The working life (the story of my grandfather, part II)

Dick Winans wore a fedora hat, scarf and an overcoat to keep warm from the cold ocean breeze. The wind at the Asbury Park boardwalk in February was chillier than it was at his home in Morris Plains, carrying a damp, frosty bite that could turn the skin red. As he walked the boardwalk, he gripped his camera tightly and prepared to capture the look of the sand, sea and the few people who, like him, loved it enough to visit the beach in freezing weather.

As much as he loved the salt air and the sound of the waves, however, Dick hated winter. That morning, in 1970, he wrapped himself from his neck to his feet, worried that even the slightest exposure to air would get him sick. Whenever he had a pain, cut or a sniffle, Dick would find the nearest person – whether it was his wife, Dorothy, or a secretary at his office at Greystone Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey – and pepper them with questions: How serious is this? How painful will this be? Can I get pneumonia?

Dick’s only way to stop worrying was to drink. When Dick drank beer, or vodka, February felt like July. Whether it was a bar in Asbury Park or the refrigerator in his Morris Plains kitchen, Dick knew where to find it, drink it and numb himself to the point that everything that bugged him before suddenly became irrelevant.

By noon on that February day, Dick had forgotten the freezing temperatures. He was ignoring the wife who anxiously waited for him in their Chevy Impala as he lingered on the boardwalk. He focused on the women who, even in their furry coats and scarves, looked radiant in the midday sun. Dick pulled out his camera, the one he bought second-hand in New York City nearly 20 years before, and started shooting.

Usually, the fur-wrapped girl was far away, standing alone or with a friend on the sand, watching the waves roll in. But Dick could aim a camera better than he could drive a car or anything else he did after drinking a six-pack of Budweiser.

At 57, Dick still wanted a life that he could enjoy. He wanted the life others had at his high school, where much of the all-male student body excelled in sports and clubs that he didn’t join, or dated women he couldn’t get near. He wanted the fun others had when they went to college in their early 20s, but because of war service and family tragedy, he couldn’t get when he graduated from Rutgers University at age 36. By then, he was married and working in a full-time job, as well as being the father of an 11-year-old daughter.

Even at Greystone, where the staff cared for a population of people whose severe mental illnesses created an atmosphere of gloom and desperation, the employees boosted each other’s morale by organizing softball games and other social get-togethers. But Dick usually chose, instead, to work in his office until late every night, work in his gardens on the weekends or sit and read the newspapers at his home, a Victorian-era duplex on the Greystone campus.

Right: Greystone

In 1970, Dick had been married 33 years, but marriage to him had become an obstacle, not a reward for years of setting what he believed was a good example of hard work and discipline for his family and co-workers. He grew tired of living the temperate life that his wife insisted they live. Beer and vodka provided an outlet, and encouraged him to push limits that once kept his marriage, his family and his life in tact. With his daughter married and living far away, and his aging, ailing wife doing little to please him, Dick wanted to shatter those limitations, even if it would cost him his family and, ultimately, his sanity.

On this February day, in 1970, Dorothy got fed-up. She watched him pull out that camera for what, she insisted, would be the last time. She warned him before: If he continued with this behavior, she was going to go move in with her daughter, Dede, and her husband, Stan, who lived in Point Pleasant, about 10 miles south of Asbury Park.

A year earlier, Dorothy had suffered a neck injury that limited her movement. Her heart began to fail, ultimately causing her to be hospitalized and mostly confined to a chair in her house. But Dorothy worried a lot about Dick, and threatened to bring him to a rehabilitation center if he didn’t stop pulling out beers from the fridge, chugging the contents and slamming the empty tin cans into the trash. She threatened to commit him when he drank, drove the car and got into a few fender benders, even though he always managed to escape trouble with the police. Dick ignored Dorothy, usually saying nothing or uttering “bitch” under his breath as he waited for her to calm down.

But this time, in February 1970, Dorothy had had enough. With her neck and back pain forcing her to hunch over as she walked, she got out of the car, limped over to a payphone, plugged in a dime and called her daughter’s house. Stan answered.

“He’s loaded!” she said. “I don’t know what to do…Please help me!”

Dorothy made similar calls before, but she had never requested a direct intervention. With her neck stiff and her heart failing, however, she made the plea directly to Stan: Please come and get me, she said. Stan then left Dede and their three children behind, getting into his car and driving 10 miles north to deal with Dick and Dorothy. As Dorothy limped back to the Impala, Dick ignored her and stayed where he always felt more comfortable: Standing on the boardwalk, staring at the sea and ogling at the women walking by.

For all his life, Dick believed he had been a good man, a person who projected class, something he learned as a student at the exclusive private high school, Peddie, in Hightstown, N.J.

As a teenager, Dick was an aspiring businessman whose main goal in life was to attend Princeton University. Following his father’s 1933 suicide, however, he sold his furniture at his Hightstown home and moved with his mother to Florida while she recovered from the effects of a stroke. He enrolled at the University of Miami but left early, returning to New Jersey to find work so he could support his mother.

Once home, he had a short courtship with Dorothy DeLacy, an old acquaintance from his days growing up in Trenton, before marrying her in 1937. As he struggled to make a living as a salesman in the publishing industry, Dick took care of his ailing mother while she was housed in the Home for Incurables and Convalescents in Newark.

Then came World War II; during which time Dick lost his mother, the person who was his best – if not his only – friend. When she died in 1942, he lost the only person who could tolerate his obsessive worrying whenever he felt the slightest pain or a cut. She was the one who taught him how to cook when he had no interest in learning how to play sports, perhaps fearing that the rough-and-tumble sports at Peddie could injure him. She was the only person who truly loved him, Dick believed, because she was the one who made him feel – more than anybody else – special.

Once the war was over, and after 4 years of Naval service in World War II that took him away from his family, Dick wanted to have what his father struggled to accomplish: Be successful, have a stable family and live the great American life. His mother gone, he wanted to be a better husband and father, and he worked hard to protect his family and his money.

In 1949, he graduated from Rutgers and, after working a few years as a statistician at the N.J. Department of Labor, scored high enough on his civil service test to be considered for an administrative position in state government. Dick then accepted an offer to become personnel director of Greystone, one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the East. Greystone, an aging, isolated facility on a hilltop in Morris Plains, N.J., promised something he never had before: Security.

Dick had a civil-service job, which carried protections that, to him, made it virtually impossible to get fired. He had a 100-year-old Victorian home on the Greystone campus that, because of his administrative duties, cost him little to rent. Instead of dealing with the high-strung world of sales, he would have a busy, but stable job that would have little contact with people other than his secretary and assistant.

Though he remained separate from the patients, Dick could somehow empathize with their plight: His grandmother, uncle and father died of gas asphyxiation, the latter case officially ruled a suicide. He often defended the people who lived in Greystone’s dirty and cramped conditions, which the hospital’s founders created in 1870 to establish a locked down, but secure way of life. Others mocked him and his family for living at the “nuthouse,” but Dick defended the patients much like he defended all people who were disadvantaged, often speaking out for civil rights for African-Americans and the disabled.

Initially, he was given an office in the main building, a Gothic structure with a French-style mansard roof that resembled a dome. Patients were housed in separate wings, separated from the administrative offices by thick, metal doors that echoed whenever they slammed closed. There, Dick had two assistants who dutifully served him, and feared him whenever his “peculiar” moods and obsessive behavior caused him to lose his temper.

At Greystone, Dick never earned more than $27,000 a year. But he had little desire to leave. After earning a masters degree at New York University in 1953, Dick had offers from companies throughout the country to work as an administrator. He turned them all down. Those jobs didn’t give him the opportunity to walk home and have lunch at his house, which was next door to the firehouse and across the street from the Greystone morgue. The hospital had a staff cafeteria with cheap food, where he and his wife ate dinner on most nights. He didn’t feel the need to move away from the brick “North Cottage” that housed a much larger office, where he and other administrators were moved in the late 1960s. There, he had a view outside of the main building’s north patient wing, with steel bars crossed in every window. But he also had a working fireplace and tile floors that were regularly cleaned.

For a while, Greystone was, to Dick, the perfect fit. The same stubbornness that made him bump heads with his father suited him well as an administrator. The man whose father thought he was too much of a momma’s boy, and wanted him to toughen up, learned how to develop a reputation as no-nonsense boss who had little patience for people who, he believed, couldn’t match his work discipline and effort. In his “North Cottage” office, he worked with a chair, a metal desk and little else that represented his passion for minimalism and frugality.

But, by the late 1960s, even Greystone, and the life he lived there, started to wear on him. He developed the same dissatisfaction his father had back in the 1920s, when he moved from place-to-pace to find the perfect job, the right money and the right way of life. Unlike his father, whose life crashed when he lost thousands of dollars in the Great Depression, Dick’s own insecurities rose to the surface slowly. He popped as many as 10 pills a day. He rubbed Vic’s VapoRub inside his nose to clear up his sinuses, even though the bottle’s label clearly warned against that any internal usage.

When he had a hernia operation, Dick worried incessantly, badgering an administrative secretary about how much he dreaded undergoing the procedure. “You want to know what it’s like to have pain? Try having a baby!” the secretary, Irene Danner told him. But Dick was stubborn, particularly when it came to believing what he wanted to believe. Instead, he took a train ride to Florida for what he said would be a “time to recuperate.”

Dick had long tried to hide his insecurities from his wife and daughter. But, by the 1960s, he started to give up. He felt resentment from his wife, with whom he never developed a close relationship since they were married on Feb. 12, 1937 – exactly nine months before Dede was born. When he landed the Greystone job, Dorothy had to give up her position in the child welfare division of state government. While at Greystone in the 1950s, Dick and Dorothy often appeared stony and cold with each other, rarely showing personal affection with each other and choosing to address themselves by their full, first names, “Richard” and “Dorothy.”

When he first met Stan, just before he married his daughter in 1959, Dick pulled him into the kitchen and announced, “We’re temperate,” while insisting that he treat her well. But, just a few years later, Stan went on walks with Dick whenever he visited the ocean, and listened to him slur his words and appear unsteady as they walked on the boardwalks in Bradley Beach and Ocean Grove. He was still sharply dressed, clipping his pens to his shirt pocket and wearing jackets and ties as casual wear.

Dick eventually bragged to Stan that, whenever he went on long trips with Dorothy to Florida and elsewhere in the country, he headed to the hotel bar and picked up women. “I always keep women on the side,” he boasted. When his wife once gave Dede a set of Lenox China, Dick got angry as he and Stan moved the set from the attic to Stan’s car. “That fucking bitch!” he yelled. “Doesn’t she know that these are $25 a plate?”

By the late 1960s, Dick had come to hate his wife, and detested that she didn’t drink. Dick often confided to his son-in-law about how he much he was dissatisfied with his life. At Greystone, he grew tired of the people who worked for him, the people who could never do the job the right way, or his way, the same people he called “dumb” and “stupid.”

What he mostly cared about was his beer and “grape juice” – his code name for vodka that he kept in the kitchen cabinet in Morris Plains – and anything else that could make what he considered his empty world a blur.

When Stan arrived on that February day, in 1970, he found Dorothy sitting in the passenger seat of their Chevy Impala. She was subdued, staring straight ahead as she sat in the car, wearing her winter coat with the car running and the heat turned on. Stan approached the window, and peered in. Dorothy rolled it down.

“Everything OK?” he asked.

“Everything is fine,” Dorothy said.

“Where is he?” Stan asked.

“He’s up on the boardwalk.”

Stan looked up and saw Dick, still wearing his heavy coat and hat, walking up and down the boardwalk, a blank look on his face.

“Everything’s OK,” Dorothy said.

Stan waved goodbye and headed back to his car. As he drove away, he looked once more. Dick kept walking, back and forth, never stopping to looking away.