Howard Agee:
changing the outlook for mental illness
BY PETER S. SCHOLTES
WHEN HOWARD AGEE LEARNED that one of his grown children had a mental illness, he looked for help. But in Minnesota, in the 1970s, there were no public supports that helped those with serious mental illness to find medication, jobs, or housing. Before 1977, when a small group of advocates formed what is now the Minnesota branch of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness), state funding for community mental health programs was zero.
“You had a choice,” says NAMI-MN communications director Chuck Krueger. “Live with your family, live in the streets, or live in an institution.”
Agee (B.S. ’49) was part of the coalition that changed that. He joined NAMI-MN’s board in 1986 after retiring from Prudential Life Insurance, where he’d been a marketing manager, and became a lobbying force—an educator of legislators. “He really could get people to do stuff,” says Krueger. “He became the board president, and through his leadership we were able to get more support groups, more residential programs, more case workers.”
Agee says his proudest moment remains the 1987 passage of the Minnesota Comprehensive Mental Health Act, which became a template for similar legislation around the country. The law finally gave mental illness the status of, well, an illness—“not poor parenting, not being lazy,” explains Agee. In 1989, he also played a significant role in convincing lawmakers to pass a bill that funded mental-illness services.
Today Agee is chairman emeritus for NAMI-MN—“that means I’m over the hill,” he jokes—and has the same infectious, wide smile as the photos in his old newspaper clippings. His wife, Lorraine Agee, first encountered his persuasiveness outside a dance at Coffman Memorial Union in 1943. They recall the story with good-humored frankness, while sitting in their Columbia Heights home.
“I had just broken up with someone else, so I thought I’d go pick up a sailor,” says Lorraine.
“So I’m the one she picked up,” says Howard.
Born in 1925, in Independence, Kansas, and raised in Missouri, Howard Agee had joined the Navy in San Francisco after high school and was sent to the University for electrician’s training. He had been quarantined to campus the night he met Lorraine—there’d been a notice of spinal meningitis. So he went to check out the dance and never made it inside.
“She gave me her phone number, ‘Cherry 2888,’ ” he recalls. “I remembered it: ‘Two people sat down and ate cherries.’ ”
They married in California 65 years ago this June. They returned to the Twin Cities while expecting their first baby, and Howard attended the University on the GI Bill. He was studying engineering until an interest test showed he would do better working with people than with things. He switched to what is now the College of Education and Human Development and graduated in 1949.
Howard taught high-school math and physics for two years before going into sales to support a growing family. He and Lorraine raised five children and now have eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Howard put his education background to use in insurance, giving seminars in seven states, as well as managing a sales force 50 strong.
He retired at the age of 59 and brought just as much energy to a life of volunteerism, often with Lorraine at his side, until health issues slowed them both. Howard might have made his biggest mark educating the public about an illness that had been stigmatized for too long.
“It’s not popular to be mentally ill,” he says. “Now we’re fearful that with the cutback in financing that this is an area that will be cut, because it’s still not popular. It’s a long battle.”