one bad apple will always make cider

Apple Creek State Institute Farms

       I have quite a few stories to tell from this place and will only touch on a few, and instead try to incorporate other facets of the job I had there so one could get a feel for what a rare experience it was.  To say the least the line between sanity and insanity was a fine line and although I was a student teacher, teaching college students how to run farm machinery and caretaking of animals, I was also in close contact with the residents of the Apple Creek Insane Asylum as they called it then and later changed the name to a more generic form calling it behavioral rehabilitation. I hate to say it but it was basically a sad dumping ground for anyone with an emotional problem or who was mentally incapacitated in any way, including bed babies, and those who were autistic, mongoloid, or brain dead. Parents were rarely seen visiting the grounds and their children who were residents some as old as 65 years or more and had been abandoned by most family members, and who were institutionalized all their life. Instead the staff was responsible for up to 20 residents per person at times. We mostly came in contact with the higher functioning residents, when we were doing farming duties around the institute.

     I worked for Ohio State University and was a student at the Agricultural Technical Institute, part of OSU, and we were responsible for the farm as it used to be the residents responsibility at one time. At that time when the residents worked there , the higher functioning residents would work with group leaders and they would use it as a form of rehabilitation and would produce food stuffs, like beef and pork on the farm to feed the residents at the institute. They also had apple orchards for apples and grapes and a dairy barn to provide milk. The herdsman and group leaders lived on the farm and on the grounds of the institute in houses provided by the state and would be available on call to handle any emergency. When I first started working there, we had just taken over the farm operations from the residents and their handlers.

     I was in charge of the beef production and at times I would have a couple hundred head of cattle to be responsible for. Some of our cattle were shipped to the Mansfield reformatory where they actually had prisoners butcher the cows. Imagine giving a murderer a knife and tell him to butcher a cow. I never saw it and was only told of what went on and the same was done with the hogs. We would raise the corn and silage necessary to feed the animals to butcher size and then call a truck and off they would go. I imagine one reason we took over the operation from the residents is because I am sure there was a lot of graft in this process of supplying state institutions and prisons with food.  I could imagine a lot of the group leaders ate a lot of T-bone at will when they wanted. There was probably a lot of cows die before the slaughter truck came and picked up a load.

    Another part of my job responsibility was to teach students who for the most part had never had any farm experience and came from the inner city  and knew nothing about farming or how to run farm machinery, as I would show them a variety of farm jobs, from plowing with a plow and tractor,  to baling hay,  to chopping silage, and even hauling manure. We would also feed hogs garbage from the institute’s kitchen as it would be cooked outside the boiler house with steam hoses in a special wagon they would dump their waste in, that we had to take daily from the institute and pull it to the hog barn and open a gate valve in a the back of a huge tank.  The garbage would then flow into troughs in the hog pen and fatten the hogs. Nothing was wasted. You would see the scrapings from food trays and apple and potato peels, as well as chicken bones and pieces of large animal bones you hoped belonged to a cow and not some poor resident. This was a job that stunk literally and in reality, like nothing you could imagine. When having new students help us do this job we would tell them that if they lost their cookies, to make sure it was in the garbage wagon, remember nothing is wasted.

       I had an old hearse I would haul students in , which was a black panel van from about the early 1960’s and it was an  International brand, it had no seats in it besides the driver’s seat where I sat, and was dark and dusty and well used inside with a lot of things wrong with it that we would reengineer in a certain ethnic way as we rolled along to allow us to make it functional to haul students around the farm to do various duties of the day. I would have someone pull the brake fuse out and replace it in the turn signal fuse slot, when needing to make a turn, then hurriedly change it back again to  work the brake lights on the vehicle. The emergency brake was a concrete block you would put on the downhill side of the rear tire to assure it would not roll away. Apple crates lined the sides of the rear van area where students would sit for the 5 or 10 minute drive to an apple orchard or a barn somewhere to feed animals. We would at times play dead in there after we had reminded the students that it used to be a hearse at the institution, as we were driving down the road and laugh uproariously at the thought, then I would lock my arms and weave the old truck haphazardly on the back gravel roads and roll my head back and close my eyes like a zombie. We had some great fun in the old hearse with at times as many as ten students in there. And we would also intermingle with the residents of the institute and those were some moments, some somber and some were very funny in a sad way, as we would observe things as the old hearse rolled along on our way to the job for the day.

     We were picking apples one time and I had a group of about 8 students from ATI, and we were just pulling up to park behind a dumpster outside the institute buildings to get out and begin picking, when we noticed a pair of legs hanging out of a dumpster. Some residents were allowed to roam the grounds and we had one guy who would kick a stone all day and cuss. One cuss word after another like damn stone got to hate this damn stone and he would kick it and mutter some more choice graphic words and then kick it again. This is all he did all day long every time I ever saw him. He would kick the stone so much he went through pair after pair of shoes they said, and if he lost his stone he would just find another and begin again. Another guy would wear everything he owned because he was afraid someone would steal it from him if he didn’t keep it with him. He had a couple of hats on and a couple of ties. You never knew how many shirts or coats he would be wearing in the impossible heat that would kill a sane man in the middle of the summertime, and then he would then sling a pair of shoes over his shoulder by the strings, so that one shoe was in front and the other in the middle of his back, and who knows what else he had crammed in the many pockets of extra jeans and stuff he would wear.

      Unbeknownst to us in the old hearse, was this same guy with nothing but his legs hanging out of this dumpster making it appear as if someone had threw a body into the dumpster. In fact the legs were motionless and as soon as I saw it I said “Hey look guys, they are throwing a way a perfectly good human being”. As soon as I said this the legs began to move at the noise from inside the hearse as everyone erupted into laughter. We watched as the legs would wiggle and move, and it looked as if they were coming out as whoever was in there, was pushing his way back out and soon the feet hit the ground and the person who was in there turned and faced us, and to my amazement it was the hoarder guy, and he had some new prizes to add to his collection he had just absconded with from inside the dumpster. It was a set of dolly wheels.

    We were still in the hearse and laughing when his feet finally hit the ground and when he turned and looked at the noise, he was acting like we were invisible when from where we parked to the dumpster was only 10 feet, anyhow he would carefully examine each of four wheels and dramatically try to cleverly conceal them in the many folds of clothes he was wearing. We just sat there amazed as he took them one by one and shoved them away and seemingly unconcerned with us or even aware we were there. After stowing his treasure he just gathered up his hats from inside the dumpster and placed them on his head, and walked off in the opposite direction away from us. We all knew why he was there at the institution after that as it left all of us with an uneasy feeling of knowing we were better off in some ways, but in other ways maybe not so much. At least he still appreciated the little things in life we would have thrown away. Lessons like this are never taught in a classroom.

      It was my understanding after discussing it with a worker who cared for the residents, that it was common problem of trying to throw things away in the buildings that housed the residents, fore as soon as they would take something away from one, another would rush over the trash can they threw it in and retrieve it. Some things had to be thrown away several times and even placing them outside in the dumpster didn’t guarantee anything as in this case.

     This is going to be a long blog on this job, as I still have much to tell of this job as it was a quite interesting part of my life.  Training those with hopefully some intelligence as opposed to observing those less fortunate. It is truly a fine line we all walk at times. So I will split it up in parts with this being part 1. Hope you enjoy.