Former Residents share their thoughts on Chuck Dederich, aka CED aka The Old Man
“In my reading assorted “Synanon” writing, aside from the names noted above, he has been referred to by the more disparaging sobriquets: Chuckles and Fat Charlie.” Cordelia Becker
“Chuck often referred to himself in grandiose terms, like herd of one elephant, Capo, and the like. It was all part of what he called “sociometry” by which he meant the process of setting himself, or someone else up to be a leader, someone who would be respected and obeyed. Part of the process always involved getting the best housing, best food, best table, best vehicle, etc. This was used for facility directors, department heads, and of course, for Chuck himself.” George Farnsworth
“No Chuck, no Synanon. Where would the ideas, the excitement of ” newness” come from. Who could make learning anything, worth while, to those of us that were dead inside, who hated the thought of changing and didn’t give in to anyone. I’m a dopefiend. I didn’t learn, that wasn’t my style. That Chuck guy, just something about him that made me listen. He gave me a chance to see a way out of shame and anger about the life I had lived. I learned persistence and how to hang tough. I really do believe, without Chuck and his ability to get through to me, without me kicking and yelling all the way. I couldn’t have done it.” Danny Anderson
“I recall Chuck’s first wife who was in Tomales Bay at the time (Dede’s mom) warned us early on. She said “Chuck will destroy Synanon. That is his pattern. His whole life everything that he did that was good he destroyed.” That was her opinion.” Ron Cook
Yes, Chuck got his insight from his trip with LSD 25. You don’t get that kind of vision from kissing a bottle of Thunderbird. He developed his charisma with people from a couple of years of stage time while in Alcoholics Anonymous. Being a cross between P.T. Barnum and W.C. Fields and having read “The Prince” by Niccolo Machiavelli and Adolpho’s “Mein Kampf” he was armed and ready for his mission in life. After finding a library book by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Big Blue Santa Monica bus and rutting around in a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant for some discarded fortune cookies containing thoughts of wisdom, he took the door off a storefront in Ocean Park and sitting on the cornerstone of his yet to-be-built Pyramid, and………….waited. Bob Whiteside
“Without Chuck, none of us would be having this conversation at all. I know; a lot of other people did an awful lot too, and without guys like Wilbur, Ted, Dan, Franky, Joe, Reid, etc., Synanon would not have been the same. But this is not about any of them. This is about the dynamic that created and launched an idea. Chuck was, after all, human. Though many of us, myself included, somewhat deified the old man, he was as flawed as the rest of us. He was what he was, plus what we wanted him to be for each of us.” Bob Adler
“On more then one occasion I heard the Old Man say one of these days I’ll come up with something that will run everybody out the door. We always thought it was a joke. Perhaps he was ‘kidding on the square’” Bruce Tobman
“Why do we continue to refer to that psychopath by the familiar and affectionate “Chuck,” like he was our buddy or something rather than the guy who tried to enslave us and rip us off? And who did.” Dave Gerstel
“That is the question, isn’t it? I call it, “The Cult Never Leaves You.” Many are still under his spell. I find myself slipping under it now and again, but less and less these days. I know what you mean about trying to describe the compromising. I had to peel layers and layers off my shell to finally acknowledge the hurt and humiliation I suffered, unburying emotions that I ignored while there.” Thank you for all your thoughtful writing pieces.” Janet Dart
“We were a special group listening to a guy drone on and on about electricity. I kept nodding my head and trying to focus on his face as if I knew what he was talking about. So did everyone else. Our attention was riveted on this discourse. Apparently. Chuck wandered into the room and sat down. He listened for a while. When the speaker asked for questions none of us had any. I did not want to ask anything because I figured everybody else understood and I was the only lame in the group. Chuck asked him questions. Many questions. I learned that Chuck was no different from me. He didn’t know what this guy was talking about but he was able to humble himself and ask the right questions (Why should he care about electricity? After-all you turn it on and get light or you don’t?). Because he cared about everything. He was just wanting to know things.” Dayla Thill
“Chuck was no hero. He was a “highly successful businessman” who exploited us like slave labor. While he and his spoiled, arrogant kin and cronies lived in mansions waited on by hordes of servants, many of us lived in bunkhouses with 300 sharing a communal bathroom with no partitions between the toilet stalls. All the while we were babbling mandatorily that we lived in utopia. Hero my Ass.” Gary Jones
“The first time I ran into Chuck, I was just turning a tight corner in TB’s kitchen. Face to face, not a foot apart. He seemed to me such an outlandish figure. Less than a foot in front of me, with his contorted, unpleasant, twitching facial features and his dead eye boring a hole through me…his huge hairy body draped with silly overalls, red socks, and slipper-like footwear stood the man I had heard so much about. I’d been in Synanon for about two months. I Had never seen the man close up. I could feel how aware and bright the man was. No mistake there. And right away, he knew the terrible thoughts … thinking about how gross this sudden meeting in the TB kitchen was for me. He could read it in my eyes, I was sure. I understood he would tear me apart in front of all those people for my unkind thoughts. I was ready to split right then and there. Instead, I reached out my hand, said it’s really nice to finally meet you, and we shook hands. He started asking some friendly questions. We chatted a bit and parted. By then, he looked nothing like the bulk of the unholy. He looked like a guy who had lost some nerve endings because of a stroke and was overweight. Not really very scary at all…to me.” Danny Anderson
“Before Chuck left, I sat with him at Think Table one morning. He was back on his meds and open about his bipolar disorder: “You know I built Synanon in a manic fury for the first 20 years. After it peaked, I became depressed. I brought it crashing down all around me.” Elena Broslovsky
“I felt protective of the man who had changed my life for the better and whose vision I held dear. My time around Chuck and Betty informed the best of who I am. My sense of having free will, my stance of gratitude, my desire to connect with others, to be inclusive, open-minded, and curious.” Elena Broslovsky
“Just before he died I made a visit to his and Ginny’s home in Visalia. He was not near being the same man I ran into that morning in TB. I just had to ask him about his lack of “words” during that visit. He told me “I have nothing left to say”. Very great sense of loss in those words for me. CED was a great man… and then he wasn’t, in my humble and surely outnumbered opinion.” Danny Anderson
“I don’t think people’s sense of gratitude is misguided – but maybe it makes them cut him more slack then he deserved, I don’t know. After all, he did start the place and deserves that credit, even if other things transpired later. I know Betty was pretty rough on him in private, as I heard her tell him one day “oh shut up you old drunk!” Oops, I was embarrassed (no, not in front of the kids!). No problem if you have no affection for the old dude, that sort of thing has to be earned or not. But I think it’s realistic to give him whatever credit is due for being the founder of our only refuge.” Ben Parks
“I lived at Tomales Bay from 1968 to 1973 and had ample chance to see Chuck in person. As for Chuck’s “wisdom”, he seemed inanely full of himself. I listened to hundreds of hours of tapes of early Synanon Games and meetings. All I heard was a loudmouthed, overbearing idiot browbeating a bunch of scared addicts. Since leaving Synanon I have had taken over 10 years of college courses including enrichment courses while teaching the physical sciences and have travelled to over 80 countries. Comparatively the intellectual atmosphere fostered by Chuck was vacuous and verbose.” Gary Jones
“I know that a lot of you people love Chuck Dederich. I’m not sure why – is it some misguided sense of gratitude or what – I just can’t really understand. I personally had absolutely NO affection for that man. Another thing – I’ve never once heard anybody mention how rude – how disrespectful – how terribly Chuck used to speak to Betty D in front of other people. Even the squares were discussing it right in front of me during one of their trips.” Anne Lombardo
“Synanon gave me a strength that I never knew I had and perhaps that is why, when my wife passed away I did not go out and get loaded. I do not want to remember Synanon as some of the people have described and yet I have an unyielding curiosity to know. Well I guess there will be a lot of questions that cannot be fully understood or answered. I pray for the man as I know we shared the same pain. God Bless Synanon And god bless Charles E. Diedrich, for the place — he has been a part of my personal history.” John DeGaglia
“He had asked the group that he was talking to at the time if they were loyal to him or to Synanon, to a man/woman they all answered, TO HIM. His reply was, “haven’t you learned anything at all — it is to Synanon that you must be loyal first“. To me that makes sense but also to me it seems he did not practice what he preached.” John DeGaglia
“I loved the man, he made incredible sacrifices for all of us. The shame is that others do not respect him for what he did and forgive him for the very same weaknesses that we all demonstrate on a daily basis. If you appreciate anything that you received at Synanon then you must be thankful to him for it was truly all his doing…strengths and weaknesses. I always feel so defensive towards him as I see too much of the criticism coming from those that do not seem to appreciate the benefits they received because of his largeness.” Ron Cook
“The things that Chuck was very good at pointing out were the ways in which we had of demonstrated our “lack of awareness, encapsulation, and tunnel vision,” Chuck taught us that we had a “need for immediate gratification” because we never learned to grow up. (I have since discovered information that suggests it is not so simply explained.) But at the time, it seemed to me there was a great deal of truth to be found in this philosophy.” “Ann Lombardo
“Some people’s resentment about Chuck is the reason I have very little to with former residents of Synanon. The people who are the most angry at our dead founder are the folks who sucked the hardest on his ass while he was alive. I have always viewed Chuck as my greatest teacher. Nothing more…nothing less. I never saw Chuck as a God or my daddy… just a great teacher.” Bruce Keller
He was charismatic, he was funny, he was bright, he was involved. His instincts were unbelievable, in that when he made a suggestion to someone as to how they had lived their lives or how they should change their lives, it was an almost egoless suggestion, which was new to me. He was really involved with other people and operating from a position of moral ascendency. I fell in love. Harold Benjamin
“The contract with the Old Man’s infallibility was built into the fabric of the society. It was for me a very painful but important lesson about confusing the message with the messenger. Norman Johnson
“In Synanon I sat in a stew with Chuck for three days. It was one of the most awesome experiences in my life, one I will never forget. To sit all this time participating with The Old Man as he taught and gamed was like watching an artist paint. His face and dead eye did not give away a thing. He was composed and articulate and made you think.” Anon
(Chuck said)…“Why don’t you get the fuck out of here?” …”The second before he said that, I was positive that I would live in Synanon for the rest of my life. The minute, the second, the microsecond the end of that phrase got out of his mouth, I was gone. It was over. I got up, and I said, “I think that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”…”Chuck… “made it possible for me to become mensch enough to do it under the proper circumstances. I really believe that to be true.”…”He banged me into a corner, and I left, and it was all over, and I have never looked back.’ Harold Benjamin
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