Our 2022 Progress Report

 Our 2022 Progress Report 

A tough year. This communique includes a summary of my brother David’s life.  Because with sadness and relief we learned that David died on November 16.  He was 66 and receiving hospice care for a few months.  

But before that we cover an organ recital (catalog of illness and injury); cultural reviews, what feels almost like an exile in reverse, politics (more than usual), etc.  

In February I had a hip replacement.  Cutting, sawing, drilling, screwing, hammering, gluing, drugging, stitching, coaching. at an out-patient surgery over about 7 hours.  I’d say that I am 95% back and heartily endorse surgery over suffering.  What else?  Arthritis in my right hand.  Failing memory.  Tinnitus. Delusions of grandeur.  All that….

Karen has been ill since February with recurrent fevers and debilitating weakness. And a skin disorder at the moment. We thought the fever mystery was resolved when appendicitis was diagnosed in late July and that trouble was removed in September.  Alas, after almost 2 months of no fevers, she had another bout.  Doctors have tried  everything but the ouija board but have not figured it out.  We will probably go to Mayo in Rochester next year.  She is a quite bit stronger than she was mid-year, no fever for a while, so that is good.  And no COVID in the house.  

I didn’t get out for much bike riding before spring in Minnesota and the folks I ride with have been less active so my miles are down.  Close to 3000 miles.  About 60,000 since I started my spreadsheet 14 years ago. Still one of the best things in my life.   With winter coming strong in mid-November, I am back to the gym at the YMCA.  Their fitness tracking ap says that I have the strength of a 58 year old.   And also, as I see it, my hair hasn’t seemed to age in 11 years either.

Family.  Matthew, Courtney, Mara and Molly are well and in the woods just north of Duluth,  Courtney switched jobs twice in 2022 and now is a special education teacher at Mara’s school.  I can picture in my mind how she is working with those kids.  Matthew drives around the north country installing commercial alarms and related systems.  And he has built a sauna, ‘cause that’s what you do in northern Minnesota.  Sold his boat since a crew of two adults and two little ones is short-staffed. Hasn’t given me a ride in, let alone let me drive, his ‘66 (‘67?) Mustang.  Mara and Molly are great.  Molly, my little imp, is close on Mara’s heels whenever Mara takes a step forward.  So as Mara starts to read, Molly has to learn her letters too.

Sara, Don, Elizabeth (Lily) and Lachlann moved to Auckland. Yes, that is in New Zealand.  On the other side of the world. Far, far, far, far away.  A dual citizen and a surgeon, Don was a welcome immigrant and got a good position there.  Sara has had to take a law school class and is figuring out what she will need to do to practice law and get a job.  LIly is happy to wear her uniform to Meadowbank School and Lachlann is in a great preschool close to Don’s work.  There are two aunts and many cousins who have made them all very welcome in NZ.  There for just 6 months, they invited dozens to Don’s November birthday party!  It is a young and hopeful country.  Sara sent me a great book about the fantastic voyaging of the Polynessian people who eventually populated the islands.  Great stories, including tales of the godwits, small birds who fly the Pacific, including Alaska to NZ flights, non-stop, in 8 days.  13,000 kilometers or 8000 miles! Nature is miraculous!

I was able to take a solo trip to Seattle in the spring before they moved.  I’ll miss the area and Don’s family who live there.  

This year I have written no poetry - need to get back to it.  I have been working on a “vocational memoir” of sorts that tells of my forty year career at Legal Aid.  It is now about 55 pages and in the editing stage in preparation for serialization in the Journal of Law and Inequality’s blog.  (Good enough for Dickens…)  I write about legal aid history as well as my experiences and add a fascinating, to me, chapter about cases that my grandfather’s client was involved in.  It is through researching the Brooks case and its background that I am able to claim connections, a degree or two or three of separation removed, to Oliver Wendell Holmes, (the jurist) and 18th century French privateers (state-authorized pirates).   I will share the Brooks case story at the end of this missive.

I also claim in my paper one or two or three degrees of separation from Prince (The Artist), Frances McDormand (the actor), Alan Page (the tackle and the jurist), Rigoberta Menchu (the Nobel Peace Prize winner) and Nicole Brown Simpson (the murdered).   Still working on it.  

I got one, just one tiny ripe Honeycrisp© apple this year off our big tree.  Delicious. The squirrels got hundreds of green ones.  Small but tasty crops of tomatoes and peppers were protected by chicken wire cages.  And nice herbs, some of which I will try to over-winter this year. The Twin Cities have been in drought this year.  Stop. Stop.  I don’t want to think about the climate disaster. War.  Gun violence. Stop. Stop. The rise of fascists.  The disaster of identity politics. The cynical Supreme Court majority.  White male supremacy.  Money in politics. Stop.

A dose of democracy in action did make me feel better as I worked as an election judge in November.  16 hours of concentrated effort among a great team of volunteers gave 880 suburban voters their say in the future of government.  I am very pleased with the systems in place and the way we can address problems if they arise.  With all the false claims of election fraud out there, we were all a bit nervous.  We reconciled the numbers of voters authorized and the number of votes cast every hour.  They matched each time and in the final count.  As head judge I consulted with other judges on each decision and made a written record of each hiccup.  I told judges that they had the option to add anything they thought I missed to the log which each precinct turns in at the end of the night.  None took me up on the offer.  

I went to bed worried and was very relieved on Wednesday.  It turns out some of my contacts have become important leaders.  My former law clerk,  Melissa Hortman, was re-elected as the Speaker of the House and is in a very important position now. She will have a majority Democratic Senate as well as all five Minnesota constitutional officers from her party.  Keith Ellison, with whom I have done some work, remains as Attorney General.  For a while, our  state Senator, Erin Murphy, seemed to be in line to be the new Senate Majority leader, but she has been there for only one term.  The Commissioner of Human Rights is a former colleague and a deputy Commissioner of the Department of Revenue taught me income tax advocacy at Legal Aid. 

I was glad to see Betty McCollum re-elected to Congress from St. Paul.  She faced what seemed to be a tough primary challenge from a purported leftist who said almost nothing about how her votes would have differed from McCollum’s, who made trumpy (false and ignorant) charges of cheating in the party caucus system.  That campaign relied almost entirely on her being a refugee and thus of a different/better(?) “identity”.  We should get more people from non-traditional backgrounds and more leftists elected, but those people should bring more to the table, not less than the people they seek to replace.  Our Minnesota state representative, Kaohly Vang Her, is a rising leader, is a Hmong refugee, skier, mother, patriot and progressive.  

I feared that the negative losing campaign might discourage that candidate’s supporters from voting in November and wonder if that happened.  I didn’t detect that she, either personally or via her hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars, was working to get out the vote this fall.  I hope I am wrong about that.

One last rant and then I move on.  A new book details how McKinsey, the  giant consulting firm, supercharged outsourcing of labor and manufacturing from the U.S., built up income inequality as a policy and hired the best and brightest.  One idea they presented to Purdue Pharma in 2017, one of the main culprits in the opioid epidemic, was that the manufacturer should establish a rebate system that would pay drug distributors according to how many people died of overdose from their supply chain. Not as an incentive to reduce overdoses.  More deaths would equal more money to the distributors in this plan.  $14,000 per death.  

As John Lennon howled:  “How can you sleep at night?”

I read a lot.  When i started this I was reading Stendahl’s The Charterhouse of Parma; Doyle’s Paddy Clark Ha, Ha, Ha.  And The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity (by Graeber and Wengrow).  

I watch video too, though not so much.  Reservation Dogs is my current top-of-the list.  One of the Treuers (Anton or David) has a Atlantic article on the show and relates how one of the writers took a scene out of their youth near Bemidji for the opening scene of the series.  I don’t know Oklahoma at all and don’t pretend expertise on Indian life, but lots of the show rings true with what I’ve observed with friends, co-workers and clients.  There is great humor and humanity on display.  And Slow Horses with the wonderfully slovenly Gary Oldman in the lead role - kinda like John Le Carre combined with The Office. 

Stendahl’s is a big book about post-Napoleon conflicts among the aristocracy in what is now northern Italy.  He completed the 500 page novel in 52 days!  I like this line from his main character who muses:  “the science (astrology) is, like three-quarters of all the non-mathematical sciences, a collection of enthusiastic fools and hypocrites paid by those they serve” - but he cannot lose the idea that his escape from prison was somehow a result of the fates.  

The narrator suggests that “Above all, one ought not to raise objections against it (reality) with the various fragments of one’s ignorance.”  Yep.

Paddy Clark is a 10 year old boy growing up in Ireland in the sixties.  Never been to Ireland, but I was a ten year old a bit earlier than this and just finished a section dealing with a neighbor kid’s slot car racing set and another about building underground fortifications surrounded by man-traps, hidden sharpened sticks and such.  My best friend Tanny had the slot cars and like Paddy’s friend’s, one car was always faster or more stable.  We didn’t bury half empty cans of paint to trap the enemy but we did try to grow poison ivy on top of our bunker.  This is an uncanny first person telling of Paddy’s day-to-day life. 

The Dawn of Everything is a stiff challenge to western experts who contend that the natural and only movement of humanity is inevitably towards greater degrees of control, inequality and loss of freedom.  They start with an argument that “The Enlightenment” in western Europe was sparked by the intellectual challenges voiced by indigenous people of the “new world” and reported on by missionaries in Quebec.  There is a lot of evidence that the material status of the “Mohawk” people and others was superior to the invaders in their home country, there were no great gaps of wealth  and that their leading intellectuals directly challenged the social and economic wisdom of the French - just as thinking began to change there.  And they show that people in many parts of the world established large cities well before the advent of agricultural specialization and some did so without hierarchies and exploitation.  Before Mesopotamia.  The authors aren’t romantics though, as they explore the differences between people in what we now call California and British Columbia.  One grouping was intent on accumulating wealth and the other had a slave population of 20%.  They also show through newly available genetic analysis as well as the movement of materials that there was much movement across geographies and cultures in the far past.  

Friends and I stopped at Cahokia near St. Louis three years ago - a city that had a bigger population than London in 1250 CE, that was trading copper goods from the Great Lakes area side by side with shells from the Gulf of Mexico.   According to the authors of The Dawn…, one consequence of the movement of people across the lands may have been that groups developed pointed contrariness in cultures - “we have slaves and potlach, not like those people to the South, who try to hoard their wealth.”  Or like St. Paul vs. Minneapolis, Minnesota vs. the Dakotas.  Catholics vs. Lutherans.  Detailed but not so dense that you need a background in archaeology or sociology to learn lots of new things.  

Lots of good music, mainly up here in my listening room.  I masked up and went out to hear Brandy Clark (The Dakota), Fontaines DC (First Av) and a neighborhood guitarist, Dean Magraw, playing Hendrix and Coltrane-inspired fusion with Chris Bates (b) and Jay Epstein (d) at the new club Metronome, downtown St. Paul.  Another local guy, Eric Koskinen, is singing and playing guitar through the Tannoys for me now - nice!  I borrowed his album through the St Paul Public Library, where I get most of my books, many recordings and where I also use scanners, meeting rooms, etc.  Hurrah for libraries!

I have started supporting NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which was a great help to my folks when they were learning how to deal with David’s illness and the medical, social, legal and personal challenges that all entails.  “You are not alone.”  Yes.  As my sister mentioned, it bears repeating that David and the family had much support from local, regional, state and federal government throughout his life and we could never have done our job without help from you, the taxpayers.   This fall I attended a service for a friend’s son whose mental illness and addictions resulted in his death at age 33.  JP’s family tried everything for him too, but too often the tragedy of mental illness just overwhelms our lives.   We are not alone.  

I continue to participate with the St Paul Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity Commission.  Other than a training program on “Using Reasonable Accommodation Rights to Get and Keep Housing for People with Disabilities” in April, the Commission has accomplished little again this year and I will not ask for reappointment.  There are new commissioners now and maybe they will invigorate the organization.  I also volunteer with the St. Paul NAACP, Volunteer Lawyers Network, Housing Justice Center and legal aid programs.  

Karen has been homebound this year and is grateful for visits from neighbors, particularly Louis, our two year old next door neighbor and Becky, our friend from across the street. We see Molly, Mara, Courtney and Matthew, though this year only in St. Paul, and that is wonderful.  We also have visits from others who I won’t list out except to say it's particularly nice to have Sara’s friends and their kids regularly.  Daily video conferences with the NZ people are nice but without the warmth of contact we would love.   If you are in town your visit is always welcome and we don’t need much if any advance notice.  Remember to take care of each other and that maintaining social contact is hard when dealing with mobility disabilities.  

One more book - Ambiguous Loss by Pauline Boss, which I learned about through a caregiver support group.  In it she points out that we often experience “ambiguous” loss - that is a loss that is real but not total and loss that is changing and whose course of events is uncertain.  If our child moves to New Zealand.  Our spouse is housebound. Our brother is brain-damaged.  Here but not entirely here.  Ambiguous.  And this makes it both more of a challenge and opens more opportunities than final or total loss.  And that it is critical to recognize this, and to be intentionally open to the inevitable change.  “Ambiguity can make people less dependent on stability and more comfortable with spontaneity and change.” Take care of self and get help.  It is a short book and very good for lay people. 

Finally, I will tell you about a peculiar sideline to my cycling routine and then ask for your theological or philosophical or tie-dyed interpretation.  When Mike and I ride we keep an eye out for church message boards.  We used to go out of our way in Hopkins to look for some fire or brimstone and sometimes found some sulfurous letters on the board.  But since they bought a pricey LED screen, the messages come out with bright lights and dim pablum.  Outsourced the content I imagine.  This summer I was out and encountered two messages at a church near Lake Phalen.  The two letter board messages were:  “The Dead Still Have Much to Teach Us” and  “Avoid Plutarch’s Shadow.”   

What do you make of these?  Surely you agree!

With our best wishes for you and yours.  

Jay and Karen

Our brother, David Walker Wilkinson, died in November at his home, Brownway Residence in Enosburg Falls, Vt.  David was 66 years old and was receiving hospice care for the last several months.

February 2007

David’s life was hard.  He was born with developmental troubles, later in life identified as cerebral palsy.  CP caused his death.  Our mom, Betty, and dad, Jim, worked with him so that he could speak, even though muscles in his mouth were not working right. He received special education help and graduated from Spaulding High School in Barre.  With the assistance of vocational specialists David got a job cutting meat in Norwich University’s kitchen and did pretty well there for a few years, eventually doing his work without a job coach.  He lived at home and bought a VW bug to commute to and from work.

He enjoyed fishing on the Otter Creek in Proctor, though we seldom caught anything.  Running about in the woods and playing in the streams in Proctor and Barre.  Rock music and  action movies.  Capture the flag along Tremont Street.  At Boy Scout Camp Sunrise he freaked out his Scout-mates by pretending to be incurably hypnotized and wandering about with eyes closed and arms outstretched.  The Red Sox and the Raiders.  One trip to the beach in San Diego.  Visits to the Button family farm in Chelsea and Walkerway Farm in Cabot.  Coffee.

In about 1980 David began to have severe anxieties and thought his co-workers were threatening  him.  He moved to St. Paul with Jay and Karen and walked the city looking for work while his thinking deteriorated.  He sought help for himself and was found to have a severe mental illness.  He flew back to Barre where our parents began the hard, hard task of understanding and dealing with this new tragedy.  

David lived at our parents home, in a group home, a supervised-living apartment, at Waterbury State Hospital, in a foster care home hosted by former Waterbury employees and at Brownway assisted living.  He received a full range of services through Washington County Mental Health Services and later other regional mental health services.  Vermont Legal Aid provided free legal counsel.  While in Montpelier he tried working on several jobs but his mental illness was too much for him.  Montpelier is a small town and the Capital city.  His neighbors knew him after a fashion and were ok with his peculiarities and didn’t object to his wanderings and consumption of endless cups of coffee at this or that downtown cafe.   

About twenty years ago he was given a new medication and had a day or two of lucidity but the medicine also created conditions that threatened his life and had to be stopped.  Sadly his ability to communicate or to read or do much of anything that we could see as giving enjoyment declined over the past two decades.  The medications that kept him from freaking out also did terrible things to him.  We could understand he was often angry or unhappy.  I hoped that David had an interesting inner mental life in his later years, even if it was all a fantasy, because his outward life was so constricted, socially, mentally, physically, etc. But that was probably just my own fantasy.   

In addition to the help he and our parents received from medical and social service and daily help professionals, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) was a source of major support for my parents.  With NAMI they learned more about the illness and systems and how to give and get help and they helped others to know that “we are not alone.”  

It was fortunate that in his 46 years of unmoored mind he never had one encounter with the criminal system.  Kudos to him and his caregivers. I am pretty sure that had he been jailed, probationed or imprisoned he would have suffered even more, cost Vermonters a lot, and died much earlier.   As my sister mentioned, it bears repeating that David and the family had much support from local, regional, state and federal government throughout his life and we could never have done our job without help from you, the taxpayers and many public servants.  

Staff at Brownway do not have an easy job there and David must often have been a challenge.  He trusted you and this was sorely lacking for him. Thank you!

Jo-Ann writes:  David’s service to his family and larger community was to help us understand the need for compassion. He taught us a lot of things.  Mom learned from him that illness is not a personal failure or bad parenting.  Dad learned the necessity of patience with those who can’t always keep up.  They both learned to share this compassion with the broader community affected by mental illness.  I learned to appreciate that my taxes, not my bank account, supported David over the majority of his life. I learned that “obvious” fixes don’t usually work in the long run. (Such as the personal message David got from Nancy Regan “Just say No to Drugs”.) All of these learnings lead back to compassion, if we start with that in mind we can survive and thrive in this crazy world.

Jay:  Yes to this, Jo-Ann.  We surely become better humans when we care for others, especially those with such challenges.  David  was wise or fortunate to avoid the scourge of alcohol and other drugs and to have a family who chose the hard work of caretaking and advocacy rather than leaving him to the “freedom of the streets”, which surely would have  killed him quickly as it has so many others. 

When our parents were no longer able to oversee David’s life and care, our brother Jon and his family, Deb, Briana and Skyler, took over with no rewards and very little complaining.  David was never able to thank them and we will never thank them enough. 

A  gathering will be held at Hooker Whitcomb Funeral Home in Barre from 2 to 3 p.m. Eastern time on December 3.  For zoom access contact me. 

The family prefers memorials for David to Washington County Mental Health Services, www.wcmhs.org or your local NAMI affiliates. You are not alone.

With sadness and affection; 

Jay, Jo-Ann, Philip, Michael and Jon and our families.

My Grandfather’s Client

My paternal grandfather and name-sake, J. Edgar Wilkinson, who died soon after I was born, was a private firm lawyer practicing in Philadelphia’s Orphans’ Court.  We call that probate court in Minnesota and it manages and addresses disputes over the deads’ estates and wills and oversees trusts and guardianships.  I was told he spent a lot of time seeing to it that the needs of widows and orphans were attended to.  But I know nothing about his practice save the following story I have recently pieced together. 

In a case where he was appointed guardian of an older man, Brooks, there was much at stake.  It was alleged in the Philadelphia court filing that led to J. Edgar Wilkinson’s appointment, that Brooks was "feeble minded and unable to properly care for his property; that he was the victim of designing persons; that large sums of money had been secured and extorted from him …”  The guardianship, with its first stop in Philadelphia, ended up in the Massachusetts Supreme Court which affirmed granddad’s authority as guardian to act in Massachusetts and require a Massachusetts conservator (who had lost authority in the Pennsylvania ruling)  to turn over Brooks’ property to his care.  The decision noted that he had posted $180,000 in surety bonds - in 1925 dollars - equivalent to $3 million today.  Wilkinson v. McIntyre, et al., 150 N.E. 228, (Mass. 1926). 

I have not fully confirmed the identity of the ward, William Gray Brooks.  He very probably was this William Gray Brooks: a Massachuesetts native reputed to be descended from Cotton Mather and the founder of Phillips Academy and brother (and heir) of a highly regarded Episcopal bishop in Boston.  

It also seems likely he was the lawyer who himself was involved in litigation of large estate claims.  William Gray Brooks was a party in one decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Blagge v. Balch, Codman v. Brooks, et al  162 U.S. 439 (1896). That case related to how money from an 1885 Act of Congress was to be distributed among the heirs of the owner of the brig Mary.  The Mary had been seized by a French privateer in 1797 during a brief war between recent allies.  A treaty later released all private claims against France for such seizures.  Congress was later persuaded, presumably by effective and well-paid lobbyists, to pass a law to pay the Mary’s owners' families (and other ship owners) for those “spoliation” losses.  Brooks’ position, he being an assignee of the claims of two descendants of the Mary’s part owner, prevailed at the Supreme Court.  In none of these cases was there any known Wilkinson involvement, but the history is fascinating.

The Blagge case was on appeal from several state Supreme Courts, one of them Massachusetts’:  Brooks v. Codman, 158 Mass. 477.  The lauded jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes was on the bench but did not have a part of Codman v. Brooks when it was back in Massachusetts courts, 167 Mass. 499 (1896), for resolution of other  disputes.   

But Holmes was the author in the still later case of Hadlock v. Brooks, 178 Mass. 425 (1901), which reviewed the money verdict in a suit for unpaid legal fees against the administrator of the same disputed estate, yes, the same Mr. Brooks.  The suit was brought by the widow of the lawyer (Hadlock) who Brooks had brought in as an associate in the Codman case.  Brooks refused to pay, asserting as his unsuccessful defense the rule against “champerty.”  I won’t go into that old concept. He lost and was ordered to pay.  A small win in a fight against inequality, but still amongst the upper classes.  But just wait….  

Before hiring Hadlock, Brooks’ associate in a senior counsel role was General Benjamin Butler.  I remembered that name but fuzzily - probably from The American Heritage magazines of my youth.  

Per Wikipedia, Butler was: a northern pro-slavery power lawyer, a war profiteer, and an anti-Semite.  His second son was named Ben-Israel.  Butler was a poor-performing Union Army general and also the organizer of the first Black Union regiment in the Civil War.  He established the Union Army policy that said that escaped enslaved people were “contraband” with respect to the slaveholders and that therefore Union forces would never return them to slaveholders.  At the time, slavery was still legal in the southern states - there was still no federal law outlawing the practice.  The term contraband surely shows the persistence, even in the North, of the view of enslaved people as property. Some say this policy dealing with the legal status of “freedmen” led to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. 

A relative on my mother’s side, part of a radical abolitionist Peacham, Vermont farm family,  taught Freedmen or “contrabands” in Freedmen’s Bureau Schools in the Gullah islands off Beaufort, S.C, throughout the Civil War.  She died there after the war.  Did she teach Justice Clarence Thomas’ ancestors?  

Butler was: a crook, a Congressman, and manager of the President Andrew Johnson impeachment trial.  He authored the (anti-) Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and The Civil Rights Act of 1875, was a supporter of women’s suffrage and personally funded farm coops for formerly enslaved people. He was a Governor of Massachusetts and then candidate for President in 1884. Butler, while Governor, appointed the first African American and Irish American judges to the Massachusetts bench and first woman (Clara Barton) to a state executive office. He was extremely wealthy, in part due to using his positions (including probably trading with the enemy while in charge of New Orleans during the Civil War) for personal gain. What a complicated man!  We see lawyers today working hard for inequality all day and contributing to equal justice at night - we should not be surprised to see such a mix 150 years ago.  Let's move on from Butler now, please.

A few years later, well before J. Edgar Wilkinson’s involvement, Mr. Brooks was again sued and lost his control of those same valuable claims concerning the loss of The Mary.  Brooks had taken over those claims by written assignment (contract) from two of his uncles. The two had been confined by their family in The Vermont Asylum for the Insane for almost fifty years, at least in part because it was the cheapest place to board them.  Brattleboro had no “poor farm'' until 1888 and kept it until 1951.  Poor farms for homeless people in Vermont were finally done away with by law in 1967.   I sometimes wonder if an enlightened version might be revived while making our way towards a better social support system for disadvantaged people in our country.  Wasn’t the WPA and CCC kind of like that during the Great Depression? 

The brothers enjoyed unusual freedom for asylum residents and existed quite normally in the community, traveling to visit friends in Boston, for example.  

While Brooks’ family doctor thought they were sane after a 42 minute interview, the Court was not persuaded that they were competent to make the assignment of claims.  In large part because it was not thought reasonable that family members and the Asylum would confine them, but for their insanity.  The court cited the fact of their long semi-institutionalization without their objection and, finally, the contents of one brother’s diaries. The real reason Brooks lost, in my view, was because he did not have them get independent legal advice, hid his activities from relatives and was dishonest about the assignments.  Brooks v. Pratt, 118 F. 725 (1902). 

The Asylum where the brothers lived, now called the Brattleboro Retreat, is a well-regarded private facility.  My father lived down the street from there in the late 1940s when he first moved to Vermont.   My family looked at The Retreat’s services when trying to help my brother to deal with mental illness. No, this did not lead me to a fascinating career in trusts and estates - I did not know the story until 2022 and in fact I skipped that class in law school.  But I had some tussles with institutions and ran into other bad lawyers. 

I tried but was unable to get a report on the outcome of J. Edgar’s work as Brooks’ guardian.  Dang.  As you can see, I do like family history and its tangents, especially tangents in law.