck? I could get a couple of weeks off, and then in January I’d go back and try again. It didn’t seem like that big a deal to me. What’s a couple of weeks off from school? I spent the time on my own, away from the house, riding my bike up into the foothills, exploring, nobody telling me what to do. It was a good time.
It would be the last good time I had for a long time.
The next Freeman entry is February 6, 1963. It’s a short note. It’s ominous. It makes reference to Agnews—which could only mean the Agnews State Hospital. I knew about Agnews. It was the state hospital for the insane.
Freeman’s note says, simply, “Mr. Dully is going to have Howard admitted to Agnews for a 10 day evaluation period. The school [Covington] definitely won’t take him back and he cannot be managed at home. I told Mr. Dully I would be glad to supply the hospital with any information they wanted.”