"Where's Molly?" Jeff Daly asked his parents one gray spring afternoon in 1957. The six-year-old Jeff stood staring at the empty chair where his little sister usually sat. After a brief silence, Jeff's father answered, "Molly's not here anymore, but she's fine. It's nothing for you to worry about. Forget it and eat your supper."
Over the next several months, when Jeff persisted in asking, "Where's Molly?" he was sent to his room. "She lives somewhere else now and she's happy," his mother firmly told him. "You're not to talk about this anymore." Jeff eventually stopped asking about Molly, but deep down never forgot her.
Nearly five decades later, on January 21, 2004 -- three months after his mother died of cancer and less than a day after his father died of heart failure -- Jeff came across his dad's wallet at his parents' home. Inside, he found a small laminated card printed with the name "Molly Jo Daly" and a Social Security number.
"My parents had told me to block her out of my mind," says Daly, now 54. "I assumed the card meant nothing." But Jeff's wife, Cindy, insisted that it was an important clue to Molly's whereabouts.
"This is your chance to find her," she said.
That afternoon, Cindy and Jeff searched for more clues in Jack Daly's house. In a crawlspace by the water heater, they found a cabinet crammed with old files. Tucked in the back was a folder labeled "Molly." Inside were a few records of Jeff's sister's life at the Fairview Hospital and Training Center in Salem, Oregon, where Molly had been taken nine days before her third birthday.
The institution had closed in 2000, but the Dalys found in the file a slip of paper listing phone numbers for three Oregon group homes for the developmentally disabled. Cindy quickly picked up the phone and dialed. The first two numbers led nowhere. But on the third call, to a home in Hillsboro, Oregon, she excitedly hollered for Jeff to get on the line. "Do you know Molly Jo Daly?" Cindy had asked the staffer who answered. There had been a long silence, then a male voice quietly said, "She's sitting right across from me."
For about three decades, beginning in the 1950s, there were thousands of "Mollys" growing up across the United States in state-funded institutions for the mildly to severely developmentally disabled. Although such institutions are becoming scarce, about 325,000 intellectually disabled adults -- many sent away as children -- are now living in small group homes or community residences. Those in their 40s and 50s in particular may have no knowledge that they have relatives of any kind, says University of Minnesota professor Charlie Lakin, who has studied demographics of the developmentally disabled. And now, with parents of these children dying without revealing any details, family contact may be cut off forever.
In the 1950s, many experts told parents that raising a child with a disability at home would be a burden to other children in the household, says Sue Swenson, executive director of the Arc (formerly known as the Association for Retarded Citizens) of the United States, an advocacy group. "Support systems didn't exist," she explains, "so most people felt they had no choice but to send the child away." Many of these "throwaway" children grew up without being touched except to have their diapers changed or to be fed, says Swenson. Now that sad chapter is finally coming to an end in Oregon, thanks to Jeff and Cindy Daly.
It was February 4, 2004, when Jeff nervously rang the doorbell of the supervised group home where Molly, then 49, was living with four other adults like her. When he and Cindy walked into the living room, residents and staffers were sitting in a circle so everybody would have a ringside seat. Molly, who has the emotions and intellect of a young child, is blind in one eye and uses a wheelchair to get around, smiled and shyly turned her head as Jeff approached.
"Molly," Jeff said through tears, hugging his sister, "I'm your brother, Jeff. I'm so sorry that I haven't been a part of your life." Molly reached out and held his hand. Turning to Cindy, Jeff sobbed, "I remember Molly! Where have those memories been hiding?" Suddenly, he recalled the close relationship he and Molly had before she was sent away -- the times they played in the sand at the beach, the laughter they shared, the nights Jeff let her sleep in his bed so she'd stay warm.
In the weeks after the reunion, Jeff learned that his wife's brother-in-law, Layne DeLoff, also had a sister who was sent to Fairview in the early 1960s. All Layne knew was that her name was Sherry and she was about a year younger than he was when she "disappeared."
Layne and his wife, Claudia, spent weeks trying to find Sherry, but Oregon officials told them it was against privacy laws to supply information without her consent. Finally, a sympathetic state worker risked her job and called the DeLoffs to say that Sherry was living at a group home in La Grande, Oregon. The Dalys couldn't believe that a search they did in a few hours took the DeLoffs almost two months and ended successfully only because somebody broke the law.
"Cindy and I decided right then to do whatever it took to get the law changed," says Jeff. He and his wife, a former lobbyist for the cell phone industry, pressured the Oregon State Legislature to make it easier for families of those with disabilities to reconnect, and Jeff, who works as a freelance cameraman, began filming a documentary about Molly's life.
State Sen. Peter Courtney sponsored "Molly's Bill" last year when he learned that most of the 20,000 children who were sent to Fairview never saw their families again. The first of its kind in the country, the law, signed in July 2005, requires that the Oregon Department of Human Services notify disabled people or their care providers when a relative wants to make contact. The Dalys are now working with the Arc to get similar legislation passed on a federal level. "We're not stopping until every state has this on the books," says Jeff. "Our parents might have thought cutting off contact was the best thing to do, but why weren't we given a choice to know our siblings?"
Records of Molly's first few doctor visits as an infant show that she was "normal," though born with a clubfoot and a lazy eye. But at 18 months, when Molly wasn't walking or talking, the pediatrician told Jack and Sue Daly that their daughter was "profoundly retarded" and recommended Fairview.
Through interviews with relatives and family friends, Jeff has learned that his mother agreed to send Molly away, "because a disabled child wasn't right for her perfect life." Jack Daly was an executive at Bumble Bee Seafoods, and he and his wife had to do a great deal of business entertaining. "My mother was concerned about her image," says Jeff.
Fairview could house up to 2,700 children and adults, and was surrounded by 200 acres of lush gardens and stately pines. Molly spent her first year there in a room with 64 other children, most of them with Down syndrome. "There was only one caregiver for all of them," Cindy says. Jeff has included in his documentary actual footage from a promotional film used by Fairview in the 1950s. The film shows infants and toddlers in a stark room filled with rows of cribs. Nurses in immaculate uniforms are praised for "touching" children three times daily. In an especially poignant scene, an enthusiastic little girl with short dark hair and sparkling eyes claps her hands on the hard floor in a room devoid of toys or comforts. "The first time I watched, I cried," says Jeff. "I knew instantly that she was Molly."
Jeff's father visited Molly early on at Fairview, but was eventually told by nurses not to come anymore because Molly cried each time he left. "I think that must have been hard on him," says Jeff. In fact, Jeff has learned that his father, who was a member of a charity group that put on free clown shows around town, returned to Fairview at least once more, dressed as a clown.
Jeff also learned that Molly's only other visitor during her 35 years in the institution was her grandmother. Until her death in 1988, Marie Mercer secretly visited Molly each month, pushing her on the playground swings when she was a child, then wheeling her around the gardens in a wheelchair when her legs weakened in her teens from lack of use.
Molly, whose IQ scores were between 30 and 60 in tests done at Fairview, was seldom allowed to exercise in the institution and was often restrained in her bed when she misbehaved. Records show that she was very angry at times, spilling trays of food, hitting people and plugging toilets. "She was a rebel," says Cindy. "She acted up because she was bored. It was probably one of the few times she got extra attention." In 1993, when Molly was moved to the small group residence where she lives today, her behavior immediately improved.
Jeff, who recalls teaching his little sister to take a few steps and say her first words, believes that the institution worsened his sister's problems. "She received no education there," he says. When Molly and Jeff reunited, she knew only about 130 words. Since then, he and Cindy have taught her 300 more, along with colors, numbers and nursery school songs. "All these years, nobody ever challenged Molly," says Cindy, who has also arranged for a physical therapist to visit Molly weekly to see if she can regain strength in her legs. "We see a lot of potential there."
It hasn't taken long for Molly to warm up to Jeff, despite nearly 47 years apart. "Brother," she says slowly, every time she sees him. Jeff and Cindy regularly bring Molly to their Seaside beach house to show her the ocean and shorebirds. For her 50th birthday, they took her and her friends from the residence to the Oregon Zoo, and on the Fourth of July, Molly rode next to Jeff in Seaside's parade and waved from his '48 Mercury.
In the beginning, Molly was upset whenever the Dalys took her back to the group home. "When you think about it, it makes sense," says Jeff. "She felt abandoned again." But because she is comfortable in Hillsboro, the Dalys don't plan to remove her from the group home (where her care is paid for by the state), and she has come to realize that Jeff will be a constant in her life.
On a gray, windy afternoon much like the day when Molly vanished, Jeff lifts Molly up the stairs of his Seaside cottage. "Wheeee!" Molly squeals, clapping her hands as they go one step at a time. After she's settled on the floor in front of a picture window with a view of the roaring surf, she goes to work making green squiggles with a crayon in her favorite coloring book. Sitting next to her, Jeff picks up a black-and-white snapshot of him and Molly hugging and laughing together just one day before she was taken away. There are almost 50 years of missing moments in his photo albums. But Jeff and Molly are slowly making up for lost time, day by day.
:: Secret Lady ::
3 addition on my secret