Despite initial misgivings, most of the ward attendants treated them decently. There was one exception, however: Jim Blackwell, a former prison guard whom patients remembered as a man with steel-gray hair, wire-rimmed spectacles, beady eyes, and a rough manner; he was particularly nasty, even sadistic. Years later Doug would shudder at the thought of him. "He was a real SOB," Doug said. "He would try and catch you on any small detail to get you in trouble. You would be playing cards and you would put a card down and your hand might fall on someone else’s — purely innocent — and he’d report it. ‘I’ll make you men even if you aren’t men,’ he’d say." ...
The only break in the monotony came with the movies every Tuesday night and the dances every Friday. These took place at the gym, on the second floor. A balcony overlooked the gym; the staff could sit there and watch the entertainment, as well. The movies were generally of high quality and relatively current. There was Frank Sinatra and Doris Day in Young at Heart, the 1954 musical remake of a Fannie Hurst novel about the romantic entanglements of four small-town sisters. Another was Hondo, a Western starring John Wayne, James Arness, and Ward Bond. The men in 15 East found that there was nothing quite like watching a movie in a mental hospital. Toward the middle of Young at Heart, a perky Doris Day tells a morose and self-pitying musician, played by Frank Sinatra, "All I know is that there is a straitjacket waiting with your number on it!" And the patients at Mount Pleasant just roared with laughter.
But the Friday night dances were the true highlight of the week. The dances, bringing together patients and staff, also attracted townspeople from Mount Pleasant who watched from the balcony. Everyone looked forward to them. For these occasions, patients were permitted to wear their own clothes, not state issue, and this was a big deal: it gave the impression of normal life. On Friday afternoon, the men in 15 East were handed their street clothes; they wrapped them around the steam pipes to make sure they were neatly pressed by the time the dance started. Female patients put on makeup. Then the much awaited moment arrived. The male patients stood on one side of the gym, and the women on the other; attendants and their wives sat on the stage. It was easy to pick out the men from 15 East — they dressed more stylishly than everyone else. Everybody mixed in; doctors’ wives danced with male patients and male ward attendants with female patients.
That year they danced to songs like "Blue Moon," "Lullaby of Birdland," "Shine on, Harvest Moon," and the "Hesitation Waltz," Harold remembers. The music was mostly waltzes and two-steps. There were a few jitterbugs but not many. It was believed that faster music, more frenetic rhythms, might get the patients too riled up.
Harold, a good dancer, had a regular dance partner — the wife of a ward attendant who was on duty when the dances took place. The expectation was that the men from the sexual psychopath ward would ask some of the female mental patients to dance; in fact, they were told to do so. Doug was never sure whether a dance partner was going to fall down in the middle of "Blue Moon" or throw up all over him or kick him in the stomach. The Sioux City group gave the female patients special names, usually after show-biz personalities. There was one they called Greta Garbo; she looked and behaved just like her — remote, mysterious, somehow alluring. It was said she had killed her mother. Another was dubbed Betty Hutton — foul-mouthed but otherwise pleasant. Then there was Tillie, a middle-aged, heavy-set woman whose hair was chopped off and who always showed up at the dances in a house dress. She was charmed by Billy Ivers, the youngest of the patients in 15 East. As soon as the music started, she would make a beeline for Billy, who did his best to be gracious....
During this period, the dances at Mount Pleasant began to be much talked about, both at the hospital and in the town, particularly because of the musical abilities of the men from 15 East who made up the patient dance band. "They were our orchestra," a woman who worked as a transcriptionist at the time said of the men in the special ward. "They were as good an orchestra as you could find today." The band was led by Lloyd Madsen, who had played the organ professionally before being sent to Mount Pleasant. There was a violin, a trumpet, an accordion, a piano, and always, Lloyd on the organ.
The story went that Lloyd had been arrested in the middle of a performance at the Cobblestone Ballroom, at Lake Okoboji, a popular resort in northern Iowa. It was just like a movie: The police entered the ballroom, the music stopped, and he was taken away to jail in Fort Dodge and sentenced to Mount Pleasant as a sexual psychopath. Lloyd had been involved with a young doctor in Fort Dodge, who subsequently left town. (A Fort Dodge dentist recalled that the doctor had a "gorgeous convertible" and that he let Lloyd borrow it. That’s when the dentist said he knew "something was up.") Lloyd, 23, was tall and stocky and very talented musically. He had a number of privileges that the other men on the sexual psychopath ward didn’t have. He was frequently allowed out of the ward to practice and often permitted to dress in street clothes. Although Lloyd successfully avoided most of the painting details, the other men in 15 East didn’t resent him, since his success reflected well on everyone in the ward. Lloyd was the favorite of Harold Craig, the music therapist, and, above all, of Dr. Monroe Fairchild, the recently arrived chief psychologist....
Fairchild and Craig concocted a scheme to have Lloyd play the organ at lunch and dinner. They had a speaker system installed in the patient dining room. The idea was therapeutic — to soothe the patients, especially at a time of day when some tended to act out and get into trouble. But it may also have been a way to make Lloyd’s life easier, to get him out of the ward so he could practice and perform every day. It was also a way they could spend more time with him.
Whatever their motives, Mount Pleasant must have been among the few state mental institutions in the country where the patients enjoyed live, piped-in music at mealtimes. Later, after Lloyd left and the sexual psychopath ward was shut down, not only did the music at lunch and dinner come to an end, but the dances stopped too. The orchestra had made the dances so good that once the men in 15 East were gone, no one was interested anymore.
By late October the ward was becoming overcrowded. There were 35 people in a space intended for 20. And there was only one bathtub. The Sioux City contingent made up the majority, but there were others too: homosexual men from other parts of the state, a couple of pedophiles, a cross-dresser, and a prisoner sent over from nearby Fort Madison.
Social worker Jackie Yamahiro, who saw the Sioux City men when they were first admitted and took their medical and family histories, began to see changes in them. Initially they were depressed, scared, anxious. They didn’t know what was going to happen to them or how long they would have to remain at the hospital. Once they settled down and realized what life was going to be like at Mount Pleasant, they began to express varying degrees of anger and resentment. But overall, Jackie never saw as much anger as she had expected. There was a certain passivity about the men, a passivity that may have had to do in part with being gay in the 1950s. By and large, they seemed to accept their fates, and, somewhere in the back of their minds, perhaps they thought they deserved them.
