The Home: A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage

While orphanages are often viewed through Dickensian lenses, McKenzie, who at the age of 10 was placed in a home for boys and girls, takes spirited issue with such disparagement. In the 1950s in Raleigh, North Carolina, life in The Home, as it was called, was no picnic, he says, but then neither was life with alcoholic, negligent parents. At the orphanage, he was sheltered in a bucolic setting; came to understand relationships that were positive, yet left room for boyish longings for a mother's affection; and established the survival techniques that led to successful adulthood. McKenzie's personal revisiting of boyhood haunts led to his inquiry into how well his peers had fared in life after The Home. More than a thousand alumni contacts confirmed his intuition that ``orphans as a group indicate a far more positive attitude toward life than the average American.'' His poignant story sheds light on institutional care that served children when all else failed. McKenzie is professor at the graduate school of management at UC-Irvine. (Feb.)