2022-10-30, Sunday, Rev 0, dr.harte.letters.set_1.html new development
dr.harte.letters.series_1.html
This begins the series of letters from Dr. James R. Harte, MD, Child Psychiatrist and later instructor to medical doctors specializing in child psychiatry at the university in Kansas City, Missouri. This page is the beginning of the process. The letters are generally in chronical order. But to actually get them sequentially correct will take time. There is a gap from the in the 1990 series as they are missing. I moved residence and cities a number of time as part of my work assignments and it is probable that they are lost in the moves. More searching will have to be done as time allows.
Legal transfer of custody from my natural mother, Radoijka to Miss Ruth Downing occured on Feb 3, 1960. Miss Downing then became legally my foster mother.
Legal adoption to Miss Downing was completed on March 3, 1961 in the Circuit Court of St. Louis, Co. It had been a difficult matter to find an attorney to take up the adoption because several refused on the basis that they did not feel that a single woman should adopt a child. At the time of legal transfer I was age 15. The hunt for a lawyer occured during 1960 time period when I was age 14. Miss Downing was at this time Director of Case Work for the Family and Children Agency of St. Louis, a Unit Way funded organization. She also had a stellar record for her work in New York City with the CSS (Community Service Society, her work of three years as Director of Refugee Resettlement for Churh World Service in Europe which was published in the New York Times shortly before she said to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth; and her work in Paine Whitney Hospital on the treatment of alcohlic with Dr, Lollie, MD & psychoanalysist. I have a paper/booklet of his published by Yale University on the causes and treatment of alcohol addiction. It is full of, well, Freudian explanations which simply do not ring true today. But in fairness to him - and I got to know him well as Ruth, he and I often went to the Peach Tree Restaurant, not to far from where Ruth and I lived in Manhattan, 12 E 97 St, dr.harte.letters.series_1.html I also have what appears to be an unpublished pamphet of Sigmon Freud on, well of course, sexuality. I say unpublished because I have several complete works of Freud and no where does this publication appear. It is translated from the German.
Lastly, I do have the large collection notes from Dr. Maragret Marler which Ruth attended in the 1930s and also how Ruth came by the Freud publication. The Marler lecture series in around 100-125 pages. I have read it and it is, well, rather more Freudian stuff. That was the big thing back then, you know. I will be posting these too, though it is going to take some time because sanning each page, then reducing to appropriate size to paste as an image into the web page all takes time. But from a scanned type written image I can convert to a pdf which is searchable using Kofax Power PDF. Then when I post these pdf's you will be able to copy and paste by opening the pdf in Windows Explorer, W-10 and I assume W-11.
Sometime several months later I did land up in St. Lukes Hospital and then for a little over a month I lived in the children's wing - psychiatric unit - of Jewish Hospital, now I believe joined with Bernard (I think) hosptial. This time period was very difficult and painful for me. In the many letter from Dr. Harte spanning several decades you will understand why. I have kept quiet on all this, and also as relates to the murder case involving Glenn Nash - because it was and still is painful. But in several of Drl Harte's letters he asks me to come into the world and share my insights because he felt that what I had learned from my experience, and how I managed to overcome these problems - which were very serious - which he felt would be very valuable in helping particularly teenage high school age guys in similar circumstances - would be of immense help to them. His specialty was in fact treatment of teenage range of mainly boys who were both destructive and delinquent to themselves and often to others through their "acting out" their pain and frustration.
I am getting near age near 77 now. If I am to leave something meaningful as a sort of "legacy" for others then I had better get started. I credit three people in my life with having the most to do with, how should I say it, saving my life. 1 Ruth Downing. This relationship may have started in Germany as my per Steve Coleman, Ruth was Director of Refugee Resetlement for Europe, Church World Service and Radja, my natural mother, was working for CWS also. But going from when I landed up in the Manhatten apartment on 96th St. and Madison ave, in a six story old apartment (we lived on the second floor with several apartments all made into one which Dr. Sherfey had done - it was a large apartment) to the months leading to Ruth's death in the nursing home - which included visits to the nursing home by Radja - every one was "mum" when I would ask them questions about my past. Radja, who I was able to visit any time I wanted except no so much when I lived in Manhattan - was the most cautious. One time when when I was age 16 and had the driver license and had driven to New York to see her and Lena, the Russian mathematician, I posed a question to Radja and she cut me off quickly by saying, "Let's not talk about the past - it's all over with." At that time I was also interested in Russian history and the war and she was much more open about that - with insights that I found suprising in their depth of knowledge.
But after Steve Coleman, one of her very best friends and whom she had known from Funk Kaserne and also before the war contacted me and then followed up per my request with the four page summary of Raca (Radja) I was able to put some of the puzzles together. And most, if not all, that he said, Radja had reluctently told me, put in bits and pieces. Never the less, I would like to have had the panorama picture. I had inherited a collection of photos, some 8x10 of people which included I assume Bishops and Archbishops of varous Orthodox Churches who were in Funk Kaserne When I asked her to identify all the people she was able to do so. But this went fast. I did manage to write down on one 8x10 the name of a person who she said was the Prince of Georgia. I didn't know my geography at that time. And she immediatly knew the name of the Archbishop standing next to the prince.
In Australia when I was able to leave the boys home (about 75 DP boys and run by the salvation army, Box Hill and another place in Adelaide, and lived with Radja and my brother, Chuckie, 5 years older, for about three months before we took off for United States, I asked her to teach me some German as Chuck would always talk to her in that language. She said I didn't need to know German. But I persisted and finally she said, OK, I will teach you two words. Which were Danka Shourn and Biter. I immediately grasped the words and the meaning and have never forgotten them. But she would go no further saying those two world was all I would ever need. Years later on that visit when I was 16 I asked her to teach me some Russian and she did the same thing but this time it was please = Пожалуйста and thank you = Спасибо. But she would go no further.
I did ask her the WHY of not learning German again. She said "I never wanted you to have an accent. And anyway, you will never need to speak any other language now that you are in America." "What about you, Radja? You know quite a few." "I needed to know other languages in order to survive and make a living. Let's talk about something else." And that was that. And that may be all there was to it. It is easy to read more into anything if you let your imagination get loose.
Ruth, on the other hand, would not identify any of the various people or the place where the photos were taken. Yet they were all in her possession. When I asked her one time why she never encouraged me to visit my natural father who was still living in Manhattan - she squirmed with some difficulty. I asked her then about this prominant lawyer who regualry came to visit us in NYC. She replied that "he (my natural father) was making a lot of trouble for her; that he was threatening to get me deported if she, Ruth, didn't let him visit with me regularly. According to Ruth, the lawyer called Fred into his office and said that if he persisted then he, the lawyer, would take him, Fred, to court and force him to pay child support and he would fight Fed in court on any deportation efforts. Fed was still working as a waiter and dish washer at Childs Restaurant in downtown Manhattan and was in no financial positon to press a case.
It's late again. 11:30pm
- Detroit, the visit - no to marriage and why - per Radja
- I meet Fred
- Vira enters the picture
- Eastern Military Academy, Long Island - school a disaster - I plead, Don't hit me -
- I am taken to Manhatten during the huricane of 1954 to the 96st apartment
- school starts with 3rd grade at prestigious Walt Whitman School, yet I can neither read, write, or any math
- I get expelled with cause
- we, Ruth, Janey and I - move to Tarry Town, NY to a big house
- I go to Scarsdale School - a high class expensive private school
- 4th grade. I am taught how to form letters - but it is all very difficult - 1st teacher
- second teacher, a Mrs (?) very kind and her name will come to me later. She is able to make some progress with me. At 16 I take Ruth to NYC for a conference and go my way of Virginia Island, place of the sleeping prophet (the name will come to me later as I have the book stilll) and I show her some of my early paintings. She says one of them reminds her of the book, There Is A River (Egar Casey) and tells me all bout it and that the picture reminds her of the book.
- we then get to Manhattan
- I visit with Radja while Ruth attends the conferenec which is held near the village
- then I go visit Lena who is now prof. of mathematics at CW Post. She tells me what I did not want to hear.
- More visit with Radja. I do not sense in any way a truth as to what Lena tells me about Radja.
- Radja then tells me something that has stayed with me all my life and changed my perspective on her and the real consquences of war and what it does to generations after the war is over. "She said, what happened to you was unavoidable. It was a miracle that you even survived your first six months. Then she told my why that was so. Then she told me more about those years in Funk Kaserne Then she told me, "You have to understand, what happened to you happened to thousands of other children, hundreds of thousands. And much worse for most of them. I was at least able to eek out a living because I could translate and I was able to accompany many refugees to Paris when I got a job working for Red Cross (she was expert in French). "There was a saying, If you could get to Paris you were safe." "Even afer the war had ended - people were starving to death and nothing could be done." Then she told me how the American army doctor told her how she might be able to save my life.
She told me, shortly after I was born in camp Funk Kaserne I contracted pneumonia, which was going around all over, everywhwere. Then I got wooping caugh, and more things. She said this happened to many of the infants who died. She talked to the American army doctor as she spoke perfect Englishf and asked if he could give me some of the new drug, penicillian. (check sp) He said he could not because of military orders. He said that the penecillian was in very short supply and they could only give it to sick and wounded military soldiers. Then the doctor told Radja that there was one possibility. If she could go around the camp and collect milk from mothers who were giving - and give this to me - there might be a change. Radja was unable to give milk herself.
Every day through out the day - Radja said she would walk around the camp and ask other mothers for their milk. And always she said they gave. After about 6 months I was out of the real danger range she said.
She shared with me more stories of how horrible it was to survive during the mass bombings of Berlin. She said something too which stayed with me forever. "We all shared whatever we had. In Berlin so many apartments had been destroyed. One I had lived in with Chuck and Vera was bombed out. We were able to find another which had three other families sharing the place. But nobody complained.
On my visit to her in 2007 in Belgrade retirement home - she would often say to me, "I have known hard times." There was no sound of self-pity in her voice. It was a soft sound of sadness and resignation. One time when Peggy and I visited her mother, Maybell, who lived her childhood during the depression on a share cropper farm which her husband operated in Alabama not too far from Chattanooga told me simply, "... those were hard times." I thought back immediatly to what Radja had kept saying to me, really to herself, in my visit to her in Belgrade. Maybell and her nine children, which included Peggy the oldest - their shack where they lived in, that is what it was for she and I drove by one day and it was still standing, had no running water. You went to the well and drew the water up with a bucket. No electricity, No plumbing. When you got old enough you helped pick the cotton. They were hard times. And I began to understand what Radja and Maybell were saying.
I was not alone in the boat. In fact, I was one of the lucky ones. But as a small child you don't comprehend such things.
I know what the Russian people, the older adults are going through today with all these threats of war from Biden and the so called NATO.
They too were burned as children. But much more deeply than ever I was. I know why they cannot trust the Amerricans or the British, I know they will launch all they have on the first sign of a real theat to them. Radja and I used to talk about that very thing. Especially afer Clinton and Blair bombed Belgrade and other cities and killed so many Serbs for no real reason at all. The Americans have never suffered real war, total war as the Russian people did, as the Serbian people did. They do not forget even today. If it comes to war with Russia, America will be totally destroyed as will Britain and Germany. Paris will be spared. But all the little NATOs will suffer a devastation they will never forget. Russia will rebuild again. - life in Norwood near Adelaide. I think. Radja gets job at Kings College for boys and teaches history. I go too but am unable to learn anything. Day after day several of the teachers try to teach me the alphabet over and over again they try to teach me by the phonetic way. But I am totally frustrated and run away into the school yard. It is at 14, in St. Louis County, Brentwood, that I finally learn all the alphabet phonetcally and start to read. My first book was The Time Machine
- but i cannot grasp the material in the public shool. I cannot sleep at all. Finally I give up. Not because "my mother rejected me" but because I saw myself as a total faiure. But no body ever asked me, "why did you do it" They would only say "you almost didn't make it - it was real close"
I had tried to tell Dr. B what was bothering me but he would only just keep looking at me and not saying a word. He never asked me "what's bothering you so much?"
And in all the years with Dr. Harte and Dr. Shroff - and Dr. M none ever asked me that simple question. It was always "Your mother totally rejected you."
In mid 1960s I got to meet Dr. Bruno Betrtleman, who wrote Love is Not Enough He was giving a lecture in Memphis to a colection of young medical doctors on the subject of childhood Autism and I had become interested in that. So Ruth contacted me, I was going to UT at the time and asked me if I wanted to attend. I said yes and drove home to do so. As the Director of Case Work for Family Service of Memphis she had the necessary connections. Also, Dr. Schroff, MD, the psychoanalyst who(m) I was seeing at that time had been adivised of this lectture and had called Ruth to let he know if I might be interested.
The point I am making is that at that Bruno Bettleman (I'll get the spelling right latger) was a psychologist, not MD, but was also a trained psychoanalysist (Freukdian school) and of a lot of fame back then. And back then the mother always got the rap for everything - she was blamed for it all. Like schitzophrenia. They blamed the mother. But now we know that physiological reasons are the main cause of schitzophrenia, such as dopamine deficiency, etc. And that for instance, psychotropic drugs such as thorazine have remarkable positive effects on both psychotic and schitzophrenic patients. Gone are the days of labotomies.
- so in these many letters from dr. harte there is that constant theme that the cause of it all was total rejection by the mother. It will take another generation of doctors before they come to accept that it is toxicity that is causing autism. But many young lives will be damaged if not ruined until then.
Again, before I hit the sack, at near 76 and with over 6 decades and much studing about it, and much time to reflect - the cause in my case was that I was the product of the war - and the next generation from that generation which lived and fought and suffered from the war directly - and that next genration lives through much of the same suffering but perhaps not as intense. Because of that reality - the Untied States and also Europe is playing with deadly fire in threateng Russia and China. They will both launch on the first move of a serious and real threat to them. They will not hesitate. They will not take the chance. They both know they can and will "ride out the storm" and will recover and start over again as they have in the past.
2022-10-31 12:25 am Rev 0