Ted Wilson, A Life of Service to Others
She was a small woman, only five foot two, but she managed to make a huge difference in the lives of many people, especially poor families, during her long life. A minister’s daughter who was raised on Long Island, she found her way to Tiffin to become a student at Heidelberg and graduated cum laude in 1917. Much later she returned to Tiffin in the early thirties when she married Ira Wilson, the chairman of the Biology Department. Immediately after graduation, Theodora Wilson sought work in Brooklyn in the young profession of social work
This was a time of transition. Jane Adams, Grace and Edith Abbott, Jacob Riis and many others had pioneered the settlement houses which sought to help immigrant families adjust to their new homes and preserve the values and customs from their old country. The state and city governments only provided care in institutions. If the father was stricken with tuberculosis or another of the diseases that killed so many people in their thirties and forties, the mother could be cared for in a Wayfarer’s Lodge and the children would be sent to orphanages. Old Folks Homes run by churches or County Almshouses were often the only options for the elderly in poor families.
There were dozens of private charities supported by voluntary contributions. The names of many of these agencies reflect their mission. There were The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the Home for the Friendless, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Children whom they sheltered not only suffered the humiliation of going home to a building with a name like that, but they also could be identified by the orange plaid mackinaws that were given to poor children at the beginning of the cold season.
Ted secured her first job as a case worker with the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, a private family service agency. The agency prided itself on trying to help families out of trouble. Financial relief was only one phase of their services. Rehabilitation was their larger aim. Private agencies worked mainly with immigrant families who were clustered in different districts in Brooklyn. The Scandinavians lived along the waterfront of South Brooklyn, the Italians in East New York, the Puerto Ricans around the Navy Yard, and blacks lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant area. New social workers were transferred to different districts every six months so that they could understand the various cultures.
Training was acquired on the job. Ted, as Theodora was called, recalls vividly her first “house call”. Her supervisor told her to take the weekly allowance to a Norwegian family “and be sure you tell that father that he should stop drinking so he can take care of his own family.” There was no advice on how one discussed a drinking problem with an alcoholic. Ted says she will never forget his look of disdain as she gently tried to point out that his family needed the money he was drinking up. “There he stood, a burly longshoreman, chopping wood for the kitchen stove, glowering down on me. To this day, I have never known why he did not raise that ax and let it down on my head for my impertinence!”
Ted remembers well climbing the dark stairways of the dilapidated tenements, past the one bathroom for four families into the dark, crowded, smelly, “railroad” flats. Some of the inner rooms had no windows and were unbearably hot in the summer.
Social workers, who were paid fifty dollars a month in the early days, could also be identified by their sensible clothes and their “Ground Gripper” rubber soled shoes. Ted remembers the wise advice of a sales clerk who objected to the dark color of the dress she wanted to buy when she learned she was a social worker. She said, “You ought to buy something gay to cheer up the poor dears!”
Ted’s agency could give a family five dollars emergency aid, but more assistance than that had to be preceded by an investigation of the family, diagnosis, and a plan for treatment which was sent to the central office. The investigation was an involved and time consuming process. The case worker had to visit at least two previous addresses, nearby relatives, the church, the school, and other social agencies, and previous employers.
A typical plan might look like this: 1. Children to Health Clinic for checkups because undernourished. 2. Mother to Maternal Health Clinic. 3. Johnny and Joey to Settlement House for clubs. 4. Mary to Settlement House for music lessons. Jack to Clinic for mental testing. 6. Mother to adult English class for aliens. 7. Request for milk from Milk Fund for Children. 8. Itemized budget and suggested weekly pension.
Ted remembered well the terrible flu epidemic of 1918. All routine work was suspended and social agencies became emergency stations to coordinate calls for doctors and nurses or hospital care. The hotels had volunteered to prepare huge amounts of soup and the services of the well-to do were enlisted for the use of their cars to deliver the soup to the homes of the sick, where mothers were too ill to prepare food for their families. Through it all, the Visiting Nurses worked many hours overtime making sick calls.
Ted came to know every foot of her district as she traveled by foot and by trolley . Women clients passed with loads of clothes on their heads. These were “homework” jobs, picking out basting threads of garments made in local factories. Mothers and children sometimes forgot appointments and had to be gotten out of bed to go to outpatient clinics to be tested for TB and venereal disease. Then, the family received their weekly allowance.
Through all her work Ted never stopped learning. She took courses at Columbia University School of Social Work from 1922 to ‘26 and completed course work for her master’s degree at the University of Chicago School of Social work in 1931. Then she married Ira Wilson and came to Tiffin where she was an important force in starting the Community Council and other service organizations. Much of the information in this article was taken from a longer article that Ted wrote for Smith College Studies in Social Work. Her work here in Tiffin is the subject of my next article.
– Mary