By Jordan Novet

Photos By Michelle Kanaar & L.G. Patterson

Until last year, I had not spent much time in Paquin Tower, that federally subsidized, 15-story building downtown whose 195 apartments form an independent living community for the elderly and the disabled. But then I started my collection, a set of stories from residents, employees and neighbors, an assortment of tales that opened my eyes to this neighborhood of Columbians. Each story I heard opened my eyes wider to the complexity of the place.

Along the way, I learned that not every Paquin resident is the same. Yes, there are people living in this high-rise who have physical and mental disabilities, but there are also luminaries in Paquin: John Fry, an architect who studied under a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple; Dave Dollens, a University of Missouri janitor who used his paychecks to buy pizza for poor kids; and Max Lewis, a lawyer who does pro bono work. And everyone, it seems, has a story to tell.

As I became acquainted with the people of Paquin Tower, I recorded their stories. They spoke at length of their experiences and shared, in their own words, their views of the world. I transcribed the recordings of the interviews and edited them for length and clarity. To put their words in context, I added brief introductions.
This is Paquin’s story. I hope Columbians find these oral histories as insightful and interesting as I did.

Alex Carter and Ryan Green

Carter, 25, and Green, 26, were living in the walk-in basement of the house next door to Paquin Tower for three months when this interview occurred. They have since moved elsewhere. The two, both from the St. Louis area, realized the building was atypical when they noticed police cars, fire trucks and ambulances going there often.

Green: Did you tell the story about the woman crying out the window?

Carter: He and I, we just got some groceries. It was …

Green: Probably week two, or something, that we were here.

Carter: Yeah, I think at just the beginning of January, we’re getting the groceries out, putting them inside, and we hear this person sobbing. Uncontrollably. I think it may have been the same one that we waved hi to, like, up on the 10th floor or something.

Green: Yeah, up there on the right side from us.

Carter: It was really creepy. Really, really creepy.

Green: And both of us had, total, probably $350 worth of groceries in there, so we had to make like five trips to get it all, and, I was just like, “Should we call somebody?” I was trying not to look at the person, but I wanted to make sure – she was sort of almost out the window.

Carter: She was just kinda leaning out the window with both arms, sobbing. And I was worried, because I was afraid, you know, she might attempt to commit suicide or something like that.

Green: Yeah. We went out there every couple minutes to make sure everything was OK, and the person eventually went inside. But it’s just – we just moved here. I didn’t know when we moved here, what exactly the story was with that tower. And we figured out, at least, with the ambulances, that something was going on. We started hearing stories.

Carter: It almost seems like you’re committed to Paquin Tower, you know? Like you’ve got nowhere else to go, you’ve got Paquin Tower. This is the feeling I get. I don’t know very much about it. I don’t know who’s there or why. I just know it’s disabled people. That’s all. And it seems like – well, typically if disabled people have families that can take care of them, they usually will. At least in my experience. But I’m thinking that these people may not have that. Maybe their families are not well off enough to support them or keep them in their house, and therefore you gotta go to Paquin Tower. It almost seems like “the home,” you know, the proverbial “home.” I think Paquin Tower itself even, just the structure, is stigmatizing in a way.

Green: It’s sort of a scary-looking building.

Carter: The façade is just a mono, economy-looking building, and it looks like it would be a project if I didn’t know it was for disabled people. I think these are some of the ideas that push people into ostracizing the tenants in Paquin …They’re there because they’re poor, or they’re disabled, you know. And that further stigmatizes them. And I’m not gonna make a value judgment on that – it just is. It is what it is. Because that’s the thing that it gives off. And I think the structure itself, because nothing in Columbia really looks like it, seems to further that stigmatization and stereotype.

Green: I would agree with that. Also, they have cell-phone towers on top of it. So you always get good service here. I’ll say that.

Carter: Which is good.

Green: That is good.

John Fry

Born in Bedford, Indiana, Fry believes he is related to Presidents Andrew Jackson and George Washington. In school, he was not sufficiently intellectually stimulated. He worked as a landscape architect under a man who had studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. A car accident and a production-line job gave him health problems, including carpal tunnel syndrome, which left his hands nearly useless. One night in 1995, when he was between homes in Columbia, he was beaten and ended up in jail on charges of which he would later be proven innocent. A friend bailed him out, and two weeks later, he moved into Paquin Tower. He is 62 now, and his paintings and other artwork can be found around the building. He keeps his art supplies in storage.

I don’t remember ever a time in my life when I wasn’t looking at the world and the people around me and wondering, like an anthologist: What are they doing? Why are they doing it? What could they possibly get out of this? Do they expect this to have a good outcome? (Laughs) Do they think this will work for them when it never does? So I grew up an outsider with this feeling that I’m just here observing. I don’t really see any part I can take in this.

I went to a school named Needmore, thinking: Well, they certainly have this named appropriately. And I got through it, and I survived it, and I spent my time in summers studying on my own. I didn’t have time during the Mickey Mouse in high school to do a whole lot of reading and thinking that was what I would call learning. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to do any of that. I didn’t have any energy for that. It was going through the motions of learning – jumping through hoops, you know, going through some kind of obstacle course. It was not learning. And it didn’t much change in college. I did not have time to read magazines and books that I needed.

During my young years, I read everything there was to read, because it came to our door. My oldest brother, Meredith – he was 23, 24 years older – he’d been out in the world, and he had been to war, and he had been to the South Pacific. He had all these experiences. He had gone in as a medic in the Navy, and realized that that was pretty much a death certificate. So he became a Marine. He never would discuss the war. The only thing he would say is it was horrible. Well, I would look at the stuff that was stashed away in his old room and I would see the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and I‘d want to talk to him about it. I wanted to have some bragging rights at school, you know. This he wouldn’t give.

It took me a long time to understand and respect that he did not want to talk about this, because then he would have insomnia, he would have flashbacks, he would have nightmares, he would have PTSD or whatever it is that they have to call it.

He wanted to contribute back, because he had help and support getting through college on GI and becoming an engineer. There were some major rewards for him, and so he would, for Christmas, as a gift to the whole family, subscribe to everything that there was. He checked off everything on the list that could be of any interest that we might read.

There was nutrition at the dinner table, at breakfast and at supper, and the snack that we could cook up after or before bedtime. There was nutrition in that. But there was also all these magazines that was nutrition as well. It fed the soul. It fed that starvation for truth and understanding. There was the Harper’s, The Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life, Esquire, the New Yorker. There was even the Prairie Farmer. We had all these magazines to read. And there was stuff in it. Plus there were the World War II annuals that I’d started pulling out of the shelves as a toddler and looking at pictures. ‘Cause I loved looking at pictures and books. I’d look at my older brothers’ and sisters’ textbooks. I just had this thirst for and this hunger for anything that I could learn in order to make sense of the world.

Sarah Bowman

Bowman, 28, began working as the recreation specialist for the adaptive-recreation programs at Paquin – a Columbia Parks & Recreation position – in 2005. The door to her office on the first floor is open every day. Residents chat with her and her colleagues in the office. She sells cookies and other concessions, the profits of which go toward the program, which has always existed at Paquin. Its operations were threatened for budgetary reasons in 2008, prompting residents to protest.

It was the most devastating three months of my life. I was on pins and needles every day. My biggest fear was for the people here in this building and who use the programs, because they don’t have anything, literally. I think that’s the thing that broke my heart the most. This is one of the things that they get to enjoy, and one of the things, they don’t have to constantly worry about, and then you’re gonna take it away from ‘em? I mean, what are they gonna have left? And that was my biggest fear throughout all of it, was they’re gonna cut this program and the residents here aren’t gonna have anything then. They’re just gonna have their rooms, and they’re gonna be depressed, and it’s just gonna continually get worse.

They just cut our budget from $88,000, basically, to $72,000, so I really just have to watch my spending. I can’t quite go out and buy all the supplies we need, just because we don’t have the money for it. So, yeah, we’re probably missing a lot of colors of glaze, but, you know, there’s how many other colors that you can use over there, is my theory, so when somebody says we don’t have a specific color, I try and point them into a direction of another color that’s similar. And office supplies may be dwindling a bit. No more colored paper for flyers. We’re down to white. So we’ll probably just stick with white for a little bit, and hopefully that way we don’t spend as much money.

It really brought everybody together as a community to go out and stand up for the right to accessible recreation. I mean, that was one thing I always learned in school at MU; recreation is available to everybody, no matter race, socioeconomic status, anything. Recreation is supposed to be available to everybody. And it really hit home when they decided to cut this program, because it’s one of the only adaptive-recreation programs other than Special Olympics, which a lot of these people are not involved in here. So where are they gonna get their recreation? They can’t afford the programs down at Stephens Lake Activity Center. They can’t afford to go down to the ARC. And so it really brought ‘em together to stand up as a community and prove that this needs to stay here, because we are entitled to it.

This program has been here since 1973, and it’s kind of formed this whole building. When people hear about Paquin, they just think, oh, that’s the old building where all the crippled people live. But the people who live here have become so used to Parks & Rec being here that I think they just feel like it should always be here. And that’s, I think, one of the things that they feel they have a right to.

POSTSCRIPT: Columbia Parks & Recreation has since received funding from a number of sources, which has allowed the department to use colored paper for flyers once again.

Lee Radtke

Radtke, 49, had just begun Ph.D. work in oral traditional literature at St. Louis University when she dropped out to take care of her daughter, Peri. She home-schooled Peri and a second child, Dylan. She worked as a freelance writer. The Columbia native moved to Moberly to teach adult education and literacy classes before returning to her hometown. She was Columbia Housing Authority’s Paquin Tower site manager from March 2007 to February 2009. This interview occurred weeks before she took a different CHA position as director of public housing operations. While at Paquin, Radtke enforced leases, oversaw move-ins and move-outs, supervised maintenance and occasionally found herself in the position of therapist.

Basically what I do is I go up to the 15th floor and I walk down the floors, and I’m looking at the lights, to make sure they’re burning, I’m looking at the exit lights, I’m looking to see if anybody’s poked a hole in the wall overnight. (Laughs) That tends to happen when you have people in mobility chairs. I’m looking at the paint job. So I’m checking all that out. As I walk down the stairwells I’m looking for signs [that someone who is] homeless spent the night in our stairwell. They do that occasionally. Not so much this year, which has been good. Sometimes, depending on what time of day it is, I’ll run into residents and chat with them briefly, see how they’re doing. I don’t generally find people smoking marijuana when I’m at work, because they know when I’m here, and they know when safety’s here, so that tends to take place when we’re not here.

We have cameras here. Channel 2 has the cameras that show the outside entrances of the building. Residents can get that on Channel 2 if they don’t have digital cable. They know when we’re here. (Laughs) They know when somebody’s come, when somebody’s gone, they watch each other like hawks – it’s really funny. Freaked me out the first six months I was here. If you went into somebody’s apartment for something, they’d have that on, or they’ll come down and tell me, I watch that all the time. And they’re all telling on each other, saying, you know, I saw that on the video monitor.

It’s funny if you get to the end of the day and you’re going, “Oh, man, I was, like, an hour and a half with one resident.” And this resident’s hearing voices coming out of the heating vents. Obviously, they’re not really there, but on the other hand, you get to know people, and it’s funny. You have to take it with a grain of a sense of humor, because it’s a very stressful job, but at the same time, you get to know people and then it’s not funny.

Chuck Dudley

Dudley, 45, has made himself known around Columbia by way of his sharply worded comments on newspaper articles online and letters to the editor. Web-savvy Columbians appear to be sick of him. The Tribune banned him from posting comments on articles on its Web site.

In person, he is loudmouthed and long-winded, but his two Papillons and his penchant for fixing residents’ computers and motorized chairs make him seem accessible. On Jan. 2, Dudley decided to stop helping residents, after receiving several threats and complaints.

In Angels Camp, Calif., he grew up with depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder, but he did not receive these diagnoses until he was in his 30s, during drug and alcohol rehab and after spending seven months in Pettis County Jail on a count of arson. He moved into Paquin Tower in 2004.

Earlier this week we had a resident who died. Albert. He lived in 209. Real nice guy. He didn’t come out much. He played guitar a lot. He had cancer. But one simple thing, though, that happened that day: when they took his body from the building, it upset the whole building and still does. Instead of using the elevator and going out the back loading dock downstairs, where they can back up the van in the garage itself to load the body up, like they normally do, they used the front door. That upset people. I heard a lot about it.

I went to Phil Steinhaus, CEO of the CHA, via e-mail, and said: “This is not cool. We can’t have this going on no more. This is not the way we’ve done it in the past.” He said, “Well, I’ll talk to Deputy Chief [Tom] Dresner about this, and I’ll talk to the funeral home.” He said, “You’re right.” So hopefully we get that fixed in the future.

It’s always been standard operating procedure when people died here to go down on the big freight elevator, ‘cause there are double doors, and they keep both doors sealed and then go take them on right to the garage. The public doesn’t have to see it. We know death is here. We know people here are dying. And some people do die, whether it’s through natural causes, through suicide, through old age. We know all these things. But we don’t have to look at it, you know? We don’t have to see it rolling out the door. That’s messed up. It does hell on your psyche. A lot of people were upset about that. That’s how easy this building can get upset.

They complain, fidget a lot, bounce around – a lot of, just, unsurety. A lot of anxiety issues. And depression issues get set off.

People here take death real personally. We’re a tight community. We know everybody here, practically. There are some people we don’t quite know, ‘cause they may have just moved in, but if you’ve lived here a year or more, people know you. You get to know everybody. You get to know what’s going on, their daily routine, when they’re going in and out the door, times they’re up, times they’re not, time to check their mail, you know – you have to know people. When a member of the family dies, it’s upsetting.

Myself in Columbia, I don’t know. A different view, maybe? The voice of a different view? Having grown up with pretty much no mother, no father, no family, growing up on my own, has given me a different view on life than, say, someone who grew up in a normal family – mom, dad, siblings, normal family life. My views are a little different: sometimes really radically left, sometimes really radically right, sometimes radically in the center, depending on the issue. I don’t care what people in Columbia think of me. What they think of themselves is a more important issue.

I have ideas. I would still like to see Parks & Rec here. I’d like to see more disabled people from Columbia using it and more disabled people from the county using it. Paquinwise, there’s a lot of things that need to go on here. I would love to see full-time volunteer med students, resident RNs, over here daily, doing an internship type of thing through the university. That would be cool.

We have more than 240 people here, with a wide range of mental and physical diagnoses. What better teaching environment to learn from! In all age groups! All backgrounds – all ethnic backgrounds, racial backgrounds, lifestyle backgrounds, upbringing backgrounds.

Before I moved in, a long time ago, we used to have a lunch program brought in here daily. There was a group that came in – they cooked hot meals for people. They fed ‘em downstairs daily. Money for that ran out. Something like that would be cool.

It’d be nice to see the monthly dinner come back in here, whether it’s a charity group that comes and does it once a month, or a church group, MU students doing nutritional studies. Learning cooking and nutrition would be great.

I mean, we’re supposed to be a Christian community. What happened to the charity in our community? What happened to charity in this country? Everybody now seems to be me, me, me, me, want, want, want, me, me, me, and the hell with you. (Laughs) It does. And our country seems to be going downhill because of it, overall – the whole country.

Richard Craghead

On weekdays, Craghead walks to the University Bookstore to do its bank deposits for three hours. He can’t work longer than that, because his voice will go away. He had a liver transplant and got his ankle restructured. He is permanently disabled. A native of Fulton, Craghead is now 62 and president of the Paquin Tower Residents’ Association.

Usually we have an agenda where our board meets the first Tuesday of the month, and we set the agenda for the meeting, which is always on the fourth Monday of the month. When we set the agenda, we try to find out if we have any speakers or anything like that. And then we have the meeting. And we always leave the last part of the meeting open for just any comments, so that’s usually when a lot of the meeting takes place.

A lot of times there are more complaints about individuals, so we try to keep it away from that, but that’s just the way it migrates – to that. At the last meeting we had a lot of people ganging up on one of the residents here, ‘cause they think he’s a little bit too hardheaded, and, I mean, you just sort of have to let them vent, but it doesn’t really accomplish anything. But it makes them feel better, because they were able to get something off their chest.

For a long time, all we had were bedbug comments. That went on for months. But a lot of things are concerns that people who live here have, and sometimes, a lot of times, those are taken to management, and sometimes things are done. Sometimes things can’t be done.

About 30 people show up. I wish it was a lot more, but, you know, you just hope that more people will become interested. But there’s such a turnover in the building that usually it takes about six months after someone has moved in before they even come out of their room. A lot of times, they’re moving here from nothing, or they’re moving here from bad situations, so it takes them a while for them to come down and start socializing.

Nora Butler

Butler, 41, a native of Lowell, Mass., moved into Paquin six or seven years ago – she can’t remember exactly when it happened. She can remember the cause of her move and her first few weeks in the high-rise.

My kids moved out. I worked over here on Providence at Hardee’s, and at the time I moved in here, I was on crutches from a knee surgery and I’m not supposed to be on my feet more than four hours a day. They wanted to move me all the way up to Bear Creek because my apartment was too big for just me. I was in a three-bedroom apartment downtown.

And I went to my doctor and said, “You’ve got to find a way to keep me on this side of town, for my job.” And she said, “Well, there is a building called Paquin Tower.” I said, “OK, how am I supposed to get into Paquin Tower?” She said, “You need a note from me stating you’re disabled.” I said, “Well, do you think I am?” She said, “Yes, you are.” And I said, “OK, how am I disabled?” She said, “Let’s say you have limited mobility.” So she wrote a note to the housing authority stating that I have limited mobility and it would serve me well to live in Paquin Tower, where there’s an elevator, so I don’t have to use the stairs. So with that note I was able to transfer from downtown here to Paquin Tower. Then I found out my mental disorders were worse than what the doctors were thinking – schizoaffective disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression. And I found out about a year and a half ago that I’m diabetic.

The Lily League was a group of people involved with Parks & Rec, and we would get together and we would make baskets for little gift bags, and it would have things like a free ceramic day or a free monthly dinner and have a little newsletter in it introducing Parks & Rec to them, and introducing different activities and stuff throughout the building. And when someone new would move into the building, why, we’d give them a couple days, and then we’d go and we’d knock on the door and give them one of these little bags.

It was very interesting to receive one when I first moved into the building. With my coupon, I went down there to the art room and I got a horse and painted a horse. Then I went to my first monthly dinner. That was not too impressive, because I ended up sitting by myself – didn’t know anybody, nobody knew me, nobody talked to me. But I later was able to talk to – I guess you’d call her the director – and she told me she would make sure that didn’t happen again.

I’ve had more friends than I’ve ever had. I mean, I’m more socially inclined than I was before. I go out. And maybe it’s not leaving the building. It’s just going downstairs, but I go down there to talk to people. I haven’t been known to go to people’s apartments and stuff to talk to them before, but I go to Shari’s apartment now, and I go to Laura’s apartment, and we just sit and talk and watch TV and just have fun.

Shari Bauer

By the time Bauer, born in Washington, Mo., was 17 months old, she had polio. Doctors put braces on her legs. A skin disease further complicated her situation. She moved into Paquin in 1982. When she got married to Sam Bauer, who had an artificial leg, in the Paquin lobby in 1984, a minister living in the building officiated. In 1990, she and Sam moved out of the building and bought a double-wide trailer. Calcium deposits formed in her body, which hampered her ability to walk. They moved back to Paquin in 2002. Sam died in 2007. Now, at 58, she gets about in an electric scooter.

A lot of people, a lot of handicapped people in my condition, can’t walk, and they need help and stuff like that. You can’t be independent no more like you used to and all that. That gets frustrating and you kinda hate yourself. Makes you feel like you’re helpless, and makes you feel like you cannot do the things that you used to do. That’s why handicapped people are very emotional people. They get aggravated at themselves. That’s how Sam used to get all the time.

Like me now. Whenever you can walk and all that, you’re freer to do whatever you want to. But whenever you’re stuck in a wheelchair like this, or a scooter, you feel like you’re helpless or stuck.

A lot of times, this makes me feel like I’m helpless. I like to be independent and not to depend on people. But when people are in wheelchairs and stuff like that, they cannot do that like able-bodied people can.

I keep on wishing that I could drive like I used to. ‘Cause I don’t want to be stuck. I like to go and travel and all that. Now, since I can’t drive with Sam, I feel like I’m stuck and stranded, and it’s hard to find drivers for my van.

A lot of people think that I can’t drive no more because my right arm is pretty weak now. I’ve got most movement in the left arm, and handicapped people have to use the controls with the left arm and drive with the right arm, and that’s a little bit too much at one time. But now they said that they’ve got some electric controls that you could put on now, that all you have to do is push buttons, or something like that, and it controls the gas pedal and the brake pedal. Put the control right there, no problem. Then I can drive.

I might go down home to see my mom now. I’d probably do what I did, like going down to St. Louis and going to different places. I’d go to Wal-Mart and go to different places here and that. Right now, I miss a lot of stuff, and I don’t like that.

When we moved back in here, we had to give up a lot of room, because we had a three-bedroom trailer out there, double-wide. I kinda hated to give that up. We moved back in here, but it’s a lot better financialwise. And also what I was missing was all the activities. Going out, visiting people and all that. ‘Cause around here, whenever you get lonely about wanting to visit people, all you have to do is go to their apartment – really easy – or go down to the lobby and that, but out there in the trailer courts and stuff, I couldn’t do that, because it was hard for me to get into the trailers or houses. Especially with this scooter. And in here, it’s a lot easier to get in and go visit people.

Elsie “Peggy” Byland

Byland, a native of Monroe City, was 54 when she moved into Paquin with her mother, Ruby Jane Umstattd, in 1974, one year after it opened. She had schizophrenia. Her mother, a nurse, worked at the Veterans Administration hospital and died in 1977. A year later, Byland moved into an apartment she liked more – the one next door. Now 86, she is believed to have lived in the building longer than any other current resident.

When they were building this building, we did not see it being built. In fact, I did not know a big building was being built, because I was always scared of Paquin. There was something about Paquin I didn’t like. But Mother come in one day and signed up to get an apartment here. And we got an apartment.

Mother always loved people. She took care of people. She was a middle child, you know, growing up. Middle children always like to go out with other people.

Terrible things happen all the time here. People always call the ambulance. They get lonesome in these apartments. They call the ambulance and the police. (Laughs) But if you call the police, they won’t come into your room. They’ll just stand at your door. I’ve never really called the police. The ambulances are wonderful. They come and get you and take you to the hospital and stay there a couple of hours. That’s really great.

The little old ladies, most of ‘em passed away. They were all in arts and crafts classes – wonderful little crafters. They could quilt and sew and knit and everything like that. And they were lovely people. I never visited any of them, though.

Mother did not like Parks & Recreation. She never spent any time in Parks & Recreation. She was into the real stuff, you know, nothing decorative. Real stuff.

I probably wouldn’t be happy at all without Paquin Tower. Yeah. I get to do just about what I want to do. I have a good time.

Do I think I’ll move away? I don’t know. I just don’t know. Probably I don’t see any possibilities of me moving away from here. I don’t think I will.

I hate when somebody says, “Do you know you’ve been here the longest of anybody?” I don’t know what to say. (Laughs) I don’t really like them telling me that. It makes me feel sensitive. I just – it’s the truth. I guess the truth’s the truth. It’s OK, I guess.

It’s a wonderful place. You’re cared for, you know, and yet, if you want to be, you can be all alone. You can be a loner.

I think I’m a heroine in my own way. I mean, I do the best I can. I do good. I play it safe, you know. I don’t do anything that’s really dangerous like smoking or drinking or carousing. I don’t do that. Once you get older, you don’t do those things.

I’m glad and privileged to be alive. Glad I’m living. I mean, it’s probably not too good a living, but it’s the way I live.

Max Lewis

Lewis, 43, from Sedalia, is a man about town.

I had just finished up my first year at college at Truman State. Then it was Northeast Missouri State University. This was in May of 1986. I actually came here to Columbia and visited a friend for a couple of days, and then I went back to Sedalia. I got a job for the Pettis County highway department, and I was working for them. We were patching up a road on a hot summer day, and it was lunchtime, and I decided to take a swim in the creek and therefore I got on the bridge and I stripped down to my underwear and I was on the outside railing of this bridge, and I dove in, and it turned out to be an approximately 21-foot dive into 2 feet of water.

It broke the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth and the sixth cervical vertebrae in my neck, at the top. They took me to Bothwell Hospital in Sedalia, and they couldn’t operate on me, so they flew me here and they did an emergency operation. They had to take some bone off my hip in order to supplant the bones that were broken up at my neck, and I had to be in the intensive care unit there, at the University of Missouri hospital, for a month and a half. Then, for another six and a half months, I was in the Rusk Rehabilitation ward.

After I got out, I was completely paralyzed, paralyzed from my chest down. I could barely move my arms but not much more than that, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t want to move back in with my family; I didn’t want my friends to be responsible for taking care of me. So my only options were to try to find a place where I could live on my own or go into a nursing home. And so I found out about Paquin Tower. I moved here February 3, 1987, and I’ve been living here ever since.

I knew when I moved in here I didn’t want my life to be over. I wanted to try to live a life as full and productive as I could, even though I had these limitations. So I went back to the University of Missouri. I decided not to go to Northeast – or Truman State, that is, now – because the school is not very accessible. University of Missouri is probably one of the most accessible universities in the nation. Plus, it’s warmer here than it is in Kirksville, and that was a big decision too, because I get so cold. If it’s under 70 degrees, I’m susceptible to being just cold. My neural regulation is messed up as far as the temperature goes or feels on me, so the warmer the climate, the more productive I am physically in the community.

I got my undergrad in health education. I think I graduated in 1992, and I turned around and got my master’s of education in health and wellness, and I finished that in 1994.

I had a notion of going into law school. I sort of blindly went into law. And I felt that I had the capability of practicing law, even though I didn’t know a great deal about it, but I was very, very curious about law school. So I went, and actually – I think it was 1999 – after I passed the LSAT, the very first day I went, I dropped out because I got so overwhelmed by thinking: Can I get all these books off the shelf, physically? Can I do all this paperwork? Can I handle all this work? I’m gonna have to pay back all this debt. Can I actually do this? And so I dropped out.

Then I came back a year later. I thought, I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t try. I’ll always regret it; I’ll always look back and say I could have possibly been a lawyer. And so I went back. And in 2003, I graduated, and then I took the bar in 2004 and passed the bar, and now I practice mostly family law. I do it all pro bono. I’m really busy.

And I serve on five boards of directors. I serve on the boards of directors for Services for Independent Living, Boone County Group Homes, the Columbia Housing Authority, Mid-Missouri Legal Services and Mustard Seed. I also coach adapted gymnastics at MU.

There was an individual that got out of the hospital at the same time I did and he has the same disability. He’s a C5-C6 cervical spinal-cord injury. And he can’t move, like myself, from the chest down. And he’s as smart as I am, I know he is, and I know him really well, and he’s a good friend, but he just stays in his apartment all day long, and he doesn’t get out. And he’s the same age I am. While I went back to school and have done what I’ve done, he’s stayed really – he stays isolated in his apartment. And I feel bad for him in that aspect. He hasn’t got that many friends, even though he’s a heck of a guy. I think a lot of him. We all have our own choices, and we make our own choices, and he seems to be happy, and I hope he is. And I respect him very much and think no less of him because he didn’t do the things that I did. I think he’s just as much a capable individual as I am in doing whatever he wants to do. It’s all a choice in life, and you never know who you run into.

Dave Dollens

Dollens, a Navy man, construction worker, janitor, and subject of newspaper articles, is getting old. He’s 67. His health is going down. He no longer takes poor kids out for pizza or stages hunger strikes on City Hall steps to support the homeless. He walks to the local VA hospital for medical care. His income is low enough for him to live in Paquin, where he moved in 2002.

By the middle of January, I noticed a bite on my stomach. A couple of bites. And so I called up my sister, and I thought maybe I had the shingles. And she said, “No, sounds like you’ve been bit by fleas.” She said, “Don’t worry about it. It’ll go away.” So it itched for about a week or so, 10 days. I stood it. Didn’t put nothing on it. Probably a couple other weeks but went by, and I’m sitting in my big chair, and when I woke up I had a bite on my arm, a bite on my leg, a red spot. So I thought maybe I had fleas in here. And I look. No, I didn’t see no fleas, and I didn’t see any damned bugs. I knew I hadn’t had no pets in here, nobody. And so, next thing I know, at a residential meeting that come up in March, they say we got bedbugs in an apartment. He hadn’t been in my house or anything, but when I was gettin’ them bites, I knew I probably had the bedbugs. So I went over to the VA, and they said they were bedbug bites.

A couple of days later, I found one on the floor. Reno, the maintenance guy, came up and found one on the floor.

They came in, they were checkin’. They were finding them in different apartments, The spray people told me that they’d spray my apartment and take everything out and wash everything, take everything down. A couple days after they sprayed, I had to take my drapes down, get them dry-cleaned, and I had to take all my good clothes down and get them dry-cleaned and wash all the others. So total, that probably cost me – it’s $153 to get the stuff dry-cleaned every time. And I’ve done that dry-cleaning three different times.

Couple days after they sprayed, I got up in the morning and one was on my pillow. So I had to throw away a chair. I gave $600 for this recliner, just had it a couple years. Had to throw it away, and I had another $300 chair here, and they didn’t tell me to throw it away, but I threw it away. ‘Cause I didn’t want them, the bedbugs, in here, you know?

I figured out it cost me more than $2,000, them bedbugs.

I don’t like living here. I ain’t got nothing in common with nobody here. Seem like everybody in here wants something for nothin’. They’ve been disabled, most of them, all their lives, and that’s all they know: gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. I see a lot of abuse with the system in here. I think my personal belief in here, there’s a lot of people on disability who shouldn’t be on disability – a lot of them. I would say half of them. Because when I was growing up and stuff, they didn’t have disability like they got now. They didn’t have all that stuff. My family wasn’t retarded, but we had a cousin that was kinda mental, and they had to care of her, her mom and dad. They didn’t get no disability. And they took care of her. These people’s parents, they don’t have to do that. But a lot of them that are on disability, hell, I think they could work. You cannot believe the way you see the taxpayer money in this building. Maybe I’m being too judgmental, I don’t know.

Mike Bishop

When Bishop was 16, he got into a car wreck that left him with a head injury. He lost almost all memory of his past. He went through rehab programs for people with head injuries before moving into Paquin in 1990. Along the way, his ability to walk declined. Now 43, he gets around in an electric scooter.

I was going 110 down a gravel road. I had a 1982 T-top Camaro and I wanted to see how fast the car could get up to, so I looked down at the speedometer and it said 110. Looked back up, there’s a T road headed to the left or right. So I slammed on the brakes, tried to make a turn and the car flipped over and I flipped out the passenger window and the car rolled back on top of me and I died right there. I was dead. But my friend found me in the ditch, and he got the car off me somehow, gave me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, brought me back to life, called the ambulance, then he took me to the hospital, but it was a small town -Harrisonville – where I lived. They couldn’t do nothing to me, so they had to call a helicopter, but it couldn’t come and get me, because it was out on a thing already, and so they took me up to St. Joseph Hospital in Kansas City, and that’s where I was for that time.

It’s fun here. (Laughs) As long as I stay in my room and don’t hear all that gossip going around. (Laughs) There’s people downstairs that talk about everything that’s not true. They want to make it true, so they have to talk, and everybody believes them.

I stayed up in my room for the longest time. I had this one guy, a friend, down there, and I thought he was a friend, and I used to talk to him all the time, just to keep him company. And then I stayed in my room all the time. I guess he got kind of mad or something. So he started a rumor saying that I was talking about someone having AIDS. And the manager called me in the office one day and said, “Can’t start those rumors or anything. It’s in your lease” – or something – “if you start rumors about people, you get kicked out of here.” And I said, “Whatever, go ahead, because I didn’t do nothing, so kick me out. I don’t care.” I guess she wanted to test me, to see if I would be scared about it. If I was scared about it, she’d know that I did it or something.

Starting rumors like that is kind of a bad deal on people. It hurts people. If they would just not talk about people – but people around here talk about people. So I just stay up in my room and stay away from those kind of people.

It’s changed, because there’s more people that talk, there’s more people that gripe at things, and no one can get along with anybody. It’s like it’s a war zone here. If everybody got along, it’d be a better place, I think.

I hope I’ll move out of here sometime, if I ever get married. But I hope not if I don’t. (Laughs) I wouldn’t want to live here if I have a wife. Because gossip – they talk about you all the time. You never have no secrets around here. You never have no privacy.

Ralph C.S. and Claudia G.C. Wade

They met while working at Goodwill Industries of Oregon in 1963, and married the next year. They followed their daughter, Heather Marie Young, from Illinois to Columbia and moved into Paquin in 2006, when Heather’s husband, Robert, took a job here. Claudia, 66, reportedly has paranoid schizophrenia; Ralph, 74, is partly illiterate and at one point was considered mentally retarded. The couple are Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Claudia: Proverbs 13:20, according to the King James Version, says, “He that walks with wise men should be wise: but a companion of fools should be destroyed.” Now, the New World translation, which I prefer, says – same verse – “He that is walking with wise persons will become wise. But he that is having dealings with the stupid ones will fare badly.”

So he’s living proof of that. Because, after we got married, Goodwill Industries told me that he was classified as mentally retarded, unteachable. And then, when we lost custody of our kids, in ‘74, he had to take a test, and they said that he was still mentally retarded, but in the borderline range. The state of Oregon, my home state, claimed that we were mentally incompetent parents. Because I was supposed to be paranoid schizophrenic and he was supposed to be mentally retarded but borderline range – in other words, mentally incapable to care for children. And so they ended our rights and eventually gave them to a Mormon family to adopt in ‘75. Then after we moved in Texas, in ‘89, Ralph took some more tests and found out he had passed over from being borderline mentally retarded into the normal range. So now, he’s considered to be normal. He reads some, but not much.

Ralph: I can spell my own name, tell you about that. But I can’t spell.

Claudia: He can copy. He can copy things. I’d read official documents to him. I would sign most of them, and then he would sign above me. And he could read enough to get by and drive a car. He knows how to read signs – forward, stop and like this. He knows enough to drive a car.

Ralph: Yield signs, stop signs, four-way stops.

Claudia: On the road, he can read the number section of it. I tell him what exit to take, and he takes that exit. So I’m sort of like a navigator.

We hope to move eventually to a two-bedroom. There are no two-bedrooms in this building. We’d have to move someplace else. If we can, we want to get a two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise. We wouldn’t mind that at all. Or a duplex. But it has to be at least two-bedroom. And I don’t want any carpeting on the floor. I’ve got allergies, and there’s too much upkeep on carpeting. And we want handicap-accessible. Because we want to be able to get in and out without climbing a flight of stairs, or because I imagine maybe one of us will be having to get a power chair, so we want to be able to get in and out of the building. And most of them around here that qualify for HUD don’t have that.

T.L. Pratt

Pratt moved into Paquin in December of 1998, after treatment of several injuries from a car wreck near his home in Quincy, Ill. He was married and divorced five times. He is legally blind. He was president of the Paquin Tower Residents’ Association from 1999 to 2001. He is 64 now.

Ellen moved in here in January ‘99, about the middle of January, and I ran across her – it was late January, early February, I’m not sure which. And I’d seen Ellen a couple of times down there for lunch and that, and the particular day that I met her, I was waiting on Services for Independent Living to come get me and take me to the mall. She and I happened to agree that we both loved egg rolls, and I offered to bring her some egg rolls back, and that’s really what started the whole thing.

And then, seriously, for almost six months – from the time that I met her to Memorial Day weekend – really about all we did was we sat and talked and drank coffee and spent the early morning together, and then she would go and get ready for the day, and I would eventually wind up downstairs and save a place for not only Ellen but some other friends of mine. We all would congregate around the same table for the lunch program that used to be here. There was me and Ellen, Aaron Perkins, sometimes Grandma Liz would come and sit with us. Aaron has passed away now. Pat Jones, who’s passed away, she used to sit with us. Richard Craghead would come and sit at the same table with us sometimes. We had many laughs. We talked about different things and ate lunch together. And it was really slick, you know. To begin with, back when, I don’t think anybody knew that Ellen and I were even going together. We just kinda kept that to ourselves. We didn’t want a bunch of rumors flying around the building about us.

As a matter of fact, Ellen actually had a boyfriend. He was somewhere else. She called him up in front of me once upon a time, to wish him happy birthday, and he got sarcastic, and she told him to stuff it and hung up on him. (Laughs) And basically that was it. I mean, she just ended the relationship right there, and, you know, I was kind of amazed that she would speak up like she did.

So we went on, and a few weeks later, I spent the night with her, and she practically moved into my apartment with me. We were living in 605, and using her apartment up here for storage. Eventually we both had to go down to recertify, and the manager said, “Why don’t you two just go ahead and get in an apartment together and, you know, take up living together?” Well, we’d asked. We’d tried. And they turned us down. Because we didn’t have a record where we used to live together at any point or another, and I forget what else it was. So we were just, OK, we’ll just keep doing what we’ve been doing, and paying rent on two places, and we’ll go on, do what we got to do. But eventually the manager talked CHA into letting us move in together.

As time went on, it got to be more and more common knowledge that Ellen and I were by that time living together, and it really didn’t come as a big shock to very many people. It just kinda got gradually around that we were living together and no big deal.

I was in 605 to begin with. That’s where I first saw Emeril. I would sit and watch Emeril, and if Ellen was there, she would watch television with me. So we’d watch Emeril and what he was cooking. And it just got to the point where I felt like some of that cooking was so simple that anybody could do it, even me, and she says, “Well, why don’t you give it as try?” And I said OK. So we started trying to duplicate some of the stuff that I saw on television.

Ellen and I, we just discovered a lot of wonderful things about each other. Like her sense of humor. She also likes baseball, believe it or not, just because I do. I watch Cardinal baseball, so Ellen started watching Cardinal baseball.

She was diagnosed with systemic lupus in ‘97. She must’ve gone into the nursing home in 2006. She came home in March of 2008 and was home ’til September, about six months, and that’s when we discovered that it was just physically impossible for me to take care of her, so that’s when she went back to the nursing home. We consider ourselves friends now.

I really enjoyed all the time that we were together. I never knew having a relationship could be like that, that close and all.

Janice Fielder

Fielder, 61, begged for money downtown before she moved into Paquin. She estimates that she smokes a pack and a half of Santa Fe cigarettes per day. She reports having polio, bulimia and paranoid schizophrenia. She limps when she walks.
Her parents graduated from the University of Missouri. She originally was a journalism major, she says, but she had to change to English because she had trouble typing and composing articles. Two years into her time at MU, she fell ill and transferred to the University of Houston, near her parents’ home at the time. She dropped out, got married and had three children. She divorced her husband and came back to Columbia to pursue a degree in nutrition at MU. She ended up enrolling in a psychiatric-rehabilitation program instead. She believes she moved into Paquin in 1990.

I had a certain amount of money on the street. I stayed at a Salvation Army, but then one of my ex-boyfriends told me to smoke a cigarette in a bathroom, so they kicked me out. Then someone came and took me into the halfway house, where I lived for a couple of years, I guess. Then I was able to get other housing and was accepted into Paquin with all the other handicapped people.

It’s the best I’ve ever had it, you know. I have no complaints, you know. But like I told you, I have friends and I have enemies, unfortunately.

My friends and I talk, we socialize, we drink coffee, we make jokes, we keep each other’s spirits up, we do laundry.

I have trouble relating with the handicapped due to the fact that I’m handicapped, you know. You can’t be codependent on a handicapped person.

All I know is, if I get put on the streets, I’ll be sunk. So my main goal is to keep myself from being homeless, you know.

I get threatened by my cousin with the hospital every day of my life, and I’m sick of it, and he knows it. So he’s trying to execute me. He says, “I want you to OD.” Because he’s the executor to my father’s estate, or something like this, and he doesn’t like the way I look, so he wants me to commit suicide. I will some day, but not right now. I want to be in control of my own death. It isn’t very cute, and it isn’t very funny, no matter how hard people laugh, is it? That’s why they’re giving me shots of antidepressant. The truth is so hard to believe and so heavy that nobody really wants to relate to it, not even me, you know.