My Scribbles!!

Powerful Personalities I have Known   By Bill Floyd

Dr. William S. Hall, Jr., State Mental Health Commissioner for South Carolina 

One of the most powerful personalities I ever met was Dr. William S. Hall, Jr.  Dr. Hall, or Bill as only his most intimate circle dared call him, was the long-serving, sometimes controversial, always booming voiced, State Commissioner of Mental Health for South Carolina from 1961 to 1984. Prior to that time, he had been, for over 15 years, Superintendent of South Carolina State Hospital, known throughout the state as “Bull Street”.

With that title, he also served as Superintendent of Crafts-Farrow State Hospital, the counterpart for SC State Hospital, for Blacks. In those days, the Mental Health System, like almost every facet of life in South Carolina was rigidly segregated and there were two different peoples – free Whites and Jim Crow Blacks – and they definitely lived in two different worlds. Segregation ran from schools to state parks to restaurant lunch counters.

Before I delve into my personal connection to Dr. Hall, let me point out that Dr. Hall did more for the well-being of the mentally ill in South Carolina than any person in the history of the state. He was also a leader at the national level and his years of service and accomplishments could fill a multi-volume book. But I first met Dr. Hall in his declining years, so my personal experiences with him definitely reflect that time in his life.

As Director of State Audits, I first met Dr. Hall in the late 1970’s during South Carolina Budget Hearings. Even though the State Auditor also was State Budget Czar, he had Directors to handle all the divisions, which included audits (about 175 per year) agency budget preparation management and presentation to the Legislature (same 175 agencies). State Information Technology for most agencies not large enough to have their own mainframe, State Research and Statistics and several other lesser divisions including Grants Management and such also were under his direct control.

While I was not involved in the budgets, I was invited to a few of the presentations in, I believe, 1979, as Ed Vaughn, the State Auditor was trying to “recruit” me to take over the SC State Budget Division, a task he failed, as I decided it was a lot more enjoyable to be Audit Director. Ed was very heavily involved in the budget process for over six months each year and, as it must have at least appeared to outsiders, hardly knew the larger, but less visible (to the Legislature) audit division even existed, except for signing the reports and on the occasion of the proverbial “chit hitting the fan” going to an agency exit conference with us when we were receiving a lot of flak for finding far too much mismanagement, etc.

Ed Vaughn probably will eventually get his own article like this, but he was not in Dr. Hall’s league for being a power personality. Good guy, yes, powerful, yes, but Dr. Hall as you will see, was one of a kind.

I was introduced to Dr. Hall and watched his presentation. Dr. Hall was unforgettable. I was not, as I am sure he did not remember who I was the next time we met.  The highlight of the presentation, something Ed talked about for years to come, was Dr. Hall “mooning” the entire State Budget and Control Board, a “unique to South Carolina” five-member board headed by the Governor. Every agency budget had to get through this Board to advance for Legislative consideration.

This mooning was not an exaggeration of the facts, although it was certainly not Dr. Hall’s intent. By this time in his life, Dr. Hall was getting a little feeble and, being a very big man (about 6’ 4”) with fairly poor eyesight, He found it necessary to get too close to the slides on the overhead projector screen and had to bend down rather far to read the numbers at the bottom of the screen, all with his back to the audience. And, in a rare, I am sure, circumstance for this well-dressed southern gentleman, the seat of his trousers failed.  Nobody in the room, including the Governor, Richard Riley, had the courage to even snicker, despite the fact he, sitting front and center, probably had the “best view”.

Dr. Hall was not used to making presentations. He was used to being totally in charge. Thus, this may well have been one of the few times in front of an audience, he was forced to rely on visual aids. In past years, Dr. Hall had basically ignored the entire formal budget process and waited for the appropriations bill to reach the Senate Finance Committee. He would send a staff of lackeys to present the Mental Health budget through the first phases of the process.

Then he would make a one-on-one visit to Senate Finance Committee Chair, Rembert Dennis, one of the most powerful men in the history of South Carolina government. There, he would tell Senator Dennis what he needed and , as best as possible, that was what he got. The Chair of the Senate Finance Committee was, incidentally, one of the five members of the Budget and Control Board.

Overall, Mental Health always stayed fairly constant at about 4% of the State General Fund Budget. In one of Dr. Hall’s earlier famous budget excursions to the Statehouse, sometime around 1950, he went to see Governor James Byrnes, who was quite a power himself.

Prior to being governor, he had served as Senator from South Carolina and led the passage of much of the New Deal for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt then appointed him to the US Supreme Court.  After 15 months he resigned his lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land to accept the position as head of Roosevelt’s Economic Stabilization Commission and later served in other capacities eventually becoming known in Washington as “ the Assistant President”.

After the War, conditions which were already deplorable, had only gotten worse in the South Carolina Mental Health System. Dr. Hall, then a relatively new head of the system (there was no State Commissioner until 1961 and the Superintendent of State Hospital basically was the equivalent) appealed to Governor James Byrnes for help. Governor Byrnes had been on the US Supreme Court when Franklin Roosevelt tapped him to assist with managing the war effort. Byrnes became widely known as “the Assistant President” and had more power than almost any non-President in US History.

After touring the facilities with Dr. Hall, Governor Byrnes knew that something serious had to be done. He arranged for buses to carry the entire Legislature to the State Hospital for a tour of conditions. After this, they passed a $10,000,000 increase to the Department’s annual budget, thus virtually doubling funding for the system overnight.

Fast forward to 1983. The Department had just received the draft of a highly critical report from the State’s Legislative Audit Council (LAC), a group of con artists who managed to present themselves as “auditors” – duplicating the State Auditor but instead reporting to the Legislature rather than the Budget and Control Board. Their audits amounted to little more than “witch hunts” and their Director, George Schroeder was a psychology major with no credentials in either accounting or auditing, where both Ed and I were CPA’s as was a large number of the staff.  That in itself would not be so bad, except not a single member of his staff had any such experience or credentials either. The closest he ever came to having anyone with any relevant credentials on his staff was hiring a former State Budget Division analyst who was not an accountant, per se, himself.  But at least he could add and subtract.

By this time, I was the Deputy State Commissioner of Mental Health for Financial Services (CFO) and was a member of every important Mental Health Management Committee except the Medical Oversight Committee.

The Department had several levels of management, of course, and this resulted in various levels of management committees and meetings. To review and comment on the Legislative Audit Council report, as we were required to do, in legally bound absolute secrecy imposed by Legislative Statute, Dr. Hall assembled the “Administrative Committee” which consisted of the the Medical Director and Administrator of each of the Departments’ eight facilities (mental health hospitals, a nursing home, an alcohol and drug addiction treatment hospital and a medical-surgical hospital) that served our various 3,800 inpatients, myself, Assistant State Commissioner, Dr. Racine Brown, Director of Administrative Services (buildings, grounds, lunchrooms, etc.) Bruce Galloway and Dr. Norman Evans, Director of Community Mental Health Services. Dr. Evans represented and supervised the 17 mental health centers that covered the entire state and over served 50,000 outpatients.

Mental Health, being a highly developed bureaucracy, had a Conference Room of magnificent proportions that easily seated several more than this group around one huge table, as well as having room for two more tables like that one that was occupied by large seating areas, complete with several couches, grouped in one corner, and additional space for folding chairs for about 60 – 80 others, plus huge side areas for TV Cameras, standing room only, etc. It actually shamed anything that even the Budget and Control Board had at the time and was fitting for a building known far and wide as “the Palace”.

The LAC is merely a side bar for this part of the story, but you need to understand the frame of mind Dr. Hall was in at this meeting. For over 45 years, he had been at the center of power and now he had a report in his hands that he, Racine, Norm and I had read and he was getting ready to share it with the key people he had worked with for years, some of them virtually his entire career. Among the crowd was Dr. Donald, head of the William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute, a mental health research hospital on our grounds that was affiliated with the University of South Carolina (USC) School of Medicine, Dr. Donald and several of his key staff were members of the USC faculty and had full credentials at the USC affiliated Richland Memorial Hospital and the William Jennings Bryan Dorn Veterans Administration Hospital as well as the Fort Jackson Army Hospital.

We reviewed the Executive Summary, which contained all their vitriol in “short form”. We then discussed our overall approach to completing the required response. Duties were assigned. Racine was to be the coordinator. This was a rare meeting, both in that we were discussing heavy matters that threatened the entire system and that there was no secretary present to fetch and record minutes. Since this was not a meeting requiring minutes, whereas we normally did at these types of meetings just for protocol, it was decided to not take minutes except for our own notes. At this point, disclosure of anything in the draft to the public was a felony under state law, so we decided it best to limit exposure to those actually required to respond.

The result of this was that Dr. Hall, who was at the point when his mind was not as sharp as it once had been, started reminiscing. This was highly unusual for him as he was a very private person. The following isn’t an exact quote as this was over 30 years ago. But it is etched in my memory, so it is pretty close.

“This kind of thing wouldn’t have happened before those walls came down (referring to the high brick walls – over 10 feet – that had surrounded the State Hospital Grounds for most of Dr. Hall’s tenure. The Department had a 200-member law enforcement department that ran the place like a small town). In those days nothing left these walls without my consent. I was King out here.”

Some very shallow gasps were heard all around the room.

Dr Hall then slammed both hands on the table and stood up leaning over the table and boomed “What do you mean? You think I wasn’t King? I ruled this place with an iron hand. My word was law within those walls.  I WAS KING!”

Nobody said a word. Dr. Hall got up and went back into his office, which was right off this huge room. While he had a private back entrance to his office, nobody else ever entered it except through this room which normally contained one or two secretaries next to the door to his secretary’s office. Then after getting past the outer secretary(s) you had to deal with his private secretary, who was the only “Admin III” in the entire department, meaning she outranked every other secretary in the Department and had, for all practical purposes, at least as much power as any facility head.

You always had to get by two secretaries and sometimes three to get into his office. The couch area provided a goodly sized waiting room and there was a small waiting area in the private secretary’s outer office (I use the term secretary here because working for Dr. Hall, that is exactly what they were and even though the rest of the Department and the state human resources called them administrative assistants, Dr. Hall was very old school. Kings do not have admin assistants.

Racine took a couple more puffs on his huge pipe and after nobody spoke for a minute, he said” I think we all have our marching orders” and got up and left. We all slowly dispersed. It was like leaving the theater after watching “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, not because it had anything to do with the subject matter but that same eerie silence that followed at least the showing of it when I went.

One of the things I never understood was why Dr. Hall still worked, Racine actually ran everything and only got Dr. Hall involved when he knew that there might be some blowback. But Dr. Hall was like Mr. Outside, still meeting almost every hour of every day with an ungodly litany of state officials, community leaders, lawyers, doctors, politicians, county solicitors and judges, mental health advocates and so forth. He would often have fifteen or more people waiting to see him. Racine could get in the private back door after calling the private secretary if he really needed something of high importance – but he knew not to go to this well too often.

I could schedule a meeting with Dr. Hall if I really needed to, but because I reported directly to Racine, as did everyone except Dr. Hall and his secretaries, I seldom did. Once I needed to when a matter needing his attention came up while Racine was on a rare vacation and a couple of times I just needed a signature on something that had already been up and down the chain of command. Otherwise I never saw him without Racine.

About this time – maybe before or after – Jim Bozard, our Human Resources Director died suddenly. He was a young man in seemingly perfect health but a brain aneurysm took him out almost instantly.

A few days later, Dr. Hall, myself and four others piled into Dr. Hall’s state-furnished car to attend the funeral in St. Mathews, about 25 miles away. Our Chief of Security, Fred Sons, drove and I ended up, as junior passenger, not in rank but in age and time in grade at the department, in the middle of the front seat. Dr. Hall took the seat in the passenger rear where he always sat when being “chauffeured”.

The car itself is the story here. This was about mid-1983 or so and the car was a 1971 Buick “Land Yacht”.  Actually it was a luxury model Buick Electra 225, burgundy with a white vinyl top and every power accessory available in 1971 cars. For years, the State Division of General Services had been trying to get Dr. Hall to turn this car in for a new one. But the newer ones were smaller and this one suited Dr. Hall fine. It was a sore spot with many state bureaucrats that this car was still in the fleet. In truth, I think some of the people downtown coveted it and would have pounced on it in a second if it became available.

Dr. Hall lived in a Department-owned house, less than 1/2 mile from our office and for 48 or so weeks each year, it was driven to and from home and to and from lunch. This was even closer, so the car, in a typical week got about 15 miles put on it. In 1983, it had less than 20,000 miles on it.

Except for a few business trips downtown each year (less than five miles either way) the car was used for little else. He always ate in the employee cafeteria at William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute, well less than quarter mile away.  Further, the Department was one of a handful of State Agencies that could manage repairs of its own fleet (the Department had well over 300 vehicles).  Thus, the car was virtually like new.

Dr. Hall kept the car until he retired.

Now let’s get back to that Legislative Audit Council Report.

It should be noted that this was not a financial audit and in a rare departure from their normal “audits” – I use that word only because they called it an “audit” – it, like all their audits, was truly a witch hunt – and did not have a single finding related to finances.  It was mostly concerned with Patient Care and Patient Rights. That part had raised my profile quite a bit as they managed to find nothing worthy of mention in an agency that had over 7,000 employees and spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

Even before I was hired, the Legislative Audit Council had tried to do an audit at Mental Health. George Schroeder and the Council had gone to the State Supreme Court to overturn a lower court order barring them from seeing patient records under existing statutes. The Supreme Court, using legislation passed to specifically allow this purpose and putting the LAC’s staff under severe criminal sanctions for releasing patient information, allowed access for this specific audit. Thus, the “audit” began about three years after it had originally been scheduled.

One day while I was still Director of State Audits, I was sitting in the basement lunch room that Dave Smith, the Assistant State Auditor had dubbed “The Plummet Club” in reference to both its location and its “sister eatery” The Summit Club, an exclusive private dining club in the Penthouse.

George Schroeder came in and immediately exclaimed to Dave, who he knew well, “We just won our case against Dr. Hall and we’re gonna’ audit the hell out of that damn place!” as he raised his bent arm with a clinched fist and grabbed his arm at the elbow with the other hand, all the while shaking his balled fist in a Germanic Victory stance.

“They’re hiding something out there and I damn well am gonna’ find out what it is!”

By the time the LAC got to Mental Health, I had been on board at least a few months. They were there just a couple of days when Carl, their “in charge” guy came to see me. He was the one person on their staff that had some financial experience as he was the aforementioned Budget and Control Board staffer.

He was upset about the name tags they were required to wear, by order of Dr. Hall. They were exactly like ours, which we were always required to wear except they had blue backgrounds whereas our had yellow-gold backgrounds. He felt that somehow there was a sinister attempt to make them stand out.

Well, duh, we did want them to stand out simply so our staff would know they weren’t some new employee or employee from another facility that they could trust with patient care. The last thing we wanted was them trying to trick our staff into getting in a position they could freely interview “crazy” people. And this was just one of the reasons that came to my mind when he asked the question.

I once went toe to toe with Dr. Hall. I had not intended to do so, but I was put in an awkward position by Mental Health Commission member E. A. Hall, Jr. (no kin to Dr. Hall). He was actually sort of my mentor, as he had gone out of his way to ensure I gave full consideration to the Mental Health job when I had applied for it.

The problem, as problems at Mental Health often were, was really Racine-created. Among other powerful figures at Mental Health was Commission Chair, Carl (C. M.) Tucker, one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina. C. M. Tucker had been Chairman of the Mental Health Commission since it had existed and was a long-time ally of Dr. Hall. He was older than Dr. Hall and was the only person I ever heard call Dr. Hall “Bill”, besides his wife. Even the Governor and all former Governors I knew called him Dr. Hall. And he routinely did it in public, sitting beside him at the head of the huge conference table. Likewise, he was Mr. Tucker to all except Dr. Hall. It reminded me of the “Tudors” series on “Showtime” several years ago where the Barons referred to Henry VIII as “Your Majesty” and Cardinal Wolsey as “Your Grace” and everybody else by name.

Now back to the Budget Hearing. The Department, always underfunded, was now being routinely forced to jump through the same budget hoops as the rest of State Government. Thus Racine had convinced Dr. Hall to make the presentation himself. This continued a few years after I arrived.

We were planning our budget for the next year and Racine, who always had his own agenda, heavily influenced by the attractive gubernatorial assistant, Sarah Shuptrine, was having us prepare the budget with very little in the way of increases. With rising costs, we were actually putting together a negative budget increase as we would not even cover bare bones inflation.

For years, the Department had been running out of operating funds in January or so (June 30 was yearend). When the new year’s money was available in July, we would pay all our overdue bills. This was the main reason I had been hired, as far as the Department was concerned. From the State’s perspective, the new position had been demanded because it had been over ten years since the Department had received a satisfactory audit report from the State Auditor. Fixing that was what Ed Vaughn and the Budget and Control Board saw as my role.

I saw my role as both and in a couple of years, we had cut the deficit to almost zero and reduced the amount of expenses we had to carry forward to the next year by almost a third. Now Racine was using up every efficiency I had achieved. In addition, there were several new unfunded mandates that were going to kill us.

I was in charge of budget control but Racine had kept Budget Preparation during the “reorganization” of the Department he had pushed through before I was hired. He didn’t push it through the Commission – he pushed it through Dr. Hall, prompting the first of many comments about what he was smoking in that pipe and holding under Dr. Hall’s nose.

He split my position in half, and pulled budgets out of it, while putting himself over everybody in the Department except Dr. Hall, as I mentioned above. All this happened between the time my recruitment started and I was hired.

In a rare absence from the Commission’s bi-weekly meeting, of Chairman Tucker, E. A. Hall, the Vice-Chairman, asked if the budget was adequate as he was very skeptical of it (as was I – and I had actually gone to his downtown office to express my concerns). Racine pontificated for 20 minutes as to why the budget was adequate and managed to cut off comments before anyone had a chance to counter that. Dr. Hall was also absent and I knew that it was useless to say anything in the mood everyone was in. E. A. then asked for any concerns any staff member had. I spoke up and said I felt we had numerous unmet needs and the budget was inadequate and needed several adjustments.  Specifically, I added that the Child and Adolescent Unit, known then as “Blanding” for the building it was housed in, was grossly understaffed and underfunded.

Note: This was well before my wife worked in the unit, so there was no conflict of interests involved in this. She later worked in the unit after it was moved to the Wilson Building but that was about three years later. I had left Mental Health by then.

Racine quickly countered with a ton of pure bull, stacked Grand Canyon deep. Racine fancied himself as a great speaker but he was a pontificator who liked to use big words and seldom was able to get his points across clearly without hours of rehearsal. Whenever he talked off the cuff as he did then, he completely obfuscated the facts and left everybody wondering WTF he was talking about. Fact is, most of our weekly Executive Committee meetings were used as his dress rehearsals for new “ideas”.

E. A. then directed anyone present to make their concerns known to the Commission before the next meeting. I took that as it was meant and prepared a very concise memorandum and mailed it from a downtown post office to every member of the commission (there were seven members). I knew this was risky but I also knew I was employable and the stakes were very high. It had been easy to quickly prepare it as I had already done all the analysis before the subject came up.

Two days later, well before the next meeting, I was called by Dr. Halls secretary who told me to come to his office immediately. He was seated at his desk and Racine was standing beside him, blowing smoke from his huge pipe.

I was informed by Dr. Hall, in the most serious manner, that never in his career had anyone dared do anything “behind his back” like that and no one would ever do it again. He then chewed on me for a few minutes and the oxygen sort of drained out of my brain and those minutes were sort of blank for me afterwards. All I knew when I left was that I still had my job. That was probably because they knew that sending me packing would probably be the end of both of them. But, they had made their point.

The next meeting saw several TV cameras and reporters present. I think they thought I had set that up, but I had not. When nothing was said about the budget during the meeting, the State Newspaper wrote a very nasty editorial about the public’s right to know being trampled on worse than any time in memory.

A few months later, Dr. Hall Turned 70 and under then South Carolina State Law, was forced to resign, as the Budget and Control Board refused an exemption only they could grant. Within a few hours, the Mental Health Commission appointed Dr. Jaime Condom, Superintendent of State Hospital as Acting State Commissioner. Within hours, he sent me a memo stating I now reported directly to him and no longer reported to Racine. After that, I had control of the budget and we finally made some progress, getting an additional $15,000,000 permanently added to the base budget. That would be the equivalent of roughly $60,000,000 today.

I was also “chosen” to serve as Finance Chair of the “Dr. Hall Retirement Committee” with the goal of raising enough money to buy him a new Cadillac. Because of the clouds that had formed – we will get back to the Legislative Audit Council later – in wake of the LAC report, the trial of a local murderer discharged from the State Hospital shortly before his crime, and the Justice Department’s investigations of patient abuse, raising money was tough.

We formed a 501 c 3 or some similarly numbered organization and did raise over $30,000 but we also had to throw a huge retirement dinner so we were able to buy “only” a new Chevrolet. Seven former Governors, many state and national legislators and hundreds of others attended the huge blast we held in Carolina Coliseum.

When Dr. Hall retired, the average length of service of state mental health commissioners was barely three years. His retirement lowered the average to a little over two years, so unusual was his tenure.  While I met Dr. Hall late in his career, when he was well past his prime and probably should have been put out to pasture rather than being manipulated as he was by Racine, he made several major accomplishments in his time.

He integrated the South Carolina Mental Health System and helped minorities rise to important jobs in the System.  And he did much of this while the rest of South Carolina was fighting change with a passion not seen since Fort Sumter.

As earlier mentioned, he fought for and won a huge budget increase with the help of Governor Byrnes. He set up several nursing facilities to tremendously improve the circumstances of the elderly mentally ill. He was a pioneer in the advance of using psychotropic medications.

Probably his biggest legacy was the creation of a teaching hospital for psychiatric residency, which became known as the William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute. At the time, it was a state of the art facility.

Before we return to the LAC, let’s look at the Justice Department. Because of several patient complaints, mostly spurred by the initial cause of the LAC report but not directly tied to it, The United States Department of Justice had threatened severe sanctions and possible criminal action against the Department and the State itself. After considerable closed door negotiations, the DOJ and the Department agreed to a broad consent order that had to be signed off by the Governor, Richard Riley, later US Secretary of Education under Bill Clinton.

Under provisions of a constitutional amendment, Riley was the first Governor of South Carolina to able serve two terms, as the limit had previously been a single term.

The consent order called for the Governor himself to be in contempt if the agreement was not fulfilled. This agreement and the fact that it put such pressure on the Governor himself was the primary reason Dr. Hall was not allowed to continue his tenure after age 70 as the Governor chaired the aforementioned Budget and Control Board, which was the only way to get a waiver.

Also as a result of this, Dr. Hall received probably the sorriest slap in the face bestowed on any Executive in South Carolina State Government history, at the hands of Dick Riley. He was not given the “Order of the Palmetto” the State’s highest honor, by the Governor, whose prerogative was absolute on its award. I have since seen it given to a “secretary” who did little to earn it. At the same time, C. M. Tucker retired as Chair of the Mental Health Commission and was given the honor. I, to this day, consider this an unforgivable slight by Dick Riley. But as Ed Vaughn, former State Auditor once said in that period “Nothing is official until Riley slaps his Dick on it”.

Every time after that I appeared before him for even the most important matters, especially when he was chairing the Budget and Control Board, I had to bite my tongue on that one. No pun intended.

The consent order contained so much that I won’t even bother with most of it, but some of the more important provisions required substantial buy-in by the Legislature – another budget crisis just after one has been settled.  In addition to more doctors and more nurses, the Department was required to install a system-wide computerized pharmacy management system. This was in an era when computers were still huge “hunks of iron” costing a fortune.

We had just recently upgraded our mainframe from one megabyte (that’s right – MEGABYTE – to eight megabytes, by purchasing a used but still very functional system for, I believe, $270,000. At this time an IBM PC, which was still a novelty, with a five-megabyte hard drive cost about $7,000 and up depending on the options.

I was appointed to chair a committee and allowed to pick its members, a rare treat when assigned to chair anything! I immediately got my IT Director (then known as Computer Services rather than IT) to help me and we chose three pharmacists and ourselves to be a committee of five, which was the smallest number I was allowed. We figured this would allow us to get at least a 2-1 majority among the pharmacists and then we could really mutually make the final decision ourselves by going with the majority or minority as we saw fit. If they all three agreed, we would probably have the best decision anyway. Besides, we knew we had veto power for all practical purposes. We could always stop a bad decision using finances or some other valid reason.

There is a huge story here for some future writing involving a power grab by Budget and Control Board staff, but I will save it for another day as Dr. Hall was no longer around and it thus did not involve him.

Now for the rest of the LAC story.

One reason Dr. Hall had never had “such disloyalty” before me was that he was himself, loyal to a fault. That has its advantages and disadvantages. Over the years, he had thus accumulated quite a host of characters that were at their highest and best use as “yes men”. They had all survived many rough ordeals together and newcomers were treated with quite a bit of skepticism, not only by Dr. Hall, but by the entire administrative staff.

One of the most irritating things I remember from my tenure at Mental Health was a certain doctor who often served as acting director of one of the facilities, and thus often a member of the administrative staff. Unlike every other member of the staff, he called me Mr. Floyd, refusing it seems to be at all familiar and use first names.

Not only was this an indirect slight, as I saw it, it made addressing him by first name, or, alternatively, as “Dr. Shithead” (insert real name), extremely uncomfortable, so I just avoided using either as much as possible.

To get to know Dr. Hall you must to get to know his key staff. Remember, although no longer completely contiguous as it had been in Dr. Hall’s early years at the Department. Then, the entire community was fairly much concentrated in two locations. “Bull Street” and “Northeast” – also known as “White Mental Health” and “Colored Mental Health”.

They were readily divisible in two groups, those that were medical doctors and those that were not. Rank mattered little. The doctors saw themselves as different. Of course, technically, they all reported to Racine, who was not a medical doctor but “only” a Ph. D. but this mattered little in the division. Most of the doctors on the Administrative Staff were facility directors also but some facility directors were not doctors. Each facility headed by a doctor also had an Administrator that was a member of Administrative Staff.

Racine was the Assistant State Commissioner and except for Dr. Hall’s involvement in the highest level decisions, for all practical purposes, he was the State Commissioner. Dr. Hall stayed busy nine or so hours every day with an ungodly parade of visitors demanding time on his calendar.

One of our facilities was G. Werber Bryan Psychiatric Hospital, located in Columbia, on the Northeast Campus. That campus originally had been the “Negro” Mental Hospital  but by this time it was fully integrated, as well as greatly expanded.  Bryan was a new facility and the campus also housed Morris Village, a new Alcohol and Drug Addiction Hospital. Bryan was built as one of four planned regional “Emergency Admission” Mental Hospitals.

It was named for a long-time member of the Mental Health Commission. He had served longer than any member except C. M. Tucker.

Werber Bryan suffered from some of the same mental infirmities as Dr. Hall did during my tenure, but in many ways his condition had deteriorated further than Dr. Hall’s by the time an important trial involving a crime committed by a former patient came up.

This patient had been released and within days, murdered someone. The family of the victim sued the Department for negligence in releasing him.  Commissioner Bryan met with Dr. Hall and the Mental Health Commission in private to discuss the case with the Staff Counsel and outside lawyers handling the case for the Commission, shortly before a regular Mental Health Commission meeting. This was one of the few things they legally could do in private – discuss pending or ongoing litigation.

As the Commission was in Executive Session, they perhaps did not see that Margaret O’shea, a staff reported for “The State” newspaper had come in. She took her seat near the front on a large couch and crossed her chubby legs, literally “mooning” the Commission members facing her way.

As the second-most senior member, Werber Bryan sat on the corner nearest the head of the table with his back to her. As they had been in Executive Session to discuss the case, Dr. Hall made the required remarks that they had discussed ongoing legislation and had taken no formal action. Then, somebody made a comment about the meeting, not really revealing anything, but keeping the topic alive. For whatever reason, Werber Bryan, who was very agitated about the case, got up and started talking about it. He made some opening remarks and then got into a bit of a tirade. This is not an exact quote but covers the gist of it. “Well, this case is going to be tough. The plaintiff’s attorney always picks the stupidest and laziest people in the jury pool so they can manipulate them. Most of these people don’t even have jobs and that’s why they show up for jury duty.”

Everybody was stunned but seemed to think that was the end of it. Everybody except Margaret O’Shea. She wrote a scathing attack of Werber Bryan, who, by the way, was still a member in good standing of the South Carolina Bar.

The judge in the case, read the article and had Werber hauled off to jail and held overnight to have a hearing on whether to hold him in contempt of court for such negative comments on the case. Well, as I said, Werber was getting pretty senile as well as pretty old. In a nutshell, he had a severe stroke that night and died a few days later.

That definitely put Ms. O’shea on my “Chit List”.

Shortly after this event, the Legislative Audit Council notified us they had completed their report on theeir “audit” of Mental Health. They wanted to send us a draft and have us review it and make any comments we had that we wanted to include as rebuttal to their report. This was, by South Carolina Statute, to be done in utmost secrecy. It was to be shown only to those on staff with a “need to know” and we each had to sign an agreement that we knew it was a felony to discuss the report in any way with anyone not also on the list that signed the disclosure form.

We met in the large conference to get our “marching orders” from Dr. Hall and Racine. Every member of the Administrative Committee was there – All three Deputies plus the Director and Administrator of each of our facilities. This was a lot of people to keep secrets, but was necessary as everyone in the room had a part to deal with, except, ironically, me. In a rare LAC report, there were no financial findings that dealt with my departments – procurement, accounting, insurance, patient banking, billing, computer services (today, this would be information technology) or the intraagency/patient mail system/cashier’s office.

I was there to help coordinate the response and deal with the LAC staff as needed.

After a few days we had our response ready and prepared for the formal release of the report, which was to be done by LAC at our next Commission Meeting (the governing board of the department).