Life at the 'Strickland Motel'

She's a no-nonsense lady with a big heart, sharing life with children in need
Doris Strickland picks collard greens with four of her foster children. The gardening yields self-esteem as well as vegetables, she says: “Those plants are theirs. Once they’ve worked that garden they love it. They refer to it as our garden, our plants, our apple trees.” (AJC Photo Archive at GSU LIbrary AJCP164-042a)

Credit: Andy Sharp / AJC file

Credit: Andy Sharp / AJC file

Doris Strickland picks collard greens with four of her foster children. The gardening yields self-esteem as well as vegetables, she says: “Those plants are theirs. Once they’ve worked that garden they love it. They refer to it as our garden, our plants, our apple trees.” (AJC Photo Archive at GSU LIbrary AJCP164-042a)

Note: This article originally ran on June 6, 1989 as part of the AJC’s award-winning “Suffer the Children” series.

A 10-year-old boy with red curls and a face full of freckles breezed into the room. Skidding to a stop, he wrapped his spindly arms around Doris Strickland's middle-aged frame, hugged her at the hips and disappeared into another room.

"While he's smiling at you, he's putting a knife in your back," Mrs. Strickland cautioned.

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The comment is close to fact. Doris Strickland tells of the time when the same boy held a butcher knife to his tiny wrist and threatened to kill himself.

"I said, 'Well, darling, blood never scared me,' " Mrs. Strickland recalled. The child then vowed to choke himself. "I told him it wouldn't work because 'I don't believe you have the guts to stand the pain.' " The boy finally snapped, "Well, I'll hire it done."

Mrs. Strickland brought the conversation to an end with, "That won't work either, because you don't have any money to hire anyone."

At 56, suicide threats no longer rattle Doris Strickland. Nine years and nearly 300 children after she began, the Marietta housewife has the distinction of being the woman officials can count on to take the toughest of tough foster children into her home.

Almost by default she is compensating the state for its shortage of group homes with her unofficial group home. Over the years, Mrs. Strickland has cared for as many as a dozen foster children at a time, ranging in age from 30 days to 17 years. They've stayed anywhere from a day to seven years.

Her selflessness and willingness to help others even as her own world is crumbling around her have elevated her to near-sainthood among social workers.

"She causes me to be uncomfortable with myself because she makes me realize she's action and a lot of us are just words," said Diane Woods, director of Juvenile Court services in Cobb County.

It was the 1979 death of her son, Bill Jr., 26, in a crash of a small plane that led her to become a foster parent.

The death of her husband, Bill, in January led Mrs. Strickland recently to take a break from foster care, and her foster children were farmed out to various state institutions and shelters.

Bill Strickland died of a heart attack after rushing to the scene of an accident involving Mark, one of the foster children who remained with the family after he came of age.

Amid her grief, she tended to Mark, who was in a coma for two months, and continued to care for as many as 10 foster children until early May.

Now she is back at it. Last Friday, after a break of just three weeks, she reclaimed one of the children who had been farmed out, a 14- year-old Vietnamese boy who wasn't doing well at the shelter where he was staying, she said.

Among those who go through foster homes the way some children go through tennis shoes, her name inspires both fear and love. Streetwise kids beg not to be sent to Mrs. Strickland's. But they often end up there because no one else will take them. And after they've been there awhile, they usually want to stay.

She has suffered unintended blows while mediating fights and taken a few punches that were intended for her. Her charges have armed themselves with knives while fighting over what to watch on television, tried to burn her house down, destroyed interior walls and jammed the plumbing to the tune of $2,000.

"When I started, I had wall-to-wall carpet without a spot. Now I don't have any carpet left," she said.

Her two most notoriously difficult charges were Jacky and Mark. Today, Jacky, 21, and Mark, 22, are permanent members of her family.

When Jacky arrived at 15, he was the "scroungiest, orneriest, get- next-to-your-skin aggravating kid that ever existed," Mrs. Strickland recalled. "I used to pay Mark to take him outside just to get him away from me."

Mrs. Strickland tamed the two the way she tempers all of her problem children, with work. "One of the things teenagers are afraid of, what scares them to death, is work,' she said.

She once roused a group of teens at 6 a.m. and had them planting collard greens, peas and carrots until sunset. The few who tried to get away got extra work. "The next day the rules were followed to a T," she recalls.

Mrs. Strickland believes that not only vegetables but self-esteem can be cultivated in the garden. "Those plants are theirs. Once they've worked that garden they love it. They refer to it as our garden, our plants, our apple trees."

The strictest rule pertains to a musician. "I do not allow Ozzy Osbourne in the house."

Come home drunk, and she calls the cops. Dating privileges must be earned and prospective dates must produce a driver's license and proof of insurance before taking out one of Mrs. Strickland's charges.

The "Strickland Motel," as she calls it, is not a fancy place. Rules are posted in crayon throughout the house, large industrial-size containers of generic food clutter the kitchen, and most of the children sleep in an attic that has been converted into a loft. Air conditioning is a luxury the "Strickland Motel" cannot afford.

The children who call it home arrive in despair, their spirits long ago broken by incest, abuse or neglect. Drugs and alcohol are often the crutches of their troubled childhood.

Given a choice, Mrs. Strickland will always favor the tough foster kids. "Most everyone wants the cute little girl that does a little curtsy. I don't get any pleasure out of that type of child. I want a kid I can help."

Social workers say she works well with troubled children because she understands their anger. "They're mad because the law comes and removes them from their house and they didn't do anything. And the parents are allowed to stay at home," Mrs. Strickland said.

At the same time, Mrs. Strickland acknowledges that most people don't have the patience to do what she does. "It's not the money," she said.

She receives $10 a day in room and board for each child and a one- time clothing allowance that varies between $150 and $300, depending on the age of the child.

"I can feed a child on $10 a day, give them baths, heat, the necessities of life," she said. But the state does nothing to cover recreational needs and the destruction that follows when teens become restless - such as the plumbing debacle.

Despite the many difficulties of caring for so many children, Mrs. Strickland knows she's the end of the line for many youths. "I feel like if I don't do it, nobody else will.

"These kids think that I'm fair. But I tell them that's not true. I'm not fair. I don't even try to be fair because the world is not fair, never was and never will be."

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Rules to Live By 

Doris Strickland takes in the toughest of foster children at her home in

Marietta, but once they step through her doorway they live by her rules,

and those rules can be as tough as the children. Some examples:

- No alcohol or drug use.

- No fighting.

- No cussing.

- No Ozzy Osbourne.

- Clean up your own mess.

- Do your own dishes.

- Good grades, completing chores and getting along are prerequisites to

dating.

- Prospective dates must produce a driver's license and proof of

insurance.

- Television and Atari privileges hinge on chores.

- Homework hours must be adhered to.

Punishment for failing to comply with house rules ranges from suspension

of television privileges to hard labor in Mrs. Strickland's garden.