I was in this place 1965…I believe my mind has blocked out a lot of terrible memories…..I was pregnant and a runaway….Before I was sent there, I was taken to court. My mom was afraid I would interrupt her love affair with her soon to be husband. My mom said I was incorrigable to the Judge….When I arrived at Geneva, I was too the reason there are no fences is because the guards will shoot at anyone trying to escape. First shot over your head as a warning, next shot in your back. We were only allowed visitors once a month and only one visitor. There main objective was to make you lose your baby. Reason for cemetery. Washed floors on your hands and knees with a scrub brush, old rag and bucket. Lifted heavy metal milk containers, above your waist, into the coolers. When you were’nt doing some kind of labor, time was spent protecting your self from butches (lesbians). Yes, girls get raped by other girls just like men in prison. And they had the audacity to call it a school. The day I left, the head of this place gave me a lecture and handed me a box with jewelry in it. She told me to pick out a piece and take it home to remind me of my time there. I handed the box back to her and informed her “I never want to remember this place”. Unfortunantly, I’m 65 years old and once in a while I still have nightmares. I’m glad I found this website. Nobody believes the suffering, physically and mentally, that we experienced unless you were there. I think the financial supporters of this place should be held responsible for. Is that why this place, supposedly, never existed.

Will you look at all those orbs? I had already planned on coming to the fox run cemetery when I come home to chicago for a visit in july. In an odd way, because I was born in that facility, I feel the need to visit the cemetery…to pay my respects to those who didn’t have a chance to live…I was one of the lucky ones…
I was in the infirmary after I was born in the detention facility, for three days. I was then sent to St. Vincent’s Orphanage…where I would spend my next eight months.
A family from Oak Lawn took me into foster care. My mother was still in the facility for a time after I was born. She met and married the man who became my beloved step father. My mom had a list of things she needed to accomplish before the courts would consider her fit to win me back from the foster family.
From what I hear from the family I grew up with and loved, it was quite a battle in court. The whole family stood along with my mother to win the battle. Unfortunately, it didn’t last with my mom and I. She and my step father just couldn’t make a go of it. My mom slipped deeply into alcoholism. She left one day, taking me with her, while my step father was working one of his two jobs. Imagine coming home and finding an empty, cold apartment. He was more worried about me that anything else.
Because of the circumstances and mystery surrounding the question of who my biological father was, I was a child who was supposed to be hidden…My mom would take me to other areas of the state of Illinois, to Detroit, St. Louis, and other places. I would be in the bar while my mother drank and cavorted.
She finally contacted my step father and family and would call them, drunk usually, and tell them to “come get this brat”…usually with directions of where to find me…or that she’d left me with this person or that person…My step father, who I shall now just refer to him as my dad, and his three brothers would load up and go for the long drive to find me. This behavior of my mothers would continue off and on for quite some time. Since the family had no legal right to keep me from her, mom would come pick me up and take me away from them, time after time…only to call again and give directions on where I could be found. I was only 2 when this went on.
I have good vivid memories of my 3rd birthday with my family. I do believe that by the time I was three, my loving family kept me from her ever doing that to me again. I know that when I was in about 3rd grade, my last name was changed to my daddy’s last name. I had report cards with my sur name given at birth, which was my mom’s surname. I have a birth certificate that was drawn up and obviously not a true document. It shows that in the spot where the fathers name is, shows my step fathers name…and it shows mom and dad’s ages to be the same…which was also not true. My mom was two years older than my dad. The document had been signed, in the “delivering doctor” spot, as a man named Dwyer.
This is something that was proven to be another lie. The man Dwyer, I actually spoke to before the facility was closed down. When I asked for that man by name, he came to the phone and was very rude to me. He said that there were never any babies born there!! He also added that he would not tell me “what my mom was in there for”…even tho I hadn’t asked him that. I found out later from someone who knew of that man, that he was only a social worker and had no business having his name down as the doctor who delivered me.
I’m going to go on my blog page and write some more on my story. I have started a book that relates my life, my mothers and her mothers lives. In my grown up life, having a daughter, I think I may have over compensated with her because of my will to break the cycle of desertion in the history of my maternal side.

Brenda,

I have not seen any pictures of the school, I wish they kept it though. There is a cement block by the cemetery with an old barbed wire fence, maybe that and the cemetery is the only thing left.