Fear Victimizes Even The Feared

Doug Wilbur would check the weather report and look out the kitchen window. If he was sure it wasn’t going to rain, he’d pull on his turquoise jacket and go for a walk.

His aunt thought he was headed to the library - his favorite spot - but his destination was a park in Carmichael, Calif.

He’d discovered this place in the fall while working with his uncle on a plumbing project in a house across the street. Doug got bored and asked about going to the park.

“My uncle told me, ‘Sure, but don’t go getting in trouble,’ and I didn’t,” Doug said.

The park became kind of special to Doug because a woman had been real nice to him there. “She talked to me and smiled,” Doug said. “She had orange hair.” Doug remembers she had three kids, one still in diapers, another with shiny, blond curls. He can’t remember what the third one looked like.

“Made me like that park, though,” Doug said. “Not that many people nice to a guy like me.”

Doug is 54, fidgety, rotund, and in his own words, “kinda slow.”

He wears sweat pants all the time because he finds regular pants uncomfortable. His favorite food is macaroni and cheese and he drinks 10 Coke Classics a day, a feat about which he’s rather proud. He likes watching TV, reading comics, repairing gadgets and lying in the tall grass of his aunt’s side yard. “Sometimes, no one knows I’m there,” he said, grinning. “They call me and I just stay real still. It’s pretty fun.”

He knows he isn’t what some of us like to call normal. “People been calling me ‘retard’ all my life,” he said. “But I can be smart about some things if I really try. That’s what my mama always told me. ‘Try, Doug, try. You can do it.”’

Doug’s father is dead and his mother, an Alzheimer’s patient in her late 70s, went to a nursing home last year. Doug has lived with his aunt and uncle ever since. They are good, decent people who admit to not quite knowing what to do with Doug.

But they knew he went to the library alone when he lived with his mom, and they wanted to make the transition to his new life as easy as possible. The first time he went after moving in with them, the aunt followed him in the car, just to make sure he’d be OK. “He just marched straight there,” she said.

They didn’t know that Doug had diversified his outings, going to the library if it was rainy, the park if it was clear.

He’d show up, sit on the same bench and watch the kids play. When they laughed, he laughed, loud and with vigor - oblivious to the attention he was drawing to himself. “When he laughs, he sort of snorts,” his aunt said. “It takes some getting used to, but it’s just Doug.”

But Doug showed up so often, the locals began to notice.

Young mothers watching children at the playground eyed him suspiciously over their paperback novels. Parents who sent their children to the park alone began hearing about the presence of a “stranger” who talked to kids and avoided adults.

Before a month was out, stories about the stranger at the park were circulating throughout the small neighborhood. “He didn’t fit,” one neighbor said.

“How can you know when you’re doing the right thing in a situation like this?” another woman asked. “What if it turned out he was a kidnapper?”

Doug became increasingly friendly with the children but clammed up whenever an adult came near. One day last month, the mothers of the neighborhood children decided to take him on.

They surrounded him as he ducked under the slide to talk to a little girl. They demanded to know his name and where he was from. They told him he was scaring the children. That maybe the playground at the park wasn’t the place for a grown man to hang out.

Doug burst into tears.

Later he would explain that he didn’t talk to the adults because they would know he was different, a fact the little kids hadn’t figured out. “I just wanted to have fun and have no one know about me,” he said. “No one saying, ‘Doug the retard.’ I kept thinking the nice lady would come back. (The other adults) would see me talking to her and know I was OK. But she never came.”

An officer was summoned who pretty much figured the situation out and took Doug home.

A neighborhood woman said she is “completely embarrassed” but isn’t sure what they might have done differently. “Either we’re alert parents or completely paranoid.”

Doug’s aunt views their fear as a sign of the times. But it is more than a little telling, she admits, when our fear extends to a man like Doug. The neighborhood, for the record, has invited Doug back. He doesn’t plan to go; has never dealt with being yelled at too well.

As we finish up, Doug is out lying in the grass. When I pass, he looks up and shouts: “Could you tell the kids, please ma’am, I didn’t mean to scare them?”

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Diana Griego Erwin McClatchy News Service