BOWDOIN – Albert Gagne was barefoot when police carried him out of his house in Newburyport, Mass., on Feb. 8, 1944.

The officers told him to put on his shoes, but he didn’t have any that fit. His clothes were dirty and torn. His head was full of lice, his body itched from scabies and his toes were scarred from where the rats had been nibbling.

“I can remember the day when it all came to an end, when the police actually came to the house and lifted me up,” he said.

Gagne was terrified. But relieved.

His father was a featherweight boxing champion. And a mean drunk. Gagne and his nine siblings watched daily as he beat up their mother and drank away the money that should have been used for food and clothes.

Even at 6 years old, Gagne knew he deserved better.

What he got was eight years at the Walter E. Fernald School, a former state institution in Massachusetts where normal boys, including Gagne, were locked up, labeled morons and exploited by the state and federal governments.

Now 66 and living in Bowdoin, Gagne wonders if he would have been better off if the state left him in his parents’ dirty house where he went days without food and had to stay awake at night to keep cockroaches away from his younger brothers and sisters.

At least then, he wouldn’t have the painful memories of being locked in an institution where he didn’t belong. He wouldn’t have to worry about the long-term effects of the radioactive oatmeal he was fed as part of a government-backed experiment.

And he wouldn’t still be fighting to get “moron” erased from his state records.

Marvelously clean’

For the first four years after Gagne and his siblings were taken from their parents, they were shuffled from one foster home to the next. Gagne and his younger brother, Bobby, managed to stay together through it all.

They lived most places for four or five months. Some families were nicer than others, but none compared to Mrs. Ring. Gagne still remembers when the state social worker dropped them at her house in Peabody, Mass.

“It was marvelously clean. Nothing was out of place,” he said. “We both just stood there and cried.”

He also remembers the day, three years later, when they were taken away. Mrs. Ring wanted to keep the boys, but the state had strict rules about how many years people could be foster parents, and her time had run out.

“There was a hanky going up to her face the last time I saw her,” Gagne said.

He and his brother assumed they were being taken to another foster home until they saw the sign: “Walter E. Fernald State School for the Feebleminded.” Gagne grabbed his brother’s hand.

“I said to him, Bobby, this is not a good place.'”

Labeled a moron

Gagne followed the social worker to a small room where he was given a series of intelligence tests. A man sat across from him, checking off boxes on a piece of paper.

“I must have been confused or scared or something because I couldn’t put a square block in a square hole,” Gagne recalled.

That was all the state needed to diagnose him as a moron, give him a blue jumpsuit and show him to the crowded dormitory where he’d spend the next eight years.

“They called them morons just to get them in there,” said Gagne’s wife, Doris, who still shakes her head in disbelief as she listens to her husband tell stories from his days at the institution.

Although some of the kids were mentally retarded or had other mental problems, many of them were merely orphans.

The institution served as a holding pen where the state made them work long hours, doing everything from making brooms to cutting up brains, and the federal government used them as human guinea pigs.

The things that happened to Gagne and the other “state boys,” as they are called in a recently published book about their experiences, have already resulted in one successful lawsuit. And the boys, now men in their 50s and 60s, are getting ready to file their second one.

Their stories have been told on CBS, NBC and ABC, and in “The State Boys Rebellion” written by Michael D’Antonio.

For Gagne, a shy man who learned early on that the best way to stay out of trouble was to keep quiet, the attention has brought relief.

He always knew he wasn’t feebleminded. But, for a reason he still can’t understand, he was embarrassed by the label.

“I don’t know why, but I was ashamed,” he said, sitting at his kitchen table in a button-down shirt, shiny black shoes and perfectly combed hair.

Quaker Oats

Gagne was released from the Fernald school in 1956 on this 18th birthday. Although many employers were reluctant to hire a “moron,” he was able to get jobs at a hospital kitchen, a foundry and a spaghetti factory.

He was working at a restaurant in Concord, N.H., when he met a friend, originally from Maine, who convinced him to move to Lewiston.

It was here that Gagne met his wife, bought a trailer in Bowdoin and found a long-term job as a groundskeeper and driver for Central Maine Medical Center. Delivering important papers and medical instruments to doctors made him feel proud.

He told few people about his time at the Fernald School. Even his wife, who calmed him at night when he woke up sweating and shaking, went years without knowing many of the details.

That all changed in December 1993.

Gagne was falling asleep on the couch when his wife yelled out, “Al, Al, wake up. There’s something on the news about the Fernald school.”

Former U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary had declassified thousands of documents, detailing how researchers fed boys at the institution doses of radiation with their Quaker Oats cereal for the purpose of studying the way the body absorbs calcium and iron.

Science club

Sanctioned by the federal government, the radiation tests were conducted over a month-long period in 1951 by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In order to get the boys to participate, school officials told them they were part of a special science club. They took them to baseball games, movies and gave them extra big desserts.

“I just kept saying, I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it,'” Gagne said.

He was in the science club. He remembered being forced to eat every bite of his oatmeal. He remembered the big needles they used to take his blood and the glass jars they gave him when he had to go to the bathroom.

“You know, at the time, I felt pretty privileged. We all did, like we were part of some special group,” he said.

Sixty years later, he wonders if the small lumps under his skin have something to do with the tainted oatmeal. His doctor told him they are nothing to worry about, but Gagne can’t help wondering.

Lawsuit

After the story about the radiation tests became public, the members of the science club started contacting one another.

Gagne described their first meeting in Boston as one of the best days of his life.

“I had always wondered about the boys. It was so good to see them. I can’t explain,” he said, speaking slowly as he tried not to cry.

Eight of the men decided to file a class-action lawsuit against Quaker Oats, MIT and the government. In the end, they each got about $50,000 from the settlement.

Now, with validation and encouragement from each other, they are turning their attention to the state of Massachusetts.

Gagne and the others did most of the manual labor at the Fernald school. They raised the vegetables they ate, they sewed the soles on their shoes, and some of them, including Gagne, were given the special job of cutting up the brains of severely retarded people who died at Fernald. They cut them in thin slices so scientists could study them.

The people who worked at the institution kept the boys in line by using techniques that today would warrant criminal charges.

Bed springs

Gagne was 12 when he tried to save a boy who was being forced to kneel on bed springs with bare legs. Gagne watched quietly from the corner until the boy started to bleed, then he got up, pushed the boy off the bed and got on the springs himself.

The heroic effort landed him in a locked closet for the rest of the afternoon.

The state boys believe they deserve compensation for the abuse they endured and the long hours they were forced to work. But that is only part of the reason they plan to sue the state.

They want an official apology. And they want “moron” removed from their state records.

“They gotta take it off there,” Gagne said.

The father of one daughter, he doesn’t want his great-grandchildren to find it if they research their family tree. He wants them to know that he was a hard-working man who did his best to care for his wife and daughter.

“You would think that a man who went through what he did would be angry at everyone,” said Gagne’s wife, Doris. “He’s not. He’s the nicest man in the world. Everybody loves him.”

These days, Gagne still wonders what he could have become if the state never took him from his parents or Mrs. Ring.

“The puzzle will never be together,” he said.

But at least now he knows one thing for sure: He isn’t a moron. He never was.

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