<Begin Segment 23>

AI: Well, I wanted to ask you, before we get too far ahead, that you had started talking about some of your work in preschools and daycare, and I wanted to, to pick up on that, on your, the, kind of the development of your work path there. Because you were, you had begun talking about how with the Madrona preschool, that you got active with doing the fundraising for that, and then what happened next as far as your, your work?

EH: Well, I, when I had Candy and Peter into a co-op, preschool program, which is... it's not totally unique to Seattle, but Seattle was one of the early cities, mid-'30s they started a preschool, a program that parents or adults could learn about preschool and how children learn by participating one day, one morning a month. In those days we were picking up four or five other kids as bringing our own, and we'd spend all day and then take them home. And then the next day, one of our other friends, one of them, another mother would pick up our kids and, and do her bit and come back, and we had monthly business, business and educational meetings. That was a requirement. But because I had that experience, and I think I was the only one in Central Area that had that experience, when CAMP decided to open their daycare program, they called me long distance in Berkeley and asked me to handle that. And I, I was willing at that time to do it part-time, because I'd never had a full-time job with four kids. But when I got home and started that, I found you can't operate daycare centers as a part-time position. Particularly because in those days, you had, you didn't have experienced people. You didn't have people who had even preschool, co-op experience. There was, there were half-a-dozen of us at the YW preschool, and there were one or two other black parents when I got to Madrona.

But at Madrona -- and I was program chairman when... see, Candy must have been six or seven. Anyway, almost from the time Larry got into Madrona, I was active at PTA, and I was doing program chairmans and, chairmanship and we had a program with all the teachers. The teachers came to PTA meetings as well as the parents. It was a good, active group, probably fifty people at least. And the teachers were saying to us, "By the time we get them in kindergarten it's too late." Meaning that that's where the problem areas were in Madrona. And so we began batting our brains about how to solve that and we came up with the idea: can we run a preschool program like the parent co-op programs, but parents -- I mean, the substitutes replace the parents. Because parents, young parents on welfare are not going to feel comfortable. In fact, in those days, there were a lot of blacks who were so ingrained and trained that you don't talk to whites, because in the South it was almost prohibited. If you were (going to) survive, you had to abide by the social culture. And so anyway, we decided we would do that, because I was working for Family Life, already I'd asked for supervisory person if I could do this, and Family Life would support it.

AI: And this was Family Life program at Y...

EH: No, Family Life was an adult education program of Seattle Public Schools. That's who ran the program, the preschool co-ops, and this was 1960-'61, by the time I became part of that staff, instructor staff, they called it. And... '62, anyway, because I was already on that staff, "Could I be assigned to Madrona, and would allow it with substitutes as mothers?" And they were well-aware, and every, I think and everybody in the school system knew that that was a fairly good idea. Everybody was having that problem, if you had racial minorities or low economic families. And Madrona church was willing to let us use their kind of basement facility social hall, which is not a good thing to have for preschool programs, but that was available, and we used it. Madrona then allowed us to use a new auditorium/lunchroom for fundraiser or Christmastime, we have something called Holly Fair. And that was very exciting, because at that point, society were, there were a lot of people aware of where the discrepancies were, so that artists and craftsmen, even restaurateurs and a lot of people were willing to contribute in whatever way they could. We had artists contributing paintings from all over the area. The Swinomish tribe in La Conner was, would send out, send us a box of hand-carved canoes, and those were real art examples. Five dollars was a lot to pay in the early '60s. But it was so successful that we did it every year, and we made our budget to carry on, we paid one, we had one paid teacher. And every, supplies and everything had to be, snacks had to be paid for. That, those were exciting years, and there were suburban areas that were wanting to pitch in and help. And we got invited to Edmonds for, on the water, on the beach, because a lot of Central Area people had never been on a sandy beach. If you lived, if you were born and raised in Seattle, you, you didn't go, you didn't venture out where you didn't know what the reaction was (going to) be. They would just as soon stay where they were welcomed and they knew they were secure. But when we did this, we took carloads out to Edmonds, and our kids had -- the Edmonds groups all chipped in, brought snacks and things.

And we had, one, we had, my job was to visit all these homes of the kids and explain the program, try to get them to come out, and in this case we had a couple of mothers. At least I know two mothers that I picked up. I, we had a nineteen-year-old mother who was born and reared in Seattle, never knew that there was such a thing as a beach. Never been on sand before. And she had a four-year-old, bright four-year-old, Arthur. She, and she kind of began to wander, just walking down the beach, kind of lost time and herself, and, and it got time to leave and she didn't come back. And we were frantic. We didn't know which way to go look for her. And pretty soon, finally, she came back late and apologetic, but she just kept saying, "I didn't know there was a place like this." And you're, she was probably on, on welfare. She had two kids, and when I went to visit her, she didn't have, she had a toilet, but she had no other running water except a kitchen sink. And so she had a big galvanized tub, and she would heat pot after pot of hot water to give the kids a bath. That was her only location. But she was an articulate -- I don't know whether she finished high school -- but anyway, she, she was willing to come.

I had another mother who lived on Twenty-third, and her kids went to Colman, the old Colman school. The one that they condemned for earthquake purposes, but when, once when I went to visit her, she was, she used to, as we rolled past Colman, she would say, "That's where I go to PTA." And at one point, she was caring for fifteen kids, and I said, "How could you? What, how, how did you end up with fifteen children?" She said, well, you know, all her, "My sisters and brothers are always so good to me," 'cause she had, she was a single mother and had three or four kids. And the rest of the family wanted to go home for Thanksgiving or something. It was their one, parents' anniversary or something. So she agreed to take all the nieces and nephews and keep them at her house for a week, and then I began to wonder, what would be welfare's reaction, or what would be Public Health's reaction to this? But she was very calm and collected, and she'd be telling me about how what went on the PTA meetings and, you'd be surprised what the kids could do, even on the stage.

And so there were people who never got a chance to be out of their own community or neighborhood, but they could take short trips like that. And for suburban area people, they also never had a chance to see this kind of population. I remember Edmonds or someplace, it was the Nordstrom family, daughter-in-law, who was teaching school, and she had managed to talk to her kids' third grade, fourth grade class about Madrona enrichment and what kind of children had to go there, and they didn't have anything at home to play with and all. She designed a horse made out of wire and -- what do they call that paste that you make newspaper and paste out of think layers of...

AI: Paper mache?

EH: Mache, paper mache. She had this elegant, heavy horse made out of wire and paper mache, all dried and painted, and loaded it in somebody's truck and brought it to one of our enrichment program, donated it. And it was just all kinds of imaginative ways, Presbyterian, Bellevue, one of the Bellevue Presbyterian churches brought clothes, and they would gather newsprint and crayons and cans of paint and things like that. So they were, they, society to some extent was ready to change. They knew the discrepancies that were going on. They would donate books and things like that.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.