| Notes |
- Social Security Applications and Claims, 1936-2007
Name: Mabel Margaret Hoar
[M Hoar] SSN: 521383286 Gender: Female Race: White Birth Date: 25 Sep 1927 Birth Place: Berton, Colorado Father Name: Elmer Hoar Mother Name: Maggie Betts Death Date: May 1992 Type of Claim: Original SSN. Notes: Oct 1948: Name listed as MABEL MARGARET HOAR; 14 Jul 1992: Name listed as M HOAR
Cemetery:
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=hoar&GSiman=1&GScid=57381&GRid=114790353&
http://www.kmitch.com/Pueblo/asylum2.html
It may never be known how many people were sterilized at the Colorado State Hospital. No records were kept, and individual patient files are closed to public scrutiny.
However, during the civil lawsuit brought by a sterilized former patient in the 1950s, attorneys asked the hospital superintendent, Dr. Frank Zimmerman, detailed questions about operations performed on five other women.
The judge in the case ruled Zimmerman didn't have to answer.
But Denver court records show all five were committed to the state hospital between 1938 and 1950.
At least three were sent there as minors.
Their case files shed light on the frighteningly efficient way in which county lunacy commissions of the time locked people up. When they met, commissioners typically heard 10 cases every three hours. They were paid $10 per case.
It's impossible to tell what happened to those women. An extensive search of computer databases and court files turned up little about them or their families.
Except for Elmer Hoar.
Hoar's sister, Mabel, was one of the women. When Elmer was 4, his father died and his mother, unable to cope, put him and his two sisters in the state orphanage. In 1944, he and Mabel were shipped to the Colorado State Hospital.
He's 70 now and has trouble remembering. He has lived in a retirement home in west Denver for 30 years. He shares a room with three other men. He's used to it.
"They told me I was sick," Elmer says of his years at the hospital. "But they never told me what I had."
He looks away and laughs. He is holding a faded photo in a cheap gold frame. Behind the smudged glass is Mabel, her hands neatly folded in her lap. A doctor once summed up her problems with a broad brush: "Mabel Hoar suffers from a definite mental disorder."
Little of her life after that is known. In and out of the hospital. Resident of a Ca?non City nursing home. Died about five years ago. Her name typed in an old court file full of unanswered questions.
"Word had gotten around to me about what happened to her," says Mabel's sister, Laura Josh, who was adopted from the orphanage. She has been married 53 years, raised two sons, and lives in the eastern plains town of Yuma.
"I wondered why in the heck they would do that to a girl," Josh says. "She was still in her late teens, early 20s at the time. I thought it was very disgusting."
For years, she and Mabel exchanged letters, Christmas and birthday cards. Josh never brought the subject up.
"I figured the least said the better."
But the truth stayed with her, gnawed at her.
"It bothered me so much that I took it to the Lord in prayer," Josh says. "I just couldn't handle it myself."
November 21, 1999
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The H600 Project Genealogy DB
1927 - 1992 (64 years)