Edgemoor Patients Paint Brighter Picture of Geriatric Hospital

The name alone of San Diego County’s Edgemoor Geriatric Hospital connotes an image of elderly patients aimlessly passing away their final days.

Add to that the underfunding and lack of attention paid to the former county poor farm in recent years, and the public view of Edgemoor is anything but positive.

But the strengths of Edgemoor--the staff (albeit overworked) and especially its resident patients--have weathered the years of neglect. And they are today rebounding under new attention.

The residents are taking more pride in themselves and their home. Individually, they have much in their past to reflect on favorably. Their backgrounds are occasionally extraordinary, often interesting, but never dull. All had productive careers and contributed much to the lives of those around them.

Through recollections from some of the patients, Edgemoor emerges far from a spiritless place of inactivity and becomes a diverse community of individuals--elderly and disabled--whom, for reasons both financial and medical, are able only to be cared for by the county.

The photographs that Norman Alfred Nelson takes these days are Polaroid snapshots of fellow residents at Edgemoor as they go about their daily routines.

But for more than a decade, through the 1950s and early 1960s, Nelson’s subjects were glamorous movie stars posing for publicity photos for Paramount Pictures and later for some of the first issues of Playboy magazine. And for almost two decades prior to his Hollywood days, Nelson roamed the world for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, putting together military manuals with pictures of everything from proper troop formations to the correct method for taking apart and putting together rifles.

Popularly known as “Sergeant” to the many volunteer workers at Edgemoor, Nelson fondly recalled the late James Mason and Marilyn Monroe as particularly enjoyable.

“She (Marilyn Monroe) was very difficult (to work with) at first but she came around,” said the 77-year old Nelson, a full shock of white hair accentuating his Scandinavian features. “She really didn’t think she was perfect--but everyone else did.”

Nelson grew up with what he called the “moving pictures” and remembered the various Hopalong Cassidy movies in particular. “Skipalong Hot Spurs, that was his nickname. I identified with the heroes, of course, but I also liked the villains because without them, we’d have no heroes.”

Was Nelson ever in awe of the actors he positioned in locations ranging from the Mohave Desert to Cuba and Finland?

“No. The stars worked for me. Just like when I was in the Army, I had generals working for me.” Nelson frequently had actors over for parties at his apartment but said the friendships didn’t always prove beneficial. “My landlord found out I worked for Paramount and raised the rent. I guess sometimes it’s not smart to let out too much information.”

Nelson moves a little slower these days than when he globe-trotted, having been slowed by several strokes and blood clots. His memory fades at certain moments, as when he tries to recount his days at UCLA prior to leaving the Army in the late 1940s. But he still relates with animation his childhood in Coudersport, Pa., when his father--”a Swedish man who spoke eight languages”--presented his son with a 2x3 Brownie.

“My first picture was taken of my parents,” Nelson said. Later, he studied art and composition in high school, first in Minnesota and later in Los Angeles, where his father moved in the late 1920s to work on a Norwegian-language newspaper.

Nelson joined the Army out of high school in 1934, but he still thinks about the Depression and the “many people who were starving.”

“The Depression came with Herbert Hoover,” Nelson said, and the experience indelibly linked Republicans with bad times, in his view. “They come to power, we have problems. I don’t like them. Ronald Reagan? No, I never took his picture and I didn’t vote for him.”

Glenn Kellison has left his imprint on San Diego. The longtime carpenter placed the top railing on the 22nd floor of the San Diego Gas & Electric skyscraper in 1967. Kellison was the construction foreman for the Buffums department store in Fashion Valley, and he worked on the City Hall tower and the multistory garage at the downtown Community Concourse. He cut and nailed lumber to put up innumerable county schools during the boom days of educational growth in the 1950s.

Kellison has been in San Diego for 41 years, but the 75-year-old construction worker took a long time coming to California. His childhood in Lake Andes, S.D.--along the Missouri River in wheat and corn country--centered on horse riding.

“Knew how to ride a horse well by the time I was 5,” Kellison said from his wheelchair at Edgemoor, where he has lived paralyzed from the neck down since suffering a serious auto accident in 1980. “By comparison, I’ve never rode a bicycle in my life.

“In fact, I spent several years in the rodeo business as a young punk, roping calves, riding bulls. Pretty messy, and besides, you couldn’t make no money in rodeo in those days.” Kellison decided to learn the carpentry trade in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1933, and was paid a $1 a day while building houses.

“But hell, I wasn’t complaining. You were lucky to have a job in those days (the Great Depression). My parents had to give up farming and move to town (Sioux City, Iowa) where my mother started a little restaurant.”

After moving with his first wife to a cattle ranch near Spokane, Wash., Kellison managed to scrape together enough savings to start a small dairy, delivering milk to Army units during World War II. But the rewards of keeping 35 cows healthy proved far less than the salaries being paid by the government to skilled workers hired for the nation’s first plutonium production plant at nearby Hanford. He became a carpenter once again.

“And then my arthritis got so bad that I couldn’t put my shirt on, so I went to California--Lemon Grove--and never had any problem after that.”

Kellison never hesitated to climb the many stories of commercial buildings to put in nails or fasten joints. “Never afraid of heights, but, I’ll tell you, I’ve got claustrophobia so bad that I couldn’t crawl under a house to save my neck.”

Carpentry has changed since Kellison’s time, and not for the better, he maintains. “Nope, the craftsmanship is not as good, because now everything is specialized, everyone now does one thing only. Today a carpenter couldn’t build a (complete) house to save his life.

“Of course, I may be a little bit prejudiced, but I just don’t like the way it is going.”

Kellison also sees today’s carpenters as penny-wise and pound-foolish for not joining craft unions. “All these guys think they’ll save up their own pension money but they never will. I get $700 a month pension from the union today and on the first day of each December, I get a $1,000 Christmas bonus. These young guys don’t think they’ll ever get old.”

San Diego was a small town when Kellison first arrived at war’s end. “Lemon Grove had one grocery store, one beer parlor, one gas station and one real estate office,” he said. “It really was all lemon groves back then.”

The area has, of course, grown by leaps and bounds since. “I’d just as soon take a beating than drive the freeways around here today,” Kellison said.

“But then, I helped build a lot of the new stuff so I shouldn’t gripe about it, should I?”

Lloyd Sawyer left Auburn, Wash., at age 14 to lead the life of a “carnie” throughout the western United States. Even today, after being confined to a wheelchair for 20 years at Edgemoor by severe arthritis, Sawyer longs for the sideshow.

“If I wasn’t crippled, I’d go right now,” he vowed, his mind still sharp as a tack. “Fun? Oh, it was great fun,” he smiled a big, toothless grin. “I’d like to buy some rides and set them up right here at Edgemoor.”

Sawyer’s first job with the carnival was blowing up balloons. “A guy came around my hometown during Auburn Days and said he needed an extra boy. He paid $5 and at that time (1937) that was a lot of money. I let school go to heck and took off with the show.”

Later, Sawyer starred as a fire and sword eater. “It ain’t hard,” Sawyer said. “And there’s no phony to it, no way. You just have to be careful not to get burnt, that’s all. I never once burned my tongue because it don’t pay to get burnt. But I always told the kids who watched me not to do it because they would get burnt.”

Sawyer, now 63, strongly defends the integrity of the carnival against the traditional image of the games and shows as somewhat less than above-board.

“Hey, boy, I’ve been around. There are no tricks, it’s on the level. There’s always a chance to win. You just have to aim the ball or pitch the dimes right.” And what about the freaks, the fat ladies and other physically marred people who have served as sideshow favorites for years and years? “Sure, you had guys with skin like an elephant, but they were really just regular people.”

His favorite ride has always been the Octopus, an eight-armed contraption that whirls its riders up and down and around at dizzying speeds. “I like my old rides better than the new one out there now,” Sawyer said, comparing his carnivals to those he has seen at Del Mar in recent years.

Sawyer also worked what he called “girlie shows” in Mexicali and Ensenada over the years, setting up tents, selling tickets and enticing passers-by into the strip-tease shows.

And a couple of times he even climbed into a sword box to chance being sawed in half by his partner. “But I never was,” he winked.

Not all Edgemoor residents are elderly. Buddy Edwards is 39. He was a movie chain advertising manager in Orange County and then worked as a timberjack in Oregon before a tragic fall in the forest left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair. Now Edwards continues therapy with a goal of finding another career.

“I fell 40 yards and guess I’m lucky to be alive,” said Edwards, a man with a full beard and forceful personality.

“I basically don’t remember what happened, and that’s probably good. Later I was told that I landed on my chin and that saved my life. But I have no regrets about it. It was an experience.”

The Maryland-born Edwards worked several years as a toy store manager in Orange County before plunging into advertising, where he decided how and when to promote movies for a countywide chain. His favorite over the years? “ ‘Jesus Christ Superstar.’ I seen it three times.”

But Edwards found the Los Angeles area unsatisfactory. “I dated girls all over L.A. but could not find the woman I wanted. I had liked the outdoors all my life--camping with my family and the like--so I went up to Oregon.” Edwards soon got married, although he said his wife left him after his accident because “she couldn’t adapt to my not being the same man that she had known.”

Edwards plans to go to a group home and at some point be able to live by himself. But he credits Edgemoor for a boost in his spirits.

“This is the best place of all the ones I’ve been at because the nurses don’t do everything for you.” And to the other residents at Edgemoor he gives general encouragement: “I don’t think age matters. It’s only how old you feel.”

Most days now, Cletus Gochenauer sits in his reclining wheelchair in front of television at Edgemoor, waiting for Lawrence Welk, his favorite TV personality, to appear.

But the 81-year-old retired electrical engineer has a much greater affinity for the “boob tube” than just watching champagne music. Gochenauer worked for years with Philo Farnsworth, one of two men credited with inventing the modern television, and later helped manage the Indiana electric company that for years manufactured televisions and radios for Sears Roebuck and Co., among other merchandisers.

Gochenauer has difficulty speaking as a result of heart and brain disease. But his strong hazel eyes brighten when asked about his longtime association with electronics, and he manages strong, if short, raspy answers.

“Born in Massella, Ind.; interested in things (electric) ever since I could read,” Gochenauer said. “Remember working with a crystal set as a kid. Tuned in radio station KHA.”

His bent toward electronics led to an undergraduate major in electrical engineering at Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., followed by four years for a master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

“My first job after that? In Fort Wayne, Ind., helping design early television tubes.”

In fact, Gochenauer had hooked up with Farnsworth, who was developing an advanced system of electronic scanning critical to the workings of television, where electronic impulses are projected into a viewing screen.

“Very exciting, yes, very,” Gochenauer said, recalling the tiny five-inch screen TV prototype that came out of the research in the late 1920s. “The picture was very clear.”

Gochenauer remained with Farnsworth, who founded a company to make televisions and radios in 1938. The firm later merged into International Telephone & Telegraph (IT&T;), and Gochenauer retired to California in 1971 “because of the climate.”

Gochenauer expresses some anger that few televisions today are made in the United States. “Price. It’s price. The costs are too high (to make them) in the U.S. And labor unions. I never believed in labor unions.”

And what does one of the nation’s electronic pioneers think about all the latest wonder gizmos today?

“They’re all right, they’re all right,” he said, breaking into as much of a grin as he could muster.

“My name is Caroline Elizabeth Young,” the alert, gregarious, 90-year-old woman formally said when introduced. “But I was divorced from the man Young who was my (second) husband,” her voice rising in indignation, “because he was a no-good, card-playing bum. I got rid of him.”

Caroline, as she is known to all the staff and her wide circle of friends at Edgemoor, has lived in San Diego since the mid-1920s. She’s not certain exactly when she came with the first husband, a bicycle repairman who trained their son to later open Zumwalt’s Bicycle Shop in North Park. But she has never forgotten her early roots, which began in a Polish household in Elmira, N.Y.

“There were lots of Polish people and my parents were from Poland,” she said. “We would talk Polish at home, but American all the other times.”

In search of new opportunities, her father took the family west by train--”a very long train ride because a family riding with us had lice”--to near Sheridan, Wyo., when she was 6. There he worked in the newly opened coal fields by day and repaired the boots of cowboys by night.

The homesteading life was hard for her parents, she says, but mostly fun for children. “I was the oldest girl in the family but I’ve sort of forgotten how many children there were total. I do remember riding a horse all the time, going to town and back, and my mother always warning me to watch the train when crossing the tracks.”

After coming to San Diego--”by car”--she said proudly, Caroline worked for many years in a variety of jobs, from maid to waitress. Her standards for honesty and proper behavior appeared to have been tested many times.

“In San Diego, I worked first in a (private) home,” Caroline said. “But I didn’t like the woman because she told me to lie to people and say she wasn’t home to people who came by to see her. I thought that was wrong.”

Later, Caroline served dinner to off-duty Navy men in a restaurant on lower Broadway. But the owner used to “pat all of us on the ‘behinds’ when we passed by so I quit.

“The cook, a Japanese boy, he was a good guy. But not the owner.”

Caroline has been a big hit since coming to Edgemoor about a year ago, being named the queen of a hospital prom held a couple of months ago. Caroline, still a good dancer even at 90, often has to show the younger patients and the nurses various steps.

“I even play the man to the nurses so I can lead,” she laughed.

But Caroline does miss the freedom that came from living an active life for so many years.

“People are very nice to me here and I am nice to them,” she said, her eyes beginning to glisten. “But I get lonesome.” And, breaking into a loud sob, Caroline cries, “There’s no place like home.”