SIOUX CITY -- Don Loomis is thankful he's alive. Thankful Turner Classic Movies shows Westerns. Thankful he can read Nancy Drew mysteries. Thankful for the nickel that comes with each beer or soda can he recycles.

Thankful to be home again, to be stuffing himself with turkey today at the home of a niece.

It's been a rugged road for Loomis, 69. He's thankful for those who befriended him, for those who helped him arrive at this place.

"Now, I've got a good life," he says.

Left Sioux City

Don Loomis' tale begins March 10, 1941, when he was taken from his mother's arms in Sioux City. According to what Loomis learned later from his mom, officials deemed her unfit to care for her six children. His parents had divorced. His father wasn't around.

"My mom told me there was a struggle when a probation officer grabbed me from her arms," Loomis says. "She said I was dropped and had a broken vertebrae and fractured skull. The injuries caused my epilepsy."

Loomis was placed at St. Monica's Home, a Sioux City orphanage. Seizures forced officials one year later to place the boy at the Hospital for Epileptics and School for Feeble-minded in Woodward, Iowa, home to approximately 2,000 residents. The facility is now called the Woodward Recourse Center.

A good place it wasn't, Loomis contends. He was 5 years old when a worker stuffed him in a laundry bag and hung him under a cold shower. He says he was beaten, a baseball bat once cracked over his head.

There were high points, too. He met Roy Rogers and Gene Autry when they stopped at the home in 1948. He shook their hands and now has photos of each in his apartment.

Loomis also met his mother at the Woodward center. She entered his room one night in 1953. Loomis thought he was about to be kidnapped.

"She told me she was my mother," he says. She then explained his fall as a baby and the reasons for his placement at Woodward.

Back to Sioux City, but no plan

Loomis earned a fifth-grade education and later was transferred to mental health facilities in the Iowa communities of Corning and Glenwood. He spent two years at the Woodbury County Home, 1966-68. He also completed a vocational rehabilitation course at Clarinda, Iowa, in 1971 and was placed at the West Central Iowa Shelter in Denison, Iowa, in 1972, where he worked as an assembler.

He was released from state care in the summer of 1973. He was 33 years old and had no income, few family connections.

"I had my freedom, finally," he remembers. "I got drunker than three billy goats and two skunks."

He made his way to Sioux City but couldn't live with his mother, who had a full house in South Sioux City. Loomis took to the streets, sorted through trash bins for food and often slept under a bridge along 11th Street.

"The best places to eat were behind a McDonald's or a bakery," he says.

A Sioux City couple found him under a bridge and took him in. They gave him clothing and warm food. He stayed with them for a year, paying what rent he could.

"They helped someone who needed it," Loomis says. "I will always be grateful for what they did."

Loomis' mother died on Thanksgiving Day in 1974. He moved in with an aunt in Sioux Falls that year and a year later relocated to Des Moines, where he found a job and stayed until 2008. He married another former Woodward resident on Nov. 4, 1983. They divorced in 1994. He says she left him for another man.

They were married 11 years, 12 days. Their divorce was final Nov. 16, 1994.

Loomis stayed in Des Moines, working at a consignment shop and collecting cans. He quit drinking and began speaking about what he calls his "institutional" life for classes at Drake University and Des Moines Area Community College.

He talked of being alone, being medicated constantly and receiving treatment that sounds bizarre by today's standards.

"I told students what I went through and answered what questions they had," he says. "They told me I had spoken to more than 4,000 students at Drake in 10 years. They paid me for telling about my life. It made me feel good to open people's eyes."

He was the first "institutional" or former homeless man hundreds of students had ever met. A few still write him. "They tell me they've never looked at homelessness or institutions the same way again," he says.

A Storm Lake, Iowa, man befriended Loomis a year ago and helped him relocate to the Buena Vista County seat. Loomis liked life there but said he didn't know enough people. In October, friends helped him move to an apartment complex on Court Street near Sioux City's downtown.

Loomis collects $659 in Social Security benefits each month. He surfs the Internet on a computer that a sociology professor and class at Buena Vista University gave him, their gift to him for opening their eyes.

After the bills, Loomis squeezes out $25 and spends it on himself. He buys Seneca cigarettes, cheapest smokes around, he says.

He does his laundry, collects cans and meets with a home health aid weekly. He watches Westerns, reads Nancy Drew and continues to organize his one-bedroom spread.

"I've got 10 banks there on the shelves," he says, pointing a lit cigarette toward shiny piggy banks. "And I've got 100 Christmas cards here that I'm sending to people who have helped me."

He'll get started on the cards after Thanksgiving. The man who was born here and left long ago says he's happy at this place in his life. The sign on his apartment door reads "Home Sweet Home."

"We're having Thanksgiving at my niece's place in Sergeant Bluff," Loomis says. "I'll eat so much turkey, you'll probably hear me gobbling."

He laughs, then shifts and grows serious. He turns the volume down on the television and asks for the final word.

"Never feel sorry for me," he says. "Praise me for what I've accomplished. Praise me for getting out. And please remember what I tell students: If you want respect, give it. If you want a friend, be one."