<Begin Segment 17>

AI: Oh, excuse me. So, now when was it that you went back to work, and you were hired at Public Health?

EH: Well, I, before Public Health I got hired on a new program, a new federal program called Model Cities came on immediately after OEO. And that was to get cities involved, signed contracts that would get cities involved to change some of the social systems, employment, particularly housing. And when... Model Cities covered a wider area, covered the whole city, and at some point, Walt Hundley had said to Dorothy Hollingsworth, who was a public school social worker but had taken leave to work for Model Cities, and was kind of his assistant director. And at one point, we were trying to expand daycare and couldn't find a director who could, who was qualified to take on that directorship. It covered a wide, a whole city, so it was a bigger job than CAMP was ever going to be. And she called and asked if I would come back or somehow help her find more locations for daycare. So I was willing to do that for a year, year-and-a-half, I worked on, solely on finding potential licensable facilities. Then when I got through with that, then she asked me to come on and stay on and monitor the health and nutrition areas. Because for preschool programs, the government will outline all the phases of the program that need monitoring, and you have to do that. Daycare is a very detailed business, and if you don't watch it and see to it that every one of these are complied to, it's so easy for, because you're so encumbered with so many details, that you let things slip or wait, and then it doesn't get done. But anyway, that's when, because I was having to monitor health and nutrition, and I developed, even when I was running CAMP, we had to develop exam forms and parents' approval forms and any number of forms. I'm afraid we really inundated the parents with forms, but oftentimes we would call parent meetings in each center and go through these steps one by one, and explain why we had to have them. But certainly, once daycare got started, it really picked up speed.

And the other thing that Licensing began to do was license daycare homes. A mother could take care of up to six children in her, in her home, providing she met all the license requirements. And I think in those days, I think daycare homes also have to be on one floor, they have to have a suitable backyard, fenced backyard, play equipment, and if you got more than six children, then you could hire an assistant, and sometimes it required more because as the children got older, or older sibs would have to have someplace to come, come to after school, and it was much more convenient to have the children at one center. But daycare home operators also then began to learn some details, and you couldn't just be a normal stay-at-home mother and let the kids, like your own kids, freely play. It took some time; they had to, they organized daycare home associations, and we would bring speakers in, or we would invite them to come to daycare center meetings, but very often, what happens in the daycare home is a little different from centers. So there was really a lot of learning. I think the community colleges even picked up on that kind of training.

AI: Well, so excuse me, when was it then that you then moved to Public Health after doing this monitoring on the nutrition and health in the --

EH: Well, and it was in that process, I was at, it was called... I think Seattle Childcare. I was probably there for about four years, and I kept badgering Dorothy Hollingsworth, who was directing then -- by that time, I think we had about twenty-five daycare, licensed daycare centers and homes, and covering from Ballard to the south end of Rainier Valley, and I was having to travel those areas, so I was driving a lot. But one of the things that happened was Ross Labs -- [coughs] -- excuse me. Ross Labs came up with a research result that said milk has no iron, and we all grew up thinking milk was the perfect food, but I would often have parents say, "Well, don't worry about it. He gets a lot of milk." But because milk has no iron, it creates, it causes low hematocrits, meaning the blood cell has to have iron to carry oxygen to the brain, for instance, and if you don't have iron, you're not (going to) have -- and vitamin C -- you're not (going to) have adequate amount of iron developing the cells. And, and if you're poor, meat is probably the highest cost item in the food budget, so the children don't get a lot of meat, and meat is where your iron is, probably your, meat is your prevalent source of iron.

The other thing is, the finding was that babies under one don't digest cow's milk as well, therefore they worked on, they developed milk, soy milk, Similac came on the scene about that time. I think I was using Similac before that, but anyway, so what Ross Lab wanted to do was change our use of milk to change it to Similac, because soybean has, is a very rich source of iron. Soybeans, actually, has more protein, calcium, iron... and potassium? Maybe one other food element that... actually, I think soybean is what saved all of China. But Public Health had a head nutritionist whose belief was that private industry has no business using a public agency to increase their business and potential.

[Interruption]

EH: I talked to the nutritionist at length, and she wouldn't come off of that pitch. So I said to Ross Lab, who came to me because they couldn't find, Odessa Brown clinic said they didn't have an adequate lab staff, and they couldn't get involved, and nobody else was willing to undertake the state Public Health. Philosophy was that King County had the biggest population in poverty, and therefore King County had to accept this and be the onstart. But this nutritionist wouldn't get off of that pitch, so I said to Ross Lab... I knew probably six or eight months before I went to Public Health that I was going there, but I decided, "Okay, I'm (going to) take advantage of this freedom of Public Health." I said, "I'd be willing to call a meeting of medical people, pediatricians and nurses and Head Start people, anybody who's involved with preschool groups, to at least listen to you. And I'm not (going to) promise anything, I'm not (going to) advocate it so much, but let, give them an opportunity to hear your pitch." And I got forty-five people immediately, and we met for six or seven months. We got a, Mary Bridge Hospital in Tacoma, I think, had a contract to work with Muckleshoots, or one of the Indian tribes, and Indian tribes are autonomous of county or state jurisdiction, so they had accepted the Ross Lab findings, and were beginning to use soy milk. Plus the fact that Ross Lab was willing to donate certain number of case to each preschool or infant center, and this was also an education opportunity, because I think at that point, who of us knew that milk didn't have any iron? It was practically that situation. And it just made sense to this group of forty-five, and we talked about it and implementing it all.

So anyway, it took four or five meetings. I forgot what the Mary Bridge doctor's name was, but she came up and spoke a couple of times, and talked about the kinds of implementations she used to get women in the reservation areas. They were scattered, and some of them didn't have transportation and that kind of thing. But, but they had developed kind of a food stamp, it was called WIC, Women, Infants, Children nutrition, and that's what they're still using. But when the group decided, "Okay, let's present this to Public Health," and I didn't mention anything about the nutritionists' philosophy, but when the group decided to go talk to... I can't remember his name. Dr.... anyway, and he was about to retire, but he said, "Hey, look at this, Bernadine, it sounds, it sounds good, don't you think?" She had to go along with it, and that's how it got started.

So then immediately she had to contact State Health, and they had to set up statewide meetings. And I remember that one of the first meetings held on this whole issue ended up in Ellensburg, because that's the central location for the state, and people came out from Yakima and Spokane and places. That, that was a good, successful experience. They, eventually we had to move out of -- we were, Seattle Day program, Seattle, Seattle Daycare, I guess it was called, it was at 200 Broadway in a small, it was a two-story brick building, but we had only the first floor, and there wasn't a meeting room big enough. And I had also asked the nurse in Red Cross, who was dealing with daycare and infant center particularly, they helped us open one at Garfield High School for teenage mothers, and we hired, we stole a domestic science teacher out of Renton who ran that program at Garfield. But, so we moved our meeting to Red Cross, the Red Cross building down on Twenty-fifth somewhere. And then it wasn't long before it became a statewide program, and it got instituted. And it really picked up speed. Now, WIC is being used all over the place.

When I was working at Public Health -- I did this before I got into Public Health, because I didn't want to have to buck the nutritionist, so that I was out of the WIC picture by the time I got to Public Health, and that was all right. It was, now it's going boom, but that, her jurisdiction deprived the state of two years of WIC benefits before we got it going, and that's too bad. When I, they called the first pediatrician's meeting at the University of Washington to introduce this, and I just thought I would go listen to what kind of questions the doctors were going to come up with, and the opening statement, there was the same Ross Lab people at the podium and saying, "The mother of WIC in this state is Elaine Hayes" -- [laughs] -- and I didn't know that was (going to) happen, but I, I just thought, "Well, I guess that's, that's one way to look at it." And it, as I watched in Public Health, the issuance of WIC, they called them WIC certificates, it's really a booming business. By the time refugees, the Vietnam refugees came along, it was a boom. I think they couldn't have, daycare centers, infant centers couldn't have operated without the help. And it got so that the parents then had to, in over three or four year time, the parents then had to bring in their own supply of Similac.

I lived through the introduction of a big debate over disposable diapers versus regular diapers, and there was a philosophy that they didn't want disposable diapers polluting the air -- [laughs] -- and the way it would, and the city even instituted -- and I think Walt Hundley was a little bit responsible for this -- they installed a... I don't know that it was called a diaper disposable furnace of a small kind, high, high heat disposal on, I think at the Cherry, Eighteenth and Cherry DSHS office. Somewhere right in there, that, that furnace never got used for some reason. There was always a controversy about... and then it wasn't long, right at that time, diaper service came into play. And that was a nip and tuck, there was a debate about whether diaper service was safe. Eventually, I think they won, 'cause a lot of people began to use that service. In the daycare centers, that was really a godsend, because though I think now probably a lot of daycare centers probably use disposable diapers, but there was a time when we were using diaper service in the infant centers. That was nip and tuck.

The other thing, I guess, eventually, when I got into Public Health, the other thing we did was institute first aid training. And I, I virtually got into Public Health because there was one nurse who was willing cope with this whole new big concept. There weren't a lot of Public Health nurses that were empathetic to daycare. They just thought it was going to be a big problem area. But training was going to make a lot of difference, and Anita Pitts was willing to institute some training programs. One of the things she did was assign a nurse practitioner, a pediatric nurse practitioner to work with me to do first aid training, but we covered not only accidents, but also preventative, identifying communicable diseases or symptoms, and accident preventions, but also need to know what, what, how to handle a child that falls, has a severe fall, or a child that throws up.

And we had to, we mandated... every center had, every staffperson had to have an annual first aid certification, and then we did four hours of that, and then four hours of CPR training with the fire department. And they were always willing to come and train. And that's, that's a big chunk of a day; I mean, it took eight hours on a Saturday, on a precious Saturday, for these daycare staff to do that. And that got enlarged into, it became a mandatory issue in licensing all over. Initially when I did it, it was just the twenty-five contracted centers, but that was interesting. And we learned a lot in the process; I mean, I wouldn't have picked up CPR, and the firemen that were certified to do this, I think they enjoyed presenting that program. It was interesting to... there was... see, what was it? Jinka was his last name, but he's a Sansei kid, there's a, there's a big Jinka family here, and he was, we knew Joyce Jinka in Garfield, and I suppose he may, he was probably a Garfield graduate. But anyway, those were, and we used the first aid manual, and used overhead projectors. I used to carry around boxes of printed material. And Public Health had tons of printed material that... I, you can't expect people to absorb everything in four hours, so we have to pass them printed material so that they could review it. Now, they finally, by the time I left in '86, they came out with a manual, a first aid manual, and that should be well-used.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.