The New American Samaritans

It's a serious, stern, responsible deed, To help an unfortunate soul in need, And your one reward, when you quiet his plaint, Is to feel like an opulent, careworn saint.

--Clarence Day

THE American view of charity has altered considerably since the kindly Mr. Day wrote Life With Father. To many, his notion seems oldfashioned, more closely allied with the times of the original good Samaritan than with the thrust of contemporary society. Charity, the fundamental decency of one man helping a less fortunate fellow, seems hopelessly out of date in the era of the welfare state, social activism and racial and ethnic tensions.

To various elements in contemporary American society, the traditional idea of personal charity seems pointless. The liberal posture, devolved from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's welfare state, holds that benefits for the poor, the sick, the needy are in fact their civil right, and should not be dependent on the largesse of some kindhearted, well-heeled benefactor. In this view, charity is a dirty word, a patronizing concept.

On the other hand, many conservatives are scornful of the operators and supporters of government benevolence; they speak of bleeding hearts who coddle people too irresponsible to carve their own living in a plentiful nation. The left-wing radicals take an equally harsh view. They feel that the entire system is so corrupt that not even the existing official machinery can correct society's ills, much less the minuscule efforts of an individual. Thus a man who, say, sponsors a ghetto child for two summer weeks in the country might be accused by the politically devoted liberal of ignoring the proper government channels, sneered at by a right-wing zealot as a "do-gooder" and denounced by a Weatherman as an irrelevant pander to a sick system.

Lifelong Crusade

Yet do-gooder is not everywhere an epithet, and charity remains a vital force. Fortunately, there are many Americans who still practice it. Indeed, there are indications that it is returning to vogue in new forms. All kinds of people are looking for alternatives to the big, impersonal welfare state; the communes of the young, for example, a novel institution in modern America, could not survive without direct, highly personal human interdependence.

Certainly a sense of moral obligation to the needy is deeply implanted in the American character. Day's "opulent, careworn saint" is a firm fixture in the national legacy. John Winthrop, Puritan leader and first Governor of Massachusetts, probably laid down the first American do-gooder's covenant when he told his flock: "We must love one another with a pure heart fervently, we must bear one another's burdens, we must look not only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren." William Penn was a tireless proponent of charity: 'The best recreation is to do good." There will be opportunity for lighter pursuits "when the pale faces are more commiserated, the pinched bellies relieved and the naked backs clothed, when the famished poor, the distressed widow and the helpless orphan are provided for." That notorious moralist Cotton Mather wrote: "If any man ask, Why is it so necessary to do good? I must say, it sounds not like the question of a good man."

During the early days of the Republic, lone fighters set out to cope with problems that a young Government was hopelessly ill-equipped--and indisposed--to conquer. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851) strove to prove that deaf-mutes could be educated; eventually he founded the first free American school for the deaf in Hartford, Conn. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe later did the same for the blind, and astounded the nation by teaching a blind, deaf and mute girl named Laura Bridgman the use of language and a number of manual skills. Perhaps the most famous 19th century American do-gooder was Dorothea Dix (1802-1887). A Boston schoolteacher, she agreed to teach a Sunday-school class for women prisoners in an East Cambridge jail. Appalled to find insane women chained in unheated cells and whipped into submission, she launched a lifelong crusade that resulted in the construction of numerous state hospitals for the insane.

The national obsession with organization inevitably led to the institutionalization of charity. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford: the names conjure images not only of capitalism at its most emphatic but also of philanthropy at its most grandiose. The staggering sums behind their ambitious projects, however, are remote and unattainable to a lone family in need.

Large-scale individual philanthropists still exist. There is Mary Lasker, wealthy beautifier of cities and benefactress of medicine; H. Ross Perot, who offered $100 million for the release of American prisoners of war in Viet Nam; W. Clement Stone, who has donated more than $500,000 for the rehabilitation of drug addicts in New York City. A different kind of do-gooder is Ralph Nader, ceaselessly warring against shoddily made products and unwieldy bureaucracy. He and some lesser imitators are in danger of becoming impersonal themselves and enmeshed in a kind of bureaucracy of protest. They are not dealing in charity; yet they are reminders that the performing of charitable deeds often requires aggressive, even offensive action.

The Laskers and the Naders, like the professional members of sundry organizations, devote most of their time to their work. More significant, perhaps, are the thousands of other Americans who manage to combine doing good with their full-time careers. After the dishes are washed or the office routine completed, they go out to help--in the most personal way--the tired, poor and bewildered. Their works may seem puny in the face of America's overwhelming problems. But such efforts are especially important in an age when the American psyche, increasingly inured to violence, may grow indifferent--like the hardened doctors in Hemingway's sardonic Christmas tale, God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen--to such simply stated goals as peace on earth, good will toward men. While thousands of examples abound, here are nine admittedly arbitrary selections of dedicated Americans who do good for their fellow Americans

WILLIAM MORIN, BUTCHER, AND WIFE JEAN, MINNEAPOLIS.

The clock was striking 9 p.m., signaling the end of Bill Morin's 13-hour shift behind the Red Owl grocery store's meat counter. He was looking forward to a quiet evening in his suburban home. But as soon as he stepped into his house, his anxious wife told him: "Dan's wife called. Dan's gone, and he's got the paycheck." The pair quickly jumped into their car and conducted a door-to-door, bar-to-bar search through Minneapolis' toughest section. They finally found Dan having a drink at a party in a housing project and called his wife, who came to pick him up. The Morins made sure that Dan did not do the driving home, then returned home themselves to enjoy what little remained of their evening together.

Dan was on probation at the time, after several bouts with the law. The Morins, both 49, are part of a new breed of do-gooders in Minnesota's Hennepin County: volunteer probation officers in the department of court services. They joined the first class of volunteers in February 1970 and are probably its most distinguished graduates; they have already been nominated for the National Volunteer Award for their work. Says Ira Schwartz, director of the Hennepin County program: "If the people with master's degrees who come to us had their intuitive skills, we'd be a lot further down the road." The once wayward Dan, now off probation, credits the Morins with transforming him from a worthless roustabout into a steadily employed construction worker with a union badge. "All my life I've been in trouble," he admits. "But they came over and made me talk. Now I feel grown up. It's not that they order you to do things. They're more like friends."

The Morins chose to work primarily with men in the 17-to-28 age bracket who have committed misdemeanors. "We make a good team," Bill says proudly; he concentrates on the man while his wife does what she can for the family. He also belies the stereotype of the blue-collar worker as the grousing, Archie Bunkeresque bigot. He grew up in a tough Polish-American enclave in Minneapolis and is proud of the fact that he has worked since he was twelve years old. But he and Jean, who worked at a day-care center for mentally retarded children until she was hospitalized recently, listened closely to their sons and decided it was time their generation did more than "simply criticize young people." Their involvement has made them unpopular with some of their neighbors; they have even marched in an end-the-war rally. Bill turned down a promotion rather than give up some of the time he spends in the probation program.

FRANK FERREE, HARLINGEN, TEXAS.

On a gray, windy morning in a dusty town near the Mexican border, a battered old van with VOLUNTEER BORDER RELIEF lettered in green on the side pulls up behind a supermarket. The figure who hauls himself from the cab looks like the local citizen most in need of relief. Ferree, 77, a stooped 6 ft. 6 in., has bowed legs, deteriorating teeth and a face that looks like an old rock weathered by dust storms. Indeed, he is the scavenger he appears; for 25 years he has scuttled through the alleys of Harlingen, scrounging loaves of day-old bread, wilting fruit and vegetables, soup bones, used soap from motels. Always, in return, he spends a few minutes picking up trash or sweeping.

Ferree puts affluence's refuse to remarkable purpose. Four times weekly he climbs into a worn old bus and distributes these goods to the Mexican migrant workers who live in brutalizing squalor on both sides of the Rio Grande. But that only begins his chores. After persistent dunning, drug companies have shipped tons of vitamins and medicines to Harlingen, and Ferree dispenses them in the Mexican towns of Reynosa and Matamoros, where he has established makeshift clinics in abandoned shacks. He ministers to minor ailments himself; with the help of admiring merchants on both sides of the border, he has arranged more than 200 harelip and cleft-palate operations for children he has found. One of his discoveries was the four-legged Mexican baby successfully operated on at a Houston hospital (TIME, June 28). He has guided another 80 people, young and old--including two blind victims of cataracts and two badly burned children--to successful hospital treatment. In his ramshackle hovel at the edge of Harlingen, the old man has even delivered two babies. Says one of Ferree's occasional volunteer assistants: "We had to blow the dust off the children to see if they were boys or girls."

Ferree's total indifference to his personal life-style annoys some of his neighbors. Says one, a garage mechanic: "I know he does good, but that house of his is a damned eyesore. He lives like a pig." Ferree came into his astonishing enterprise by accident. A native of Nebraska, he bought 20 acres near Harlingen in 1946; he has since sold 19 and given away the proceeds. One day he saw several Mexicans pick banana peels up off the street and eat them. Soon afterward, he says, he found a weeping Chicano family that had been cheated of its wages. "The next thing you know," he muses, "I had them on my hands and began scrounging for them. One thing led to another." Ferree lives on a meager pension he receives from his World War I service in the Signal Corps. What will happen to his charges when he is gone? "Maybe somebody will take it over, maybe not," he says. "I don't think about that. I worry about one cleft palate and one hungry stomach at a time."

MARIE CIRILLO, CLAIBORNE COUNTY, TENN.

The rutted mountains of the eastern Tennessee coal country are scarcely hospitable to doers of good works. Strip mining has raped the Appalachian countryside of its fertility and robbed its people of spirit. They shuffle grimly about, gray as the coal dust that settles over their desolate towns, hostile toward all outsiders, wary even of each other. There is no Hatfield-McCoy romance to their bitter internecine feuds. Sometimes the young are lured away by gaudy tales of life in Cincinnati and Atlanta and Chicago, but they usually return home after the first paycheck to "lay out" under the moon on the gritty hillsides and guzzle from bottles of home-stilled corn.

Into this forbidding setting stepped an equally forbidding woman: Marie Cirillo, 42, a former nun of the Roman Catholic Glenmary Sisters. Four years ago, she resigned from the order and offered her services to the bishop of Nashville. "I had worked with mountain people in Chicago," she says, "and I was curious to find out what these mountains meant to them." She quickly found out what her presence meant to the local populace. Her office and several projects have twice been put to the torch, leering miners have propositioned her, and one of her local sympathizers saw her own house riddled with 32 bullets by night riders.

Miss Cirillo did not bat a conventtrained eye. "I am a community developer, not a social worker," she announced, and she set about developing. Working in a four-county area with a population of 12,000, she has started an industrial-development group, a health council, a folk-art program, adult literacy classes, and is about to tackle the desperate housing and water problems. She also wangled a loan from the Small Business Administration to set up a company that makes wooden pallets for forklift truck cargo. She still runs up against resistance. Twice her blue Volkswagen has been nudged onto precarious mountain-road shoulders. But she has earned the reluctant respect of the miners with her facts-and-figures approach to local problems. For the first time in generations, these obdurate people are angry over mining exploitation; now, too, they are seriously interested in expanded adult classes and establishing a day-care center. Says she: "As they work on these projects, they find themselves talking to people they have ignored for 25 years."

PHILIP POLLNER, PHYSICIAN, WASHINGTON, D.C.

It is the close of another long week at the George Washington University student health center. Dr. Pollner, 32, a handsome physician from The Bronx whose long dark hair curls over the collar of his white medical coat, hurries to finish up his chores. His mind is already on his upcoming three-day weekend; it is the same trip he takes every third week, to Holmes County in the dreary reaches of the Mississippi Delta country. There he will work successive 14-hour days treating, without fee, indigent black farmers and their families, many of whom had never received medical care until Dr. Pollner came along.

He first went to that destitute county --considered the ninth poorest in the nation--because he admired the late Robert F. Kennedy. "I wanted to do something in his memory," says Dr. Pollner; the R.F.K. Foundation directed him to Holmes County. "I saw what Robert Kennedy saw," he says, "and I was shocked. I made a promise to do something to help." He immediately realized that one doctor working by himself for a year could do little. With a trickle of operating money from the foundation, he worked out a comprehensive health program centered on a clinic, then set out to find funds for its establishment.

His two-year search was discouraging. "I thought getting money would be easy, that the hard part would be getting people to go there to work," he admits. "But it was the other way around." Help finally came through one of his patients, a 17-year-old student at Annandale High School in suburban Virginia. The student helped Dr. Pollner round up 4,000 youngsters, who joined him in a 32-mile march. They raised $6,000 and won pledges of funds and equipment from the United Auto Workers, Hewlett-Packard and several pharmaceutical companies. Pollner's makeshift clinic won the support of the local white population in Mississippi and last summer attracted four registered nurses and some 30 student volunteers. They helped the doctor treat up to 50 patients a day. Now, Pollner observes: "The patients got better out of proportion to their treatment. They knew we cared."

MRS. CHARLESZETTA WADDLES, MINISTER, DETROIT.

For months, Detroiters who called a city hall hot line at night or on weekends heard the following recording: "Detroit city offices are closed at the present time, but will be open tomorrow during regular working hours. In the event of an emergency, call Mother Waddles at 925-0901." More than likely, the problem would have been taken care of with compassion and dispatch. Until a story in the Detroit Free Press embarrassed city officials, off-hours calls for financial aid, emotional assistance or emergency relief were referred to Mother Waddles, 59, a freelance philanthropist whom Mayor Roman Gribbs calls "an urban saint."

Mother Waddles' appearance suggests Aunt Jemima rather than St. Charleszetta, but the mayor's description of her is apt. In her "Perpetual Mission," open 24 hours a day on Gratiot Avenue in the city's black ghetto, Mother Waddles and 30 volunteers operate on the skimpiest of budgets; she is currently $65,000 in debt. This year the mission will feed some 100,000 indigents, distribute 1,400 Christmas baskets, serve 400 hot Christmas dinners and provide college scholarships for 100 high school graduates. Mrs. Waddles and her ten children, who range in age from 19 to 44, spend most of their time at the mission aiding an average of 75 families a day. An ordained nondenominational minister, she goes about her works with a Christian devotion tempered by shrewd ghetto sensibilities. "I don't preach," she explains, "but if they ask for a message they got something coming." They also get food and clothing for a pittance if they have it, for nothing if they do not.

Born in St. Louis. Mother Waddles early learned the necessity of virtue. Her father died when she was twelve, and she was forced to drop out of school to support her pregnant mother and six brothers and sisters. She married for the first time at 14 and was widowed at 19. In 1957 she married Payton Waddles, who now makes $ 11,000 a year at the laundry at the Ford River Rouge complex. She plunged into practical missionary work in earnest. "The Bible says we should comfort one another," she says, "but you can't comfort the hungry without food, or the naked without clothing or the sick without medical care." She will soon open a free clinic staffed by eight volunteer doctors and fed by a medicinal lifeline from McKesson & Robbins drug company. She herself lives more humbly than one would suppose. A local television station donated the dress she wore to President Nixon's Inauguration in 1969 as one of 50 Michigan residents selected by the state Republican Party.

WILLIAM BORAH AND RICHARD BAUMBACH JR., LAWYERS, NEW ORLEANS.

As young bucks who grew up in the citadel of Southern elegance, the pair seemed groomed for show rather than toil. Scions of two of New Orleans' most prominent families, they were raised in colonnaded homes safely hidden from public view by delicate hedgewoods and stately live oaks. They graduated together in the top half of their law school class at Tulane; Baumbach then won a Fulbright scholarship to study international law in South America, while Borah entered the master's program in international trade at the London School of Economics. They appeared destined for splendid careers in international trade.

Then in 1965, they renewed their friendship at the Napoleon House, a French Quarter bar. They discussed the imminent construction of an elevated Mississippi riverfront expressway, which would have been an aesthetic catastrophe for the graceful Vieux Carre. They launched a thorough investigation of the project and within two weeks produced a detailed report showing the expressway to be the result of shoddy planning. Their findings did not endear them to the Chamber of Commerce--nor, they were astonished to find, to many of their lifelong friends. They were quietly but firmly pushed out of what they refer to as the "velvet rut." Says Borah: 'If you are born in the right family and keep your mouth shut, you can just ride it on through." But they persevered, haranguing at public meetings, until they finally attracted national attention (the New Orleans papers had conspicuously ignored them). Finally, almost three years later, the young attorneys won what they call "the Second Battle of New Orleans": federal funds for the project were canceled for purely environmental reasons. Borah and Baumbach have now become activist do-gooders; they are New Orleans' resident environmental crusaders--at considerable personal cost. Borah, now 34, and his wife live frugally off the remains of his inheritance while banking her teaching salary; Baumbach, also 34, who never before gave money a second thought, is having difficulty scraping up funds to get his 1963 Chevrolet repaired. "The main thing we've learned," says Borah. ' is not to believe automatically that the so-called experts know what they're talking about." Their latest target: a proposed Mississippi River bridge that they contend would dump an impossible traffic load onto the city's placid uptown streets.

JEAN JACOBS, HOUSEWIFE, SAN FRANCISCO.

As a woman who spent six years of her childhood in an orphanage, Mrs. Jacobs, 56, has an understandably special concern for institutionalized children. She and her husband Tevis, a successful and prominent corporation lawyer, have four children, one adopted, one a foster child. It was only natural that Mrs. Jacobs involve herself in child-care work. She was appointed to the board of trustees for the local Jewish Child Care Center and eventually helped replace the institution with smaller permanent homes for groups of children.

She now calls such activities "all the nice things that people like me do," because she finally discovered that her work was more than a genteel social obligation. One night six years ago she received a call from a friend, whose secretary at that moment was in a state of hysteria in a phone booth opposite San Francisco's Juvenile Hall. The woman's four-year-old child had wandered away from nursery school and had been taken by police to the hall, where his frantic parents found him screaming in an iron-barred crib covered with fishnet. The authorities refused to release the child--until the furious Mrs. Jacobs telephoned a juvenile court judge who ordered the child set free.

The incident goaded Mrs. Jacobs into organizing a campaign to overhaul the city's entire system of dealing with unwanted or delinquent children. She ran headlong into an ineluctable bureaucracy and conditions grimly reminiscent of Oliver Twist. The chief probation officer told her: "If anybody cared about these kids, they wouldn't be here. The community uses Juvenile Hall for a dumping ground." The hall's resident doctor scorned her lack of credentials and said, "What you must realize is that by the time these children get to us, they've been through so much that there is nothing we could do to them that would damage them further."

That is not precisely true. Mrs. Jacobs found out about a girl whose tuberculosis had gone undiscovered in the hall for six months, and another whose broken arm had been improperly set. She found that it was a regular practice to lock children in cold, isolated cells for up to 48 hours as a disciplinary measure. She began to study her bureaucratic form charts, hounded the closed meetings of the juvenile justice commission. As she recalls: "They all sat around politely listening to explanations of practices that seemed insane to me." With her husband footing the bills, Mrs. Jacobs organized a citizens' committee which goaded the city into forming a special outside commission to investigate delinquencies in the juvenile justice system. Almost singlehanded, Mrs. Jacobs has created a sense of community responsibility for the once lamentable conditions in San Francisco's Juvenile Hall and courts.

T.J. DERMOT DUNPHY, BUSINESSMAN, NEW YORK CITY.

It is not easy for a black to get started in a business operation, especially in a field as dominated by whites as fuel-oil service. In May 1970, Charles Wallace was a struggling black businessman on the verge of bankruptcy. He knew little about accounting and finance, and was further handicapped by poor sources of supply and inadequate equipment. Finally he called on Dermot Dunphy and a group of volunteer consultants to minority entrepreneurs, which is run by the Harvard Business School Club of New York. Dunphy sat down with Wallace, broke his problems down into separate categories, then called on volunteers to handle each area. They helped find the proper oil sources and set up an effective bookkeeping section. Now Wallace's thriving business stands to clear half a million dollars this year. Says Wallace: "Dermot is the bridge, the man who makes the contacts when I have a problem that I can't solve. He launched me like a rocket, but he doesn't try to hold my hand."

Wallace is but one of dozens of minority-group small businessmen whom Dunphy and his team have launched. Dunphy sold his own prosperous paper-bag business to the Hammermill Co. in 1968; he now works for the Sealed Air Corp. He joined his former business school roommate, Harold Tanner, in forming a group of top-and middle-level executives who spend five to 15 hours a week helping minority businessmen turn a profit. Says Dunphy: "Jobs and education are still the main event in aiding minority groups in America. But small business is the most difficult field to open compared with education, big business and government. The skills necessary to start a small business are difficult to develop, because you really have to be a jack of all trades."

At 39, Dunphy is just that. A native of Dublin, he earned a law degree at Oxford, then got his M.B.A. at Harvard. In the summer between his two years there, he traveled round the country, picking up such disparate jobs as janitor and private detective. Knocking about made him aware of the plight of minority groups in America, and once he established himself he decided to help out in the way he knew best. As he puts it: "What better thing can I do as a businessman than to communicate to others the skills and values which will contribute to the economic development of a stronger black community?"

ROBERT POULIN, POLICEMAN, WATERVILLE, ME.

On the surface, Poulin looks like a cop right out of Adam 12. He is 6 ft. tall, strapping, fresh-faced and gregarious. He owns a modest seven-room home, has a pretty wife and two healthy children. At 29, Poulin gets along equally well with the townsfolk and students from nearby Colby College. He likes to joke, likes aged bourbon, likes cold beer. Two nights a week he drives 15 miles to the University of Maine campus, where he studies psychology and English composition. He also heads a Boy Scout troop in the best Police Athletic League tradition.

But not quite. Poulin's Troop 416 is agonizingly unique, its membership drawn exclusively from the Hilltop School for retarded and deformed children. Each Friday morning the redoubtable patrolman dons his red bandanna and scoutmaster's cap and takes charge of 15 of the most heartbreaking youngsters in all of New England. One lad has only half a face, another is strapped into a wheelchair, several others are schizophrenic; most have an unfavorable prognosis. During one meeting, a boy who could not talk until Poulin formed the troop reads haltingly through the Scout oath, then breaks into happy shouts of "Scout! Scout!" when he is done.

Another lad begins to laugh, but the laugh quickly plummets into uncontrollable hysteria; he smashes a small Christmas tree to the floor and slams his hand against a windowpane. Three other tiny boys clutch at Poulin's legs, shrieking, and try to bring him down. After an hour and a half Poulin calmly dismisses the troop; the boys are taken back to other classrooms by school aides. "This was nothing," he sighs. "You should see the action when I take the boys on trips. You go into the woods and every time you go hunting for one who's left the trail, three others get lost."

Poulin happened onto his volunteer job one January afternoon in 1970, when he was driving his police car by the academy. He stopped and enthralled the children by letting them play with the flashing light and siren. School officials soon asked him if he would form a Scout troop for a group of difficult youngsters. Now Friday morning is the highlight of the children's week. While the task has cost Poulin money from his own pocket --and considerable emotional pain--he would not give it up for anything. He even manages to visit the school on one of his days off. "They're my boys," he says quietly. "We have a mutual admiration society going here." The admiration extends to the children's parents. Says one mother, Rita Tuttle: "These boys don't need a Santa Claus. They've got Bob Poulin 52 weeks a year."

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