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Late one Saturday at an Idaho racetrack, a custodian, making his rounds to lock up, came upon an old man sitting placidly in a wheelchair.  He was wearing a brand-new sweatsuit, blue bedroom slippers and a baseball cap inscribed with “Proud to Be an American.”  A typewritten note identified him as “John King,” a retired farmer suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.  In reality, the man was John Kingery, age eighty-two, a former auto worker from Portland, Oregon.  His daughter had apparently removed him from a Portland nursing home and driven him three hundred miles east, where she dumped him.  “Granny-dumping” is on the rise, say observers such as Robert Anzinger, past president of the American College of Emergency Physicains.  He estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 elderly people are left on the doorsteps of hospitals every year.  Whoever brought them there quickly sped away, leaving nurses and other staff to figure out identity, insurance coverage and a plan for the future.

IN-LAWS:  Getting Along with Your Other Family, Ron and Jorie Kincaid, page 155