50 Years of Small Victories

When 20-year-old Alice Morrison unpacked her Saratoga trunk in her tiny room at the Vineland (N.J.) Training School in 1900, she had a sinking sensation. The silent, halting students she had just seen were far different from the kind she had been taught to cope with at the New Hampton (N.H.) Literary and Biblical Institution.

In 1900, when Alice Morrison came to Vineland, it was one of three pioneer institutions for the mentally deficient,* had been going just twelve years. The rest of the U.S. knew precious little about retarded children (i.e., those with an intelligence fixed below the twelve-year level) or what could be done for them. Horrified and grief-stricken parents hid the unhappy children in back rooms or sent them to be cared for in inadequately equipped asylums.

A Stammered Grace. When Alice Morrison arrived, the school owned six buildings and had 200 students. She spent a long day looking around her and sizing up her job. As she surveyed the children's bowed heads at the evening meal and listened to one youngster repeat a stammered grace, she made up her mind to stay.

She stayed. She married one of the school officials, Charles Emerson Nash, set up housekeeping in the administration building. To many of the children whose parents never visited them, the Nashes became "Mother" and "Pop."

As director of studies, Alice Nash was continually exploring new possibilities for her limited boys & girls: music, dramatics, dancing and a variety of handicrafts as well as slow-motion versions of the three Rs. Vineland became known as one of the foremost schools for mental deficients in the U.S.

Places in the World. Most of her victories were small ones: teaching a mongoloid boy (with a three-year-old's intelligence) to plow a straight furrow; coaxing a few words from a six-year-old who had never spoken; teaching a girl to sew a straight hem or weave a towel. But she also fought for places in the outside world for students she felt were ready, every year sent 15 or 20 out to earn their own way. During World War II she had the satisfaction of seeing a hundred of her "boys" accepted for service.

Last week, as Alice Nash completed her 50th year there, Vineland's 93 buildings spread over a broad, 1,100-acre campus. A hundred Vineland boys ran a 400-acre farm which helped feed the school's 550 students. The school had already fostered five other New Jersey institutions for the mentally retarded, served as the model for such schools as far away as Australia. The next step was a $1,000,000 fund-raising drive to build a new research center and expand the school's facilities.

As the drive got under way, 70-year-old Alice Morrison Nash sat in the crowded ballroom of Manhattan's Statler Hotel one night last week and listened to tributes from Nobel Prizewinner Pearl Buck, Stateswoman Ruth Bryan Rohde and New Jersey Governor Alfred E. Driscoll. She nodded happily at the applause of friends, former students and parents who had gathered to honor her, then prepared to return to her boys & girls at Vineland.

*The others: Walter E. Fernald State School in Waverley, Mass., established in 1848; and the Elwyn (Pa.) Training School, established in 1852.

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