Sad Tale Reunites Family

The Fernald School scandal brings a father and son together.

Every Tuesday night for two years, Danny rice has spent a couple of hours playing in an after work basketball league in a rented gym at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham.

The location is convenient for the 28-year-old shipping clerk, because the lives only about a mile away.

Two weeks ago, Danny learned that his father once played basketball on the very court he now frequents. Two weeks ago, Danny rice met his father for the first time.

This is a story about a father and son brought together by an ironic twist of fate after nearly three decades apart--and about the glimmer hope in an otherwise dark saga of human immorality.

The tale beings in 1955 when Danny's biological father, Charlie Dyer, then 15, was enrolled in the Fernals School by his mother. Charlie, who was dyslexic, had an IQ of 70.

Charlie's years at Fernald were not happy ones. he had chronic ear infections that were left untreated by the school's staff, even when the ears stated bleeding. He lost all of his teeth. And he never learned to read to write.

In 1956, Charlie was asked to become a member of Fernald's new "Science Club." The club sounded like fun, because it provided Charlie and his friends with a rare opportunity to get off campus, for occasional field trips to MIT.

But, unbeknownst to Charlie, the science Club had a more sinister Motive. Its members were being used, without their consent, for experiments involving radioactive food they ingested. Neither the school's director, nor the Harvard-affiliated physician leading the tests, ever told the students or their parents that radiation was involved.

Within a few years of his 1961 discharge from Fenarld, Charlie met a woman named Louise, and within a few months of that, Louise was pregnant. charlie wanted to marry her, but Louise married someone else and disappeared.

That was the last charlie Dyre heard of Louise, or of his then-unborn son, for nearly 30 years.

A couple of weeks ago, Charlie--now a truck driver in Salem. with a wife and two daughters--heard something on the news about the Fernald Science Club. Since then, as the true nature of the club's activities have become known, his life has been chaos, filled with meetings with investigators, lawyer, even Senator Kennedy. He's been interviewed by dozens of journalists, and has appeared on the local TV news several times.

That's Where Louise's mother saw her daughter's onetime boyfriends, and became worried that her grandson might have inherited some harmful after effects of the radiation tests performed long ago on the father he never knew. Louise's mother called Louise, who called Charlie, who called Danny.

"I was a little nervous," charlie recalls of his fist encounter with his son, at danny's home down the street from Fernald. "I had given up on [meeting Danny]. But I had always thought of him, and I always told my daughters they had a brother."

Yet the darrker legacy of what happened at Fernald still haunts charlie. Now on disability leave from work with a back injury, he worries about potential long-term effects from he radiation. he still has a tough battle ahead, as he attempts to win financial compensation from the state.

"It's happening so fast," says Danny. There's so many questions that aren't answered yet."

Stephen E. Frank's column appears on alternate Thursdays.