Paul Otero flew in from Omaha for the reunion, and after the hugs and handshakes, he peeled away from the crowd to talk about his family and give me a tour of his sprawling childhood home in northwest Denver.
Chances are good the home did not look much like yours.
You should hope your childhood did not resemble his, either.
“As a kid, you’re trying to figure out your value in the world,” he told me Sunday. “Kids outside this place would point their finger at you when you went to school.
“We were a mystery to them. They’d want to know what went on here. You’d hear words like ‘bastard’ and ‘illegitimate.’ ”
Otero grew up in the Mount St. Vincent Home for Children at 4159 Lowell Blvd., a three-story brick building that for most of its history housed boys who were orphans, abandoned or the children of unwed mothers.
Founded in 1883 by the Sisters of Charity, Mount St. Vincent celebrated its 125th anniversary this weekend. More than 200 former residents showed up.
Most were grown men. They all remembered their sisters.
“When I was here from 1952 to 1964, there were 75 boys and 25 sisters,” said Otero, a thick-chested man of 57 with a mane of black hair just starting to gray. “The nuns played such a vital role. They were our friends, our mothers, our teachers.
“They were even our fathers because they played ball with us,” he said. “They were the most important part of our lives.”
Each family is its own private world. Some are unknowable.
Otero was born here in 1950 at the Florence Crittenton Home hospital. His mom was 14; his dad was 17 and not in the picture.
He has never met them.
Otero showed me the cursory history of his childhood in Mount St. Vincent’s ledgers. His parents are named in neatly penned ink. Whoever inscribed the boy’s last name misspelled it “Ortero.”
He matter-of-factly summed up his early life. “My mother couldn’t take care of me, and back in the 1950s it was a stigma with unwed mothers,” he said.
From the Crittenton Home, Otero went to the Infant of Prague, a Catholic nursery. Two years later he was brought to Mount St. Vincent. It was here that he learned the bonds of brotherhood, even if those brothers came and went, some departing for foster homes or outright adoption.
“The most important thing I got out of this place was the character building, learning how to appreciate other people and do right by them,” Otero said. “And learning from the sisters’ self-reliance and independence. They knew no one was going to take care of us.”
At 13, Otero transferred to Boys Town in Omaha. At 18, he was drafted into the Army, where his hitch included a one-year tour in Vietnam as a combat engineer.
He came home and went to college on the GI Bill and went on to a career as an artist of striking talent. Today, his work hangs in his childhood home. His fifth grandchild is on the way.
Mount St. Vincent serves 110 children these days, 44 of them residents of the therapeutic unit for abused children. Five nuns remain, plus a support staff.
Otero told me what it was like to encounter a nun in the hallway and hear the care in her voice. That’s why he came back.
“This place shaped what’s in my heart,” he said. “This is where my heart is. It’s my family.”
William Porter writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at wporter@denverpost.com or 303-954-1977.
