Carolyn Clark was missing. Her job at a sheltered workshop in a bleak warehouse district had ended at 4 p.m., and Clark was expected to board the first of two buses that would take her on the long ride back to her supervised apartment.
It had taken three months to get Clark to this point. The mildly retarded woman had been forced to spend 29 of her 45 years in an institution for the mentally retarded, until a judge ruled last year that the state had done a great injustice to her, that she should have been freed long ago.
She was released in October into the care of a nonprofit agency that teaches handicapped people the living skills that are so hard to learn inside an institution`s walls. In Clark`s case, she had to be taught nearly everything–how to cook for herself, how to iron, how to use a washing machine, how to shop for groceries and clothes.
How to take a city bus alone.
And now she was missing.
”Now, I`m a little concerned,” said Clark`s live-in supervisor, Gwendolyn Brown, as the minutes stretched into hours with no word on Clark`s whereabouts.
Brown is a pleasant-looking women of 28, experienced in the care of the mentally disabled, with a demeanor as calm as a rock. But this worried her. Clark had failed to come directly home from the workshop on two other occasions, but she had not been gone this long.
About 8:30, Brown received a call from Kim, one of Clark`s workshop friends. The two had had a fight, Kim said, and Clark had refused to ride the bus with her. She said she was going to walk home alone.
Brown started calling other workers in Carolyn Clark`s program, and they began driving the dark city streets in search of a slightly bent, 5-foot-2 sprite of a woman with delicate hands and wrists. About 9 p.m., Brown called the police.
They found Clark at 1:30 a.m. She was standing on a deserted street corner, near a graffiti-covered rowhouse and a bar. Clark was at least 40 blocks from her workshop and 35 blocks from her apartment. According to the police, Clark had been helped by an apparent good Samaritan, a young man who called police twice and waited at Clark`s side until they arrived to take her home.
The Jan. 16 incident worried the people who care about Carolyn Clark. But they did not conclude from it that she should still be in an institution–only that it would be a long, tough process to prepare her to live on her own.
There is a ”very delicate balance” involved in reintroducing a person like Clark to the outside world, said Ilene Shane of the Developmental Disabilities Law Project in Philadelphia, one of the public interest attorneys who fought for her freedom.
”You want to keep giving them more independence,” she said, ”yet you want them to exercise that independence responsibly. . . . It`s a hard process that requires a lot of judgment. There was a time I thought they were moving too slowly. Now they may be moving too quickly.”
Clark is a free woman now, said another of her attorneys, Stephen Gold of Philadelphia`s Public Interest Law Center. She is free ”to go to the movies or a bar . . . to have sex, to have relationships, that is clearly part of being an adult. But most people who reach that point have been socialized to have antennae, to weigh the dangers. If it were my wife, or my son or my daughter, I know those three people all have a great street sense. Carolyn doesn`t have that.”
Carolyn Clark was institutionalized at age 15 in November, 1956, and released in October, 1985. During that time, the Vietnam War began and ended. The space program advanced from satellites to moon landings, to space shuttles. The nation had seven different presidents.
Clark grew from girlhood to middle age, from a fresh-faced teenager to a sometimes haggard-looking woman who wears false teeth. All of that time she was committed to a deceptively pretty-looking central Pennsylvania institution for the retarded called the Laurelton Center.
At Laurelton, everything was done for her: her cooking, her washing, the planning of her day. With permission from the staff, she could leave the state-run center`s grounds and walk to nearby sandwich shops. She was allowed to visit a boyfriend in the town of State College, several miles away.
Beneath the apparent easyness, though, was an iron fist of control. Bathrooms had no doors; bedrooms were shared with others. Lights went out at 11 whether Clark was tired or not.
When she acted out–when she threw a tantrum and became assaultive, for instance–staffers put her in a restraint chair, strapping her in so that she could not move. On other occasions, they put her into a time-out room. ”There was a time when she lived in the time-out room for months at a time,” said attorney Shane.
Clark had a baby while at Laurelton, father unknown. It was a blond, 7-pound-plus normal boy, according to Clark`s mother. Clark at first tried to keep the child but then agreed to the baby`s adoption in 1972. After that, the State of Pennsylvania had Carolyn Clark sterilized.
”I was mixed up,” Clark said during a recent interview in her workshop cafeteria. ”The doctor asked me, and I said, `Yeah.”`
If she had not been sent to an institution, said a psychologist who testified at Clark`s court hearing in May, ”I think she would be a normally functioning individual in her community; maybe married and have kids, have a job.”
But Clark simply did not fit in with community standards of the 1950s. She was mildly retarded (although doctors at the time incorrectly labeled her as ”severely defective”). Probably worse than that, in society`s view, was her behavior. She skipped school; she was arrested for incorrigibility and disorderly conduct. The school authorities accused her of being part of a group of girls who hung out in parks and bars.
At home, Clark and five siblings lived with a mother and an unemployed father in a four-room house. They scraped by on relief, and the children
–half-starved, according to one report–begged. According to several records, Clark was sexually abused.
She was placed briefly in a foster home until, one morning at 4:30, police found her in a park with four boys. A doctor concluded that she was
”an easy sex victim of the unscrupulous” and that an institution might have a stabilizing effect on her.
Clark was committed to Laurelton and remained there nearly three decades in spite of her own nearly constant efforts to win freedom and despite the fact that the Laurelton staff itself fought for years for her release.
In June, U.S. District Judge Daniel H. Huyett III ruled that her constitutional rights had been violated. He ordered her placed in a community living arrangement which, at the moment, is costing the state about $70,000 a year (compared with the roughly $48,000 it cost to keep Clark institutionalized). The cost is expected to drop dramatically as Clark is moved into a home with more clients and as she learns the skills she needs to be truly free.
Experts who testified at Clark`s court hearing estimated that she would need three to four years of full- and then part-time supervision before she could live and function on her own. An official of Teaching Family Corp., the nonprofit agency that contracts with Philadelphia to care for her, guesses that her instruction will take four or five years.
Roger Peterson, Teaching Family`s co-director of residential programs, compared the process to ”tying shoes–there`s 137 steps to tying shoes.”
Clark must be taught to go grocery shopping, for instance, and this task will have to be broken down into many smaller tasks. ”The first thing you do is make a list,” Peterson said. ”That is what we will work on. `What do we need, Carolyn? What do you want for dinner this week? Look in the
refrigerator.` ” Only after that, Peterson said, will she be ready for the next steps–going to the store to familiarize herself with the aisles, then learning how to pick out items, then learning how to pay for them in the checkout line.
But there have been signs of real progress.
”In the beginning we had a problem with breaking things,” said Clark`s supervisor, Gwen Brown.
Breaking things?
”If she was angry, she`d break something,” Brown said.
And there were tantrums. They used to last an hour to three hours, Brown said. ”Now she`ll say, `I`m sorry. I won`t do that again.` She hasn`t broken anything in months.”
Last month, a few days before the actual date, staffers and clients in Clark`s program threw a 45th birthday party for her in an attractive townhouse that Clark and Gwen Brown had moved into just that morning. The townhouse, which has a fireplace, fine dining room and living room with modern soft chairs, will be Clark`s and Brown`s temporary home until a bigger house for more clients can be found.
The birthday party was Clark`s first since 1956 in the outside world. She was charming, witty and also a bit sly.
”I couldn`t wait to get myself out of that joint,” she said when asked how it felt to be free.
What did she want to do?
”In the news(paper), I put in that I wanted to have a Philadelphia pretzel and see Michael Jackson. And Michael Jackson`s not here. He`s in Florida.”
What did she like best?
”I`m happy I`m with Gwen and Margaret and Kathy.”
By the following Monday, Clark`s happy party mood had collapsed. When she woke up, she refused to go to her workshop. Gwen Brown left her alone for a while, knowing she would be bored. Clark wailed over the phone to a caller that she was ”alone and real scared. . . . Would you take me please? Would you come for me? . . . I don`t have nothing to do!”
By Tuesday, the boredom ploy had apparently worked, and Clark was back at work at the Albert Teti Developmental Center, a block-long former factory building owned by the Philadelphia chapter of the Association for Retarded Citizens. Clark sat at a long gray metal table with 21 other retarded adults. Under the watchful eye of kindly looking supervisors, she did her task reasonably well: counting out 100 long silver bolts and then packing them into yellow and brown cardboard boxes.
During a break in her workshop`s cafeteria, Clark was asked what she wanted to do with her life.
”I want to get married,” she said. ”I have a boyfriend (in State College). . . . And he is the best boyfriend. And I want him up here so I can see him.”
What will she do after she gets married?
”I guess we`ll do what we want to do then.”
Had she tried to find her family yet, her mother?
”I`ve never gotten in touch with my mother. I don`t know if she`s dead or not.”
Did she want to see her?
”Yeah, if she`s not dead. I`ve got to ask somebody if she`s dead. Because she`d come see me. That`s why I carry on, and get mad, because I can`t find my mother too much.”
Helen Clark, Carolyn`s mother, said she has no plans to see her daughter. ”I don`t know how she is,” she said. ”I don`t know if she`s violent or anything like that. Will she get mad at me and say I put her away? I don`t want to walk around and have her mad at me. I don`t know. (She) says she loves me. But you know, a person`s away (for) years, I don`t know how they`re gonna be.”
