3 Comments Posted by Neal

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Autumn Twin commented: "These are nice respectable homes these MDs had. I wouldn't want to be a child growing up on the campus of a large mental hospital, but they are nice homes." Actually, it was a fairly pleasant environment to grow up in, and as children of the hospital doctors we soon grew accustomed to being around mentally ill people. Back in the 1940's and early 1950's, before the discovery of really effective psychotropic drugs, the care that patients received at Pilgrim was pretty close to being State-of-the-Art Psychiatry at the time, and the buildings and grounds of every state hospital were very well maintained. Some of the milder schizophrenic patients even did work around the hospital grounds such as lawn mowing, pruning, gardening, or transplanting trees and shrubs (Pilgrim had a very large experimental nursery for many years), and some others worked in doctor's homes as cooks, nannies, or cleaning ladies. I still remember the various patients who worked in or near our home in the homes of my childhood friends as generally being very nice people, albeit a bit strange in their behavior on occasion.
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The first television set bought by a doctor on the staff at Pilgrim was bought in 1947, I think, by a doctor who lived in a single family residence (actually bldg#61) on the PSH map. After we got home from school, most of us (preteen) children of the staff would ride our bikes over to this house and leave them in a heap on the front lawn. Then we'd all sit on the floor in front of the 16" black and white TV screenin the living room. We'd watch Howdy Doody for a while and sometimes stay for a bit of the western movie on Six Gun Playhouse before we had to go home for dinner.
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When my dad was on the staff of PSH back in the 1940s and early 50's, this building was called the Staff House; unmarried doctors or married staff who had no children lived in small kitchenless apartments there. The building had its own kitchen staff and a very nice dining room. Every December there was a very nice Christmas party for all the medical staff and their families - it was especially fun for us kids. Just about everybody went, including some of the Jewish doctors who had survived interment in Hitler's Concentration camps. I still remember being able to get ice-cold bottles of Coca cola on hot summer days (for just a nickel) from an early-model vending machine in the back of the building, near the staff house kitchen.