<Begin Segment 26>

AI: So what you're really describing here is the beginning of, of well-organized, licensed daycare that was affordable for the lower-income families.

EH: Well, yes, and not only affordable, but you had to be within an income range, very low-income scale. And if you had a job, you had to list that, we had to have, I developed all kinds of forms, health examination forms, and parent permission forms, bio sketch forms, and parents had to learn that they needed to give us bona fide telephone numbers and addresses, and if they couldn't pick up their, if the child was (going to) be picked up and somebody else had to substitute, we had to know who that person was, and what the relationship was. And so we, the parents learned from the bottom what parent responsibilities were. And everybody learned. But these were parents who, a lot of them might have been doing domestic work, very low salaries, even at that. So they couldn't pay, if they were earning three hundred to four hundred, five hundred a month at the most, they couldn't pay three, two or three hundred dollars for daycare. So it was not only providing child care, but it was also providing, maintaining jobs for low-income people. And I remember a mother with three kids landed a job at Virginia Mason, and she was pleased and diligent, but she really worried about those kids. And I placed her at First Baptist Church, which was almost, it was closest item to Virginia Mason. And her doctor, one of the doctors that she was around in pediatrics, was interested in her attitude and what she was learning. And he consented to be our program physician, which we had to have, a licensed doctor who could give us advice. We relied mostly on Odessa Brown clinic, but that was a very good feeling.

But I also organized parent meetings, and education programs at Yesler Terrace, the parents and the teachers had certain kinds of problems; bedwetting and, and I called, then I called... child psychiatrist who was stationed at Harborview, and he was very good, because black parents never got the insight of a psychiatrist. And he was very frank and empathetic, he didn't, he wasn't cocky and he didn't yell at the parents, but I remember a parent concerned about her child regressing and bedwetting, and... Dr. Bill Womack, I guess it was, said, "What else is going on in the child's life?" And it took her a while, but she said she had a new boyfriend, and he said, "Are you giving your child your time priority, or are you giving it to the boyfriend?" And, "How does the child relate to the boyfriend?" You know, so it was an eye-opener for a lot of people, that the child's priority, takes priority. But what kind of reactions and how do you bridge the gaps? But these were eye-opener... I had a, I had a doctor who said to a patient, who was a teacher in a daycare center, was having some kind of problems with her little one, and, and the doctor said to her, "What do you expect when you send your kids to a baby factory?" And I was appalled and really angry, and so I wrote this up in a report, and at some point we had medical communication ability, and I wrote this up in a -- "how do you, you do you expect that parent to maintain her job in a daycare center when a doctor takes this kind of attitude?" It was a long time before doctors approved of daycare centers. But it didn't take them long to realize that it was a great thing if, if they didn't have this free daycare available, they wouldn't have the staff that -- and they would have very erratic staff, because if their children didn't have good, reliable care, the mother was going to be constantly upset or worried, or what was she -- sick children was another whole big issue that we had to help solve. We couldn't bring sick children into the center, but we had to help solve that. There was a lot of, daycare is a whole, new chapter.

AI: Well, so how long were, did you do this work with the, with the daycare centers?

EH: Five, five years.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.