The voice of a lost generation

In August 1941, Mina Boyce, a 21-year-old widow and an alcoholic, handed her baby over to state social workers, setting little Freddie Boyce on the miserable road to the ''Water E. Fernald School for the Feebleminded."

Over the next seven years, Freddie lived in seven foster homes and then was locked behind the iron gates of Fernald, an institution for people with mental retardation. There he would stay until his ''parole" 11 years later.

The injustice, similar to the fate of thousands of children unlucky enough to fall into government custody before 1960, might have been forgotten, but Boyce never accepted the idea that he was ''feebleminded." Decades later, when documents revealed that he and other children had been subjected to unethical radiation experiments while at Fernald, Boyce seized his chance: He rounded up his friends from Fernald, filed a lawsuit, and exposed a dark chapter of American history.

''We didn't commit any crimes. We were just 7-year-old orphans," declared the traveling carnival barker at a packed Washington D.C. hearing in 1994. Though he was testifying about being fed radioactive oatmeal, Boyce was really talking about being locked away for years without education, without love, without hope.

Now, Frederick Boyce is dying. But he is going out as the voice of a lost generation rather than the lost boy he once was.

From his sickbed in the Colonial Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Weymouth, he talks on the phone to an executive at Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks who tells him the screenplay for a proposed movie about his life is finished and fabulous. And, though Boyce is thin and weak from colon cancer, he promises another caller to speak at an upcoming State House meeting ''if I'm around."

''Something like this is kind of surreal," said Boyce, 65, who always assumed he would be a ''spectator" in life rather than a mover and a shaker. ''How can this little kid from a state institution be able to do so much?"

But people who know Boyce say he possesses a rare resilience that has allowed him to rise above a nightmare that left many others bitter, ashamed, or demoralized. Boyce, they said, never blamed himself for his predicament. He forgave his keepers at Fernald, even the ones who administered arbitrary beatings and humiliations. And, even as he prepares to die, he retains his almost dizzying optimism, stocking up on prizes for his carnival concession booth just in case he gets well enough to go back on the road as he has for the last 43 years.

''I don't know anyone who has as many friends as Freddie," said Abra Figueroa, Boyce's ex-wife and close friend, who came from Oklahoma to visit him last weekend.

Boyce, who loves to discuss Stephen Hawking's theories on black holes and keeps a poetry anthology at his bedside, is not, and never was, mentally retarded. Dr. Norman Frost, a pediatrician, once wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine that the main difference between Boyce and ''normal" people is that ''he is better looking and more charming." With his soothing, low voice and sharp Portuguese features, he always had a gift for luring people to the carnival midway.

But Boyce was born to a mother who lost custody of 13 children to the state in an era when psychologists used a now-discredited IQ test to determine whether a child should be institutionalized. When Freddie got his first test, he had never been to school, and he became anxious as strangers asked him to define words such as ''timid" and ''tame." He scored 65 on a test where 100 was considered normal, making him ''feebleminded" in the terminology of the time.

Freddie found hundreds of other boys and girls much like him among the 2,000-plus residents at Fernald -- mostly ''problem" children who were being warehoused at the 19th-century brick campus along with people with genuine mental retardation. All of them suffered in an environment that offered little education, required menial labor such as picking beans and mopping bathroom floors, and permitted outsiders to visit mainly on ''company Sundays."

Freddie couldn't understand why he was being held -- ''There ain't nothing wrong with me," he would tell attendants -- to no avail. When, in 1960, the Fernald staff finally agreed with Boyce's claim that he was safe to leave the school, he couldn't read or write -- and no one apologized.

Boyce worked hard to build a life, hiring a tutor to visit him weekly and gradually saving money from his carnival work to buy a house in Norwell. He made his peace with his mother, coming to see her as a victim of her own difficult childhood, and with the staff at Fernald, which he saw as part of a system beyond their control. But his 1987 marriage to Figueroa lasted less than two years, and he came to think of himself as someone who had difficulty forming intimate relationships.

''I accepted I have a life that's always going to have pieces missing," Boyce told journalist Michael D'Antonio, author of ''The State Boys Rebellion," a book about those who grew up at the Fernald School.

Finally, in 1993, a librarian at Fernald discovered an old ledger book that described the way Boyce and other children in the 1950s had been seduced into taking part in medical experiments with promises of Red Sox tickets, Christmas parties, and other tokens. The children in the so-called ''Fernald Science Club" had been fed oatmeal laced with slightly radioactive milk as part of a nutrition study for Quaker Oats.

When The Globe published a story on the experiments, it made international news and triggered a congressional inquiry.

Boyce quickly became the face of the scandal, aggressively calling reporters to tell his story and organizing former ''Fernald Science Club" members to sue Quaker Oats, the researchers who did the experiments, and the state and federal agencies that were supposed to protect children. Although the radiation levels were probably too low to do much harm -- and Boyce doesn't blame the experiments for his cancer -- the group received a $3 million settlement for violations of their rights, which worked out to $50,000 to $65,000 for each of the several dozen people.

Perhaps more important to Boyce, the controversy gave him a platform. He remembers feeling ''weak-kneed" as he entered the ballroom of a Washington, D.C., hotel to testify about the Fernald experiments before a federal panel investigating the abuse of human research subjects. But Boyce made the most of his chance, telling panelists, ''The idea of getting consent for experiments under these conditions was not only cruel but hypocritical. They bribed us by offering us special privileges, knowing that we had so little that we would do practically anything for attention."

In the years that followed, Boyce received a personal apology for the radiation experiments from President Bill Clinton, while D'Antonio's 2004 book made clear that the radiation experiments were part of a larger tableau of suffering. Boyce did interviews about his past with everyone from People Magazine to ''60 Minutes," where staffers called him ''one-take Freddie" for his ability to speak from the heart in punchy soundbites.

Steven Spielberg was so impressed by Boyce's story that his production company, DreamWorks, bought the film rights to ''The State Boys Rebellion" and commissioned Jose Riviera, award-winning screenwriter of the movie ''The Motorcycle Diaries," to produce a script. Meredith Bagby, the former DreamWorks executive who spearheaded the project until this month, said the movie is not a certainty yet, but the screenplay is ''amazing."

''It's an instant story like 'Cuckoo's Nest' or 'Cider House Rules' " by John Irving, said Bagby. ''It's about kids, and no matter how bad it was, they always had this child-like optimism."

Boyce, who can no longer eat much solid food and is receiving treatment only for pain, knows he won't be around if and when the movie gets made, but he doesn't seem to mind. He only hopes that other ''Fernald Science Club" members carry on the effort to get a formal apology for their mistreatment from the state of Massachusetts.

''I feel like I made my life," he said. And he's proud that a Hollywood movie may be his epitaph. ''I want to see the story come out as strong as possible so that these institutions can't do what they did to us again."

Scott Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com.