Call Schaper took his sister Rebecca to some of the places he once lived.

He was No. 70, a right guard for the Greenville High Red Raiders.

Three years younger, she was a cheerleader.

Brother and sister from a well-to-do family that lived on Chanticleer Drive in Greenville. Their father was a textile executive, their mother a debutante. The perfect couple.  The perfect family. Everyone thought so.

Few knew the truth.

Life inside that house festered with a mother’s schizophrenia and attempts to control the voices and the hallucinations with vodka, and an embarrassed father concerned with social standing and how things looked.

Call Richmond and his sister Rebecca Schaper emerged, yet their lives in the ensuing 30 years could not have been more different.

Richmond spent decades moving from town to town across the country, homeless and hearing voices only in his mind, surviving on odd jobs, Budweiser and Jack Daniel and whatever discarded cigarette butts he could find.

Schaper went to the University of South Carolina to study criminal justice, but instead met a national champion track star who six months later would become her husband. They raised two daughters, one of whom works with Jim Schaper at the software development company he founded seven years ago in Atlanta.

And in all the time they were apart, Schaper never gave up on her brother, even though others did.

“We don’t remember each other as children,” Schaper said. Blocked out, perhaps, by the chaos that controlled their lives. Schaper remembers having to go spend the night at a friends house and learned later it was the first time her mother was committed to Marshall Pickens Hospital.

Schaper was 6 when her mother tried to kill herself. Schaper learned later it was her second attempt. She remembers seeing her mother pour vodka into a glass and drink it straight and begging her mother to stop. “For me,” the little girl would plead.

As a teen she became stand-in mother for her younger brother as Richmond went off to Presbyterian College. But between semesters of his senior year, Richmond left school and began what would be 20 years on the road, some of it beside the railroad tracks in the woods off Poinsett Highway.

Mary Richmond, their mother, swallowed pills with vodka one night and died. Eleven years later, Call Richmond Sr. shot himself in the heart in the shower of the Chanticleer home. Schaper said he, too, had suffered from depression and had been hospitalized for it. She learned later a Boy Scout leader abused him.  

Schaper said through it all she never forgot Call Jr. She did not know where he was or even if he was alive. There was a phone call once. One visit. Then, about 10 years ago, her mother-in-law who lives in Anderson called. Call had been to her house to pick up furniture for Haven of Rest rescue mission.

The next day, Schaper drove to Anderson and there was her brother standing in the parking lot of the mission. They hugged. They cried.

“I haven’t let him out of my sight since,” she said.

She moved him into an apartment, got him treatment and made sure he took his medication. It has not been easy. Even the simplest tasks such as cutting toenails can be a problem for him. There has been one regression, and Richmond was hospitalized, but the journey generally has been slow and steady.

Their story is the subject of a documentary by Emmy-award winning filmmaker Kyle Tekiela to be released in time for the festival circuit next spring. Schaper says the film is her life’s mission. She wants to lift the veil of secrecy, to reduce the stigma people place on mental illness and the homeless.

Bill Lindsey, the executive director of the South Carolina chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the perception of mental illness has certainly improved in the past 10 years, but the stigma remains.

This, even though one in four people in this country suffer from some form of mental illness. It must be seen as an illness just the same as diabetes, he said. It’s not a choice. It’s not behavior. It’s a problem with chemical development in the brain.  

Along the way, Schaper said she’s learned some things about herself – to be more patient and quiet, that she had to take care of herself before she could even hope to care for others. That she was not Call’s mother. She had to let go.   

And so perhaps it is a good thing that she is at her family’s beach house this weekend at DeBourdeau near Georgetown and Call is doing something on his own, with three high school pals.

He is attending his 40th high school reunion at the Shrine Club. The first reunion he has been to.

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