NONFICTION - March 31, 1996

THE HOME: A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage by Richard McKenzie (Basic Books: $22; 240 pp.) Richard McKenzie, who from age 10 until college lived at a place called the Home in 1950s North Carolina, hates the word “orphan.” For him, it conjures pathetic Hollywood images of destitute children with grim pasts and no futures. After completing a survey of a thousand alumni of the Home, McKenzie concluded that these children were happier and more successful than their counterparts with “normal families.” They revealed a preference for growing up in homes over foster care or remaining with their own families. When asked where he grew up, McKenzie will reply: “On a farm in North Carolina on 1,500 acres.” He remembers hard work, close friendships and most of all a routine (so critical for children) that his immediate family was not able to provide. McKenzie, who now has his own family and is a professor of economics at UC Irvine, had a fearsome childhood before arriving at the Home. His father was a drunk who repeatedly beat his mother, who finally divorced him, became a drunk herself and took up prostitution to make ends meet, killing herself just days after sleeping, in a drunken stupor, with her son (the author of this book). The Home might not have been perfect, he writes, but it provided the sense of respectability and belonging that this boy needed to put the past behind him and create a life.