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AI: Well, so now, before our break, you were just talking about your work with the daycare centers being developed under CAMP's program, and so you were there in the late '60s and into the early '70s?

EH: No, I stayed with it for five years, roughly. One of the things that happened was my, one of my youngsters was cutting school too much, and I decided, "Okay, it's time for me to watch the homefront a bit." But as I -- and we had just moved into Roosevelt, Ravenna area in the late, well, '66. So there was a certain amount of being familiar, getting reacquainted with a new environment, and then I became active in that PTA, but also did things then to accommodate a better cross-section, that Roosevelt could be quite an elitist school, but OEO was just starting, and OEO was significant in that not only did daycare start up, but they were opening up doors for a wider cross-section, and also then making the public aware, and the city aware of where and when it had to change. They also tried to change housing patterns a little bit, but when Mayor Braman came into CAMP to say, "What can we do?" knowing what happened at Watts, and Watts happened in '65, late '65, and that was a riotous situation. That, I think, allowed CAMP to, for instance, point up that Seattle also is missing cross-town transportation. In those days, all the buses went downtown, and if you wanted to go to the University District from Central Area, you had to go downtown and take a bus out to the University District. So that's one of the things CAMP was able to do, put them, put cross-town transportation into effect.

The other thing that happened was the hospitals were in outlying, particularly Children's Orthopedic was way out there in Sand Point, and here was a concentration of a population that needed medical facilities, particularly for children, closer at hand. A lot of people didn't have cars, even, and to pay a cab or to find somebody to give 'em ride to Children's Orthopedic was a job. So Odessa Brown clinic got established in Central Area, and Children's Orthopedic took it upon themselves to make this an annex of Children's Orthopedic. That made a lot of difference in the world. I was having trouble, for instance, getting, mandating physical exams for children, and dental exams. And the only place they could go -- at least for dental -- was Public Health. And initially, even when enrichment programs were started in early December, we would somehow help parents get dental attention if they needed it. But I remember a couple of families coming back to me, saying, complaining, and saying that they didn't want to go back to Public Health because they were kept waiting there right straight through staff's lunch hours, and then they may or may not get served. And when you're a single mother with three or four children hungry at lunchtime, and still having to wait for the staff to get back to get dental attention, that's so inconsiderate and unfair, I said, "Okay, I'm not asking, I'm not (going to) ask you to go back to Public Health. We'll find the money to get dental services for you." But that's the kind of thing that often happened; it was hard enough, I think, for black parents in those days to go to a white institution or white service doctors and nurses. They didn't really, they couldn't be confident in what they were, services they were getting. But that's the kind of thing that, it took a while for people to build up enough confidence.

One of the, I think one my great satisfactions in the daycare situation was to provide daycare to enable parents to get whatever jobs they can, or go to school and not have to worry about what their children were going through. I had a, I remember one mother who finally landed a job as a nurse -- no, as a LPN, Licensed Practical Nurse at Virginia Mason, and she was a single parent and had three kids, but grateful that she got the job, and she loved the doctor that she was working for. As she communicated with that doctor about daycare and some of the concerns that staff was expressing, he was willing to become our program doctor. And by that time, I think I had three or four centers, so he wasn't seeing every child, but he was kind of overseeing, or if I had problems, questions, I was free to call him. And he would come out very regularly. Sometimes I think we even had to meet on Saturdays for him to go over files. But that kind of thing probably wouldn't have happened had that kind of bridge not established. And Elsie was just a faithful, hard-working mother, and she was, her kids were at First Baptist, so she was in walking distance from Virginia Mason. But there were any number of health problems that -- and sometimes, sometimes it was a problem to get parents to, to take you seriously, and if they had a question, a health question, I just couldn't risk letting them come back into a center without a doctor signing off on... but that was happening all over the country.

When I was working for Public Health, or even before I got to Public Health, I would get calls from daycare centers hither and yon. A lot of them from Rainier, Rainier Valley area, to say, "What is shigellosis?" And I would explain to them and they, and their reaction would be, "How are we supposed to know this?" It was a black daycare operator, and I, at that point, I had to say, "Look, that's one of those diarrhea situations that you have to get a doctor's release." In fact, I think it was shigellosis that required two negative stool cultures before you could come back into a daycare center. And in one case, a doctor had signed off to say, "This child's been in the hospital with shigellosis, but she's recovered and free to come back." And I had to call that doctor back and say, "You know, I need proof that she's had double-negative stool cultures." And, "What? I never heard of that. Where'd you get that information?" And I said, "Well, call the epidemiologist in Public Health." But, so sometimes you ran into challenging situations like that, but all over the, particularly south end, Beacon Hill, West Seattle.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.