In North Carolina the governor sets an example
Budget cuts are forcing many state and local governments to abandon social programs, but North Carolina's Gov. Jim Hunt thinks he has found a way to maintain what he calls the "work of compassion." Every Monday morning, after his weekly cabinet meeting, Hunt, 43, drops state business and hurries across downtown Raleigh to Broughton High School. There he spends an hour tutoring a student (like 18-year-old Latvian immigrant Arnis Liepkaln, right) in math to prepare for the statewide high school competency test that Hunt himself initiated. "Everyone should give up some time to help someone else," believes Hunt, who is setting his own example.
In 1977 the two-term Democrat started North Carolina's innovative Governor's Office of Citizen Affairs, thought to be the largest, most successful state-encouraged volunteer program in the nation. Working through county committees, Hunt has provided training, publicity and recruiting assistance. He has personally honored volunteers, whose services range from Meals on Wheels to translating books into Braille, with certificates and receptions. Hunt also encourages volunteers to work in government offices themselves. His Citizens' Advocate Office relies on only four paid staffers plus 12 part-time volunteers, many of them local businessmen, to handle 14,000 inquiries a year. The results are astounding. Hunt estimates that in the past two years volunteers working for the state have performed more than 400,000 "tasks" that would otherwise have cost the taxpayers $170 million. "We would have had to hire 14,500 more full-time employees to accomplish the same thing," he reckons.
It was Hunt's wife, Carolyn, 43, a longtime volunteer—most recently as an unpaid tutor in Raleigh city schools—who first interested him in voluntarism. Their children, Baxter, 17, and Rachel, 15, both work with the blind. "Good citizens ought to do three things," declares the governor. "They should pay their taxes. They should contribute to the charity or church of their choice. But money's no substitute for getting involved with your hands and heart. We have 226 million people in this country," says Hunt. "If we get them all volunteering, why, we could change the face of America."
A 65-year-old virtuosa makes music count in Chicago
In 1966, spurred by a psychologist friend who challenged her argument that music could prevent violence, concert pianist Emma Endres-Kountz founded an 80-voice children's choir in Chicago's low-income Robert Taylor housing project. "I found six children with absolute pitch," she remembers. "Those children weren't allowed to be prodigies. Their talents were wasted." Never again, decided Endres-Kountz. At 65, she is the director of MERIT (Music Education Reaching Instrumental Talents), a two-year-old program giving tuition-free musical instruction to 180 disadvantaged children drawn from 80 Chicago-area schools. "Without music and art you can't teach the whole child," she reasons. "The imagination is stifled and the joy is pressed out of them."
A child prodigy who performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony at age 9, Emma graduated from the Juilliard School and studied under Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky. But in 1957, after her 15-year-old son died of a heart attack, she and her husband, Frederick, "faced a choice of grieving for the rest of our lives or giving ourselves to young people," she explains. She gave up the concert circuit and now devotes 40 hours a week to teaching and administration, rigorously expecting her students to be "responsible to their talents the way I had to be as a child." The students, who attend Saturday classes in rooms borrowed from Roosevelt University, are expelled for more than two unexcused absences. Yet there is a long waiting list for admittance, and—thanks to an annual budget of $120,000 from local and state governments, corporations and private donors—13 teachers give 35 different classes on everything from flute to French horn. "You can't get this kind of instruction elsewhere even if you wanted to pay for it," says Emma. Last year 54 percent of her graduates entered colleges with music scholarships. "So many children are victims of an education that lets them get by with their least efforts," says Endres-Kountz. "With us they cannot."
For some callers, talk isn't cheap: It's a lifeline for the elderly
Noel Coward once quipped that he had been born alone and he would die alone. But for many of the 24,094,000 elderly Americans, isolation remains one of their deepest fears and dangers. To combat it, schoolteacher Ellen Freas, 51, volunteered a year ago to head up Reassurance Contact, a Mercer County, N.J. telephone service that makes daily calls at a prearranged time to check the well-being of elderly citizens living alone. "It's so simple; anyone can do this from home," she emphasizes. "You're only spending three to five minutes a day on each call and you could save a life." One of those served is an 81-year-old man who had previously lain helpless for 18 hours in his home after muggers knocked away his walker. Freas—who has two grown children—spends up to 25 hours a week working for the program, which has quadrupled to 37 callers under her direction (it is part of a nationwide organization run by the nonsectarian Contact Teleministries USA). "This is a way of giving the elderly the security to live alone," says Freas. She now recruits in nursing homes to find callers among the elderly themselves. "They like to be on the giving end too," she explains. Even on a small scale, she adds, "Voluntarism is stimulated by just a little success. Everything you do is appreciated."
Henry Winkler uses the Fonz to inspire some special kids
Early this year Henry Winkler was in his office not far from the set of ABC's durable sitcom Happy Days, reciting lines into a tape recorder. "Hey, Ricky, I hear you like the Fonz," Winkler began, "and you like to sing and laugh and joke. I want you to clap for yourself like I'm clapping for you. I love you, Ricky." But this tape was not for his TV show. Winkler was recording it for an audience of one: an 18-year-old autistic boy in Northridge, Calif. Says Scott Pious of the Behavior Research Institute, who requested Winkler's help, "The tape is really going to benefit Ricky, and Henry gave so much. He's an amazing guy."
That was only one of many requests carried out by Winkler, 35, who has quietly emerged as one of Hollywood's most indefatigable Samaritans. He recently co-hosted a telethon for United Cerebral Palsy (whose poster girl, Dina Springer, is shown with him at top) and has raised money and made appearances for the Epilepsy Foundation of America, the Rainbow Cancer Foundation (for children), UNICEF, the Los Angeles Children's Museum (of which he is a founder), Aid to Adoption of Special Kids, City of Hope, juvenile courts and a group to help abused children, among others. "Children knock my socks off," he explains. "If you give a little confidence, a little support, you can watch a kid fly like a bird."
Winkler began working with children as a student at McBurney High School in New York and continued after creating Fonzie on Happy Days. "I can use Fonz as a tool," he observes, "because he has a language kids understand. But after that it's me." Winkler works tirelessly for his causes, but carefully avoids publicizing his contribution. "This is not something highfalutin I do," he cautions. "I can't tell other people how to get involved. I can tell them where to go and what they might experience. I'm having a wonderful and very full life. You have to give back that energy or you'll explode."
In his Brooklyn basement, an engineer turns kids on to books
"If you see a problem and don't address it, you become part of that problem," declares George Harvey, 49, a New York City Department of Transportation engineer. For the past 17 years his book discussion group has kindled a passion for reading and higher education among teenagers from the mean streets of his native Brooklyn. On Wednesday nights in the basement of his Crown Heights home, 12 to 20 regulars rap among themselves or with guest speakers about weekly assignments that range from Baldwin to Brecht to Bellow. "I want to show the kids there's more to life than the immediate world in which they live," says Harvey, a graduate of New York's Cooper Union whose love of literature came from his West Indian parents. With the help of a chemist neighbor who fills in, Harvey keeps the sessions going 44 weeks a year. In 1969 he took on another of the Three R's. On Saturday mornings, with former students and others lending a hand, 20 to 30 kids tackle math exercises, then play chess as a reward. "I like reading and chess," Harvey shrugs, "so I'm helping where best I can."
Basketball, another of Harvey's passions, led to his original circle back in 1963. He was coaching a church team at the time, and since many of his players were superior athletes, he was puzzled that they weren't on school squads. Then he found out why. "The youngsters weren't getting good enough grades because they didn't like to read." So Harvey scheduled three weekly practices—two for basketball and one for reading. At first they objected, he recalls, "but I told them if they didn't attend the book discussion, they couldn't play on my team. Later," he continues, "the young women on the block got curious. One of them said to me, 'I know you don't have a basketball court in your basement. What's happening?' When they joined the group, it just took off."
Harvey's financial support is minimal. Parents and corporations have made donations, an engineering association contributes $30 monthly for paperbacks and the State University of New York at Stony Brook provided chess sets and calculators. But over the years Harvey has taught hundreds of students—some for as long as four years. An astonishing 80 percent of them go on to college. His alumni sometimes return on Wednesday nights, and a few of them have started book circles of their own. "A lot of us went to college solely because of George," says Janet Tucker, 32, now a customer service rep with Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co. "He gave us an excitement over books we never got in school."
Harvey believes that the only requirement for starting this kind of program is enthusiasm. "Volunteer in something you really like to do," he advises. "If you like theater, start a theatrical group, and don't wait for someone else to do what you can do. People turn people on every day—but usually to bad things," he sums up. "You can't go to a party without getting offered this drug or that. So why not turn somebody on to reading?"
An ex-teacher resurrects his old Newark neighborhood
"Can you imagine living in Newark and coming into this place?" asks Steve Adubato, 48, the blunt and ebullient director of the city's flourishing North Ward Educational and Cultural Center. In a splendidly renovated Victorian mansion, Adubato has built one of the nation's most successful community self-help organizations and a tangible symbol of new vitality in a city long synonymous with urban burnout. His staff of 75 full-time workers runs 17 different programs, including a day-care center, secretarial training and transportation for the elderly. The center's $2 million budget taps three levels of government and corporate contributors like the Prudential Insurance Co. and New Jersey Bell. The center also runs its own construction company, which restores neighborhood houses and, Adubato hopes, will eventually plow its profits back into the operation. "Our goal is to be self-supporting," says Adubato, who draws a $27,000 salary. "You've got to run your projects like a business and avoid do-gooders. They use their hearts only, not their heads, and good intentions can get in the way." For example, the center has no program for drug addicts or parolees. "Would you send your grandmother or your child to a place where there were junkies or ex-cons?" asks Adubato. "I'm also proud to say that no one here has a master's in social work. People should run their own neighborhoods."
Adubato, a lifelong Newark resident and former high school teacher, set up the NWECC in a storefront in 1971 to help stem the flight of Newark's largely Italian minority, many of whom had seen the election of black Mayor Kenneth Gibson the previous year as the last stage in their disenfranchisement. A seed-money grant of $100,000 from the Ford Foundation enabled Adubato to buy and rehabilitate the mansion.
At first his group was treated with suspicion by skeptics. But Mayor Gibson and other black leaders backed Adubato. "They know the city will benefit if it remains multiracial," notes Adubato. He has long campaigned to bring more jobs to Newark, an issue on which blacks and Hispanics (now 80 percent of the population) as well as Italians have united. "We don't have enough of a managerial class here, not enough problem-solvers," Adubato points out. "Most of our firemen, policemen and teachers live in other places. But we have demonstrated that there is hope for those who remain here." Still, he does not mask the difficulties. "Newark could fail," Adubato says. "I could fail. But the fact that I have an opportunity to be part of the solution is the exciting thing. I have my selfish reasons for doing this. I want my city to work."
A St. Louisan forsakes glamor to dole out shoes—and dignity
When Rosa Campbell was working as Hugh Hefner's social secretary a few years ago in Los Angeles, she was surrounded by wealth and glamor but felt "a void in my life. I had a gut feeling that there was something else I should be doing." So she moved back to her hometown of St. Louis to become president of Aunts and Uncles, Inc., a private charity that last year gave away 14,000 pairs of new shoes to needy children and adults in the area. "Shoes mean dignity," she explains. "You ought to watch their little faces light up when they see them. Some kids as old as 12 have never had a new pair of shoes."
Aunts and Uncles was started in 1966 by Rosa's brother, Lawrence Albert, who mortgaged his dry-cleaning business to get it going. But 11 years later, beset by poor health and a fire that destroyed his warehouse and 15,000 pairs of shoes, he called on Rosa to help. "I thought I could straighten everything out in six months," says Campbell, 45, a divorcee with four children, three of whom still live in L.A. "That didn't prove to be the case."
Determined to avoid government involvement—"That system makes people hostile because it is handing out something and at the same time making them ashamed to take it"—Campbell persuaded manufacturers like Edison Brothers to donate shoes. The Reliable Life Insurance Co. and other firms helped her buy more.
Campbell, who remembers the pain of being teased as a child for wearing her brother's shoes on Easter Sunday, has been credited by a school official for lowering dropout rates. "Shoes are not only important for your physical well-being but for your psychological well-being," she says. "It's hard to go to school and concentrate when you're trying to hide your feet all day."
Why does she do it? "There's much more involved than just giving a pair of shoes," she says. "It's knowing that every day I live I'm going to get up and help somebody. I may not have a lot now," she notes, "but you don't get as much happiness out of having as you do out of sharing."
In his own gym, a New Mexico milkman fights teenage crime
DESIRE, AMBITION, STAMINA, VICTORY are the watchwords painted on the walls of the Lordsburg (N.Mex.) Boxing Club and Gym. Its founder, Ruben Gomez, 23, has reckoned their value in his life and is eager to pass them on to the 50 boys who frequent his makeshift ring in the small (pop. 4,200) southwestern town. Every workday, after a nine-hour shift driving a milk delivery truck, Gomez runs three miles with his novice boxers, then coaches them for bouts he has arranged with nearby clubs. He hopes the discipline will keep the youths out of trouble, and police credit him with helping to lower the juvenile crime rate. "I don't want these kids to be like I was, so I give them a straighter line to walk," says Ruben, who at 13 was sniffing glue and snatching purses. Though he starred in high-school sports, nothing so inspired him as the movie Rocky. He taught himself boxing and talked a landlord into letting him turn an ex-dance-hall into a gym. Gomez then shook loose $3,000 from the town and county for new speed bags, mouthpieces and gloves. "I want to get more kids interested in what they can do for themselves," he says. "Once that happens, there's no way they can turn back."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
