Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 5, 1992 TAG: 9201050112
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
ADVERSITY SHAPED SHELTER BOSS
The women who work at Roanoke's shelter for battered women have a story they like to tell on their director, Darlene Young.A couple of years ago, a young woman, homeless and alcoholic, was sleeping in the bushes near the shelter. The staff would sneak out back and give her money and food.
Then Young "caught us and chewed us out," shelter counselor Rita Mullins recalls.
Young lectured her staff: She wanted to help people like the woman, but the shelter had only enough to help battered women and their children.
Three days later, staffers at the shelter caught Young sneaking the woman food. She just couldn't let her go hungry.
"We still give her a hard time over that," Mullins said.
The story illustrates two things that Darlene Young's admirers say about her: She works hard to stretch the shelter's tight budget - and she has a big heart that often defies book-learned administrative methods.
It's no wonder. Young took a less-than-traditional path to the director's job at the Turning Point shelter. She survived crunching poverty and violence as a young girl in Roanoke's slums, and then overcame a lack of a college education and years of on-the-job frustration.
In her six years as a staffer at the shelter - the last four as director - Young has helped oversee an expansion of its programs and an increase of nearly 400 percent in the number of women and children it serves.
Young said the tough times she's endured in her life have helped her learn the skills that are needed for helping abused women and children. "It takes love and compassion. That's what it takes from all of us here."
People in the Roanoke Valley who are concerned about domestic violence say Young has those qualities in abundance.
"She's just wise and warm and wonderful," said Gloria Charlton, a social worker who has referred battered women to the shelter. The shelter "is really a protective place," Charlton said.
"I'd go to the ends of the Earth for her," said one former shelter resident, 73. "That woman works hard. I don't think people really give her credit for how hard she works."
One recent night, Young was going out her front door on the way to church when the phone rang. A problem at the shelter. She gave instructions about how to handle it and went on to her Thursday night worship service.
The moment she got home from church, the phone was ringing. Another call from the shelter.
"I wish I could reach a happy medium where I could slow down a bit," Young said. "I just can't seem to do it."
The Turning Point, a program of Roanoke's Salvation Army post, provides food, shelter, support, counseling and myriad other services to hundreds of women and children each year.
It's in a building that once was the main clubhouse for the Salvation Army - the same building where Young found refuge as a girl during the 1940s and 1950s from the bleakness of one of Roanoke's poorest neighborhoods.
A tough childhood
For much of her childhood, she lived near the Norfolk and Western tracks, in a rundown two-story house west of downtown. Her family lived in three upstairs rooms with no kitchen sink. They carried up buckets of water from downstairs.
Darlene, her grandmother and her two brothers all slept in one room - she and her grandmother in one bed and the boys in the other. Her mother slept on a roll-away bed in the living room.
Young remembers being a little girl, perhaps 8 or 9, and being awakened after midnight by her grandmother.
Her grandmother would heat up a poker in a pot-bellied stove until it glowed red. Then, if Darlene's mother came home with a man, her grandmother would chase him away with the poker.
Young never knew who her father was. "I begged my mother to tell me, but she never would."
Both her mother and grandmother had tough lives. Young's grandfather had served a long prison sentence for murder.
Young's mother held the same job for more than 30 years, grinding glass lenses at American Optical. She died at 52 from cirrhosis of the liver, which Darlene learned later was a result of alcoholism that grew worse over the years.
Going to the Salvation Army was the one thing in her life that Darlene looked forward to. She and the other children learned sewing and played volleyball. "I lived to get over to the Salvation Army. It was peaceful. It was different from anything that I was used to."
Some neighbor girls introduced her to the Salvation Army - which then had its main offices on Salem Avenue - when she was 8. She became a junior soldier in the Salvation Army when she was 10 and a senior soldier when she was 14.
A change in plans
After graduating from high school, Darlene got a job as a sales clerk at Heironimus department store.
In 1957, at age 18, she married Dalton Young.
She wanted to be a Salvation Army minister. But being a minister - an officer in the organization's hierarchy - required that both husband and wife commit themselves and attend training together. At first, Dalton didn't want to be a preacher. Later, he felt the call, but by then Darlene had become pregnant.
They planned to put things off until after the child was born.
With her husband away in the service, Young was living with her mother, who by then had a place of her own. Young's grandmother had promised to give her a baby shower, and Darlene had invited "all these big deals" she worked for at the department store.
Then her grandmother called and told her: "I'm not gonna give you your shower because your mother was drunk and came down here and tore up my place."
Young told her that her mother didn't even drink.
Her grandmother said to go look in her mother's closet.
Young did, and discovered it was full of shopping bags stuffed with empty liquor bottles. She started throwing them onto the floor one by one, shattering them.
Later, her grandmother came in and saw what Young had done. She threw Young to the ground. "She really beat me half to death."
Young has always believed that beating was why her daughter was born with cerebral palsy. With a handicapped child, she and her husband were unable to go away to study for the ministry.
She went through a couple of years of bitterness: "Why did God do this to us?" But anger couldn't shake her basic commitment to the faith that the Salvation Army had instilled in her.
She took a job as a receptionist at the Salvation Army. Later, she became the organization's social services director, doling small handouts to help the needy.
Rescued by the flood
When she was asked to become the Salvation Army's bookkeeper, she dutifully took the job - and suffered almost every minute of it. "You can't even balance your checkbook," her husband teased her when she started.
At age 46, she felt frustrated and stuck.
She was dedicated to the Salvation Army's mission, but she hated being the bookkeeper. She was ready to quit.
Then the flood came.
The waters that surged through the Roanoke Valley in November 1985 left a trail of destruction - and a flood of contributions to the Salvation Army to help its victims.
The local commander at the time, Capt. Allen Satterlee, persuaded Young to stick around long enough to handle all the new paperwork.
Then Satterlee offered her a new job - as an advocate at the battered woman's shelter.
Young said she'd been happily married for years. It wouldn't be the right job for her, she said.
Satterlee persisted, and Young agreed to take the job and the pay cut that went along with it - anything to work with people instead of paper.
She learned her job as the shelter's advocate from scratch. She helped women swear out warrants against abusive mates, went to court with them, found them housing, protected them from husbands who wouldn't give up even after a judge had convicted them.
"I've been chased and cussed at and spit at and everything else," Young said. "But I'm not afraid. Our lives are in danger all the time around here."
Young loved her new job but thought she'd never be able to become director, because she didn't have a college degree. But in 1988, just before he left to take a post in Alabama, Satterlee offered Young the director's job.
"Me?" she asked. "Remember, you said I didn't have the education for it."
He said he was willing to take a chance on her. She had the experience and the know-how.
"Sometimes you expect someone to do well - and they exceed your expectations," Satterlee said in a recent telephone interview from Alabama.
Staying confident
Young said the current post commander, Capt. Dean Hinson, has shown confidence in her just as Satterlee did. He lets her run the show and trusts her judgment.
Her biggest problem has been staying confident in herself.
When she took over the director's job, "I was constantly waiting to make a mistake. . . . I still get scared. I still get insecure."
She gets nervous when she has to speak in public - something she does nearly 100 times a year. But she gets her message across by speaking plainly and conversationally - from the heart.
Once, before she talked to a group of teachers in Roanoke County, "I was petrified. I was worried about my English."
She prayed beforehand, then "just let it all out." She told the teachers all about how tough things had been for her growing up. Some were teary-eyed by the end.
Mullins, who has worked with Young for six years, said both she and Young had rough childhoods that made it hard to believe in themselves when they became adults. But "somewhere along the way, telling these women they should feel good about themselves, we convinced ourselves of that, too."
Young also has learned that she doesn't need a college degree to meet the administrative demands of running a human services program, such as writing the grant proposals that have helped keep the shelter growing.
"I said I'd never be able to do that," she said. But now "I know I can do anything I set my head to."
Two of her six daughters have followed in her footsteps. Her adoptive daughter, Sharon, is a Salvation Army minister, and her youngest daughter, Robin, is in training to become an officer.
For herself, Young said that she wouldn't be where she is today without the Salvation Army.
"I think people who give, give because somewhere along the way somebody cared about them enough to help them. Really, I think that's what life is all about."
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