Bob,those are great questions.I came in September 1977,when Str8 was 1 year and 3 weeks old.Kathy,was Kathy Vosburgh,definitely needed work on the face but I was too busy admiring her busoms(I was only 16).Once I saw them,she could have had a face like Mr.Ed(the horse,not the old perv who sat at the front desk).I was there when 4th phasers graduated and the group was definitely a lot roudier when I came there then when I left.This was not by accident.Read the ISACS interview with the former director and a lot of this was made clear.The program actually had some altruistic roots,the old con about therapy was the goal and not profits.I guess some people realized that was great for rhetoric,but impractical as far as keeping a rehab's doors open and that's when things began to change more and more.I'm not sure about you and Mr. D,but my parents only paid at the intake and that was pretty much it.I was,when I came in,only one of a handful of rich kids from an upper-middle class family.By the time I left,I think that we were at least half of the group.Twenty percent of the kids who were sent there were sent there by Judge Dadswell or Judge Page,looking at far more serious consequences if they didn't enter the program.By the time I left,court orders were almost non-existant.I guess that Jim Hartz decided that it was far more practical to cure the drug habits of the kids from solvent families then from those of the insolvent.Bob,by the time you got there,most of the hard cases advanced or found their way out.Doug Hemminger,believe it or not,was very handy with his fists.There were lots of fights in the Rahall Building.As tough as I thought I was when I came in,the sheer numbers and some of the guys who they could subdue before I came in(there were a couple I knew)let me know right away that overt resistance was a losing cause.They probably did have those bats,but not by the time I got there.What they would do is put 6 to 8 fourth phasers around a jerk and take him to a vacant area about 50 yards long and "run" him.I never had it happen to me but I think they told the mark to run and if he didn't they would force by limbs and hair until his legs collapsed from exhaustion.This practice stopped when HRS started to visit and the Jerry Vancil interview hit the paper(Read Wes Fager).Laura Morgan had a daughter who went through the Seed,Jennifer,but she never had anything to do with Str8 as far as I knew.Marlene Hauser(remember her?)had a daughter who went through the Seed who was on Senior Staff when I came in named Robin German.Now,she was beautiful!If you ever saw her,Bob,you'd forget Terri.This was all before Phase 5 or a Seven Step Society.Probably,they changed their billing structure before these wonderful developments as well.
