Dully Howard - My lobotomy : a memoir

This is a true story. However, in the interest of protecting the privacy of certain individuals, some names and identities have been changed.

My name is Howard Dully. Im a bus driver. Im a husband, and a father, and a grandfather. Im into doo-wop music, travel, and photography.

Im also a survivor: In 1960, when I was twelve years old, I was given a transorbital, or ice pick, lobotomy.

My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some tests. It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.

The surgery damaged me in many ways. But it didnt fix me, or turn me into a robot. So my family put me into an institution.

I spent the next four decades in and out of insane asylums, jails, and halfway houses. I was homeless, alcoholic, and drug-addicted. I was lost. I knew I wasnt crazy. But I knew something was wrong with me. Was it the lobotomy? Was it something else? I hadnt been a bad kid. I hadnt ever hurt anyone. Or had I? Was there something I had done, and forgottensomething so horrible that I deserved a lobotomy?

I asked myself that question for more than forty years. I thought about my lobotomy all the time, but I never talked about it. It was my terrible secret. What had been so wrong with me?

In 1998, when I was fifty, things changed. I had suffered a heart attack. I had married a woman I really loved. I had gotten clean and sober, and gone back to school and earned a degree. People who met me didnt know Id had a lobotomy, or spent ten years in mental hospitals. They met a big manIm six foot seven and 330 poundswith a big mustache and a big laugh whose job was driving special education kids to school on a yellow school bus.

They didnt see the man who was tormented by his shadowy past. Then Dr. Freeman died. My stepmother died. My dad and I had never talked about the past, and now he was in poor health, too. I was afraid all the people who really knew what had happened to me would be gone soon.

So I decided to try to find out what had been done to me. I sat down in front of my computer, logged on to the Internet, and typed in the words Dr. Walter Freeman.

So began a journey that, four years later, brought me to Washington, D.C. I had met a pair of radio producers who were doing a program on lobotomy for NPR. They had arranged permission for me to see Dr. Walter Freemans lobotomy archives. Even though Freeman personally lobotomized more than five thousand patients and paved the way for the lobotomies of tens of thousands more, I was the first one in history to show up asking to see his files.

The archivists handed me a manila folder. On the front of it were the words DULLY, Howard.

The great mystery of my life was inside. The question that had haunted me for more than forty years was about to be answered.

T his much I know for sure: I was born in Peralta Hospital in Oakland, California, on November 30, 1948. My parents were Rodney Lloyd Dully and June Louise Pierce Dully. I was their first child, and they named me Howard August Dully, after my fathers father. Rodney was twenty-three. June was thirty-four.

They had been married less than a year. Their wedding was held on Sunday, December 28, 1947, three days after Christmas, at one oclock in the afternoon, at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Sacramento, California. The wedding photographs show an eager, nervous couple. Hes in white tie and tails, with a white carnation in his lapel. Shes in white satin, and a veil decorated with white flowers. They are both dark-haired and dark-eyed. Together they are cutting the cakestaring at the cake, not at each otherand smiling.

A reception followed at 917 Forty-fifth Street, at the home of my mothers uncle Ross and aunt Ruth Pierce. My fathers mother attended. So did his two brothers. One of them, his younger brother, Kenneth, wore a tuxedo all the way up from San Jose on the train.

My fathers relatives were railroad workers and lumberjack types from the area around Chehalis and Centralia, Washington. My dad spent his summers in a lumber camp with one of his uncles. They were logging people.

My fathers father was an immigrant, born in 1899 in a place called Revel, Estonia, in what would later be the Soviet Union. When he left Estonia, his name was August Tulle. When he got to America, where he joined his brothers, Alexander and Johnhe had two sisters, Marja and Lovisa, who he left behind in Estoniahe was called August Dully. He later added the first name Howard, because it sounded American to him.

My fathers mother was the child of immigrants from Ireland. She was born Beulah Belle Cowan in Litchfield, Michigan, in 1902. Her family later moved to Portland, Oregon, in time for Beulah to attend high school, where she was so smart she skipped two grades.

August went to Portland, too, because thats where his brothers were. According to his World War I draft registration card, he was brown-haired, blue-eyed, and of medium height. He got work as a window dresser for the Columbia River Ship Company. He became a mason. He met the redheaded Beulah at a dance. She told her mother that night, I just met the man Im going to marry. She was sixteen. A short while later, they tied the knot and took a freighter to San Francisco for their honeymoon, and stayed. A 1920 U.S. Census survey shows them living in an apartment building on Fourth Street. Howard A. Dully was now a naturalized citizen, working as a laborer in the shipyards.

Sometime after, they moved to Washington, where my grandfather went to work on the railroads. They started having sonsEugene, Rodney, and Kennethbefore August got sick with tuberculosis. Beulah believed he caught it on that freighter going to San Francisco. He died at home, in bed, on New Years Day, 1929. My dad was three years old. His baby brother was only fourteen months old.

Beulah Belle never remarried. She was hardheaded and strong-willed. She said, I will never again have a man tell me what to do.

But she had a hard time taking care of her family. She couldnt keep up payments on the house. When she lost it, the boys went to stay with relatives. My dad was sent to live with an aunt and uncle at age six, and was shuffled from place to place after that. By his own account, he lived in six different cities before he finished high schoolborn in Centralia, Washington; then shipped around Oregon to Marshfield, Grants Pass, Medford, and Eugene; then to Ryderwood, Washington, where he and his brother Kenneth lived in a logging camp with their former housekeeper Evelyn Townsend and her husband, Orville Black.

At eighteen, Rod left Washington to serve with the U.S. Army, enlisting in San Francisco on December 9, 1943. Though he later was reluctant to talk about it, I know from my uncles that he was sent overseas and stationed in France. He served with the 723rd Railroad Division, laying track in an area near LAigle, France, that was surrounded by mines. One of my uncles told me that my father never recovered from the war. He said, The man who went away to France never came back. He was damaged by what he saw there.