A discovery

Only a short post this week, working overtime on lots of stuff so will be more expansive next time. I am trying to write the story as I proceed with the research so that has been taking some extra hours. My big discovery this week was about the Arcadia Sunland. I did a previous blog on this, then when I made my trip to Tacachale in Gainesville, none of the staff could recall an Arcadia Sunland. I knew I had seen it somewhere in my lists of the locations of the centers, and thought I had found it in the Tallahassee archives. I was starting to think I had dreamed the whole thing, as my trip to Arcadia did not provide definitive evidence.

While doing another on line search this week, I found a link to a google search of newspaper archives and started to pull up everything published on Sunland via the St Pete Times web site. This was very fruitful, leading me to lots of articles, especially on Sunland controversies. One article in published 1968 caught my eye: the Florida Psychological Association called for the closing of the Arcadia Sunland Center, which had opened the previous summer. The center was located at Dorr Field according to the article. I had visited Carlstrom field, about 5 miles from there, as that was where I was directed by the townspeople. Both Dorr and Carlstrom were training airbases in the world wars. Now I am very anxious to go back to Arcadia and have another look. I will do this next week and combine it with my trip to Ft Myers to visit the Gulf Coast Center, formerly Sunland, that just closed in June 2010. What a discovery!

Finally, while traveling with family over the weekend, I picked up a copy of the October Elle magazine, expecting to get an update on fall fashions. Surprisingly, there was a lengthy human interest story about a woman named Amanda, a young wife and mother who was born to a severely disabled patient at the Fairview Training Center in Oregon, that state's equivalent of Sunland. Amanda was adopted and raised by her aunt, and was unaware that her mother was severely intellectually disabled. These training centers existed in every state and all have since closed down or been severely curtailed with the movement toward community based care. It seems I can find materials related to my study anywhere I look. The story is called The Race to Find Myself, and it chronicles Amanda's search to find the mother that she was told had died.