Hillcrest Receiving Home

I was at Hillcrest in 1978 with my brother and two sisters. I remember hearing a lot about Hillcrest as a kid in San Diego. It was considered a very scary place synonymous with juvenile hall and that scared me a lot as I was basically a juvenile delinquent raising hell all over downtown San Diego. Our family were drifters who spent many nights in movie theaters, parks, "borrowed" abandoned buildings, etc. Well, we were living at the Blue Bell Motel on PCH when my mom and stepdad decided to move to Hawaii. When the welfare check came, they bought tickets and took off, but left us with a baby-sitter in Linda Vista. Ten kids in the baby-sitter's home, constant stream of men hooking up with two of the lady's daughters, and a lot of drug use and physical abuse. When she heard nothing from my parents in Hawaii, she reached out to my grandma in Seattle to have use taken off her hands, but it was too late. We were seized from the home by child services and went to Hillcrest. HIllcrest was definitely institutional, but not as bad as I feared. The caretakers were nice. We when to a Padre game, movies, ice-skaingWe earned points by being good and helping out, so I was a kitchen helper and did my best to stay out of trouble. My sisters were sent to the younger unit, so I did not get to see them at all once we went to HIllcrest, so that was sad. I remember going to a small school there, but don't remember learning anything. I liked the playground, which overlooked the canyon. Very high fence. I also remember everyone asking, "What are you in here for?" Everyone talked about what had happened to them as if they were the ones who did the mis-deeds for which they were in the home. Child abuse, molestation, neglect, parents in jail, etc. For me it was "abandonment." Sad to know that kids take the blame for the shit their parents do, but I guess I did. I thought, if I had just been good, maybe my mom would have taken me to Hawaii, instead of dumping me off with the crappy baby-sitter. We were at Hillcrest for a couple of months until Child Services found a foster home in Poway for all four of us. That would be another blog post, but they found my mother in Hawaii and charged her with abandonment. My step-father had taken off. After two years in the foster home, we went to live in Hawaii with her. Another long story, but two years later she took off again and we went to a foster home in Hawaii. Haven't heard anything from my mom since then.