Black swallowtail butterflies flutter up from tall grass as Richard McKenzie walks, smiling, beside an abandoned railroad track in rural North Carolina. He is white-haired and 63, but vividly recalls running with a boy's legs beside the trains, a happy young man. Parentless, consigned to an orphanage, and happy.
"People don't want to believe it, but I did pretty well in life because I was raised here, not in spite of it," he says. "Was I damaged by the experience? I don't think so, not at all." Here is the Barium Springs Home for Children--simply "The Home" to young McKenzie and his fellow orphans in the 1950s--a place he often visits to chase the memories that have shaped his passion.
Perhaps more than anyone else in the country, McKenzie is responsible for renewed interest in institutionalizing parentless children. If that sounds cold, it's because, McKenzie will tell you, the images most of us associate with orphanages are as anachronistic as those in Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist." Orphanages "were not the Dickensian hellholes portrayed in the movies," he insists. "They were places where a lot of kids were protected and given another chance in life."
To make his case, McKenzie has written a book and produced a documentary, which some public television stations around the U.S. are planning to air late this year and in 2006. When he's not working at UC Irvine, where he is an economics professor at the Paul Merage School of Business, McKenzie is on the stump, giving speeches and appearing at pro-orphanage fund-raisers.
What makes his crusade remarkable is his persistence despite massive opposition. Federal law favors foster care and adoption for kids whose parents can't or won't care for them, and states are required to provide services aimed at keeping families together and returning children who are in foster care to their parents as soon as possible.
Mountains of research and most child welfare experts dispute the notion that orphanages make sense, financially or otherwise. McKenzie did conduct two surveys that support his position, but they weren't scientific and aren't taken seriously by the mainstream. His brother, who lived with him at Barium Springs, is no fan of orphanages and, McKenzie says, won't talk about his time in North Carolina. There are orphanage advocates who think that some of his arguments are misguided.
The professor forges ahead anyway. He seems to enjoy going against the tide, making shocking statements to underscore subtle points--or, perhaps, to get people's attention.
