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mothers” who failed to show enough affection to their infants. Obsessive-compulsive disorder was blamed on problems in the second to third year of life, clashing with the mother around toilet training. The public conception of madness became hopelessly intertwined with the idea of the mother-as-monster. When, in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho placed the blame for the most famous delusional homicidal maniac of cinema, Norman Bates, squarely on the shoulders of his dead mother, it made all the sense in the world.
----
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THIS IS WHAT the Galvins would be up against when their boys started getting sick: an emboldened therapeutic profession seizing the moral high ground, doing battle with the devils of eugenics and surgery and chemical experimentation, and more than ready to search for a different way to explain the disease—a cause much closer to home. In 1965, Theodore Lidz, a prominent Yale psychiatrist best known for attributing schizophrenia to a patient’s family dynamics, said that schizophrenogenic mothers “became dangerous figures to males,” and had “castrating” relationships with their husbands. As a general rule, Lidz recommended that schizophrenia patients be removed from their families entirely.
Parents of Don and Mimi Galvin’s era didn’t have to know about the double-bind theory or the schizophrenogenic mother to understand that anything wrong with their children would raise questions about them. What happened to those children when they were in their care? Who let them become this way? What sort of parents were they? The lesson of the times was clear. If something seemed off about your child, the last thing you should do is tell a doctor about it.
* The idea of sterilizing the insane and “feeble-minded” had caught on in America many years earlier. Eugenics was a hallmark of the turn-of-the-century Progressive Era in America, influencing Kallmann and Rüdin and, among others, the Nazis.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 5
When, after four years of out-of-town postings, the Galvins returned to Colorado Springs in 1958, the dusty town they’d left behind was fading into history. The United States Air Force Academy had opened while they were gone, and thousands of newcomers—cadets and their instructors and all the personnel needed to support a vast new military institution—were swiftly changing the character of the place. Where once there had been a dirt road with a couple of ruts, crossed by barbed wire gates that you had to open and close yourself, now there was Academy Boulevard, paved and leading to a gate that was guarded like it was the checkpoint between East and West Berlin. Inside, the Academy had its own post office, commissary, and telephone exchange. And the glistening new structures of the Academy itself were modernist masterpieces—sleek glass boxes designed by the largest architectural firm in the nation, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, rising up from the clay of the West, announcing the dawn of a new American era.
Don could be a part of that future, just as he’d always hoped. At his previous posting, in northern California, he had worked nights at Stanford to earn a master’s degree in political science. Now he was back in Colorado to start a version of the academic life he’d longed for, joining the Academy faculty as an instructor.
The Air Force moved the family into one of a warren of one-story military family houses on the new campus. Theirs was on a hill, with a small patch of grass and a south-facing front door. Don and Mimi set up four bunk beds in the basement level for their eight boys. That worked well until their ninth boy, Matthew, was born in December. Their oldest, Donald, was thirteen now, and he and the brothers close to him in age used the Academy grounds as a playground. They had the run of the place: the indoor and outdoor rec centers, the ice rinks, the swimming pools, the
----
—
THIS IS WHAT the Galvins would be up against when their boys started getting sick: an emboldened therapeutic profession seizing the moral high ground, doing battle with the devils of eugenics and surgery and chemical experimentation, and more than ready to search for a different way to explain the disease—a cause much closer to home. In 1965, Theodore Lidz, a prominent Yale psychiatrist best known for attributing schizophrenia to a patient’s family dynamics, said that schizophrenogenic mothers “became dangerous figures to males,” and had “castrating” relationships with their husbands. As a general rule, Lidz recommended that schizophrenia patients be removed from their families entirely.
Parents of Don and Mimi Galvin’s era didn’t have to know about the double-bind theory or the schizophrenogenic mother to understand that anything wrong with their children would raise questions about them. What happened to those children when they were in their care? Who let them become this way? What sort of parents were they? The lesson of the times was clear. If something seemed off about your child, the last thing you should do is tell a doctor about it.
* The idea of sterilizing the insane and “feeble-minded” had caught on in America many years earlier. Eugenics was a hallmark of the turn-of-the-century Progressive Era in America, influencing Kallmann and Rüdin and, among others, the Nazis.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 5
When, after four years of out-of-town postings, the Galvins returned to Colorado Springs in 1958, the dusty town they’d left behind was fading into history. The United States Air Force Academy had opened while they were gone, and thousands of newcomers—cadets and their instructors and all the personnel needed to support a vast new military institution—were swiftly changing the character of the place. Where once there had been a dirt road with a couple of ruts, crossed by barbed wire gates that you had to open and close yourself, now there was Academy Boulevard, paved and leading to a gate that was guarded like it was the checkpoint between East and West Berlin. Inside, the Academy had its own post office, commissary, and telephone exchange. And the glistening new structures of the Academy itself were modernist masterpieces—sleek glass boxes designed by the largest architectural firm in the nation, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, rising up from the clay of the West, announcing the dawn of a new American era.
Don could be a part of that future, just as he’d always hoped. At his previous posting, in northern California, he had worked nights at Stanford to earn a master’s degree in political science. Now he was back in Colorado to start a version of the academic life he’d longed for, joining the Academy faculty as an instructor.
The Air Force moved the family into one of a warren of one-story military family houses on the new campus. Theirs was on a hill, with a small patch of grass and a south-facing front door. Don and Mimi set up four bunk beds in the basement level for their eight boys. That worked well until their ninth boy, Matthew, was born in December. Their oldest, Donald, was thirteen now, and he and the brothers close to him in age used the Academy grounds as a playground. They had the run of the place: the indoor and outdoor rec centers, the ice rinks, the swimming pools, the
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