THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412180076
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATT BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 221 lines
Hot rolls. Homemade. Every Sunday night. With a delicious smell that half a century later still makes Grace V. Johnson smile.
For Johnson - a middle child of 10 born to a young mother and an alcoholic father who left them - the old Edgewater Home for Girls in Norfolk was ``truly a blessing'' in 1940.
But there also was heartache. A mother who didn't always make it on visiting day. No birthday cakes until she was 14 and out of the home. A lifelong difficulty in trusting people, in forming relationships.
Orphanages. They're a hot topic again. Some see them as a tool in reforming the welfare system. But can an idea that worked for a 1940s child like Johnson accommodate the increasingly troubled kids of the late '90s? Most experts don't think so.
``I think these kids are angrier,'' said Arlene A. Eyler, director of the Centerville Group Home in Chesapeake for 10 years. ``They're angry they're not where they ought to be.
``They have more information. They see things on TV and wonder why they don't have them. . . . It's just much, much more complicated.''
The orphanage home where Johnson lived for four years is torn down now. So are many of the other orphanages that operated in Hampton Roads and around the country. Others like the Barry Robinson Center and St. Mary's in Norfolk evolved into facilities that help troubled or disabled children.
Orphanages were phased out as longer life expectancies created fewer true orphans, as increased welfare support for poor families reduced the number of economic orphans, and as a preference for foster care and group-treatment homes emerged in the 1950s.
Child-welfare experts determined, beginning early in the century, that children thrive better in families than in institutions - if not their own families, then in foster or adoptive ones.
But orphanages are being talked about again, if only tentatively. It began after the November elections, when incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested that part of reforming the country's beleaguered welfare system include cutting off payments to unwed teenage mothers, to discourage them from having children before they're ready to care for them.
Under the GOP's ``Personal Responsibility Act'' of its ``Contract With America,'' part of the money saved through welfare reform could be used by states to set up orphanages for the children of these young mothers, until they've finished school or career training and find jobs.
Johnson doesn't think it's altogether a bad idea, particularly for children suffering from deep poverty or neglect or being bounced from foster home to foster home.
But many child-welfare experts decry the proposal, calling it a failed 19th-century answer to a 20th-century problem.
``It seems like an awful experiment to do to children,'' said Miriam J. Cohen, a history professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who specializes in the history of welfare and reform.
``It's a radical experiment in something we haven't seen in a hundred years. What's new about it, is what I haven't seen.''
Like most of the 30 to 40 children at the Edgewater Home, Johnson wasn't a true orphan. But after her father left the family, her mother couldn't care for all 10 children, including a newborn, despite help from private charities such as the Salvation Army and a nearby mission where the kids went after school for ``cocoa and cookies and love and attention.''
The baby and the two oldest girls, who could work part-time, stayed with their mother in the Berkley section. Two brothers went to the old Turney Home for Boys on Massachusetts Avenue in Norfolk.
In 1940, 9-year-old Johnson and four sisters entered the Edgewater Home, a rambling riverfront house on manicured grounds on Powhatan Avenue in Norfolk that had housed the facility since 1919. It was begun elsewhere in 1804 as the Female Charitable Society.
``It was needed,'' Johnson said. ``We were a lot better off. We didn't have to worry about moving month to month. We didn't have to worry about having good food.''
And no more sleeping four to a bed - each girl got her own bed, nightstand and chair in a room shared by 10.
A handbell got them up at 7 a.m. and told them when to line up for washing faces or going to meals. Older kids helped the younger ones at tables set with napkins, blessed with grace and loaded with hot food. The children never noticed any World War II rationing, Johnson said.
They had school clothes, play clothes and church clothes, donated by individuals and churches. A shoe store guaranteed everyone had boots for winter. They never looked different than the other kids in school, although they used tokens to buy lunch.
After school, they played on the swings, they played volleyball, jacks and King of the Mountain on the home's grounds. After supper, they did homework in a room equipped with an updated Encyclopedia Britannica. They made their beds, washed dishes and folded laundry.
They were given change to buy candy at a nearby pharmacy. Some got spanked when they misbehaved. But at Christmas, up to 40 stockings - one for every child - were hung along a wall and filled with donated presents.
No, it was not a normal childhood, Johnson allowed, ``but it was not that bad.''
``You never stopped wanting your mother,'' she said. ``You never stopped wanting that. But if you could go over and get your sister, you were OK.''
Her older sisters - and less frequently, her mother - visited on the first and third Sundays. She saw her brothers just twice a year: at Elks Club-sponsored Christmas parties and on annual summer outings to Ocean View's amusement park.
On Sundays, the children were loaded into cars headed for various area churches. Her first time, Johnson randomly was directed to the ``Methodist car,'' and in time was befriended by her Sunday school teacher, a single woman named Marion White. When Johnson was 13, lonely, gangly and stuttering, White became her guardian and took her home. Johnson treated White as her mother and, later, Johnson's three children considered her their grandmother.
Johnson, now 62 and living in Virginia Beach, sometimes runs into other Edgewater alumni, some of whom say they're ashamed they had to go there. Not Johnson.
``I was taught a better life. I got an education,'' she said. ``I'm not ashamed of it. I was an innocent child. I was a victim.''
Across the Elizabeth River, Alice Kinsey Durham also has memories more sweet than bitter about her ``eight years, nine months and 17 days'' in the old Portsmouth Orphanage on County Street.
One is of writing Santa for a specific gift each of her nine Christmases there and having it duly delivered by costumed Seaboard Railroad employees. A certain doll. A necklace. A wooden child's desk that her own daughter still has.
Durham's mother did visit, every third Sunday, bringing a small, sweet pear. And although she couldn't send her daughter off to school each morning with a hug, she did send her fried fruit pies for lunch, through a cousin who attended the same school.
The orphanage began in 1856 after yellow fever ravaged the city. By Sept. 1, 1937, when 6-year-old Durham and her 9-year-old sister became residents, it housed 15 to 16 children, boys and girls, who could stay until they turned 18.
Durham's father had died when she was about 5, and her mother had surgery the next year and couldn't care for them. A 12-year-old brother was too old to start at the orphanage - they took no new residents over 11 - and stayed with the mother at an aunt's nearby home.
Durham remembers her first day because there was a birthday party for the matron of the orphanage. Later, others told her that she cried that first day. She doesn't remember that, or anything of her life before the orphanage. She often calls it the place where her life began.
``I never minded it,'' she said. ``I guess I tend to forget the bad. I must.''
But others weren't so happy. At a reunion she organized last year, she was surprised to hear so many say they were unhappy then and still bothered by their experiences. Not her.
She left the orphanage in 1946, at the end of her sophomore year, and returned to live with her mother. But the memories stuck. When she went to work at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in 1961, she organized her office to collect Christmas gifts and provide dinners for needy children. Now retired at 63, she still does the same through her church.
``That was because of my experience,'' she said, her eyes tearing.
Despite good memories, Durham and Johnson acknowledge that things are different today.
Where there might have been a few hundred children in the handful of area orphanages during the 1930s and 1940s, there now are more than 1,000 in foster care in South Hampton Roads. They're part of 500,000 across the United States, with 10 to 20 percent in group homes or other facilities.
Nationally, of the 14 million people receiving welfare benefits, 9 million are children. Of those, 2.8 million have no listed father, one category of children suggested for placement in orphanages. It costs $200 a month per child for food stamps and Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the basic welfare benefit, said Earl N. Stuck, director of residential care for the Child Welfare League of America in Washington. It costs $3,000 a month per child to run an institution with 24-hour staffing, Stuck said.
``Do we want to be in the business of removing kids from home simply because of poverty?'' Stuck asked. ``Are we going to start legislating orphans into existence?''
Churches have fewer members these days, and fewer churches can afford to run orphanages, as they often did in the past, Stuck said. More children are in social-services systems now due to the increased population, more reported incidents of abuse and neglect, fewer extended families living near each other and fewer stable, two-parent families.
``Orphanages for poor children would break up families,'' said Nancy Vosler, associate professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis. ``It's strange that we're hearing proposals for orphanages from the same people who are crying for a return to family values.''
The demise of orphanages began at a 1909 White House conference on children called by President Theodore Roosevelt. Some 200 experts unanimously agreed that children shouldn't be sent to orphanages simply because they were poor, but instead aid should be provided so their families could stay together.
But it wasn't until 1980 that the federal Child Welfare Act forced states to enact laws aimed at keeping families together through aid or counseling or, if children must be removed for safety reasons, to return them to their families as soon as possible.
Eyler of the Centerville Group Home in Chesapeake, where a dozen teenagers receive counseling, agrees the current system fails many children, but she isn't sure orphanages are the answer. She doesn't want to see families broken down any further.
``Families really want to do the right thing,'' she said. ``They may get bogged down. . . . I rarely meet parents who don't care. They do care, but maybe don't have the resources.''
Rep. Gingrich has touted the example of Nebraska's Boys Town orphanage as seen in the 1938 movie. But Boys Town isn't the movie ``Boys Town'' anymore. Residents there now live in small cottages in groups of six to eight, so they learn how to live in families and, hopefully, not have dysfunctional families of their own.
Grace Johnson, wearing a blue sweatshirt that reads ``Best Granny on Earth,'' said her experience at the Edgewater Home for Girls gave her character, discipline that still shows in the carefully lined-up pictures on her walls, and a lifelong drive to prove that she wasn't less than anyone else.
And it gave her something else:
``I know I'm more tender with children,'' she said. ``I know I have more empathy with them.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BILL TIERNAN/Staff
Grace V. Johnson went to an orphanage in 1940, when she was 9. ``We
were a lot better off,'' she says.
Photo
Orphanages were phased out as welfare support increased and a
preference for foster care and group-treatment homes emerged. The
Barry Robinson Center, shown earlier this century, above, evolved
into a facility that treats troubled and disabled children.
Photo
JIM WALKER/Staff
Alice Kinsey Durham stands by a desk from the Portsmouth orphanage
where she lived for eight years.
by CNB