Starting Salem in New Hampshire

From The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

He who helps in the saving of others, saves himself as well.

—HARTMANN VON AUE

IN JULY AND AUGUST 1978, GOTTFRIED MüLLER’S CHILDREN’S orchestra came for four weeks to the United States and toured the halls he had requested and which Louise Sutermeister and I had set up and publicized; they also took a trip to Florida. I traveled with him and the kids, and in each city Herr Müller gave speeches to groups of invited guests.

In one city only two people showed up to hear him. He knocked himself out, giving a powerful and enthusiastic speech about Salem, the coming times, and the work he was doing. He was dramatic, dynamic, and moving.

Afterward I asked him why he’d gone to so much trouble for just two people; he could have just sat with them and talked.

“When only a few people show up, then you know it is the most important speech you must give,” he said. “Just as when a person donates only $1 to Salem, that is the most important donation.” It reminded me of the story Jesus told in the Bible about the widow who could afford to give only a few mites (pennies) and how her contribution was more important and spiritually powerful than those of the wealthy elite. Similarly, one person has often been at the pivot point of world changes. If that one person happened to be in an audience that had only a few people—or even only that one person—giving that speech may be the event that could eventually lead to the transformation of the world.

The last week of July, I flew home to help my wife, Louise, give birth to our second child. After the horrific experience we had had with our first in a suburban Detroit hospital, where the doctor showed up late and drunk (it was Christmas Eve) and the nurses tied Louise down to the bed and forced her knees together until he arrived, we decided to deliver our second at home. A friend who was a midwife joined us, and another friend who was an MD and lived nearby was “on call” for us. In preparation Louise had attended several births with our midwife friend, and I’d joined in helping our neighbors deliver their baby at home. After two hours of labor, about three in the morning, Justin slid out into my hands. It was a miracle! We gave him the middle name of Noah because Herr Müller so often referred to Salem villages as “arks in a sea of chaos and turbulence,” and his birth seemed to signal a turning point in our lives in that direction.

A week later Louise, Justin, and I flew to Washington to see the Salem orchestra perform at Kennedy Center and attend a dinner for Herr Müller that Louise Sutermeister had arranged at the Watergate Hotel. It was a gala event, with some of the biggest names in Washington society as sponsors, including Maestro Mstislav Rostropovich and Celeste Holm.

It was the end of the tour, and the logical end of my association with Herr Müller. I’d done the job he’d hired me to do (although I never ended up sending him a bill because of the events that followed shortly), and the reasonable thing to do now would be to return to Michigan and continue with my radio program, the advertising agency, and the herbal company; back to my old, crumbling mansion built by R. E. Olds (founder of Oldsmobile) and our new Volvos; back to making money and being spiritually unfulfilled. But I wasn’t prepared to do that and had been wondering if and how I could reorganize things to work more closely with Herr Müller.

As we ate delicious vegetarian meals prepared by the hotel’s staff, Herr Müller turned to me and said bluntly, “Why don’t you sell your business and join us in this work?”

I felt like he had put a knife into my heart. It was everything I wanted and yet also so many things that I feared—so much change, so much to leave behind.

I looked at my wife. Louise, breast-feeding Justin, smiled and nodded in affirmation.

“Okay,” I said. “What should we do?”

He shrugged. “Start out by helping Louise Sutermeister raise money for Salem here in America.”

And so we went back to Michigan. We arranged to sell and transfer our businesses, I quit my part-time job at WITL radio station, and in October 1978 we moved to New Hampshire. For the first half-year, I tried to raise money for the Maryland program, but it was not to be. I gave speeches and visited donors, but nobody wanted to give money to somebody who wasn’t “doing the work” themselves. So, my wife and I decided we should start our own Salem program in New Hampshire.

We began by taking three foster children into our home. Louise did most of the child care, while I did fundraising, gave speeches, and wrote grant applications. I created a nonprofit corporation and jumped through the hoops the state provided in order to get a license as a group home and, eventually, a residential treatment facility.

Over the next few years, as word spread, we drew some wonderful people to help us, and donations came as a result of our PR and fundraising efforts. We moved up north to a rental property on Stinson Lake in Rumney, and in 1979 opened several houses for kids.

The first of the two houses was an old, white building that once was a summer camp and at another time a school. It had started out as a farmhouse overlooking the lake, but several additions followed in the hundred years or so since it was first built. Children and house-parents lived in the old house part, and staff and a school we started filled the other quarters. It was located several miles up a long, winding mountain road to nearly the top of Stinson Mountain, where Stinson Lake settled like a filled-in volcanic caldera.

Next door to “the white house” was “the brown house,” an old four-bedroom vacation house that we reinsulated and that became home to a second “family” of six children.

The edges of the road were the beginnings of the White Mountain National Forest, about 20 miles west of Plymouth, and, local lore said, the woods extended without a stop all the way up through the state, into Canadian forestland, and all the way up to the Arctic Circle. Bears, moose, foxes, deer, and wild turkeys would occasionally show up in our yards or forage through our trash.

The children we took in were, in Herr Müller’s paraphrasing of the Bible, the least of the least. They were the children who had been rejected by one foster family after another, often rejected by other institutions, and some even came to us from the state mental hospital or the state-run prisons for children. As one of our house-parents told J. Tevere MacFadyen, who wrote a marvelous article about us for Country Journal magazine,¹ “These kids here are those who by definition couldn’t make it in a family. That’s why they’re in a group home. We’ve had one girl, 13 years old, who’d been through 29 foster homes before she got here. At the last one she broke her foster mother’s leg with an iron. These kids eat foster parents for breakfast. They just run right through them, burn them out, and when it becomes evident to the social worker that they’re not going to make it in a foster home, they go into an institution.”

On the other hand, the reason these kids are so tough is because they’ve been given nothing but hell all their lives. They arrive with dossiers an inch thick, often with broken bones, cigarette burns, or the psychic scars of emotional or sexual abuse. One boy came into the program after having been drugged in another institution to the point of drooling with Thorazine, a powerful antipsychotic, and was often tied to his bed for days at a time. After a few years with us, without drugs or restraint, he graduated from high school with honors.

The “magic” part of our formula, in my opinion, was Herr Müller’s revelation about the need for family. Those of us who grew up in a “normal” home tend to take family for granted. As Robert Frost said in “The Death of the Hired Man”:²

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.

I’ve always known that if worse came to worst, I could turn to my parents, siblings, and extended family for help and support. That knowledge has enabled me to take chances and step out into areas that others may consider adventurous, and it has provided me with a lifelong sense of security.

But these children usually have no place to call home, no safe place where they can return and be accepted. Such a reality is unthinkably frightening to most of us, even as adults: imagine how terrifying it must be for a child.

So instead of being thrown out of the program when they reach 17 or 18 and the funding stops, kids are told that they’re always welcome. They can stay if they need (although, as in a normal family, we work to help them become self-reliant out in the real world and make the transition to adult independence). If they hit a rough time in their lives in the future, they’re always welcome to come back.

In 1981 I went into Uganda for Salem with comedian and social activist Dick Gregory. On our way to Africa, we stopped at the Salem Children’s Village in Stadtsteinach, Germany. It was a week or two before Christmas, as I recall, and we had dinner with one of the families. In addition to the six or seven children in the home with their house-parents and helpers, there were two young men in their early twenties at the table.

“Who are they?” Dick asked the house-parents.

“They grew up here,” the housemother answered, “and one is now in the army and the other has a job in Frankfurt. But they came home for Christmas.”

Home was the core, the central and most-effective therapy.

Our treatment plans drew heavily on the work of Alfred Adler, Rudolf Dreikurs, and others who advocate “logical consequences” instead of punishment. Children must learn that there are consequences to their actions and that they have choices in life. When they grow up, there won’t be people to follow them around and dose them with drugs or restrain them if they get out of control. Life’s lessons began at Salem with learning to put away the bicycle, clean up one’s own messes, and interact rationally with other children and adults.

Within a year of the time we moved up to Rumney, we had three sets of house-parents, 12 children, a teacher, a cook, a carpenter, a child-care assistant, a secretary, and a therapeutic program director, and I was the executive director. We hired part-time therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists to work with the children individually and to train and consult with our staff regularly.

We were blessed with some truly brilliant individuals: Ken, our cook, ended up writing numerous hot-selling cookbooks in later years; Barbara stayed in child care and teaching; one of our house-parents earned his PhD in divinity school; and others moved into related social-work fields. A man in his late sixties, Grandpa Irving, stayed with us for nearly a year; he lent a multigenerational flavor to the program and taught us all about how to most efficiently gather firewood from the forest and plant vegetables. At that time everybody was earning between $25 and $112 per week, plus room and board. We became a community as much as an institution, and there was an intense sense of camaraderie.

As word about us spread and we were written up in Country Journal, East-West Journal, New Age Journal, Mother Earth News, Prevention, and other similar publications, we drew an advisory board of famous vegetarians. I spent several evenings in New York at the apartment of Gloria Swanson, who lent her name to our work and loved to cook vegetarian meals with me. Dennis Weaver and his family did two fundraising concerts for us, as did Dick Gregory. National Public Radio sent Sanford Ungar and Nina Ellis up to do a report on us, and that 18-minute segment—the longest they’d ever run up to that time on the All Things Considered show—drew what Ungar later described to me as “one of the biggest responses we’ve ever had to that type of piece on the show.”

As time went on, we learned that 137 acres on the other side of the lake were for sale, and, through a series of events I can only call miraculous, we were able to buy the land and begin building houses.

A half dozen or so young men and women, most in their early twenties, volunteered for the brutal job of building a passive solar house from scratch throughout the course of the harsh New Hampshire winter. These courageous volunteers, particularly Daniel, Sam, Anita, and Michael, referred to themselves as “the Siberians” and lent an even stronger sense of mission to our work as they labored in the freezing temperatures, often for 10 or more hours a day, until the first house was completed and we were ready to move the program from one side of the lake to the other.

Once Herr Müller commented to me: “I live like a king. I have the best food, the best friends, horses to ride, a forest to walk in, and a work that I would pay to do if I had to. What could be better?” This is a man who owns only his clothes and books and a bit of furniture.

But the fact is that Salem work (or any type of service work) should be done only for the fire in the work, the joy of doing it that’s derived right then and there.

People who do things because they expect to be rewarded in heaven are often not alive: they’re living in a future that has not yet come. (Those who avoid things because of a fear of hell are not living in the moment, either.)

While heaven may be a useful side effect of the work, it’s only a small part of why one should do the work.

The clearest, most real motivation comes from the knowledge that the quality of the work we do, the spiritual vibration it spreads around, is based on the reasons for our doing it. If we do things as martyrs, we are merely spreading around martyrdom. The value of that is pretty minimal and, as in the case of the suicide bombers we’ve seen so much of lately, can even be profoundly destructive.

But if we do our work out of joy, love, and an enthusiasm born of the work itself—be it meditation and prayer, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, building community, or whatever—we’re pumping into the world joy, love, and a general lightening of the vibratory universe in which we all live.

For example, when Herr Müller decided he wanted to reduce the number of animals who were unnecessarily suffering because of medical and cosmetic experimentation (vivisection), he didn’t go out and bomb research laboratories or try to portray scientists as evil people. He didn’t go out into the world with hatred or anger.

Instead he created the Salem Research Institute, hired a biochemist and a few other scientists, and compiled a 2-inch-thick hardcover book published in English that chronicled tens of thousands of experiments where working with human tissue in culture (in a petri dish) was a more effective—and cheaper—way of doing research than using live animals. (One of the best examples: human tissue sample tests showed that Thalidomide had the potential to cause mutations, but the studies on rabbits required by the British equivalent of the US Food and Drug Administration didn’t show such activity. So, the product went to market as a “proven safe cure” for morning sickness even as some scientists working with human tissues were worrying out loud that it might cause birth defects.)

After compiling all this research, and other books with information about how and where to obtain human tissue cultures and how to do research on them, Herr Müller sent his scientists out to all the big drug and cosmetics companies to talk with their directors of research about ways they could both save money and produce more-valid research results. As a result, many companies changed their policies, and millions of animals were spared from vivisection.

They were campaigning against vivisection, but not in a way that spread the vibration or energy of war and opposition. Herr Müller reframed the idea of research and thus changed the world for the better. And he did it from a place of cooperation and help, not of saintliness or martyrdom or a crusader’s zeal.

Salem’s efforts to reform the child-care systems in Europe and the United States were similar: When we’d speak at conferences about the advantage of family-based residential treatment models, we didn’t talk much about how it was “right” or “good” or anything like that. Instead we talked about how it would reduce the number of children in care who would grow up to become “institution-created criminals” and thus add to the financial and social burdens of the government organizations funding child care.

Similarly, when I talk about teaching meditation or doing the Salem work, even the painful things such as working in the slums of Bogotá or ducking bullets in war-torn Uganda, please don’t think of me (or think that I think of me) as a saint or martyr. I do these things because they’re more self-actualizing than anything else I’ve ever known and because I love to be fully alive in the moment. I hope that that was the vibration I was spreading through both the work and the world as I was doing those things—and that I am now helping to create in showing and talking about them to people.

The years at Salem in New Hampshire taught Louise and me more about ourselves and our capabilities than any other time of our lives. They gave us a vivid insight—a powerful feeling—of our purpose for incarnating into this earth.

The people we worked with have shared with me, both at that time and in conversations in later years, similar comments about their own experience of working at Salem.

From this I’ve come to firmly believe that when we help others, even in small ways such as by sharing smiles or unnoticed acts of kindness, we come closer to our own enlightenment, our own salvation. As so many before us have found, serving others is one of the most useful routes to spiritual transformation.

From The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann,
© 1997, published by Inner Traditions International.