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February 18, 2001Book shares personal memories, history of state hospitalBy MIKE NORTONRecord-Eagle staff writer TRAVERSE CITY - Earle Steele was 9 years old when he got his first glimpse of the Traverse City State Hospital. The year was 1922, and Earle's father had just been hired as the hospital's head gardener. As he and his family trudged through the snow to their home on the hospital grounds, the young boy couldn't know that he would be spending the next seven decades of his life there. From that frosty evening in 1922 until the closing of the hospital in 1989, Earle Steele was a part of its scenery: as schoolboy, greenhouse worker, gardener, grounds superintendent and museum curator. He watched the huge institution grow, expand and finally shrink back into obsolescence. But the impressive grounds, now known as the Grand Traverse Commons, still remain. Much of that landscape, especially the majestic trees that tower above the scene, is the work of Earle Steele and his father, who believed in the dictum of hospital founder J.D. Munson that "beauty is therapy." "I find it very hard to put into words how I feel about my earlier years at this hospital," he wrote. "Often when asked, I'm sure my answer is still inadequate. What prevails above all else is the quietness of the area and the camaraderie between the employees and between employees and patients, and yes, even between patients." Several years ago, Steele began sharing stories about his career at the hospital with his granddaughter, Traverse City writer Kristen Hains. She helped organize and shape them into book form and the result, "Beauty is Therapy: Memories of the Traverse City State Hospital," has just been published under Hains' own label, Denali & Co. Its 86 pages, including drawings and photographs, were compiled from years of conversations, letters and interviews between Steele and Hains. "We actually got started back when the hospital closed in 1989," said Hains. "People kept telling him, 'You ought to be writing this stuff down.' But we'd start up and put it down over and over again, and finally last June we realized we'd better get the lead out and get it done." One reason is Steele's advancing age; he's now 87. But an even more important consideration was his concern that 21st century Traverse City residents and visitors have no accurate idea of what the hospital was like in the days when it contained over a quarter of the city's population. It was a thriving self-sufficient farm with all the trimmings of a small city. Particularly today, when many of the great brick buildings have been torn down and others are in danger of collapse, he wanted to preserve the memory of a quieter, more cheerful time. "I am saddened by the deterioration that is now ongoing," he told his granddaughter, "and I can hardly describe my feelings viewing the deterioration of what was so beautifully rendered for the mentally ill over those early years." "Beauty is Therapy" isn't just a history of the hospital. It's an intensely personal memoir, a picture into which Steele constantly reappears as both observer and participant. We see him as a youngster, hitching a ride on the early-morning sleigh that delivered milk to the hospital, as a young employee in trouble with the FBI for taking photographs of Traverse City for a patient during wartime, as a department head who had the painful duty of laying off longtime friends and colleagues when the hospital began to shrink. Hains said she worked hard to preserve her grandfather's voice - "the feeling of grandfather in rocking chair, with granddaughter at his knee." She sorted through the materials and tried to arrange them into a single coherent story. "I didn't want to turn it into the book I would have written, because it's his story," she said. The book retails for $10.95. Steele and Hains will be signing copies of "Beauty is Therapy" today from 1-3 p.m. at the Traverse Area District Library, and Saturday, Feb. 24, from 1-3 p.m. at Horizon Books in downtown Traverse City. |