By Katy Savage, Standard Staff
HARTLAND — Fred Coley remembers what used to be on his property, before the town spent $70,000 to take it all away. There were wedding albums, art supplies, yearbooks and birth certificates. There was a toolbox full of hand tools, a construction trailer and a wall cabinet with his cameras — maybe 50 of them, he guessed. There were dozens of old trucks.
Coley stayed away as the town — armed with a ruling from a state Superior Court judge — hauled Coley’s possessions off the property.
“I was afraid I’d snap,” Coley said.
They took his trailers and his trucks — almost 300 tons worth of junk, town officials say.
“Nobody said a word to me,” Coley said. “They removed me like I was dead. The only problem is; I’m not dead.
“They should’ve had the courtesy to say, ‘Fred we’re going to do a number on you.’” Despite Coley’s claim that he wasn’t informed, the select board issued several notices and letters to Coley concerning the fines. When it came time for court dates, he failed to appear.
“I don’t think we had a lot of choice, of course things like that should not happen. There’s no need for things like that to happen, but things do,” said select board chair Gordon Richardson.
Coley, 83, has accumulated $40,000 worth of junk ordinance fines that he said he can’t pay.
How it got to this point is perplexing to those that know Coley.
“He’s been a fixture. He’s a very likable fellow. We don’t understand why this happened,” Richardson said.
Coley doesn’t have an answer as to why it happened. Neither does his wife, Joyce.
“It’s a sickness,” she said.
Coley’s psychologist tells him he’s a “hoarder” but Coley doesn’t like that term. Coley attributes his habit of collecting partially to growing up in the Great Depression.
“Do I get carried away? Yeah. I admit it,” Coley said.
100 percent recidivism
About 5 percent of Americans hoard.
“The recidivism rate for going back to hoarding is almost 100 percent,” said Burlington Housing Authority Retention Specialist David O’Leary.
The Burlington Housing Authority manages hundreds of affordable living apartments in the Burlington area. It’s taken an education-based approach to dealing with hoarders — the majority of whom are single, O’Leary said. BHA gives hoarders autonomy to work out the pros and cons of retaining so much.
“What you don’t do is go in and clear everybody’s stuff out,” O’Leary said. “It makes the person feel pretty terrible about themselves. They feel violated, angry, anxious.”
That makes the people “do what makes them feel comfortable and that is to hoard,” said O’Leary.
Hoarders are compulsive shoppers, they’re perfectionists and they have a hard time making decisions, said Psychologist Elena Marie Ramirez who specializes in hoarding.
“People who are hoarders are very good at hiding the way they’re feeling,” she said.
They find comfort in ritual and in collecting, Ramirez said.
“That’s what hoarding really is, it’s an extreme form of avoidance,” said Ramirez.
Burlington Housing Authority Retention Specialist Team Leader Mike Ohler sees hoarders often.
“You hear stories about someone’s grandparents who grew up in the depression and they never wanted to get rid of (anything),” Ohler said. “The common thread that runs through it is that most often they’re not feeling very good about themselves.”
‘I’m the stabilizing factor’
Coley’s life hasn’t been easy. Some of his children have been arrested, he said. There have been drinking problems in his family and abuse issues. Coley lost one daughter in the 1980s. She died in a car accident in Claremont after she fell into the wrong crowd. Coley thinks she was pushed out of a vehicle.
“As much of a rogue as I am, I think I’m the stabilizing factor,” Coley said.
Coley and his wife are not native Hartlanders (they moved from Connecticut in the 1950s) but they raised their six kids in Hartland. They’re both active community people, outgoing, well-known and well-liked.
Coley served on the board of the Hartland Unitarian Universalist Society. Joyce used to help with Girl Scouts and they attend dinners at the American Legion.
“There’s always the gossip. I felt bad the way it all ended up. What are you going to do?” said friend Hylene Devoyd.
Coley worked at Cone-Blanchard Machine Company in Windsor until he retired at 58.
Buying old vehicles and selling them was a hobby.
He remembers buying a loader that needed work on the transmission — a $3,000 to $4,000 fix he didn’t have. So it sat there.
Over time, motor homes and old cars took up all of Coley’s land, just sitting there.
“I bought and sold. The problem is I bought more than I sold,” Coley said.
Eventually he couldn’t pay to heat the old white house on the property and the family moved into a mobile home. Coley’s kids lived in separate mobile homes on the same property, all crammed together. But it wasn’t long before the vehicles sat there, vacant.
When it got to be too much so Coley and his wife moved to an apartment in Windsor and left the junk behind.
“He collected every car there was and he’d drive them and go pick up another one. That’s how he’s been,” Devoyd said.
She wasn’t hopeful that Coley would ever change.
“I understand once you’re a hoarder you’re always a hoarder. It’s like a disease and you can’t do much about that,” Devoyd said.
‘I’ll handle it myself’
Another friend, who did not want to be named, admitted Coley’s place “did look awful.”
“I know some of it was Fred’s fault but I also think the town didn’t do it quite right,” she said, comparing Coley’s hoarding problem to drug or alcohol addiction.
Coley’s middle-aged kids offered to take the property over. They’ve offered to help clean and to help pay, but when it came time to do the work, Coley was stubborn.
“I said, ‘I’ll handle it myself,’” Coley said. “We’ve kind of lost our connections as a family over it. It hasn’t been all that good.”’ It’s caused so much tension that his wife had a mental breakdown one day and moved out of their Windsor apartment, to a mobile home in Ascutney.
Coley and Joyce are high school sweethearts and July marked their 60-year wedding anniversary.
They’re not living together now but they’re not divorced. Joyce says divorce conflicts with her Christian beliefs.
“It was one of those things that just hit me. It was just hard for both of us,” said Joyce when asked about moving out.
Coley goes to Joyce’s to have dinners and watch television sometimes, but he doesn’t think they’ll live together again.
Coley says the apartment in Windsor is full of books and papers that he can’t throw away.
But he doesn’t let people inside.
This article first appeared in the October 20, 2016 edition of the Vermont Standard.