AUBURN – The Auburn Public Library, located at the Auburn Mall, will welcome Albert Gagne, Joseph Almeida and Robert Gagne at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, June 2, to discuss the book, “The State Boys Rebellion,” and the upcoming movie based on their lives as wards of the Walter E. Fernald State School. Theirs is a story of struggle and survival, and how as men they reunited to find justice.
The “State Boys Rebellion,” by award-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio, uncovers the tragedy of those who suffered through their childhoods confined to the Walter E. Fernald State School for the Feebleminded in Waltham, Mass.
The Fernald School and its counterparts were not schools, but warehouses for the mentally and physically handicapped, and dumping grounds for children of parents who gave up and a state that discounted them as feebleminded. Kids like the Gagne Brothers were labeled social burdens, subjected to physical and mental abuse, and forced to serve as an unpaid labor force. After World War II, the Fernald and other Schools turned their charges over to the government, which, with partnering institutions and corporations, used the children as subjects of “medical experiments.”
For more information for more information on this and other APL programs, call 782-3191.
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