1987-1998

By G. Wayne Miller, Journal staff writer

01:33 mins

...One morning in the second week of September 1987, a nurse forced Frank Beazley out of bed. He’d barely stirred since late August, when he’d been operated on again. Surgeons were trying to save a failing kidney. The situation left Frank deeply depressed.
...It’s a beautiful day, the nurse said. I’m putting you on the back ramp and you’re going to stay there.
...This was the same ramp where an ambulance from Rhode Island Hospital had delivered Frank more than 20 years before. It faced Wallum Lake, with its late-summer breeze.
...I want to stay in bed, Frank said.
...You’re going to the back ramp and I’m leaving you.
...I don’t want to.
...You have no choice.
...Frank sat for hours, alone with a lake.
...The next day, the nurse brought him back out. Every day for a week or so, back on the ramp.
...What’s the matter with you? Frank began to think. I can talk, I can hear, I can see. We’ve got people here at Zambarano who are blind or can’t talk, God bless them, and they’re always laughing. And here I am making a fool out of myself.
...A staff psychologist worked with Frank. He brought Frank into his office every day, and after counseling him, left him alone with soft music.
...A half-century before at St. Joseph’s Orphanage, Sister Rita Marie had told Frank about forks in the road. In the late summer of 1987, he’d reached another one.
...You need to snap out of it, Frank thought.
...On Sunday, Sept. 13, he watched his favorite football team, the New England Patriots, win their season opener against Miami. He ate dinner and entertained two outside friends.
...‘‘Appetite good, in better spirits,’’ a nurse wrote on Sept. 23.
...Two weeks later, Frank went shopping at Lincoln Mall.

...SURGEONS REMOVED Frank’s left ureter and kidney in June 1989, but this time, he did not descend into darkness. People needed him. And he had learned, many years before, the virtue of extending a hand.
...You know, Francis, you’ll always be rewarded one way or another by helping people out, Sister Rita Marie had counseled him when he was 8 years old.
...When Louie Pafundi and others founded a group called Patients for Progress, in 1979, Frank had joined. Members at the first meeting began a campaign for a more diversified menu and greater staffing at Zambarano. The years passed and Frank was elected and reelected president and vice president. He led successful campaigns for a new bus, improved lighting, better elevators, picnic tables, a lake observation deck, and a handicapped-accessible telephone. The group held fundraisers and hosted dinner dances and parties.
...And they had the support of new hospital administrator James P. Benedict, who took charge with the philosophy that these people were more than patients — they were grownups, too. Benedict encouraged Patients for Progress. He demanded that the people in his charge wear street clothes, not hospital johnnies, which had been the rule for years. He ended the long practice of putting patients to bed for the night before the 3 p.m. shift change.
...By 1989, Patients for Progress had expanded into the legislative arena. State budget constraints in the ensuing years imperiled services for the disabled at Zambarano Hospital and elsewhere, and Frank testified at Senate and House hearings. He was an eloquent spokesman for the disabled, a telegenic figure with a homespun manner. His quadriplegia lent him moral authority. Politicians listened when Frank took the microphone.
...He did not mince words.
...‘‘If Governor DiPrete has any heart at all, he should stand up and say Zambarano will be here for us,’’ Frank said in 1990, when DiPrete threatened to close a ward at Zambarano. Not only would that have unsettled the patients who made the floor their home — it would have been a prelude, many believed, to shutting the place entirely. ‘‘Let us live our lives in peace,’’ Frank told legislators considering DiPrete’s proposal.
...How could they ignore him? They lived blessedly normal lives. Frank would never walk or hug someone again.
...Despite the opposition, the ward closed. When a plan surfaced the next year to close another, Frank and others renewed the campaign — and this time, they succeeded. Frank was pleased, but not satisfied.
...‘‘It’s a feather in our cap,’’ he said, ‘‘but we must do more. They are very low on help here and it’s not good. They are losing help and no one is making a move.’’
...His work for the disabled brought Frank a Victory Award from the National Rehabilitation Hospital, a leader in treating neurological disorders. In April 1993, Frank, flying for the first time on an airplane, went to Washington, D.C., to be honored. He shook Vice President Al Gore’s hand in a Rose Garden ceremony and wore a tuxedo to the awards banquet. He visited the museums and memorials, and sang ballads and drank Guinness beer in an Irish pub. He met Lynda Carter, TV’s Wonder Woman, who gave him her autograph — a trophy for Room 17.

Frank talks with pen pal Keri Steinkamp, a fourth grader. Journal photo/Andrew Dickerman

...Frank returned to Rhode Island as something of a celebrity. Schools invited him to speak. Newspapers featured him.
...In one story, Frank revealed that all he’d ever wanted for Christmas was for his mother to call him ‘‘Son.’’ He struck the family theme on a visit to a fourth-grade class in Warwick.
...‘‘Always remember one thing,’’ he told the students. ‘‘You have a mother and a father. Always love them. Don’t get yourself hooked on drugs. Don’t get yourself hooked on alcohol. Make your mother proud.’’

...WHEN FRANK WOKE up on the morning of May 10, 1994, Louie was asleep. Frank did not try to wake him. Louie had recently suffered a heart attack, which had been followed by pneumonia; he needed his rest.
...Frank ate lunch, and his roommate still had not stirred.
...Louie, I’ll talk to you later, Frank said.
...Frank went down to the chapel for Mass. He was waiting for the chaplain to begin when a nurse found him.
...Louie was dead.

Listen to Frank talk about his paintings Journal photo/Mary Murphy

...Frank returned to Room 17 and cried beside his best friend before they wheeled Louie’s body to the morgue. He remembered the fun times, the good that they’d accomplished, the seasons that had unfolded on beautiful Wallum Lake. Sixty-nine years old, Louie had spent almost a third of his life at Zambarano. Frank had spent nearly half of his there.
...Meanwhile, the other Musketeer declined. Mike’s muscular dystrophy was advancing to its inevitable end.
...Frank was saddened, but not depressed.
...Life goes on, he thought. Seasons change; the wheel turns.
...Frank continued with his advocacy — and he found a new passion, painting. Starting with a sponge that an instructor wedged between the fingers of his good hand, the left, Frank advanced to a paintbrush. He could not execute broad strokes, but he could daub and dot in an impressionist style. Frank worked in watercolors and acrylics, becoming so accomplished that a market emerged for his paintings, prints, and cards.

Frank with his painting teacher Ann Garthwaite. Journal photo/Mary Murphy

Frank's painting of Zambarano's administration building. Journal photo/Mary Murphy

Garthwaite used to come to Zambarano twice a week. Journal photo/Mary Murphy

...Poetry also compelled Frank. He composed his verses in his head, then dictated them to someone who could use a keyboard or a pen. Many subjects interested Frank: flowers, sunsets, sailing, the northern lights that lit his way as he walked in the night to get his foster mother’s beer. His early years were a recurring theme, including ‘‘In the Garden,’’ a poem that he co-wrote with Mike Saporito:

...AS HE NEARED 70, Frank began to reflect on things left undone. He wanted to visit his birthplace, which he had not seen since 1953.
...If I can get on Nova Scotia soil one more time, he thought, then I will be at peace.
...Forty-four years had passed since he left Canada — 44 years without a letter or a phone call, no contact whatsoever with his mother and half-sister. For all he knew, Edna and Snookie were dead — and if they were alive, they almost certainly had no knowledge of him. Baby Francis had disappeared, taking with him a terrible family secret. It would follow him to his grave, or so perhaps these Beazleys of Halifax believed.
...Frank wanted to find his family.
...He did not have the money to underwrite a professional search, so he obtained a copy of a Halifax phone directory. Forty-six Beazleys were listed. Frank sent letters to a fourth of them seeking information about his relatives. He wrote that his maternal grandmother, presumably dead by now, was named Nellie Beazley — and that one of her children, Edna, had married a man named Lawrence Moffatt who was killed in the Second World War. The Moffatts had one child, Helen, nicknamed Snookie. She would be in her late 50s, if she were alive.
...No one replied to Frank’s letters. He sent a second batch.
...This time, he received a response.
...The Beazley who wrote back was a young Halifax resident who had researched Beazley history back to the family’s roots in medieval England. Until Frank’s letter, he knew nothing of Frank, Edna’s illegitimate child. He knew little about Frank’s grandmother and mother, but he agreed to meet Frank when he arrived in Nova Scotia. Perhaps he would have more to offer by then.
...Meanwhile, Frank had been trying to locate his childhood records. Here, too, he faced intimidating odds.
...St. Joseph’s Orphanage, where he lived from age 5 to 12, had been torn down, and the nuns who had run it no longer had the records. Nor did they have records from the Home of the Guardian Angel, where Frank lived from 11 days after birth until he was 5. The records might have been shipped to a social service agency or the archdiocese. Strict privacy laws frustrated inquiries, and staff shortages slowed hunts through dusty archives. Assisted by Zambarano psychologist Barbara Waterman, Frank over the course of several months contacted numerous agencies and bureaucrats. None had what he sought.
...By the spring of 1998, a fundraising campaign organized by friends brought Frank almost $6,000, enabling him to hire a nurse and pay for a community friend to accompany him to Nova Scotia. A travel agent made arrangements for them to fly from Boston to Halifax. They would stay seven days.
...A week before the trip, a social worker called Waterman. She had found the records.
  

TOMORROW | NORTHERN LIGHTS

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