Harsh conditions at All Saints Boys Home

Harsh conditions at All Saints Boys Home are presented as both material hardship and a deeper failure of care: the home lacks money, suitable support, and a public identity that might make anyone want to sustain it. By 1937, its bishop is still stranded in Iowa, managing a place whose recurring problems include starchy food, mildew, inadequate priests, and pedophiles. The boys, meanwhile, are described as castaways whom ordinary families do not want and whose own leader admits he does not want them either.

A deteriorating institution

The home’s difficulties are not a sudden crisis but a prolonged condition. The archbishop had assigned the bishop both discipline and the task of securing long-term funding, suggesting that money might eventually earn him a better post. Yet that promised future never arrives. Four years later, the bishop has not solved the cash-flow problem and has reduced a much longer catalogue of complaints to five central failures: third-rate priests, starchy food, mildew, pedophiles, and a steady trickle of boys considered too wild or too hungry to belong in a normal family.

The list places bodily deprivation and institutional danger beside one another. Starchy food and mildew evoke a place unable to provide even ordinary comfort; the reference to pedophiles makes the problem more grave than a shabby building or an unpleasant menu. The account does not describe individual incidents behind that entry, but its inclusion among the bishop’s defining problems makes clear that the home’s troubles concern the safety and treatment of its children as well as its upkeep. The institution is failing in the very setting meant to receive boys who have nowhere else to go.

Money without a viable endowment

The home survives through a patchwork of familiar appeals: selling sherry and Bible bookmarks, begging, and ingratiating itself with potential supporters. These methods keep it limping along but do not answer the need the archbishop identified: a dependable endowment. The difficulty is not simply that the home lacks wealthy prospects. Its needs do not fit the charitable forms donors already recognize.

Potential benefactors are more accustomed to funding chairs, scholarships, or memorials. All Saints Boys Home has no departments with chairs to endow, and its wards do not attend a school in the ordinary sense. The narrative underscores the mismatch by comparing the home to a prison that is not truly a place of rehabilitation: admission is not something anyone seeks. Scholarships therefore offer donors no reassuring educational institution to invest in. Memorials fail for a different reason: the boys are too young to die, and the people approached do not want to memorialize children whom society is already trying to forget.

The contrast exposes how fundraising depends on the image of the recipient as much as on need. The boys require long-term care, but the home cannot easily translate that requirement into the familiar symbols of academic advancement or commemoration. Its wards are not only short of money; they are difficult to make visible as people whom donors might wish to remember. The charitable system’s preferred objects of generosity leave this institution outside their frame.

Boys regarded as unwanted

The bishop’s own account makes the home’s emotional climate inseparable from its material one. Boys arrive because they are judged too unruly or too hungry for an ordinary family, and the bishop recognizes their rejection without resisting it: he understands why others do not want them because he does not want them either. The phrase “castaway kids” captures the result. The children are gathered in one place, but that placement does not itself make them welcome or secure in the broader sense of belonging.

The account also recalls well-meaning couples who occasionally visit hoping to adopt one of the boys. Their intentions offer a possible route out of the home, but none shows interest in Calvin Evans. That rejection reflects the particular reputation he has acquired there, while also showing how the promise of adoption does not extend equally to every child. For Calvin, the home’s general condition becomes a repeated personal fact: even among boys already unwanted by ordinary families, he is passed over.

Calvin Evans as a measure of neglect

The bishop remembers Calvin Evans repeatedly appearing in his office after another infraction. Calvin has broken a window, stolen a book, and given a black eye to a priest who was trying to make him feel loved. These episodes make Calvin the boy who most often occupies the bishop’s attention, but attention arrives chiefly as discipline. The gap between the priest’s attempted affection and the black eye is left stark, without turning the episode into proof of a single explanation for Calvin’s behavior.

The bishop sometimes ranks the boys by the trouble they cause, yet Calvin always comes first, making the exercise seem pointless. This recurring judgment reduces the boy to the home’s most dependable problem while offering no sign that the institution can change the conditions around him. His missed adoption, repeated office visits, and notoriety among the boys connect individual exclusion to the home’s wider inability to provide a stable, sustaining family setting. Through Calvin, the institution’s failures are not abstract: they shape how one child is seen, disciplined, and left without an alternative.