#22 – Dick Bernard: Johnny, Carl and Elmer L.

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Yesterday’s post on Heather (#21, May 13) got me to thinking back to those “good old days” about which people my age tend to recall so fondly as we face these troubled times. “Wouldn’t it be nice”, we tend to say, “if only we could be transported back into those good old times when life was simpler.” Indeed, on occasion, around will come some e-mail talking about those past-times when government didn’t intrude so much, and self-reliance was more a value. “Wouldn’t it be nice.”
After I posted the column, my memory went back to the time between 1945 and 1951, right after WWII, between age 5 and 11, when we lived in a little town not far from the Hawk’s Nest pictured on the front page of this blog.
In this town was a kid named Johnny, older and bigger than the gang I ran with, but on reflection, obviously retarded, often with us. In my memory, Johnny couldn’t talk, and lived at home down the street. He hardly had ability (as we measured such), but occasionally we could get him enraged, and then he would be fearsome. Nothing ever came of this rage – we could outrun him. The next day he’d be back.
I wonder whatever happened to Johnny.
It was at this point in time when I remember those visits to the town with the School for the Feeble Minded, briefly described in #21. (The 1982 History of that town headlines the section as being about the “State School”, and says it was established by State Government in 1903 as the “Institution for the Feeble-Minded”, and that it was, by 1982, “the largest employer in [the] County”.) In a recent conversation, a friend remembered an Aunt who had been confined there for some reason and “used the rope” (hung herself), likely to escape the misery of her confinement. Such facts don’t often appear in official histories.
In those same good old days, Carl, in another context, was growing up, retarded, on a farm in Minnesota. He was able to work, and he was worked, hard. In today’s context, his treatment would be called “abuse”. What happened on the farm stayed on the farm. I knew Carl for several years when he lived with my sister and her family. He lived to an unusually old age for someone with his disability, and at the end lived semi-independently in a community up north. He could not have survived on his own. He benefitted from a more enlightened day.
Our society was very late in the game of engaging in the reality of special needs and needs for special education and other special services.
I come from a life-long environment of public education, but even so, it was late in the game when I became fully aware of how slow we were in acknowledging the reality of unmet special needs.
In the early 1990s I became good friends with a former Governor of Minnesota, Elmer L. Andersen. He was a conservative Republican, and I met him through reading his columns in a community newspaper which he owned, and to which I subscribed, largely so I could read his columns on sundry topics.
I liked his philosophy, as expressed in his opinions, so much that in the spring of 1995 I decided to nominate him for the Friend of Education Award from my union, the Minnesota Education Association. I didn’t live in the state when he was in government, so my nomination was based solely on his opinion pieces. It became obvious, quickly, that there was much more to Elmer than what I knew of him.
He won the Friend of Education Award in the fall of 1995, and here I let my former colleague and good friend Judy Berglund complete the story as she wrote it for the MEA Advocate in October, 1995: Then-state legislator Elmer L. Andersen was “the architect of Minnesota’ special education program in 1955.
“At that time, one in 12 children was born with disabilities, and unable to benefit from a normal school environment,” he says. “I thought the Legislature ought to do something about that.”
The Legislature set up an interim commission, which he chaired. Every one of its recommendations was adopted by the 1957 Legislature, which established one of the best and most comprehensive special education programs in the nation. Families with retarded children got financial help to enroll their children in school, training programs and scholarships were provided for aspiring special education teachers.
That was 20 years before federal special education laws were passed, laws Andersen thinks hampered the program by encumbering it with extensive regulation. “Nevertheless, Minnesota took the lead in recognizing that all children have potential, all have God-given gifts, all have special needs,” he says….”
Mr. Andersen never wavered from his commitment to quality education for all, regardless of abilities or circumstance. Our friendship continued until his death during Thanksgiving week, 2004. He and many others are heroes for today’s and tomorrows Heather’s.
But todays most vulnerable citizens are most likely to be on the “chopping block” in tight economic times. Their budgets are easy to cut. They have little voice, only us.

#21 – Dick Bernard: Heather and a salute to "Community"

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Last night, shortly before 7 p.m. at Ballfield #5 in Lakeville MN, Heather Bernard came up to the plate, wearing an Ohio State pullover, and holding and jiggling her bat like she’d doubtless seen countless batters on television prepare for the pitch. (She looked pretty good, actually!)
The pitcher lobbed the softball towards the plate, and ultimately Heather swung and connected, a well hit ground ball. She dropped the bat and took off towards first, running harder than I’d ever seen her run, and she made it: an earned single. That hit was something to be really proud of, and I’m talking also about me, her Dad.
At that moment between home plate and first base, something else came together for me: the abundant good side of not only America, but of people generally, regardless of where they live, or how directly or indirectly they might be positively involved in others lives.
Heather is my daughter, 33 now, Down Syndrome. We think she was probably on the right team last night, but as I write I’m still not certain of that. Regardless, the coach fit her into the lineup, and she took seriously her position as short left-fielder, and like her teammates she had her turn at bat in the one-hour game.
Left alone in this game of life, Heather’s odds of even survival were never good. She was born with a serious heart defect which required several surgeries before she was five years old. She lives because a heart pacemaker keeps hers ticking!
And when I saw her running to first base last night, it was a testimony to modern technology: her first pacemaker allowed only a single level of activity; currently, the pacemaker adjusts to the level of exertion, and consequently Heather could actually run to first base, rather than slowly walk as would have been the case over 30 years ago.
Heather was playing ball last night because another community, likely primarily parents of similar special needs “kids” like Heather, who have organized and support a once a week league. Out of such leagues, come participants in the long well-established Special Olympics program. Indeed Special Olympics exists because of special needs kids. http://www.specialolympics.org/
Last night someone, likely a parent of one of the other participants, approached us with a flier from a local Pizza establishment who had agreed to make a large match, up to $5000, for contributions to this local activity. We live a long distance from the town, so I wrote out a check instead.
I gave thanks, last night, for something I’ve been aware of for years, but which only infrequently bubbles to the surface: we are bombarded every day with bad news, and all manner of political positioning on supposedly major issues of the day, but at the end of the day the big news is taking place in millions of settings across our country and across the world: settings like that Ballfield #5 in Lakeville MN last night.
It is useful to keep that in mind. We are the good – and the bad – of the huge community in which we all live. And we have a great capacity to make life better, or worse, depending on how broadly or narrowly we choose to define that word “community”.
A public community, very large, and largely invisible, has nurtured Heathers life over all these years.
There are lots of Heathers, and lots of communities. As we know, it’s not too many decades ago where her fate, realistically, would have been to end up in a School for the Feeble Minded somewhere…. I remember seeing one of these schools, frequently, when we went to visit our grandparents in a particular town in the 1940s and 1950s. The mentally deficient of the state were ware-housed there, and on pleasant days you could see them gathered on the lawn behind the fence, and we could look at them like one would look at animals in a zoo.
Our society looked at Heather’s kind differently then. That’s just as it was.
Hopefully in these troubled economic times we won’t be tempted to backslide….

#17 – Dick Bernard: Don Bartlette, Macaroni at Midnight.

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Today was Diversity Day for Bloomington MN high schools and I went out to Jefferson High School in Bloomington to staff a table for a group in which I am active called World Citizen www.peacesites.org.
I had the written program for the day, but wasn’t certain when I was supposed to be there, so I went out early. The first two periods of the day featured an assembly talk by a “Dr. Bartlette, Speaker”. I had no idea who this person was, and the program didn’t say any more about him or his topic. It was a very nice day outside, and the choice between listening to somebody give a speech to a bunch of kids captive in a school auditorium, and enjoying some fine spring weather seemed a no-brainer.
But something drew me into the auditorium for the second talk. Still, rather than sit down, I stood in the back, much like a teacher on duty. At least I had an escape route.
Dr. Bartlette was given a very low key introduction, and walked up to the podium, a short man, wearing a short sleeved dark shirt, very plain appearing. He began to speak, quietly, and with something of a speech impediment.
He quietly told his life story, born in a small log cabin up the hill and in the woods outside of a town, born with severe facial deformities, unable to speak, growing up shunned as a native American in North Dakota, but also shunned by his own father who had expected him to be normal at birth, and he wasn’t. He was shunned by virtually everyone except, it seemed, his mother, and ultimately a wealthy woman in the town of 1700 people became something of a guardian angel. She saw something in him, or perhaps it was her sense of his worth as a human being that led her to help him thrive. His life began to turn around. In his high school years someone, perhaps the wealthy woman (I don’t recall off-hand), prevailed on the most popular high school kid to befriend him, and the youngster did, and Don blossomed, becoming class and student council president and valedictorian of his class.
He had his audience completely engaged. I was standing back there, choking back tears, choking back tears, choking back tears. And he continued to tell his story.
He continued to learn, and ultimately achieved his doctorate and now, as his business card says, he is a “Public Speaker”, worldwide. He now lives in Ohio.
Doctors went to work on his face, replacing the deformed half-nose with which he was born with a plastic nose that serves him well. Other major facial and other defects needed correction as well. He got his degrees, and one of his first jobs was as Human Rights Director for the city of Bloomington MN in the late 1970s. It was not a time, he said, where diversity was celebrated.
He finished his talk to great applause from the young people in attendance. He came back to thank them for their attentiveness to his story. He left the stage, and I thought I’d not see him again. But my 45 or so minutes in his presence profoundly impacted me.
After the talk I saw him walking a short distance away. I went up and shook his hand and thanked him for a powerful witness to possibility. We compared notes: he had graduated from his North Dakota high school the same year I did: 1958. He knew my small towns; I knew his. We will likely stay in touch. There is much for us to connect about.
I looked him up on the internet. Material about him can be found by searching Don Bartlett Macaroni at Midnight (yes, there is a story to that). A movie about him is apparently now in production.
If you ever hear that he is in your area, make it a point to stop in.
You won’t regret it.

#16 – Jane Stillwater: A flu survivor, 2009

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A reader comment follows this post.
Note from the moderator: For most of us, the flu hysteria of Spring 2009 has (thankfully) been a spectator sport. Jane Stillwater, her friend, and her granddaughter happened to have the flu during the peak news time about the feared “Swine Flu pandemic”. Jane writes from Berkeley CA. For certain, read the end note, received this morning. I posted previously on this topic at April 27, 2009.
Jane Stillwater: After a friend of mine came down with a severe dose of some kind of terrible flu and I nursed him back to health, guess what happened next? Yeah, I got sick too. Really sick. “OMG, now I’ve got swine flu!” I whined — in between trips to the bathroom.
But in my more lucid moments, I managed to do some research on the subject (as we all know, Google is the poor man’s health insurance). Just how serious IS swine flu? I know that I am feeling like heck-warmed-over right now, but let’s put this thing into perspective. According to my friend Joe Thompson who loves to send me statistics, within one year in America over 61,000 people will die of pneumonia. One out of every 20 who contract pneumonia will die. And since January of this year alone, over 1,300 people have died from ordinary flu. But only one person has died from swine flu.
Great. Now we have put this so-called pandemic into perspective. But does that make me feel better? No. So I trudged off to the local ER to get treated for swine flu — or not. And they gave me a face mask as soon as I walked in the door. “Do you get many swine flu patients here?” I asked the triage nurse.
“Actually no,” he replied. “We get several people a day coming in with flu symptoms and we test them, but so far no one has tested positive.” There were only eight people in the waiting room and only two of us had been handed face masks. It’s hard to breathe with this on.
Then I sat around the waiting room for an hour and watched a History Channel segment on gangs. “It’s all about protecting the lucrative drug trade,” said the TV. “They’re going to do whatever they can to keep the money flowing in.” In case you might be wondering why swine flu is being hyped as this horrible death machine but pneumonia, a proven killer, is not? Could it be “all about protecting the lucrative drug trade” — and keeping the money flowing in at all costs?
Then I saw the doctor, described my symptoms to him and whimpered a bit more. He said to take Pepto Bismo, stay hydrated, eat healthy and wait it out.
“Flu is a virus then?”
“Yes. There have been several anti-virals developed to combat HIV that might be used to treat it, but mainly you just wait it out.” I didn’t know that. “And just in case you do have swine flu, remember that swine flu is milder than regular flu.” I definitely did not know that!
“But do I — or do I not — have the swine flu?” I asked. So the doctor pulled out some sterile swabs and took samples from my nose.
“We send them off to the State of California for testing and you’ll know the results in a few days. It might be five days because of the weekend.” If this is really a super-emergency, five days is a long time! Plus if this is really a national crisis, then why aren’t the state lab guys working on weekends? “And if you do have swine flu, they’ll come to your home and ask you who you have been in contact with and try to figure out how you got exposed to it. There is a seven-day incubation period so it would have to have been someone you have been around approximately seven days ago.”
Then I went home and drank plenty of liquids.
After undergoing this bit of involuntary research on flu symptoms, I have been forced to come to the painful conclusion that this whole swine flu pandemic scare is both a hype and a hoax — and that our media, our politicians and corporate America have failed the American public yet again in their efforts to scare us into giving them our money, just like what happened in Vietnam and Iraq, and in the savings and loan debacle and the AIG bailout.
America is a democracy ruled by us? What democracy? Apparently we are being played like a fiddle. Again.
PS: Regarding “protecting the lucrative drug trade,” Dr. Joseph Mercola, medical consultant on CNN and ABC News, has this to say:
“According to the World Health Organization’s Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response site; as of April 27 there are:.” http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/04/29/Swine-Flu.aspx
109 laboratory confirmed cases in U.S. — 1 death (reported by CDC as of April 30)
26 confirmed cases in Mexico — 7 deaths
6 confirmed cases in Canada — 0 deaths
1 confirmed case in Spain — 0 deaths
Additionally, nearly all suspected new cases have been reported as mild. Personally, I am highly skeptical. It simply doesn’t add up to a real pandemic. But it does raise serious questions about where this brand new, never before seen virus came from, especially since it cannot be contracted from eating pork products, and has never before been seen in pigs, and contains traits from the bird flu — and which, so far, only seems to respond to Tamiflu. Are we just that lucky, or… what?
“Your fear will make some people VERY rich in today’s crumbling economy. According to the Associated Press, at least one financial analyst estimates up to $388 million worth of Tamiflu sales in the near future — and that’s without a pandemic outbreak.
“More than half a dozen pharmaceutical companies, including Gilead Sciences Inc., Roche, GlaxoSmithKline and other companies with a stake in flu treatments and detection, have seen a rise in their shares in a matter of days, and will likely see revenue boosts if the swine flu outbreak continues to spread. As soon as Homeland Security declared a health emergency, 25 percent — about 12 million doses — of Tamiflu and Relenza treatment courses were released from the nation’s stockpile. However, beware that the declaration also allows unapproved tests and drugs to be administered to children. Many health and government officials are more than willing to take that chance with your life, and the life of your child. But are you?
“Remember, Tamiflu went through some rough times not too long ago, as the dangers of this drug came to light when, in 2007, the FDA finally began investigating some 1,800 adverse event reports related to the drug. Common side effects of Tamiflu include:
Nausea
Vomiting
Diarrhea
Headache
Dizziness
Fatigue
Cough
All in all, the very symptoms you’re trying to avoid. More serious symptoms included convulsions, delirium or delusions, and 14 deaths in children and teens as a result of neuropsychiatric problems and brain infections (which led Japan to ban Tamiflu for children in 2007). And that’s for a drug that, when used as directed, only reduces the duration of influenza symptoms by 1 to 1 ½ days, according to the official data
End note received from Jane overnight, May 5, 2009: No word from the state health dept so I guess that I am officially swine-flu-free. Not many people can say that with certainty but I can! It seems like everyone in my family is now finally well again. It’s been a very rough week.
End note from moderator: It is little more than a week since “Swine Flu” grabbed and continued to dominate the headlines (see Apr 27 09 posting). From potential pandemic status, Swine Flu has moved off the front pages after “infecting” virtually everyone in the media, or public policy. There are charges of over-reacting, or under-reacting, or reacting improperly in other ways. Perhaps Swine Flu was never a threat at all, perhaps it will become one still. Whatever the case, the explosion of publicity and near panic has not helped enlighten or protect the public. Why believe the next burst of publicity about Swine Flu or anything else? One is reminded of the “cry wolf” story we learned as children.

#11 – Dick Bernard: Swine Flu, Fear, Hype and Hysteria

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During 1918, my mother almost died in the WW I flu epidemic. I know because she wrote about it in her memories, thusly:
“I think one of the most traumatic experiences I had happened when I was about nine years old and got the World War I flu. Many people were very sick and some died. I had a very rough siege with that flu and remember when Dr. Salvage came out in some very cold winter weather, in the middle of the night, to keep me from bleeding to death. I don’t remember what he did but I had a very high fever and was bleeding from the nose and I spit out chunks of blood. I think they thought I was gone for sure. I recovered though and it took a long while for me to regain my strength. I can remember having some wild dreams and nightmares and must have been out of my head at least part of the time. .”
Esther Bernard, Jan. 1981, page 116 of Pioneers: The Busch and Berning families of LaMoure County North Dakota.
I was seven years old when I got hepatitis and had a very rough time with that. There was no simple way to handle yellow jaundice and it had to work out of the system. I think they give blood transfusions now. I had an upset stomach for several years after that which is probably why I had such a rough time with the 1918 flu
I thought of Mom’s recollection this morning with the breaking news about the Mexican Swine Flu fears. It became big news yesterday; today’s paper had much front page coverage, including a map of the United States which showed 8 cases in Ohio, 7 in California, 2 each in Texas, , Kansas and Ohio. “It’s not a time to panic,” the White House said”, while suggestions were about that we were at a time of possible epidemic, or global pandemic. 1918 came up, as did 1957 and 1968. I wasn’t around in 1918, but I don’t remember anything about 1957 or 1968 so the grim reaper must’ve passed us by. (By the winter of 1918 Mom’s family included her parents and six children. As best as I can tell, she is the only one who got sick with the flu. The 1918 pandemic apparently mainly impacted on young adults – people 20-40. My grandparents would have been in that general age range; neither got sick.)
I don’t know all the details about 1918 and the flu epidemic. I know my grandparents had telephone then; that Dr. Salvage was in a town 10 miles away, that roads were good enough for a car to get through to most farms IF they weren’t blocked with snow, or impassable due to mud.
I don’t know what Dr. Salvage had in his medical bag when he visited Mom; I don’t know if something in that bag helped her turn the corner, or if Mom just got lucky and slowly got better. It does appear, though, from the history she and her siblings recited that at her farm the grim reaper had picked her, and only her, for attention during that awful time period. And I know, too, that in that long ago time the odds of medicine making any difference at all were much lower than today: if you got sick, you either got better or you didn’t. Other than the phone and the newspapers and word of mouth, there were no other media to really fan up the fear, such as there is today.
So, today, lots of newsprint and air time is expended to emphasize the possibility of a dire threat from a flu that has so far affected 21 people in the entire United States. (As I write, the MSN home page has updated the number to 40). People are assessing who they know who’s been to Mexico recently. I took a couple across the driveway to the airport a month or so ago, as they were enroute to a two week vacation in Mexico. A good friend recently came back from a vacation in Mexico. Should I steer clear of them till the threat passes? Will I start to see people wearing masks in grocery stores? Should I buy a mask, or get in line for Tamiflu?
What I do know is that fear sells, and sells well; and fear can rapidly turn into hysteria. And there are many who benefit from the hype, selling fear and hysteria. Of course, fear and hysteria solve nothing, but are certain realities.
Is it useful to exercise prudence in these times? Absolutely. But making it into front page news at this stage?