When Donald Vitkus was 6 years old he was committed to the Belchertown State School.
In his book “You’ll Like it Here,” local author Ed Orzechowski tells Vitkus’ story through his eyes, laying bare the de-humanizing environment of a Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation institution of the mid-1900s. In a series of interviews over eight years, Donald related his story to the author, Orzechowski, a journalist whose articles, features and columns have appeared in The Springfield Republican, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, and Early American Life magazine.
On June 11 at 6:30 p.m., Orzechowski will read from his book at the Sunderland Public Library.
Misdiagnosed and clinically labeled a “moron” with an I.Q. of 41, 6-year-old Donald Vitkus was committed to Belchertown State School in 1949 as patient number 3394. From that day onward, he begins a lifelong battle to convince others — and himself — that he is not a moron. This is a story of the resiliency of the human spirit.
Abandoned by his unwed mother during World War II, Donald is placed in foster care. He is 27 days old. Belchertown State School — a sprawling institution like hundreds across the country — becomes Donald’s home for the next eleven years. Behind barred windows and locked doors, he is subjected to beatings, mind-numbing medications, straitjackets, solitary confinement, and brutal regimentation. He “graduates” with a fourth-grade education, and at 17 is paroled to see if he can make it on the outside. In 1964 he is drafted, serves a year in Vietnam, and returns to the challenges of marriage and children, holding a job, earning his high school diploma and an associate’s degree, discovering his own roots, and becoming a caregiver and advocate in the system that once imprisoned him.
Donald wants his story told.
“I never want us to return to those days,” he says. Since it was shuttered in 1992 following a federal class-action lawsuit, other more academic books have been published about Belchertown and places like it, but none has been told by a patient who lived there.
A retired high school English teacher and radio news person, Orzechowski lives with his wife, Gail, in Northampton, Massachusetts. The reading at the Sunderland Public Library will also include a presentation on the writing of the book and the history behind it. Copies of the book will be available for sale and the author available to sign them. More information is available at sunderlandpubliclibrary.org.