Why I hate Mackworth Island

BY RICK WORMWOOD

On a recent, overcast morning, the deaf gathered in the quiet corner of a

Two navy blue vans and a yellow school bus arrived to load us up for the
short drive to Mackworth Island, the 100-acre jewel in Casco Bay that is
home to the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf, Maine’s only institution
of its kind. Given the afternoon’s emotional agenda, the school’s
administration took the unusual step of closing the island, which is also a
state park, to the public. Certain people who used to work for the school, and who still vehemently deny the
truth of what once happened there, will occasionally make trouble for the former students. Nobody wanted them
around. We were going to Mackworth for some healing, not to fight.

Passing through a security checkpoint on the bridge seemed to justify the palpable nervousness in the vans. I
couldn’t help but feel that it was a dangerous day. When we were deposited near the guardhouse, not far from a
convoy of what seemed like every fire truck the town of Falmouth possessed, people started making their way
up the hill towards the house that we had all come to watch burn.

It’s not hyperbole to say that the abandoned farmhouse that had been rotting away in a secluded island meadow
for more than a decade was the epicenter of the most evil and shameful chapter in 20th-century Maine history.
A quick perusal of the 1982 state attorney general’s report on the scandal that hit the school is horrifying. For
many years, this house was the home of Dr. Robert E. Kelly, the Governor Baxter School’s principal from the
early 1960s until his resignation in 1981. According to the AG’s report, it was common practice for Kelly to
require young male students to report to the farmhouse at night so that he could "teach him about sex for the
future." His lessons, say the report, included strip poker, sex acts, bondage, the threat of beatings, and lots of
photographs. Kelly was a shutterbug. You know all those pictures you’ve seen from Abu Ghraib Prison? Well,
just imagine that instead of Iraqi prisoners, they are young deaf kids, and instead of the pictures being taken to
humiliate a suspected insurgent into spilling the beans about terrorism, which is twisted enough, they were shot
to shame kids into doing whatever sick sexual thing Dr. Kelly desired.

Now imagine, if you can, that this went on in one form or another for 20 years. Dr. Kelly knew just how to
break his targets down. Stories abound in the deaf community, and not all made it into the AG’s report, but try
just this one on for size: Any child initially unwilling to comply would be bound naked to a tree outside until
almost dawn, when they would be released with a warning; if they were still unwilling to submit the next night,
it was back on the tree.

The remote school’s layout provided the perfect setup for Kelly’s activities. Not only was the house just far
enough away from the rest of the school to be hidden from view, but who were the kids going to tell? Most of
them were too ashamed of what happened to tell anyone, but even if they had wanted to, they couldn’t
communicate with 99 percent of the population unless the hearing person was willing to take some extra time
and trouble to glean the message.

And where would they see these people anyway? They lived in isolation on an island. There were no police
cruisers happening by on routine patrol that might notice something, no early-bird neighbors walking their dogs
at four in the morning to wonder why the hell there was a naked kid tied to a tree. Charles Dickens and Stephen
King could have worked on the problem for a year and not come up with a more perfect location for such an
insidious thing to happen.

Deaf since birth, my only sibling and older sister, Sharon, attended Governor Baxter from 1973 until the
watershed year of 1981, when the shit hit the fan in public. Because of her, I practically grew up on Mackworth
Island. Our mother was constantly shuttling Sharon to or from the dorms where she spent weeknights, or
attending some fair or seminar, almost always with me in tow. I knew the ins and outs of the island and the
Governor Baxter School long before attending school myself, and back then, I thought that Mackworth Island
was a wonderful place: not only postcard beautiful, but full of playgrounds and curiosities. And if my mom and
I encountered Dr. Kelly, or his boss, Dr. Joseph Youngs — Governor Baxter’s superintendent and the de facto
King of Mackworth Island — before leaving, then all the better. Even a passing audience in the corridors was a
special event.

Bumping into them was like chancing upon the Pope, or maybe Don Corleone. When we met up, my mother
would lavish them with a level of deference and gratitude usually reserved for priests, and I, taking my cues
from her, did the same. We craved their approval. It makes me sick to remember now, but that’s all in hindsight.
At the time, we didn’t know the truth.

As a kid growing up in Sanford, when Dr. Kelly’s name was spoken in our house it was said with enough
reverence to suggest that he was a saint in heaven. Dr. Kelly and Dr. Youngs were considered among the
leading lights of American deaf education. Maine was lucky to have them, we were told, and so it seemed to be
(even in the course of its criminal investigation, the attorney general’s office did find that hundreds of students
appeared to receive good educations and sound care thanks to other dedicated professionals not involved in any
wrongdoing). The Governor Baxter School was a place that the frightened parents of small deaf children, people
wondering how their kids would learn the extra skills necessary for them to make their way in the world, were
beyond relieved to learn existed. It was an answer to their prayers. They delivered their extra-vulnerable
children to live and learn on the island with great relief and dispatch.

Whenever a kid came home on the weekend and told his or her parents a strange story or displayed an unusual
bruise or mark, Youngs or Kelly had an explanation: The student got hurt during harmless roughhousing. The
kid was telling lies because he or she was having a hard time adjusting. The child wanted attention; had a
fanciful imagination. The deference these men cultivated among the families of their charges, combined with
how deeply people needed to believe that Governor Baxter actually was what it seemed, made such lame
excuses work time and time again. Kelly and Youngs were hard men to question. Only with the AG report did
many of us find out that the injuries were often the result of their fists.

My sister broke her arm out there once, and we still don’t know why or how.

The two men were very different types. Dr. Kelly didn’t affect Dr. Youngs’s paterfamilias, Albert Schweitzer–
of–Casco Bay act. Youngs was Mister Community Involvement — the Falmouth Lions Club 1968 Man of the
Year, the past president of both the Falmouth and Portland Rotary Clubs, past president of the American
Society of Deaf Educators, etc. Dr. Youngs was a public figure. If you had a board, he would sit on it. If you
had a civic group, he would come and give a talk about his educational philosophies. He ate more banquet
chicken than a presidential candidate, and had more commemorative gavels than Judge Wapner.
Dr. Kelly was, by contrast, quiet. Though not the public personage that Youngs was, he did make his presence
felt at the school. I can remember once visiting my sister’s class and being startled to see Dr. Kelly walking
around the outside of the buildings, peering in at the students through the windows. Never could I imagine my
own grade-school principal, Sister Theresa, the toughest Ursuline nun in the diocese, doing something so
strange. When I asked my sister’s teacher about it, she said that Dr. Kelly walked around the school like that all
the time.

There was also a telling piece of sign language that Kelly would flash to kids in class through the windows
while making his exterior rounds. Former students say that he would just slightly lift his thumb before bringing
it back down on top of his fist, which meant: "This is where I have you, under my thumb." It was all part of how
he kept people frightened and quiet.

He was the spirit and driving force behind Mackworth Island’s secret culture of sexual abuse and its code of
silence. And it wasn’t just Kelly devouring young boys, or Joe Youngs beating the crap out of whomever
stepped out of line, or various other faculty and staff taking their cues from the top and acting in kind, although
the public eventually learned that all of that happened. In a twisted version of trickle-down economics, the older
students extended what had happened to them to the younger kids until the abuse touched nearly everybody.
Then some of those kids brought it home from the island.

I know this from firsthand experience.

In 1980, soon after Sharon started commuting to Mackworth Island daily instead of sleeping in the dorm, when
I was nine and she was 12, she came into my room late one night and turned on the light so that we could sign
to one another. Sitting on my bed, she signed, "I want to show you something."

"What," I replied?

Then she pulled aside her nightgown to expose a breast and leaned forward, clearly aiming to stick that breast in
my face. When I lurched away, practically climbing up the headboard, she grabbed my foot and pulled it
between her legs, wanting me to stick my toes in her vagina. As I pushed her away she tried to overpower me,
so the fight was on, but she didn’t want to escalate to a point that would have awakened our sleeping parents, so
she quickly changed tactics and tried to convince me.

"No, no, you don’t understand," she kept repeating, "I want to show you something. You don’t understand. I
want to show you something."

I pointed towards her room, signing "no" and insisting that she leave. After realizing that I would not acquiesce,
Sharon stood up, called me fucking stupid and then returned to her bed, but there was no door between our two
attic bedrooms, nothing to shut or lock between us to prevent her from returning, which she did most nights for
the next few months. Sometimes, when I heard her coming, I’d turn on my light and send her back before she
crossed the threshold; or I’d pretend to be asleep, so that after sitting on the edge of my bed and poking my
shoulder a few times she’d give up. Often, she would hit the light herself, and then insist that she only wanted to
show me something, that she was mad at me for being stupid, that I should just let her.

"Just let me," she would sign again and again. "I just want to show you something." These late-night encounters
always ended with her stomping away, frustrated. To say that this freaked me out doesn’t even begin to get
there. I was beyond freaked out. Why she would try something like that with me was beyond my nine-year-old
ability to fathom.

Physically, things never progressed past the inelegant and immediately rebuffed bum’s rush of that first night,
but they would have if she’d had her way. Those frightening evenings were the beginning of my life as a night
owl. Sound sleep was hard to come by. I stayed up reading, or with one ear on her room and the other on a
small radio. On most nights I made certain that she was sleeping soundly before relaxing enough to drift off
myself.

Afraid of the consequences to her if I said anything, and also because I was a bewildered kid with no idea of
where to begin, it took me 13 years to tell anybody what had happened, but even after telling my now-ex-wife
two days before our wedding, the subject didn’t surface again until being discussed for 40 seconds in the
summer of 1997. I remember it because it happened to be the night that Robert Mitchum died. July 1. That’s
how I remember it. It was my deepest secret.

Within a year of what happened between my sister and me came February of 1981, when stories about the true
conditions at the school hit the press. Coping, a state-published newsletter for the disabled, laid out the basic
charges, and that was like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over the lantern. Over the next few weeks, the Press
Herald got more specific. Dr. Youngs was accused of viciously beating students, including one well-
documented time when he stabbed a student in the thigh with a pen to get his attention. Jan Repass, the Dean of
Students, himself deaf, was accused of having sexual relations with teenage girls, and Dr. Kelly, well, what I
told you about him before was just the tip of the iceberg. Governor Joe Brennan ordered the Attorney General to
investigate, but all three men named in the news stories denied everything.

They tried to both fight the charges and to return to their jobs, but the blood was in the water. Too many other
shoes kept dropping. The furor all of this caused dominated the papers for months. I had a Press Herald paper
route at the time, and every morning as these things were exploding into public view I would sit on the steps of
Sleeper’s Market, where I picked up my papers, and read the articles in the light of dawn, dreading to see just
how much farther my world had splintered apart since the previous day.

As the allegations piled up, I was again at my mother’s side as she became involved in a parents organization
that formed to oppose the school administration. In a strange way, this was one of the most exciting periods of
my life. Always the only child sitting around crowded tables in various Portland bars or church basements, I
listened in amazement as the adults plotted against our former heroes. It felt like we were joining a great
rebellion, attempting to overthrow the great commanding power of our lives, but this participation and
excitement eventually cost me my final bit of idealism.

First, Youngs, Kelly, and Repass resigned, which we thought was a great victory because it meant they had to
vacate the school and island. But, to quote Attorney General James E. Tierney: "Because many of the incidents
uncovered by the State investigators were beyond the statute of limitations, and other incidents were not clearly
criminal violations under the current language of the Maine Criminal Code, and because of considerations for
the emotional well-being of the victims, no criminal indictments will be sought by the State as a result of
evidence compiled to date by this office."

That’s right. When the attorney general’s office issued their report, it was announced that no charges would be
filed against anybody involved, not because the stories of abuse weren’t deemed credible, but because only
people for whom the statute of limitations had expired were willing to testify. Any student that had been
targeted recently was afraid to talk, so nobody responsible ever stood before a judge or jury.

If that seems hard to conceive of, consider this analogy: When the regime fell on Mackworth Island it was a lot
like when Saddam Hussein’s government fell, in that right after it happened there were a lot of people going
around Baghdad saying, "This storm will pass, and when it does, Saddam will be back, so keep your mouth shut
and don’t help the infidels." Governor Baxter’s students had good reason to suspect that Kelly and Youngs
might survive the accusations, because they had before. In the late 1970s, students had circulated a petition
calling for Youngs and Kelly’s removal, which they sent to Augusta. A couple of days later, Dr. Youngs called
a school assembly and ripped the petition up in front of everybody. Without giving its merits a second thought,
Augusta had just turned it over to Dr. Youngs. Given that history, how could anyone from Augusta make the
students feel safe enough to speak out? They could not.
Until learning that no one would go to jail for these crimes, I was completely naïve. I believed in truth, justice
and the American Way. I was a Boy Scout in Saint Ignatius Parish Troop 327. I took my hat off during the
National Anthem and rooted against Communist athletes on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Nothing in the world
as I understood it had prepared me for the moment when I realized that nobody would be held responsible for
the outrage at Governor Baxter. It was crushing. I was beyond devastated.

Compounding that tragedy, when their potential legal troubles disappeared, nothing prevented Kelly, Youngs,
and Repass from collecting their pensions, since they had resigned and not been fired. Dr. Youngs angrily
professed his innocence to anyone who would listen right up until he died of cancer a few years later. Dr. Kelly
left the state, but he still gets a monthly pension check from Augusta. Jan Repass is Portland Adult Ed’s most
popular sign language instructor. I check the catalog every time it comes to my house, and his classes are
consistently marked "fills up fast," which always makes me want to puke. Maybe he’s made his peace with the
past, but I’m still making mine.

This is why I hate Mackworth Island, and I even hate that people around here think of it as such a beautiful,
wonderful place — perfect for short hikes or long picnics. Two married members of my band, the Rumbling
Proletariat, go there for romantic walks. I know someone else who was proposed to there by her longtime
boyfriend. That one really bothered me. Would you propose to someone at Auschwitz? Would you stroll around
Ground Zero, holding hands with your baby and listening to the birds sing? I guess that you might if you had no
idea of what had transpired there, and that’s the way it is with most people around here regarding Mackworth.

Lots of people know that something untoward happened on the island, but they aren’t sure what, and they aren’t
real keen to find out. Why would they be, if it never touched their lives? I can’t blame people for not wanting to
face it. I’d prefer not facing it myself, but to those of us connected to what happened at Governor Baxter, it’s a
piece of recent history so big that it seems to fill the sky. I’m not saying that nobody knows, just that almost
nobody knows the real story. Sure, it’s been in the press. It’s been written about dozens of times since 1981, and
I’m sure a lot of people saw the articles about the budget fight over what’s commonly called the Governor
Baxter School Compensation Fund, which was set up for the victims several years ago, or the preparations for
destroying the farmhouse.

Not even Governor Baldacci knows what happened. On March 25, survivors, supporters, and deaf activists
gathered at the State Capital to protest the proposed budget, which at the time did not include the promised
funding for the Governor Baxter School Compensation Program. After all of the speeches on the steps, and
several victimized former students once again told their stories to the state media, everyone moved into the
rotunda, where Governor Baldacci was about to proclaim April 15 "Teach Kids To Save Day."

When this bit of flummery was over, one of the deaf activists asked Baldacci if he would briefly meet with the
Governor Baxter alumni there that day. Baldacci came right over, listened very intently to the deaf plead for the
Compensation Program, and then told everybody that no mater how much he wished that things were different,
he was committed to a balanced budget, and this prevented him from being able to allocate the six-million-
dollar infusion the fund needed. Eventually, when the final budget passed, the money was included, but that was
their party line on that day.

The Governor Baxter alumni then asked Baldacci about Dr. Kelly’s pension, a subject that Maine’s deaf
community finds endlessly infuriating. As they explained who Kelly was, the governor seemed confused, and
then, as he listened, mad. "Who is this man?" Baldacci demanded, before adding, "Someone give me a pen and
a piece of paper so I can write down his name."

I was standing behind the governor at this point, and once the interpreters finished signing what he’d said, 40
deaf people went into their pockets all at once, they were so anxious to meet his request. Some of them actually
seemed to think that he was going to do something about Kelly’s pension. But Baldacci, by his own admission,
was in the dark and didn’t even know who Kelly was. Maybe that’s why he could live with not funding the
Governor Baxter School Compensation Program. Worse, if the governor doesn’t know about Dr. Robert E.
Kelly, whom I consider an evil, degenerate, and remorseless pedophile who got his twisted, illegal jollies right
under Augusta’s nose for decades, then how the hell does he know to look for the next Dr. Kelly, who could be
coming soon to a school near you?

That’s why I was on Mackworth Island to watch that damn farmhouse burn down to nothing. That’s why we
were all there. Hardly anyone knows the truth, and hardly anyone cares. Whatever peace there was to be had
wasn’t going to come from outside the deaf community. We had to go out and get it for ourselves.

Dr. Kelly’s persuasion tree had been cut down several years earlier with similar ceremony. Many of the people
who came to watch the house go had also been there when the tree came down; they pointed out the spot in the
grass where it had stood.

Several rows of folding chairs had been brought down from the school, but nobody sat. For the sake of closure,
which I have always considered a cheap and overrated concept, we were all invited to throw an item onto the
farmhouse’s porch to be consumed in the inferno, the idea being to transfer our rage and anger to these things
and then let these emotions go forever when they were destroyed. Small blocks of wood were provided on
which to write messages. Some people threw in the pictures that Kelly had taken of them. Then the local fire
department burned the place down to almost nothing. It was hot and glorious.

In 1984, my sister suffered a mental breakdown from which she has never recovered. She needs to be constantly
assured of her safety, always asking, "Is everything okay? Am I safe? Do you like me?" She is obsessed with
sex, and has believed herself to be pregnant for longer than I care to remember. She carries around a doll in
place of the baby that never arrives. Occasionally, she makes up stories about being raped, at different times
alleging that both my father and I have raped her.

Do these rape visions have anything to do with her time at Governor Baxter? You could ask the same question
about her mental illness in general. Was it the bad luck of biology, or did the God-knows-what that happened to
her on Mackworth Island drive her crazy? A school friend of hers once told me how groups of boys would run
Sharon down in the dorms at night like a wolf pack in order to pin her down and grope her, and this wasn’t
something that only happened occasionally. For years, if you asked Sharon about anything improper that
happened to her at the Governor Baxter School, all she would say is that once a housemother smacked her on
the hand for no good reason. Press on to inquire about possible sexual abuse and she would adamantly contend
that nothing like that ever happened to her. She doesn’t know about it happening to others, either, but these
denials belie her sexual obsession.

Her story on that matter has changed slightly in recent months. When she was asked to write down anything
abusive that might have occurred to her, she supplied three words before refusing to elaborate: "dorm,"
"principal," and most ominously, "sisterhood." Does a mystery like that lead to closure? Man, I hope so. I hope
maybe someday.

It’s rumored that Dr. Kelly lives in Port St. Lucie, Florida, although some say Ireland. Wherever he is, Dr.
Robert E. Kelly is a free man, sitting somewhere unperturbed. He may be thumbing through his old snapshot
collection as you read this. But we cheered anyway as the flames consumed his old lair. The fire didn’t make up
for anything, but when justice is elusive and imperfect, you have to hope that there is a reckoning somewhere
other than on Earth. In that context, watching those roaring flames and imagining that they are the judgment
awaiting Kelly someday, somewhere, was slightly satisfying, and when you’ve been marked by something as
terrible as what happened to so many, for so long, on that lovely island, slightly satisfying is as good as it gets.

Printed in "The Portland Phoenix" Issue Date June 4-10, 2004