By Lisa Chmelecki,Staff Writer

BOWDOIN – Albert Gagne didn’t see the resemblance at first, but now that he’s given it some thought, he agrees with his friends and family.

Robert Redford would be a good casting choice.

“I guess we do kinda look alike, and I do have the same mellow personality as most of the characters he plays,” Gagne said.

The 67-year-old Bowdoin man smiles like a boy when he talks about Steven Spielberg’s plans to make a movie about him and his former classmates at the Walter E. Fernald State School for the Feebleminded.

For decades, Gagne didn’t tell anyone the horrid details of what happened to him during the eight years he was locked up and exploited at the state institution in Massachusetts.

Even his wife, who calmed him at night when he woke up sweating and shaking, didn’t know how bad it really was.

A shy man who learned early that the best way to stay out of trouble was to keep quiet, Gagne didn’t let on how much he struggled to forget the memories of being locked up, labeled a moron and treated like a human guinea pig.

He hoped it would simply go away.

The exact opposite happened.

In the early 1990s, former U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary declassified thousands of documents, detailing the abuses at the Fernald School.

The documents included evidence that government-funded researchers fed boys at the institution doses of radiation with their Quaker Oats cereal for the purpose of studying the way the body absorbed calcium and iron.

The story captured the attention of CBS, NBC, ABC, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio, and most recently, Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg’s DreamWorks Pictures has bought the rights to D’Antonio’s book, “State Boys Rebellion,” and Gagne and his wife have been told to expect a call from a screenwriter.

“This is just the beginning,” Gagne said. “It’s all coming out now.”

Gagne and his brother were taken to the Fernald School after years of being shuffled from one foster home to another.

Like many of the “students” there, Gagne was labeled a moron despite showing no signs of inferior intelligence. He was released from the school in 1956 on his 18th birthday, a year before his classmates staged a violent uprising to garner media attention.

The institution remained open through the 1970s.

Gagne doesn’t know how soon the movie will be produced.

He wonders if someone will want to interview him. Or if he’ll get to meet the actor chosen to play him. He and his wife, who live in a small trailer on a rural road in Bowdoin, have even imagined attending the premiere.

“I think it’s quite something,” Doris Gagne said.

“I love it. I love all of it,” Gagne said. “It’s too bad I can’t be in it.”

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