A reel horror
HER ROAD from perdition to salvation starts and ends in Sunset Park. When her father died in 1987, Donna Mae DePola, then 38, rummaged in his dropped ceiling on 54th St., where she knew he hid a loaded handgun, and discovered 12 tin canisters containing reel-to-reel films.
“I was a drug addict in early recovery,” Depola, 63, says now, sitting in her office as president and CEO of the Resource Training and Counseling Center, a substance-abuse treatment program on 39th St. in the Brooklyn neighborhood.
“I started using drugs at 9,” she says. “Quaaludes. Then ups, downs, mushrooms, acid. Anything to make the pain go away.”
Unable to find a reel-to-reel film projector, Depola gave the 12 tins to her psychologist, Joan Standora, who discovered that Depola’s father, Teddy, a TV repairman, had filmed his rapes of his daughter, dating each film can, a cinematic family album of incest.
“It started when I was 4,” she says. “He threatened to kill me if I told anyone. It only stopped when I moved out at 17. My mother had to know, but she was terrified of him. He was an animal. He beat me every day. He beat her. She was a victim, too. But my older sister said he never molested her. And my kid brother, who joined the Marines young and became a cop in Seattle, never suspected anything.”
To this day, Depola never carries change in her pockets because it reminds her of her father approaching her bedroom door, jingling pocket coins.
“As a kid, I thought the incest was normal,” she says. “I remember telling a girl at PS 94 about what my dad did to me the night before and she was horrified. I asked, ‘Why? Don’t you have sex with your father too?’ ”
Depola began using cocaine every day and having sex with a parade of neighborhood guys. “I was an ugly kid with a big Afro hairdo, and I used sex to make guys like me,” she says.
On May 25, 1969, Depola married a Norwegian seaman. “To get away from my father,” she says. “I worked on a freighter to Norway with my husband. Great guy, but after six weeks I flew home. Divorced him.”
She be- came a “functional coke addict,” operating successful delis in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge.
On Sept. 9, 1973, she married again, this time a wealthy fuel oil company owner.
“I helped start Bravo ambulance service,” she says. “And one day in an ambulance I looked at the woman with me and I was overwhelmingly attracted to her. We kissed. But she was married with kids. I didn’t want to wreck her family. So I went to her sisterin-law for advice. And she hit on me. My husband was a wonderful guy — still a friend — and he told me to do what makes me happy. So I ran off with her to Seattle for a few years.”
Depola returned and took over the Lutheran Medical Center coffee shop. “I was a good businesswoman,” she says. “I had a forceful personality just like my father, and like him I could only work for myself because I could never take orders.”
In 1985, Depola sat in her coffee shop office, a big pile of cocaine on her desk from a $4,000-a-week habit, as her mother was having open-heart surgery upstairs. The sick moment made her confront her own mortality.
“My life was a waste,” she says. “I went into drug treatment. I relapsed. Back to treatment. Then to Holliswood Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, because I also had psych issues. I was there the day the Mets won the World Series in 1986. A year later, my father died. And I found the 12 tins in his ceiling.”
In 1994, Depola used her business acumen to team with Standora to start the nonprofit Resource Center to train alcohol and substance abuse counselors. The center has since graduated 9,000 people, operating in five locations, but is headquartered on 39th St. in Sunset Park, 15 short blocks and a galaxy from the bedroom on 54th St. where her father abused her. On film. The films have been burned, but Donna Mae Depola has written a self-published autobiographical novel called “Twelve Tins” about her journey from hell to salvation.
“If it helps one person who’s experienced some of what I did, the six years it took to write it will be worth it.”