Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 17, 1991 TAG: 9102170289
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
If you want advice on how to attack rural poverty, the place to go is Roanoke, Va., and the Virginia Water Project.
And the person to see is Wilma Warren, the closest thing there is to a Mother Teresa for the rural American poor.
Roanoke is the birthplace of a national movement to bring water and services to poor rural communities.
The Rural Community Assistance Program, now in every state, grew out of the insistence of a bunch of Roanokers that poor people just outside their city ought to have safe drinking water just like them.
If you get to know Wilma Warren, you'll hear a lot about Bridgewater and Bristow - Bridgewater, her hometown, and the late Bristow Hardin, her old boss.
"If you didn't grow up in Bridgewater," she likes to say, "you didn't grow up."
Dad was a George Washington National Forest ranger. His five kids grew up splashing around in the North River and soaking up the liberal politics around Bridgewater College, a Church of the Brethren school. Wilma wanted to be president of the United States.
But after attending Bridgewater College, she wrote radio shows for a Harrisonburg music company. She married James M. Warren III, a Staunton photographer, and they wound up in Roanoke.
After she'd had four children and was in her late 30s, Wilma Warren became secretary at Roanoke's West End Elementary School, one of the first Western Virginia schools to desegregate and a place that turned her life around.
Principal Bristow Hardin was a thundering foe of poverty, a jolly man, too, with a graduate degree in drama.
He saved paper tubes for rainy-day duels with teachers. He extracted confessions from mischievous students with his "lie detector," a wooden toy with a propeller that, he said, changed direction when a lie was told. He counseled feuds around the school at 10th Street and Campbell Avenue Southwest.
And he gave Warren an introductory course in poverty. She came to know its smell in the homes of her students, "like cabbage cooked a thousand years." She wondered at the resilience of kids living in circumstances so bleak "even Albert Einstein couldn't overcome."
Hardin and his wife, Teeny, were her closest friends, and when Bristow Hardin was named first director of Roanoke's anti-poverty agency, Total Action Against Poverty, Warren became his assistant.
They began in 1965 with no desks and three phones on the floor in an old flour mill on Shenandoah Avenue. The world of Wilma Warren, once a quiet housewife who vacuumed her living room every single day, enlarged once again.
TAP founder and Salem businessman Cabell Brand rushed into her office and told her to grab one of those phones off the floor and get some big shot at the White House for him.
The big shot called right back. "You talk about empowerment," she said. "That empowered me."
Hardin assigned an impoverished area of the Roanoke Valley to every staffer, including Warren and himself. They went door to door, eyeballing the problems.
Clean drinking water was the big one in rural areas, especially in poor, predominantly black settlements long neglected by county governments. Cities were required to provide safe water to residents; counties were not.
At a country store in Botetourt County, Warren found people paying a nickel for a Coke bottle of tap water. They bought six at a time. Warren saw that a bath for thousands of Virginians was an occasional dip in a tub filled with heated creek water.
How, Warren wondered, could poor people move up in the world if they couldn't even keep themselves and their children clean?
When she asked legislators about the discrepancy in city and county services, they told her, well, country people could move to cities to get water. That infuriated her.
She heard another refrain from well-heeled county supervisors: "Listen, I carried water for my mother until I was 17 years old." Yes, Warren noted, and you wouldn't want to do it again.
Everywhere, she encountered the myth that country springs gushed pure water, somehow miraculously spared from contamination by sewage, fertilizers, animal waste and pesticides. That just wasn't so, she argued.
At Hardin's insistence, she began working on plans in 1967 for a special TAP unit, the Demonstration Water Project. It would get plumbing into rural homes near Roanoke.
"Bristow became obsessed with it," Warren remembers. "That's all he talked about."
By early 1975, the project had birthed the National Demonstration Project, later RCAP, and the Roanoke office was going statewide as the Virginia Water Project.
One Saturday afternoon that summer, Hardin died of a heart attack near a Smith Mountain Lake cabin his family owned with Warren.
The death of Warren's good friend at 52 was awful for everybody at TAP, and that Monday morning, Warren awoke to another startling realization. "Bristow Hardin," she remembers thinking, "you ran off and left me with the Virginia Water Project."
She finished plans for the new statewide agency. She went to state and national board meetings, but she refused offers to be the Virginia Water Project's director, at least until the first director quit in 1977.
She'd become the Queen of Sludge, she joked. Divorced by then, she put heart and soul into her job.
Under her leadership, the Virginia Water Project has generated $224 million in public and private money for drinking water and wastewater systems across the state. It's brought help to 77,419 Virginia homes and a lot more individuals.
"They brought 180,000 people water and wastewater for the first time," TAP director Ted Edlich said.
Finally, somebody had filled the gap in water services for rural Virginians. "There just wasn't anything until the Virginia Water Project," said Fay Lohr, director of Virginia's Office of Community Services.
The number of rural Virginia households with incomplete plumbing has been cut by two-thirds since 1960. There were 270,000 such homes in that year's census, down to 90,000 in 1980 - a population still about the size of Roanoke's.
Details from the 1990 census are not available, but Warren thinks she's still far from her goal of making Virginia the first state to lick rural water problems.
Democrats and Republicans at the General Assembly praise Warren, her 16 staff members and the dozens of outreach workers who coordinate her work around the state. Bills to fund the water project have never failed.
This year, the project's taking a 10 percent cut in funding because of the state budget crisis. The water project had won $450,000 each of the previous three years.
"Wilma Warren is a sly old fox," said water-project board member Maxine Waller of Ivanhoe. She said Warren knows how to pull the right strings in a nice, honest way.
Warren can schmooze with governors and university presidents one day, Waller said, and the next, " . . . she can come to Southwest Virginia and sit down in a tar-paper shack and feel comfortable. Wilma is able to be in both worlds and still do what's right."
"I think that group has probably gotten as much bang for the buck as any similar group in the commonwealth," said Sen. Dudley Emick, D-Fincastle.
Del. Alan Diamonstein, D-Newport News, said thousands of people around the state can thank Wilma Warren and the water project for finally acquiring the "small conveniences" of life.
The water project's always been politically savvy.
In December 1978, somebody on President Jimmy Carter's staff made the mistaken assumption that the water project was a holdover from Richard Nixon's administration. They were going to cut the project's federal money.
Cabell Brand had project admirers around the state call Washington. Warren's office got an urgent call from the White House. They wanted to go home for Christmas but were being deluged with calls from Virginia. "Is there any way," a Carter aide asked meekly, "you could turn it off?"
Warren is annoyed by most national politics. "I'm mad and frustrated," she said, "that poverty's really not on the national agenda."
Democratic and Republican presidents alike, she said, are more eager to earn a place in international history than deal with suffering at home.
Virginia's current plight is no help, either. Gov. Douglas Wilder wanted to attack rural poverty, Warren said, then was hit with the budget mess. "We've got our chief executive who would do something, but he hasn't got any walking-around money," she said. "We're going backwards."
The rural poor will suffer more in this recession than poor people in cities, she thinks. "There are more rural people living on the edge financially than there are urban," she said.
"Heart" is a word people often use when they talk about Wilma Warren, who's 64 now.
Warren's aide of many years, Mary Terry, remembers her boss growing tearful when she heard about an old Franklin County woman who, on crutches, hauled water up her hill from a creek.
Around Roanoke County, Warren found conditions unchanged since the turn of the century. She helped Oldfields, a black community near Hollins where people were still without water and plumbing in the 1980s. Many were elderly.
"Here they were," Warren said, "at the end of their lives and didn't even have water."
It galled her that some Virginians walked half a mile to an outhouse at night and used slop jars at home to contain their waste.
Warren has changed a lot of that.
Residents of the Botetourt County community of Eagle Rock soon will no longer live with the shame of their sewage being piped directly into the James River. With the Virginia Water Project's help and a fat state grant, the county will build a $985,000 treatment plant.
Trammel, a community in the coalfields, is putting its first wastewater system on line soon, thanks to the water project.
Sister Pauline Champagne, a nun and project outreach worker in Buchanan County, just got water in the home of a family with four children. They no longer have to depend on a creek that often runs dry. For the first time, the children can take baths.
Fay Lohr, the state's director of community services, said the water project's mission goes beyond drilling wells and paying for hardware. "They empower communities," she said, "communities that don't believe very much in themselves."
That's important to Warren, and so she has a rule: She'll fire a staffer who goes into a community and starts filling out grant application forms. That's not helping people, she says; they need to learn how to do it themselves.
Warren's crazy about rural places. "I feel a greater sense of reality when I'm in those communities and when I'm talking to those people," she says.
She wants to write a book about how Virginia communities like Mule Hell and Scratch Ankle got their names.
"I'd say she is probably the most knowledgeable person I know in the area of rural development - nationally," Edlich said.
Some say even internationally.
When the Caribbean island of St. Croix lost water and services in Hurricane Hugo in 1989, "The first person they called was Wilma Warren at the Virginia Water Project," Brand said.
When Poland, India and Scotland needed advice on rural development and water, they sent for Wilma Warren. The Ford Foundation has paid for her travels.
The United Nations sent officials from Kenya, Venezuela and other countries to the water project. The World Bank has sent officials from around the world to Roanoke, and so has the State Department.
Warren's had her share of sadness, too, the last few years.
Her eldest child, Frank, committed suicide six years ago. He'd suffered from schizophrenia since his junior year of architecture study at the University of Virginia.
And her office burned in a fire that destroyed TAP headquarters in December 1989. Communities that her staff had helped years ago sent sympathy cards and money.
Mary Terry, Warren's aide, picked through the burned-out building and salvaged a printout of the project's mailing list, something they'd developed over 20 years.
The project's work has continued through two moves since the fire - first to rent-free quarters at Crestar Bank downtown and then, with $20,000 worth of donated bank furniture, to an office building on Peters Creek Road. They'll eventually move into TAP's new central offices in the Crystal Tower building downtown.
Right now, Warren and her staff are cranking out projects to get water services to 125 more Virginia communities.
Warren's kids are grown now, and she's a grandmother. Sons Jim and Steve are in Roanoke - Jim's in sales at Roanoke Book & Stationery; Steve is a Red Cross spokesman here. Daughter Jane Hazlegrove is moving back to Virginia from North Carolina soon with her family.
Last fall, when the national Rural Community Assistance Program gave Warren a special award for her service to rural America, her children wrote her a letter.
"You gave us, your children, so much to dream about," they wrote. "We were not told what limits would be put on us in this life, or who we should become to please you. And for so many rural Virginians in poverty, you have done the same thing."
Wilma Warren's not thinking about putting any limits on her life, either. "I really feel now like I'm doing what I was meant to do."
Besides, she said, "I'm not tired. I'm not ready to give up."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB