Word: dale
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YEVONDA GRAHAM'S CHILDHOOD MEMORIES are mostly the stuff of nightmares. In and out of 36 foster homes, Vonda, now 22, says she was sexually abused by relatives, molested by a foster parent and raped as a teenager. By the time she got to the home of Dale Graham and Karla Groschelle in Whitley City, Ky., at 17, she had been in eight hospitals and three group homes and had just run away from her last foster home. Arriving at the couple's house for what she expected to be yet another short-term placement, she remembers...
Instead she found that for the first time in her peripatetic life, she felt at home. Karla and Dale "didn't seem fake," she says. "Usually when I'd act up, my [other] foster parents would just send me away, but they didn't. They stuck in there with me." Even when Vonda's date wrecked Karla's brand-new Durango on prom night, Vonda remembers fondly that Karla was worried more about whether Vonda was hurt than about the car. In fact, for the first several months, things went so well that one evening Vonda sat Karla and Dale...
...still waiting for her happy ending. At 13 she received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She never stayed on the prescribed medications but did get hooked on the painkiller Oxycontin. ("I forget my problems. I forget everything," she says of her addiction.) When Karla, now 47, and Dale, 53, tried to intervene, Vonda resisted. Karla, a therapist, says Vonda once agreed to enroll in a rehab program and then checked herself out just three hours after she arrived. She was arrested in 2002 for breaking into a house to steal money for drugs and has been...
...chasm doesn't occur and that kid is never willing to open that door again." But she also tells parents to "take care of themselves and to accept that they cannot do everything. We're careful not to lay more guilt on the parents." Karla and Dale say their home is open to Vonda as long as she stays clean. But they have also come to accept that their daughter will make the ultimate choice about how to lead her life. "All we can do is be there for her and be supportive when she's going down the right...
...should have cooled by now. "We struggle with that all the time," says Maguire. "Are we picking the scab of something that's already healed? Because we don't know what people are thinking." Radio programmers make it their business to know. "They're still through the floor," says Dale Carter, program director at KFKF in Kansas City, Mo. "There's a technology called the Dial where listeners react to songs, and every time we test the Dixie Chicks ..." Carter makes a noise like a boulder falling from a high cliff. "It's not the music, because we're playing...