Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.org Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/Director Scott Knudson.

In this episode Producer Randy Cadwell follows author Wendell Affield as he remembers his childhood in a household with mental illness in his book Chickenhouse Chronicles.

I'm Wendell Affield.

I live in the countryside a little bit west of Bemidji, Minnesota.

How did I get into the writing...

I spent four years in the Navy, when I got my discharge I was really undecided what to do.

It was 1969 and I got a fill-in job as a meat cutter for Jewel Foods down in Chicago, Illinois.

Well 30 years later I retired from that profession as a manager at Luekens Village Foods in Bemidji, Minnesota.

And I knew I had stories to tell.

I retired in 2001 and I started taking classes at BSU and it just truly opened a world to me, a whole new world.

I began writing what I call memory stories and over the years they evolved to the point where students and professors began telling me you need to make this into a book, you need to make it into a book.

One of the things that motivated me to tell my stories is having been raised on a farm up in Nebish I knew a lot of the old World War II Vets, you know, who were also farmers and by 2000 they were in the autumn of their life and they'd come in and a few of them started telling me trauma stories of their time in World War II of being captured or being wounded or losing a friend.

They would get choked up and walk away and I didn't realize till many years later, when I was studying at BSU, that these very well may have been the anniversary date of their trauma.

Trauma anniversaries are really powerful triggers for bringing up old memories and it may have very well been the first time they ever told anyone cuz they knew that I had been in Vietnam, that I was wounded and medevaced home and whatnot.

So they, I think, felt a level of trust sharing their memories.

But with them walking away, with their story uncompleted, they're all gone now, I came to realize that if I didn't tell my stories they'd die with me and that was probably the original motivator to start writing.

Eventually the book was published, Muddy Jungle Rivers, and it just opened amazing doors to me.

I was invited to do a Veterans Writing Workshop down in Chanhassen, I believe it was, and so in doing my research on that I came across a term I wasn't familiar with and it was expressive writing therapy or written exposure therapy.

There's several different terms.

And in effect, when you've gone through a trauma, and not just war, any kind of trauma, in putting your story down on paper you create boundaries and you can begin making sense of it.

And that's I realize that's kind of what happened to me.

My writing was very cathartic.

I was diagnosed by the VA with PTSD in the early '90s and the more I began researching it and I came across this new term, post-traumatic growth, and I started studying that, and to me it's an amazing theory.

And we all have seen it of people who have gone through a trauma, be it a car accident or losing a sibling or a child or any number of things.

Unfortunately and sadly too many women are abused.

But writing those memories, putting them on paper, it's a beginning process of integrating them into your life experience and that's kind of where I am today.

I was born in New York City.

My mother met my stepfather Herman through a lonely hearts club newspaper called Cupid's Columns.

It's actually printed in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

We moved up to the farm in September of 1949, and I was raised on a little farm homestead 20 miles north of We were not very comfortable financially.

From the time I was about 10 years old I was trapping and hunting and helping supplement meat on the table.

When I was 12 years old, in 1960, my mother was committed to Fergus Falls State Hospital and we children were all placed, by then there were nine of us, placed in foster homes.

In 2010 my mother passed away and I was her probate administrator.

In 1984 my mother inherited everything from my grandmother's estate.

She had it shipped from Seattle, Washington to the farm in northern Minnesota.

It started out in the upstairs, in the hayloft of the dairy barn and then the early '90s I believe, straight line wind blew through and toppled the barn and all these things from the hayloft were just, my brothers just threw them in a chicken house.

So the late winter of 2010, after my mother Barbara died, this was a building that had been off limits for many years, she had a padlock on the door and refused to let anyone explore what was in it.

We knew there was an inheritance.

The morning I opened it with my sister Laurel, at first glance it looked like a pile of trash, because the roof leaked, the windows leaked, and over the 26 year period the stuff laid in there, with our changing climates fluctuating more than 100°, there was so much damage.

Some of the documents were completely destroyed.

On top it was almost like a crust over a stack of hay, but it sheltered underneath.

This is an old feed hopper , we discovered my grandfather's urn in it.

My grandmother's urn was just mixed in with all the piles of junk.

Some of the siblings wanted to burn everything and I just went in there and started digging and I thought no, this we need, this is our history.

So I got several big plastic totes in Bemidji and my sister Laurel and I just filled the totes up and I brought them out to my farm at that time and they just reeked from mouse urine and droppings and dead mouse skeletons in some of them and it was just kind of a disaster.

But there were some amazing, just incredible discoveries we made in it.

My grandmother was a, I guess today you would, she'd probably be a star on a hoarder episode, but I'm so thankful that she was.

Okay what's here.

Here let's start at the top.

Here these are college transcripts.

I have one from my grandmother from Vassar College, she graduated in 1915.

Here's one from Williams College where my grandfather went.

Here we have my mother's transcript from Juilliard School of Music in New York City.

Grandmother had them in a bag inside of another bag.

And these are all from the 1800s, the earliest one is 1822.

This is Beltrami County juvenile court records.

And I learned something quite interesting.

In 1952, my mother Barbara, with then five children, ran away from Herman and the farm in Nebish, Minnesota.

We ended up out in Chelan, Washington where we spent the summer and when it got cold we ended up coming back to the farm.

And it was just we were very poor, very poor.

When we came back in Autumn of '52, she must have applied for welfare because by 1954 this court document shows that we had a lady, Farah Graves, that started visiting the farm.

And it's so sad.

This court document, you know, if people say, you know, don't believe things I talk about in our childhood and how filthy our house was and dysfunctional, all they got to do is read our court document and it's all spelled out.

I'll just read: Farah Graves, first duly sworn, testified that she had known the family since 1954 being responsible for supervision of Aid to Dependent Children grants to four of the children by a prior marriage, including two of Curry's children indicated.

Okay, she reviewed the condition of the home during her visits which indicated that the house on each occasion was dirty and filthy and that the children were at times dressed in dirty clothes or not adequately clothed.

And that was just the way our childhood was.

That was just it.

Aunt Polly, my mother's younger sister, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1945 and my mother struggled from the time she was a teenager.

Her first documented suicide attempt was in 1937 and my grandmother wrote that my mother was schizophrenic and she obviously, and I'm guessing she did that because her other daughter was schizophrenic, so it, I suppose, it just stood to reason that both of them were.

Well, I began studying schizophrenia because I thought if I'm going to tell these stories, which as soon as I started digging into this stuff I thought these stories have to be told, it's kind of like my Vietnam memoir, if I don't tell these stories I know this stuff's all going to get burned and trashed when I'm gone.

And so I spent several years just organizing.

The journey of exploring our chickenhouse treasures, it's just ongoing.

Where is the door to these stories and after so many years of studying the documents and exploring them and organizing them, I came to the conclusion that with, like I mentioned earlier, Herman and Barbara met through Cupid's Columns, a singles catalog.

My mother always claimed that Herman had an advertisement and she answered it.

Well, in fact, she's the one that placed an advertisement.

I found it, it's in Cupid's Columns.

Herman answered it and so I realized that Herman made first contact, the story must begin with him.

I published Herman and Herman is quite a small book.

When Susan Carol Hauser retired from BSU she invited me to join a writers group that she had started and I brought the lonely hearts club catalogues to a meeting one day.

She said this is women's history, young women need to learn about these cuz there's hundreds and hundreds of advertisements.

And we don't understand and it's not really history that most people are familiar with, the women's struggle in the 1940's.

It was a tough time, the postwar years.

Divorce rates were astronomical, there were a lot of widows out there.

I created my little Herman book as kind of a supplementary text for women's studies programs.

As I was working on Herman I was doing timelines and making outlines and notes of my memory stories from when I was a child.

One of the huge blessings that I found, after Barb died, our photo albums mysteriously disappeared from the house, but what was left behind were bags and bags of negatives.

So I bought a light box and a big microscope that I could just put over a whole strip of negatives and I went through hundreds and hundreds of negatives and I found some priceless, just priceless pictures.

When you think about it, and I was reflecting on it, when you create a photo album the person always uses the pictures that put them in the best light, that make them look great.

The true story is in the negatives, okay, and so I found some just priceless photos.

I went through them and picked out the ones I wanted reproduced and I used a lot of those pictures actually in my Pawns book.

Pawns was the second book in the series.

It's a story of our childhood and sadly, very sadly, the dysfunction that we grew up with.

In the beginning of my Pawns book there's a picture of me, 5 years old, barefoot, standing in front of our newly built barn in the early 50's.

And just looking at that picture I could remember the smells came back to me, the summer smells.

Those memories were just so incredibly detailed coming back.

Getting back to my grandmother saying my mother was schizophrenic, that Barbara was schizophrenic, I started studying schizophrenia.

This is from Third Judicial Court in Dona Ana County in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

And this, as I mentioned, supplied incredible information about my mother.

Details and insights I never.

There's a psychiatric report in here, and in 1946 a psychiatrist determined that my mother struggled with a personality disorder.

Well borderline personality disorder wasn't recognized as a diagnosable mental disorder until 1980.

So this man, figure how many decades before, he recognized that she struggled with this issue.

And it was at that point looked at as borderline schizophrenia.

And I found this book Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified by Dr Robert O Friedel.

And I was probably 20 pages into it and I realized what Friedel was describing fit my mother to a tee.

The criteria, the symptoms for borderline, Barbara manifested, presented all of them.

And so I started studying borderline and Barbara's absolute number one symptom of borderline personality disorder was her fear of abandonment.

But along with that fear of abandonment came impulsiveness and unwise decisions with selecting men.

When I started working on my Chickenhouse Chronicles, I realized that I had to figure out who our fathers were.

Because Barb came to the farm in 1949 with four kids and my two older siblings, I don't look anything like them.

My younger sister Laurel doesn't look like them.

But Barb claimed we all had the same father.

Well, in 1966, actually when I came back from Vietnam on my first tour, I went to Los Cruces, New Mexico, to meet this man, John Curry, who is listed on my birth certificate as father.

And he let me know in short order that I was not his son and so that was, I suppose we could say, that was a beginning of a search that ended in 2019 when I did discover my family in New York.

Through hints in the chickenhouse and through DNA.

I actually was almost ready to have my third Chickenhouse book published, Barbara, when these discoveries happened and so I ended up delaying the publishing and added a part three with the blessings of my new siblings.

I learned so much about my mother.

One of the things with borderline disorder is the person struggles with anger issues.

And Barbara, from the time she was a teenager and it's well documented and I have it in my Barbara book and stuff, she would beat the crap out of my grandmother, out of her mother, physically assault her.

And when I was a child, and all my siblings would - my older siblings especially that remember - they would fully acknowledge that I was her black sheep and she was not nice to me.

My sister Laurel and I gathered everything into totes and on the floor there were several dozen old letters and papers and stuff and they looked like they were going to the trash.

But on a impulse I just threw them in a tote and in researching my Barbara book I went through those severely damaged documents and there was this one letter that was totally damaged but I could read the postage date on it and it was December of 1947.

And it was a very critical time in my mother's life.

She had just gone through a divorce and my grandmother was terrified that she would commit suicide and take her children with her.

I have 1940's newspaper clippings of women who did that and the method of choice back then was to shut all windows and doors and turn the gas stove on.

And I came to realize in my research and how Barb's behavior toward me when I was a kid that she, cuz John Curry knew about me, knew she had gotten pregnant with me, that she blamed my existence that she wasn't able to reconcile with Curry after the divorce I believe.

And that was a part of my learning curve I think of her behavior, her borderline behavior.

And today I just look at it very objectively and speak about it very objectively because I've come to really understand her struggle.

I started out with the chickenhouse documents, but they were like clues to a larger picture.

And as I learned about my mother, yeah healing, but I think more so understanding my mother's struggle.

I think that was a huge thing that I've come to realize with, you know, people that have mental challenges.

If you can begin to understand their struggle, it's easier to maybe accept what they're dealing with.

I think that's a huge part of it, and in that acceptance comes a form of healing perhaps.

My writing is all based on primary source documents, some of it isn't happy, some of it is tragic.

I think I mentioned earlier my mother's rage.

It's tragic that she behaved that way, but to not tell that part of the story is to me kind of an untruth and it's, you know, it's not doing anyone favors.

You're not going to learn unless you have the full story.

I encourage people to write your family stories and get out there and interview that older generation cuz when we are gone, our stories are gone.

Until the next visit.

Thanks for watching.

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Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.org.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.

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