The home1996
A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage
by Richard B. McKenzie
Like other children in the 1950s, Richard McKenzie remembers pillow fights and pea shootouts; Tarzanlike swings across wooded ravines and carefully camouflaged forts; and later, slicked-back hair and an Elvis-inspired cool calculated to impress the girls.
But for McKenzie, the son of alcoholic and abusive parents, these happy memories came after years of violence and fear. Placed at the age of ten in a home for children in North Carolina, he was given a chance to make a new beginning. This poignant memoir, written with heartfelt immediacy, tells the story of his life there more than four decades ago.
Neither the idealistic world of "Boys Town" nor a cold and loveless Dickensian institution, The Home, as everyone called it, provided its charges with the stability they needed to build...