About Us
A Brief History: As Remembered by Dennis Felty
3400 people lived at the Harrisburg State Hospital
At this time, 3,400 people lived at the Harrisburg State Hospital. A group of employees at the Harrisburg State Hospital, including Barbara Scheffer, Evelyn Byron, Mark Barton, Byron Firestone and myself, Dennis Felty, began meeting to explore alternatives to the horrendous conditions at the Hospital.
I was a new 1968 graduate of Elizabethtown College with a degree in Psychology. During college, two of my professors David Lasky and Tony Felice worked part time at the Harrisburg State Hospital and shared stories about the conditions there with their students. Both Lasky and Felice later left Elizabethtown College to work full time at the Harrisburg State Hospital and several of their students joined them in their work which was directed at changing the conditions at the institution.
At that time, Dr. Janet Kelley was the Director of the Resident Center at The Harrisburg State Hospital. The Center was an alternative inpatient program based on the concepts of a therapeutic community and the Patient Rights Movement. Dr. Kelley was conducting courses in organizational change and the impact of institutionalization on people. Dr Kelley's courses were attended by people such as Mark Barton, Barbara Scheffer, Larry Kauffman, John Stamen, Barry Schaffer, Terry Forrest, Bob Finkelstein, myself and others.
We all knew that there was something profoundly wrong with how people were being treated, however at the time there was absolutely no vision of what the alternative was. Harold Kiester Director of the Intermediate Care Facility at the Hospital asked me to begin working in the community in the hope of impacting the availability of community services for people that might be able to leave the Hospital. I began working at the Harrisburg Hospital Community Mental Health Center at Brady Hall with Dr Adlestein and Judy Vercher. This work resulted in co-founding with Iris Harad, the Market Place, a community based pre-partial hospitalization program for people preparing to leave the hospital. Robert Scott and Peter House had just developed "Goal Planning" and were directly involved in The Market Place program. Robert Scott was to become a long term Keystone Board Member and Iris Harad would eventually serve as Keystone's third Board Chairman.
Pennhurst State Center 1997
Mel Knowlton, who had worked with Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger at ENCOR (Eastern Nebraska Community Organization Retardation) was hired by the State Office of Mental Retardation to create a community based program for people with mental retardation including community services for people living in state mental retardation centers. ENCOR, a comprehensive community service system in Omaha Nebraska, was the origin of many outstanding people who would help build the community system across the country. Dr Wolfensberger was the originator of the concepts of Normalization and Social Role Valorization (SRV) that defined core principles for Keystone. Dr Wolfensberger remains a trusted advisor today.
This group, which included Mel Knowlton and Brian Lensick, Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Mental Retardation, would bring Keystone to Hartford in 1990. The grop also included Charley Galloway who would later serve as Connecticut's Deputy Director, and Bill West,who as the Director of Pennsylvania's Association of Retarded Citizens (ARC) helped bring some of the landmark litigation including Pennhurst vs. Halderman that resulted in the complete closing of Pennhurst in 1980 and changed the landscape of community and institutional services.
In 1997, I had the opportunity to work with Sebastian Triscari and Lisa Ramirez in the production of Every Day Lives, a video documentary for the Office of Mental Retardation about the history of Mental Retardation in Pennsylvania. We were given the keys to Pennhurst, now abandoned and were permitted to film at both the Pennhurst and Polk State Centers.
In 1972, at the time Keystone started, there were about 5000 children and adults with mental retardation living at Pennhurst. I remember getting a letter from a young woman who lived at Pennhurst asking for help in leaving. On her own, she came to Harrisburg on a bus to visit and was one of the first people to move into our apartment program in Pineford.
Dennis Felty at Pennhurst 1997
In producing the Every Day Lives video we asked people to come back to the grounds of Pennhurst and interviewed them about what their lives had been like at Pennhurst. We interviewed a couple who were married after leaving and who now live in an apartment about a mile from grounds of Pennhurst and are still very much in love. A man in his 60s took me to the swing set he played on as a child. It was completely overgrown with vines, he said "this is where I played." Another women quietly said "you didn't want to go to unit 6 that's where they killed you."
With the aid of the keys we entered some of Pennhurst's abandoned buildings. In the children's ward, there were toys and helmets still scattered on the floor. The sunlight came in through the windows which were covered with bars and chain link. Records were strewn across the floor and there was a beautiful mural on the wall - a painting of Mickey Mouse was visible under the peeling paint.
Pennhurst Administration Building 1997
One of the many astounding discoveries at Pennhurst, during the production of Every Day Lives, was a very fine ceramic insert next to the main door of the Administration Building. The insert depicts a plantation scene with slaves picking cotton.
Leave this site and go to a new site
Open a new window on top of the current window
Open an Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) file in the current window