(Note: This will probably get edited and moved around. But I wanted to start getting something written before it completely evaporates from my mind.)
No, this is not about Yale University. It’s about a strange little clinic/church put together by a minor-league crackpot in San Diego 40 or 50 years ago.
People who have lived in that town for a long time might have been puzzled by a small sign that was along the side of the road just west of the intersection of 70th St and El Cajon Blvd for years. I think it disappeared sometime in the 1980s or even later. It was just 18 inches square or so and read “Church of the Merciful Savior/Yale Foundation 1 block” with an arrow pointing south. But at that location there was nothing except the rental office of an apartment complex. So what used to be there?
Back in the late 1950s/early 1960s I was in grammar school and my range was in about the mile radius circle around the intersection of 70th Street and University Avenue in San Diego, Calif. You know, wherever a kid can get to on his bike in an hour or two is the main extent of his world. It seemed like a huge area at the time. Now it seems incredibly tiny.
So…what do kids like better than scary things?
One that was sort of fun was the pet cemetery next to the pet hospital at the end of the street. Of course this was long before Steven King, but on a cold October night around Halloween you could at least partially scare yourself.
So one day the word got around the kid grapevine that there were these weird abandoned buildings with Frankenstein laboratory equipment and other strange machines about a mile from home. Well of course you can’t wait until you can get on your bike and get on down there to check it out for yourself.
The corner of 70th St and Saranac at that time was a quiet residential neighborhood — this whole area was considered fairly distant from population. It was about a mile from my house.
There were two vacant buildings on the corner lot. One was apparently a church and the other was the “clinic.” The church was the “Church of the Merciful Savior” and the clinic was the “Yale Foundation.”
So of course I had to get on my bike and get down there. The chapel was sort of a disappointment. It was a relatively large building that had already been partially vandalized. They had found the boxes of leaflets and strewn them all over. I collected one of each kind I could find with a view towards creating a history of the compound.
The really weird and cool thing was the other building (“The Yale Foundation”). This appeared to be constructed like a clinic with patient rooms, examination rooms, etc. It wasn’t large however. There were some weird passageways and what were probably laboratories. There were still a few bottles and some labware around that wasn’t broken…who know what kind of mad experiments the good doctor was into towards the End?
The neatest part was that there were several huge machines that looked like some kind of Wimshurst machines. I think there were two or three of them left. They were too heavy for the vandals to carry off and a bit too sturdy to do a lot of damage to.
They were built mainly out of wood. They had some kind of motor arrangement and a mechanism to turn large plates of what looked like amber glass. Apparently one of Dr. Yale’s therapies was to charge these things up and somehow zap your cancer (?) or whatever with them.
Anyway, I developed some insane scheme to try to find someone with a truck and cart one of them off. I think I almost figured out a way to do it until my parents caught wind of the idea and firmly quashed it…why did they always have to bring logic and reason around to my great plans?
The only other thing I can vaguely remember if I really strain my brain is this. I did spend some time downtown once trawling through the newspaper morgue, and I finally did find a single article about Dr. Yale. From what I could glean, there was some sort of court case involving that property, which was probably going to get auctioned off due to lack of mortgage or back tax payments, and Dr Yale could only attend the hearing in a wheelchair, being old and sick. The rest, as they say, is silence. Unless somewhere along the line someone else did similar research and I just haven’e run across it.
