TRASH GUYZ

and a daughter managed Opportunity Farm and lived in a separate house.

The boys rode in a wooden-seat bus to a New Gloucester public school.

“We saw boys and girls,” but “didn’t even mingle” with the latter, Roland said. “I didn’t even know how to talk to a girl.” and the Opportunity Farm boys “often kept to themselves.”

On Sundays they went to a Protestant church. “I went from Catholic to Protestant,” he said.

At Opportunity Farm the older boys cared for the farm animals (horses and pigs), feeding them and cleaning the pens and stables. The younger boys could earn 10 cents an hour by picking peas before supper, Roland recalled.

The older and younger boys did not play together, but Roland could visit Raymond at the Big House, and boys “raced bicycles around the property.” There were no fences enclosing the boys inside the farm’s boundary, unlike

What’s the Healy Asylum where “we were all fenced in.”

Each summer the boys went to Camp Don Bosco in Wayne. Roland and Raymond were at Opportunity Farm one summer’s day when “my real father and two of my aunts and one uncle came up to see us. This was the first time I’d seen” the aunts, Roland recalled. “We felt privileged to have them there visiting us. It was like heaven.”

The guests brought a new Western Flyer bicycle for the Soucy brothers, plus a rare warm physical contact. “We did not know what we were missing, hugs and kisses,” Roland explained. “We never got any affection.”

He remembered one time when the younger boys were taken to a Lewiston movie theater. Roland fell asleep during the movie — he smiled while admitting he “cannot remember its name” — and stayed that night with a Lewiston family. That brief sojourn with parents and (cont. on page 18)

The th ing about eye disease is, you may n o t know you have it. Some conditions are asymptomatic, and by the time symptoms do present we’re left with fewer options. An annual examination at GFVC can ensure that we diagnose any latent disease with cutting-edge technology. We’ll also check your vision and adjust your prescription. And while you’re here, you can check out the latest designer frames.

(cont. from page 17) their children remains a pleasant memory.

The Soucys discovered that life could be difficult at Opportunity Farm. Lined up “almost according to height, you had to march militarily to the cafeteria and back,” Roland said. “There was no talking” while boys went to and from the cafeteria and ate there. “It was very regimented. You had to clean up your plate.”

Punishment did occur, and one time the Soucys ran away. “We were on the main road,” but were caught, returned to the farm, and punished, Roland said. Referring to the farm’s name, he said “it wasn’t an opportunity for us. For us little kids, we had to go someplace.” The state “couldn’t put us out on the street.

“It was good getting away from the farm when the bus picked you up,” he said.

Roland “was 13 or 14 when our mother found us.” She had married a New York man; removing her sons from Opportunity Farm, she took them and Tammy to live with their stepfather in Middletown, New York. Disaster befell the Soucy children there; Roland praised a particular local family for helping him escape the nightmare that his new home became. He later served in the military.