More Tales From Fairfield Hills

(This is the fourth in a series of Tales of Fairfield Hills, stories shared by local residents who worked and lived there when the property was a functioning psychiatric institution. Now owned by the Town of Newtown and being re-created, the property’s past has been the subject of stories, some of which may have some truth to them, some which may be purely fabrication. These tales, though, come from the hearts of those who knew it best.)

Brothers George Geckle, now living in South Carolina, and Bob Geckle of Newtown recall Fairfield Hills fondly.

“Bob and I grew up on Walnut Tree Hill in our grandma’s house. I was 12 years old when we moved to staff housing at the end of Queen Street, in 1951,” said George. To the best of his recollection, he said, their dad started working at Fairfield State Hospital (Fairfield Hills Hospital) as an attendant, “and moved up in rank.” Their mother was also employed at Fairfield Hills, said the men, first as a nurse and later as a switchboard operator in Newtown Hall.

“Dad became the business administrator at Fairfield Hills,” George said. “Our father was fortunate to become the business manager. He knew that whoever succeeded him would need an MBA. But Dr [Clifford] Moore liked my father, and gave him the opportunity,” he said.

“We lived for two years in that first house. Then we moved to the 1820 farmhouse on Queen Street,” said Bob, who has reclaimed the farmhouse in recent years and lives there with his wife. “Les Reyonlds lived there before us. He was the farm manager at Fairfield Hills, and we moved in when he retired,” said Bob. Where Merryhill Child Care now is housed was the home of the Fairfield Hills superintendent at the time, he said.

What both Bob and George Geckle remember distinctly are the patients who worked in their family home, and the patients with whom they worked on the grounds at Fairfield Hills, when the young men were teens.

“Back then,” said Bob, “if patients had the ability and desire, they could work on the grounds, the farm, or staff housing. There was a range of patients at the hospital. Honestly, some of them should never have been institutionalized. Today, they wouldn’t be.”

The patients performed general housework for the Geckle family. “We had one patient, a Dutch woman named Hilda, who cooked us three apple pies a week. Bertha, all she wanted to do was housework. She didn’t want to be bothered with anything else,” Bob said. The household work was more like a form of early therapy, he said, in that his mother gave back to the patients as much as the patients gave to them. “My mother made breakfast for one patient, every morning. Another woman, Irene, would watch soap operas with my mom. If my mom wasn’t home, she would watch and take notes, to let my mom know what had happened,” he chuckled. Irene was also a frequent guest at the George Geckle, Sr, home for holidays.

Bob also remembered a patient named Caruba, who performed a sort of public service. “Caruba would stand out on the corner of the green, and shout out the baseball scores from the night before!”

“They were all very nice people,” added George, “usually just women who couldn’t take care of themselves, and their families didn’t want them, so they became wards of the state. They might have been mentally slow is all,” he said. “There was a lot of that, in those days, people who just couldn’t care for themselves,” said George. “As America got to be more of a nuclear society, these people got shunted off to hospitals,” he said.

Neither of the men recalls ever being afraid of patients in their home, or on the grounds.

“I was up there all the time with my father,” said Bob. “I would go on the wards with him, if something happened and he was the on-call administrator,” he said. He remembered vividly the night the sprinkler system went off in Cochran House and he accompanied his father to the grounds to assess the situation. “There was four inches of water in there,” he said.

When he was about 17 years old, said George, he worked for Freddy Harris on the grounds, a job his younger brother, Bob, also held during the summers. He never felt any fear in terms of any patients with whom he worked, he said, despite the occasional outburst of anger or frustration. “It was a wonderful summer job for me,” George said, particularly operating the winged mower around the 100-plus acres.

In his later high school and between college years, Bob also worked on the grounds and in maintenance. “When I worked on maintenance,” he said, “I had a crew of patients working for me, so there was some overseeing to the job.”

Bob also worked on the operational farm at Fairfield Hills Hospital, which he believes shut down in the late 1970s. “It was a converging of events, I guess. Some thought that patients were being taken advantage of by working for meager wages on the farm, and it was concurrent with an evolving change in mental health care. It was thought that the patients needed to spend more time on reflecting and not working. That more therapy and drugs would help. That all came together, and the farm closed,” he said. “I remember the day they took the last of the cows out of the barn. There were patients who had worked there for 40 years, guys in their 50s and 60s, who were crying…”

“It was wonderful to be a part of that institution,” said George, who is now a semiretired English professor from the University of South Carolina. “I don’t recollect anyone complaining about working at Fairfield State Hospital. It was considered very good work.”

“It was quite an experience,” his brother agreed. “If you spend your entire life in that environment, you don’t take it to be anything unusual,” he said.

“I don’t think anybody in Newtown was really afraid of the patients or nervous about the hospital,” George said. “I think they’re more nervous now that the town has bought Fairfield Hills and what they are going to do with it,” he laughed.

Growing up with Fairfield State Hospital a significant part of their lives, both Bob and George Geckle said that they learned to be more accepting of people with mental disabilities.

“I am definitely more sensitive to those with mental illness,” Bob said. “I guess I grew up with the attitude that mental illness is not too different from any physical illness,” he said.

“There are a lot of misconceptions about mental illness. You expect the mentally ill to be like a Hollywood movie, but that’s not the way it is. It’s just people who can’t cope in society. Working with those people helped me develop empathy for the less fortunate. I learned a lot,” said George, “working at Fairfield Hills.”