I worked as a Houseparent at Hathaway for about 14 months. This how I described it in my 1976 Antioch Portfolio:
Hathaway Children’s Village is located five miles up Old Tujunga Canyon into the Angeles National Forest. It is the site of the old Paradise Ranch of Cecil B. DeMille, where he hid away from Hollywood and sometimes made movies. In his will the land was given to be a children’s home, utilizing the fine old rustic lodges as residences and administrative offices. In 1972 construction of an ambitious new plant directly adjacent to the “Old Ranch” as it came to be known, was completed, and the new Hathaway Children’s Village opened. This was a 3.9 million dollar plant, funded one third by state, one third by federal, and one third by private money.
I worked as a “floater” between cottages for the first three months.
After three months I was hired onto the weekend shift, in cottage one and two. This had been, ever since the new Village opened two years previously, the only all girls’ cottage. A few weeks before I transferred to the cottage, the administration suddenly shifted half of the girls to other cottages and other placements, and sent in six boys from the ITU and other cottages. The staff in I/II was very upset, as they had been given no warning and they had finally stabilized their situation after about a year of very hard work. The cottage therapist quit and a new therapist was hired. She was so overwhelmed by the anger she felt coming from all the staff that she told the supervisor she would not be able to work with them. She asked that seven of the ten staff be fired or she would quit. The supervisor said this would be impossible, and the new therapist quit. At this point I was hired into the cottage, to replace a female staff member who had also quit at this time.
While there, the Social Worker in our cottage told me about a place where I could get a fully accredited bachelor’s degree by documenting my life experience since leaving Stanford as the equivalent of enough units to complete the degree.
My fourteen months working as a Houseparent at Hathaway Children’s Village came to a turbulent end with six months left in the Antioch program. I decided to take advantage of the free time to work intensively on my Portfolio and finally get my college degree. I would have no savings left when I graduated in June but my lifetime earning potential would be greatly increased.
In the Portfolio section called Care of Emotionally Disturbed Pre-Adolescents Item #4 is Self-Assessment: Evaluate this learning activity. Mention such things as the quality of the experience itself and its personal significance to you. I wrote in 1976, obviously still emotional about the way it all ended:
Quality: Hathaway has made me very angry. I feel the quality of the effort that I made there was very high but that the administrative messages to the children and the staff were frequently very inconsiderate. I went through a two month period when I was the only person in the cottage Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, who had any experience or information about how to take care of the children. This was eventually damaging to my health but I was treated as if this were not at all unusual. I was asked to tear apart 11 year old girls’ rooms to teach them what an awful thing it is to smoke cigarettes (see enclosed letter). I tried to the best of my ability to comply with what I thought were very irrational policies. When I expressed how difficult it was for me to do this I was told to leave immediately, and not even say goodbye to the people I had worked with for over a year. I had no support from anywhere from which to carry on a dialog with that sort of unreasonable attitude. My only choices were to leave or to stay and fight with the people I needed to be working in harmony with. I left and then the people who forced me to leave told the unemployment department that I had quit voluntarily and should not be eligible for benefits. I feel that the integrity of Hathaway as an institution is on a very low level, as these last encounters were really only the quality of all the previous exchanges writ large.
I learned a lot working at Hathaway, including some of the hard realities of the world of work. The whole piece i wrote at the time is at the link above, including the evaluation by Lou Ray Partlow.
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