Once a month, Regina and Sherman Steinberg load boxes of Tasty Kakes and Dunkin' Sticks into their daughter's minivan and drive through Spring Grove Hospital Center to the door of Red Brick Cottage 3 -- a home of trapped minds they will unlock with their own key.

Inside wait Dwayne, a cherubic man given to repetition, and Gregory, whose cogent conversation gives way to rambling discussions of mass conspiracy, and a woman whose name may or may not be Lois, who has been at Spring Grove so long that the Steinbergs cannot remember just how long it has been.

Regina Steinberg has been making this journey for a half-century as a member of the Golden Rule Guild for Mental Aid, a Northwest Baltimore group that next month will celebrate its 50th anniversary of helping the mentally ill.

The guild, begun as a gathering of concerned young women, has quietly become one of the most enduring volunteer presences in Maryland's state mental hospitals.

Its members have been witness to a period of monumental change in the treatment of the mentally ill -- from the era of dungeonlike institutions where patients were locked away and forgotten, to the release of thousands of patients across the country thanks to anti-psychotic drugs.

"I think they provide a socialization link to the community that wouldn't be made any other way," Fred Hitchcock, director of volunteer services for the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said of the guild. "They have made long-lasting friendships, because they're not part of the medical team, they're not part of the social work. They're the community saying, 'We miss you.' "

But there are fewer and fewer patients for the guild to visit. The hospitals they serve -- Spring Grove in Catonsville and Springfield Hospital Center in Sykesville -- hold a fraction of the population they once did, with Spring Grove's population dwindling to about 400.

State legislators have ordered the drafting of a plan by summer to shift more patients into residential treatment programs or close one or more of Maryland's eight psychiatric hospitals.

Like the hospitals it serves, some members of the guild worry that their group could become a thing of the past. The guild's oldest member is 91; the youngest, in her early 50s. It has 35 members, down from a high of 150.

'Worst story ever told'

The guild was born with the publication in 1949 of "Maryland's Shame," a series of articles in The Sun described as "the worst story ever told" by the newspaper. It featured pictures of rows of women patients in padlocked chairs, where they stayed all day because there were not enough attendants to handle them. It showed "idiot" children sleeping two to a bed; men lying nude in their own filth.

Rose Golden, a young registered nurse in Northwest Baltimore, had a relative at Spring Grove at the time. She knew about the conditions there -- and she decided it was time to do something. So she gathered together women like her -- relatives, friends, many of them housewives with small children who knew nothing about mental illness.

A dozen women met in 1949 -- eight of whom are still members. "It grew like Topsy," says Golden, now 84.

The name was chosen not for the guild's founder, but for the way its members hoped to treat the patients they met.

Norma Moritz, 73, the group's president, was 22 when she joined. "I hadn't done anything like that before," she says.

And she didn't quite know what she was getting into until she saw the first patients -- catatonic, disheveled and dirty. She helped the other women pass out coffee and sweets, unsure that any of the patients really understood what was happening, either.

Then came the breakthrough moment. "They lined the corridor and applauded us," Moritz remembers. "And then [attendants] locked the doors behind us."

Roslyn Leiter, 79, of Mount Washington, another original member, remembers visiting a group of chronic patients at Spring Grove during the 1960s.

'Couldn't say anything'

She sat next to a woman so lost in her own world that when Leiter put something in her lap, it immediately fell off. But several visits later, Leiter said, "She came up to me and said, 'I knew you were here. I just couldn't say anything.' "

They raised money for the patients with spaghetti dinners, ad books, bake sales and bingo game after bingo game. They held "treats" -- evenings of coffee and bingo -- for patients. Once a year they'd hold donor appreciation dinners with elaborate musical productions.

The first gifts were small but important to the patients: cigarettes, cosmetics, toothpaste. The women in the group couldn't believe that the patients had no mirrors, no way to see themselves to put on a bit of rouge. Glass was not allowed. The guild donated metal mirrors.

They gave colorful plastic dinnerware, equipment for an eye clinic, a public address system to pipe music into dining rooms, a library project. Later, the guild began to hold Passover Seders for Jewish patients -- giving about 50 people each year a precious chance to leave their hospital for a day to journey to a Pikesville synagogue.

'Fantastic, outstanding'

Betty Jean Maus, director of volunteer services at Springfield, has known members of the guild practically since it formed -- she has worked at Springfield for 44 years.

"One fantastic, outstanding group," she called them. "They've given us pianos. They've given us TVs. They have given us so much. Whatever the need would be, you just asked them and you got it."

And they found out that wasn't enough.

"The parties we've given, the gifts, the TVs, the furniture we've bought, are all fine, but where's the rest of the 'dose' that will really complete the recovery?" Leiter wrote to Gov. Marvin Mandel in 1969. "Maybe many more Community Mental Health Clinics, and Day Centers, easily accessible and better-staffed, will keep our troubled citizens from drowning in the tidal waves of impersonal institutional existence."

In part, the guild has seen what it wanted come to pass. It has now shifted some work to the homeless shelters, group homes and halfway houses where the mentally ill, released from institutions, often end up. But guild members also oppose the idea of closing a place like Spring Grove.

"These people do not belong out, because they don't have homes," Regina Steinberg says angrily.

In the guild's heyday, there were as many as eight "treats" a month. Over the years, as the hospitals' population dwindled and the guild's ranks thinned and grayed, the visits have come less frequently -- now about once a month.

'I'm lucky like that'

Still the Steinbergs, of Pikesville, unload their offerings for about 36 patients at Red Brick 3. "We love when they come," says patient Dwayne. "We don't get much sweets."

The bingo cards are passed around. All is quiet as the patients somberly mark their numbers -- until Kenneth, a gap-toothed man in a worn navy cardigan, jumps up to shout: "Bingo, bingo, bingo!" He runs across the room to retrieve his prize bag of potato chips.

"I'm lucky like that," Kenneth says later. "Born to be a winner."

One by one, the patients all are lucky on this night. Norma Miller, who at 84 is co-chairwoman of the treat committee, calls out combinations until every last player has won.

They collect prizes of toothpaste, costume jewelry, hand lotion. Mary, whose broken glasses are held together with tape, carefully picks out a strand of lavender pearls. "Pretty," she says.

Quickly and shyly, as if someone might take away their gifts, the patients return to their familiar ward with the lime-green walls. The woman who may or may not be named Lois lingers.

Tonight, Regina Steinberg notes, Lois' hair looks shinier than usual, her teeth look better, and instead of being agitated as she sometimes is, Lois is quiet and sweet.

"I notice you're getting better all the time," Regina, 76, says to her. "One of these days I expect to see you go home."

Lois hugs Regina. She hugs Sherman. She calls him Pop. Then she shuffles back onto the ward.

Forty minutes after it began, the Spring Grove treat is over.