Yes, I lived at Turley Children's Home in 1963. My sister, Sarah Hudson Pierce, lived there longer and this is her Turley Home/Hope Harbor orphans page web site which you have just found. I went there when I was 17.

My mother was 38 and my father was 48 when they married. I was born the next year and Sarah was born 2 1/2 years later. Our mother and father owned a 66 acre farm in Sulphur Springs, Ark.

We grew most of our food, canned, smoked food, raised hogs, chickens, and had a very small dairy. Daddy sold the extra milk to an evaporative canning company every day. We had horses for plowing, haying, harvesting, and pulling our wagon to town (no car).We had a water well, out door toilet, kerosene lamps, (no electricity), and my father cut our cooking and heating wood. I consider my childhood very pleasant with both mother and father there every day.

Mother loved flowers and grew roses, all kinds of lilies, peonies, hollyhocks, cannas, althea, morning glories and many other annuals. I can still remember the heady fragrance of blue hyacinth and waking up to the dewy wet lawn sparkling in the early morning sun. Also, there was the thrill of playing in the clusters of heirloom seven sisters pink rambler roses and laying on the lawn under a large 80 year old very fragrant white rose bush as the petals were dropping. A flowering almond bush was one of the first flowers to bloom in the spring. The fence rows had wild lilac violas which I gathered to decorate mud pies. We had a wonderful Juneberry bush at the edge of our garden and wild grapes grew in our woods. We, also, had peach, persimmon, black walnut, plum, and choke cherry trees. There were rhubarb, asparagus, and strawberry beds which we harvested each year. Mother spent the whole summer canning food from our large garden, fields, and trees. Mother made a lot of home made yeast bread and I can still smell it raising. Also, the fragrance of the clean laundry when she brought it in from the cloths line.

Daddy worked hard on our farm. He raised most of the food for us and for our animals. There were fields of corn, pumpkins, potatoes, peanuts, onions, and sweet potatoes. He gathered these and stored them in the barn for winter use. The onions were so sweet that Sarah and I would have a contest to see who could eat the most onions!

My daddy loved the land and taught me to love it. I was the oldest, and because there was no son, I was learning to work with dad in the field, milking the cows, and feeding the animals. I was happy because I could milk almost as fast as he could. One fall, daddy gathered the dry corn stalks into shocks and placed pumpkins around them and took a black and white picture of it. Even, with only a 6th grade education, he still appreciated the beauty of nature and tried to capture it. He made his own wagon wheels and forged the large iron band that encircled the wheel. He immediately put it into the horse and cow watering trough to cool. He was an only child so he had learned from his mother how to use the treadle sewing machine. He sewed aprons, sun bonnets, and school bags for us to carry our books. Our parents also made all our own butter and cottage cheese. We always had lots of home grown cantaloupes and watermelons in the summer. Neighbors came over for home made ice cream from our cows. An ice truck sold big blocks of ice from house to house which we bought when we made ice cream. I had a happy life on the farm and as I look back now, I believe God gave that to me as a gift to help me get through what was to come.

One night, I overheard daddy telling mother that he was getting too sick to work the farm. He had developed navel and abdominal hernias. (That was before the time of hernia surgery.) He also had "coronary thrombosis" and was on digitalis with the heart problem. He was having lots of fluid retention and dizziness with fainting spells. As he talked to mom, they were crying.

Soon, our farm was sold and we moved into town to the edge of Southwest City, Missouri. We bought 2 acres with a small 3 room house as daddy rapidly became bedfast. I was 9 years old at the time. When all the money that was left after buying the small home was used up, we had to go onto total disability welfare for daddy which was only $102 a month and Aid to Dependant Children welfare for us which was $82.50 a month. Mother did not qualify for anything. She was only 4' 11" when grown. At 2 years old, she had fallen through a sod house roof and was in and out of a coma for a whole summer. When I was 7, she had double pneumonia at home,and each day the doctor was surprised to find her alive when he came. I believe both of these things contributed to brain damage which kept her from doing many things. There was no welfare help for this.

One cold spring morning on March 19, 1958, when I was 12, Mother told me to wake daddy for his breakfast. When I went into the bedroom, I found him looking at mother's side of the bed. I touched his hand to find it cold and hard. He had died in the night and she hadn't realized it.

When dad died, the $102.00 stopped coming. All we had to live on was $82.50 a month. There were no food stamp programs, chip medical programs, or school free lunch programs in those days. Members, in our local Church of Christ where we attended, did not try to help us as a family and we didn't even know how to ask for help. Our little local church group had hired Wayne and Linda Earnest, fresh out of Bible college, to be the minister of our church. Wayne Earnest was part of a group with in the church which did not believe in orphanages. He believed it was the responsibility of the members to care for their own needy children within their group. He and his wife were a source of precious friendship. He visited daddy often before he died. They were at our house or we were at theirs. You may be shocked to hear that there was a day when a ministering couple actually came to your humble abode in your worst times and even had you in their home often. I now believe I encountered two of God's true servants who were walking out what they saw in the Word. "They visited the widows and the orphans in their affliction." They pleaded our case to the church members to no avail. Soon, the church replaced them with another minister.

Later, the church got involved and placed my sister with in a Church of Christ foster home in another town and at another church. The foster family took my sister in because there wouldn't be a vacancy at the home until the end of her eight grade in 1962. Soon they took her 100 miles to Tulsa to Turley Children's Home and she has told me how painful leaving this loving foster home was and then to hear Mrs. Wilson screaming when she arrived at Turley Children's Home.

She never wrote to tell me how bad it was because she didn't know any way out because she would starve at home and her foster parents had given her up.

I had a beautiful golden collie that was mine for a long time. I had taught him several tricks. I came home to find that one of the church members came to our house after my sister left and shot him.

I took him with me when I went through a huge woods by our house to pick wild huckleberries to can for food. With very little food, I was digging holes and trying to plant food. At 12 years old, I picked and canned 69 quarts huckleberries. I also picked and canned wild blackberries. There was no wood for heat in the winter now so I tried to cut firewood but found I was not strong enough. Our one cow that we kept from selling the farm was at a neighbor's farm about a mile away. The neighbor got the morning milk and I walked to the farm each evening and milked and carried the heavy bucket home. Soon we no longer even had the cow. My sister wrote to tell me that if I came to the orphanage, they would find someone to pay for my college education. I always felt that my sister was hoping my presence would protect her. I later found I was powerless. I found no way to eat or finish school without going to the home. I remember when I was 15 I was 5'4" and weighed only 85 lbs. I was very naive I thought I would be going to a wonderful Christian environment.

My house "mother", Mrs. Wilson, was neurotic. Mr. Wilson, the house"father", was molesting one of the younger girls. Other girls had actually witnessed it. One day, he came into the laundry room where I was working and grabbed me and tried to kiss me on the mouth. Fortunately, he was elderly with Parkinson disease. I hit him, breaking his glasses, and was able to flee. I would get permission to go to the office building to get the mail. This was my only opportunity to talk to Ruby Martin the "counselor" (We were never allowed to talk to her.) I would weep and beg her to move me to the nursery (2-9 year old children) with the Raines family. She kept promising but never did it.

Every day was so hard in the cottage. For example, If the pots and pans weren't stacked the way she thought they should be, you were grounded and made to scrub windows and walls with lye soap without rubber gloves till your hands were raw and bleeding. Mrs. Wilson constantly accused girls of doing or saying things that they had not done. Then, she would spank, ground, or assign heavy work loads. Another thing she did was to cut off hair very short for punishment, put in a permanent too long and burn the hair for punishment, or not let the girl bathe for weeks. The physical punishment was nothing compared to the emotional abuse. Mrs Wilson found out the I loved to sew and had made my own clothes since I was 12, so she soon was telling me that I could no longer sew for myself. I could only sew to patch and repair other girls clothes. If you expressed enjoyment or interest in anything, you would soon be sorry. It was twisted to punish you for imagined wrongs. I was painfully shy and afraid so I never disputed any of the false accusations. One supper, I was the first to take a bite of the cantaloupe to discover that it was totally rotten. When I told everyone, Mrs Wilson made me eat the whole slice but no one else had to eat theirs. (It took me about 20 years to learn to like cantaloupe again.) One day, Mrs. Wilson did a load of white laundry and got a red garment in with it so I was accused and grounded for 6 months and made to scrub with lye all day.

I had long hair and I knew that she would attack my hair soon. Just before bed time, I had a girl cut my hair. The next morning when she saw me she was furious. That was the last time I ever cut my hair short.

I told the other senior high girls that we needed to make a pact to get the best education possible and stay in church so that, one day, we could get someone to listen to us to try to stop the abuse at the home. I would wake up in the night screaming thinking I heard her walking down the hall to my room. When one of the girls,Cleta Meek, left the home the day she turned 18, Mrs. Wilson stripped her senior class ring off her finger. The next day I was given the class ring. A girl at school asked to see the ring and noticed the initials C. M. in the band and told everyone that I had stolen the ring.

That summer, the older students got to go to Wyoming for two weeks of church mission work. As we were heading back to Turley on the home's bus, I began to have asthma attacks. If I coughed, I could not inhale and would almost pass out. Later, when I left Turley home, the asthma stopped. Much later, I learned that what I was experiencing was "fear induced asthma". This began when we began our mission us trip back and I became fearful in anticipation of more attacks by Mrs. Wilson and it was too much for me to handle. The end came when Mrs. Wilson accused me of saying that she was not the mother of a certain little girl in the cottage. It was Wednesday night and we were all dressing to get on the home's bus to go to church. She was screaming and grabbed my makeup and broke it. She said I had on too much makeup and made me scrub with lye soap till my face was raw. (We were allowed to wear makeup but I wore very little.) After that, she drug me to the living room where all the other girls were setting. She told all the girls that I hated them. Then, she went around the room and made all the girls tell why they hated me as though they did. She even tried to make my sister do this. Everyone was mortified and scared. Even Mr. Wilson was begging her to stop. The buses' arrival is the only thing that brought this to an end. I got on the bus with her clutching my arm and I was forced to set by her as she told everyone how bad I was. I was such a shy timid person that I never once spoke to defend myself during the whole trauma. At church, she still clutched me as she sat by me in my senior high class and attacked me to friends. After class, she hung onto me as we went to the auditorium for a short sermon and altar call. I looked several rows back to the counselor, Ruby Martin and mouthed "Help me." Mrs. Martin motioned "just wait". When the altar call came, something inside of me said "This is your only chance to survive, the counselor is never going to do anything to protect you." I broke free from Mrs. Wilson and ran to the front of the auditorium and sat down in front of Bill Smith, the minister. He asked me what I wanted and I said, "Protect me" He didn't know what to make of that so soon the meeting was over as I cried hysterically. People began to leave and Mrs. Wilson walked up. I began to cry harder and beg for protection. She soon left. Ruby Martin then had to decide what to do with me. Much later, as I looked back on the situation, I actually believe they were trying to force me to leave because I had turned 18 in September of my senior year. It probably really shook them when I fled to the front of the church and begged for help.

Ruby Martin took me to the home of some friends of hers. I lived with this family the rest of my senior year. When I went to their home, the class ring was stripped off my finger and given to someone else. My dresser contents at the children's home were dumped into a cardboard box and brought to me. The suitcase that I brought to the home was taken and the $4.00 that I had in the dresser was stolen. It's pretty bad when you have to steal from orphans!

The woman I lived with wrote fiction books which sold and her husband drove a diesel rig and their in home adult daughter was a beauty operator. I weighed about 120 lbs. when I went there and I weighed about 100 lbs. when I went to college. All meals were placed on the plate in very small portions. There were no dishes from which to get more. No lunch money was ever provided. I was never without hunger. The whole family was over weight and the man ended up losing a leg and eyesight to diabetics.

A wonderful Christian family named Bill and Edith Gunn from Amarillo, TX. who owned Gunn Brothers Trading Stamps, were found to pay for my college education. I went to Oklahoma Christian University. I even attended summer school. The university was out all of August so the Turley Home superintendent told me that I had to come back and work in the nursery building each August or he would tell Bill Gunn to quit paying for college.

When I arrived at the nursery building, I became aware of what a wonderful couple the Raines were. They really loved the children in their cottage. They even bought an old stretch lemo. that they used to take the 12 children on vacation with them. Later, when they left the home, they even took some with them into their own home to rear. 2-3 years ago when I went to Tulsa for a small reunion of a few from the home, the Raines were there.(I have never heard of an official reunion) The Raines told me that Mr. Raines was doing manual labor, maybe carpentry, at Turley where he witnessed bad things happening to children. He told his wife and they got hired in the nursery to try to make a difference. Even they were not treated very nice while there.

While I worked in the nursery every August, my only pay was a bed and food and the privilege of going to the supply building to look through old donated clothing for garments I could cut up to make me clothes. In my whole experience there, not one garment or underwear was bought for me.

During my first year in college, my sister wrote me to tell me that Sonja, a little girl in the cottage that Mr. Wilson had been molesting, had put some bug poison in his buttermilk. That evening at supper, he didn't feel like eating and told his wife to drink his buttermilk. Of coarse, she was rushed to the hospital where she stayed several days. At first, everyone thought that he had poisoned her. Later, during questioning, Sonja confessed. I felt so sorry for Sonja. She had been molested for several years and even one summer when she went with my sister to our cousin's home for a few days, a certain preacher who later served for many years on the Turley home board, went by our cousins to pick up Sonja, only, to bring her back to Turley. Sarah was to stay a few days longer. This man exposed himself to Sonja and tried to molest her. He knows who he is and he is still alive and has never been prosecuted!

Lloyd Connell knew what was happening but didn't stop it. At one point, he told Mrs, Wilson to keep her husband away from the girls but nothing changed. Enough of us told him what was happening but nothing changed.

There was another girl (Gloria Grogan) that developed lumps in her legs and no one would take her to the doctor. She died of cancer.

At the end of my junior year, I was getting married so I wrote Bill Smith, the minister at the church near Turley Home, and asked to use the building for the wedding. The Turley superintendent, Lloyd Connell, wrote me and told me that I could not come back to get married. He told me that if I told Bill Gunn this, he would tell him not to pay my senior year. What he did not know is that I had asked Bill Gunn to walk me down the isle at the wedding because my father was dead. Last minute, I had to call the Gunns and tell them to come to Abilene, TX. where I transferred to be able to get my degree in art education. The Gunns arrived days before the wedding to give me a rehearsal dinner, help with the wedding, and lavish me with wonderful gifts which I still cherish. He began to beg me to tell him why I moved the wedding from the first moment they arrived. Finally, near the end, I confessed to him what Lloyd Connell had written. Then Mr. Gunn asked me if the home had bought me any clothes during the last few years. He had made arrangements with them for that. I never received a thing. Fortunately, the first time he talked with me at college, he noticed my severe dental problems. I had many cavities, an under bite, and several missing permanent teeth which never developed because of very little nutrition. He sent me to a dentist where he paid for fillings, extractions, braces, and a partial plate. He was the one who provided the bus for Turley and a large building (which is named after him) for Oklahoma Christian University. He was a very generous man. After finding out what happened to me, he said Turley home would never see another penny.

It took several years to quit having bad dreams thinking I was hearing Mrs. Wilson coming down the hall to hurt me. I spent several years unable to talk about the home without shaking all over and having bad headaches.

I graduated from Abilene Christian University with the Gunns paying for my senior year. I have a BS ed in secondary art education with the teaching certificate and a minor in bible. We did art shows for several years for a living and I was chosen each year to represent the state of Texas through a peer review board naming me as one of the 'Top Fifty artists". I stopped for 24 years to home school our daughters. They are all grown, so, for the last five years, I have worked in education in the federal prison. I also spend many hours baby setting grandchildren while parents work and go to college. I've designed for galleries, interior decoration firms, and designed garments for stores. I've taught in 4 H Clubs, Home school associations, and Christian schools. Some of the subjects were photography, food and nutrition, horticulture, fashion design, architectural design, woodworking,weaving and spinning, wheel thrown pottery, cake decorating, and natural fiber. On my small farm, I've grown tame brazos blackberries for a grocery chain and fields of flowers for the wholesale cut flower market. I'm involved in a church where the spirit of God moves. I am one of the rare few from Turley home who is still in church even though it is not the Church of Christ. Most never return to church after leaving Turley. Some were so physically or emotionally wounded that they couldn't even work for a living and are still very dysfunctional. (I met one man at the "reunion" who was so physically scarred all over. He is still in great emotional pain and finds it very difficult to talk about.)I hope I haven't bored you too much. If you have any further questions please email me at artparadise45@hushmail.com