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Her boyfriend was a technician there and he told her she could be one, too, and Rose Hanzlicek would have taken a job anywhere to get out of Nuckolls County.

The 19-year-old was assigned to the R Building, where 150 women lived in four wards. She helped them dress and get to meals on time, anything they needed to live day to day.

“They acted strange at times," Hanzlicek said last week. “But I went in with the attitude that they are human beings.”

Hanzlicek lived in an apartment on the center’s expansive grounds south of the city, first with fellow employees and later with her boyfriend-turned-husband, Albert.

Eventually, the couple bought a house and began a family. Albert took a job at the newspaper, stuffing inserts on the night shift. Hanzlicek went to work in the Regional Center’s recreation department and ended her career in administration, more than six decades later.

Treatment was primitive in those early years, the 90-year-old widow said last week.

Patients were given Epsom salt until they were too weak to cause trouble. Some underwent electroshock therapy. Others were given lobotomies.

In one of the women’s wards, every patient went to bed in a straitjacket. Others were tied to bed rails with ropes or chains.

“In today’s life, that was barbaric,” she said. “It was just barbaric.”

Some patients came to the Regional Center — then called the State Hospital — because they had epilepsy. Or because they were alcoholics. Or suffered from syphilis.

“Some of the women were just going through the change of life,” Hanzlicek said.

Back then — before advancements in psychiatry, before the advent of psychotropic drugs — all of the buildings were full and some patients were taken to the chapel to sleep.

“At that time, you came to the hospital to die,” she said. “That was the plan.”

* * *

The Nebraska Asylum for the Insane opened in 1870 southwest of the Capital City, its 480 acres pleasant and well-kept, according to records from the day.

The asylum’s first patients were admitted for a variety of ills: Financial problems, disappointment in love, religious excitement, sunstroke, domestic trouble, masturbation, overwork, heredity, intemperance.

The building was just a year old when it burned to the ground and was rapidly rebuilt, a Victorian structure made of sandstone.

Over time, more buildings sprang up and the Legislature came up with new names for the expanding facility. The Nebraska Hospital for the Insane. The Lincoln State Hospital. The Lincoln Regional Center.

A second regional center was built in Hastings in 1885: the Hospital for the Incurably Insane.

A third center followed in Norfolk with its 1888 opening — and the arrival of 89 patients from Lincoln — heralded in print that February.

“Efforts had been made to keep the matter as quiet as possible and thus avoid a crowd,” wrote the Norfolk Daily News, “but early in the afternoon it became evident that about all the people in town knew about it and were bound to be on hand when the special train bringing the insane people arrived.”

By the middle of the last century, nearly 5,000 patients lived in the state’s three institutions, nearly 1,700 of those in a bucolic campus just off Folsom Street with its own post office.

Patients tended the grounds and worked in the kitchen. Elderly patients with dementia sat and rocked.

Then Thorazine came along — the first generation of antipsychotic medications — and patients believed to be hopeless got better. The 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act passed and, all over the country, more than 500,000 patients were released from state hospitals.

The Lincoln-Lancaster County Mental Health Center opened. Community-based services were designed to accommodate former patients, but the nation’s streets filled with homeless people suffering from chronic mental illnesses.

“The whole federal government and the whole system abdicated responsibility to the mentally ill,” Mary Hepburn O’Shea told the Journal Star in 1998. “They were literally dying on the streets.”

Today, patients come and go from the state’s three regional centers — repurposed for the changing times and in accordance with legislation passed in 2004 to shift care further away from institutions and into communities.

There are waiting lists for one of the 231 beds at the center on Folsom. Some wait more than 70 days.

But beds sit empty because there aren’t enough nurses to provide care for those who need it.

* * *

Rose Hanzlicek remembers the youngest patient, a 3-year-old boy, deemed ungovernable.

She remembers the farm women whose families dropped them off and didn’t return.

“They knew how to cook.”

She remembers reading histories of her workplace, describing patients delivered by horse and wagon by weary family members.

Hanzlicek was 78 when she retired from the Lincoln Regional Center in 2006.

Sometime in the early 1950s, she left R Building and her job as a technician and went to work in the recreation department. Eventually, she became its activities director. She supervised the Wagon Wheel, a patient carpentry shop. She started a carnival for patients and staff and their families.

She designed a six-hole golf course on the grounds and helped usher in the Regional Center’s arboretum.

“I loved my job,” she says. “I liked what I did.”

She watched treatment change and people change.

“There was a big difference when they started to get meds, that was the thing that changed behavior and there were some people who went home.”

She would see them on the street or in the grocery store, patients who had become friends over the years.

Watching the Regional Center empty has been a good thing.

“People are better off in the community,” she said. “If there is a place out there for them, it’s always a step forward.”

Regional center through the years