100 Years Of Helping Children Children’s Home Society Celebrates Birthday With Book Of Historic Photos

In 1896 when the Rev. Harrison D. Brown and his wife, Libbie, placed a baby named Gabriel with a Seattle family, the Children’s Home Society of Washington was born.

Now, a century later, the society celebrates its 100th anniversary with the publication of a new book. Called “A Century of Turning Hope into Reality,” the book features the poignant photographs of the orphaned and abandoned children who wound up in the society’s care.

The photographs were culled from historical archives throughout the state. Today, we publish a collection of them to honor the society’s 100th anniversary.

“In many ways the agency has come full circle,” says Stephanie Cline, the society’s public relations director in Seattle. “What the agency does today is very close to its roots.”

The society became well-known during World War II and throughout the 1960s for placing infants for adoption. In its history, it has put 22,000 children into families.

But since the 1970s, when the numbers of healthy babies available for adoption plummeted, the society has returned to programs that help salvage troubled families.

Today, the Spokane offices provide six different services for families and children. They offer counseling and peer support groups for troubled families, and support for people raising grandchildren, nieces and nephews. A program called Parents and Teachers for Kids helps parents improve their children’s school performance.

The Adoption Resource Center offers information, support and search assistance for adopted children, adoptive families and birth parents. Families for Kids, a $5.1 million partnership program, focuses on reforming the state’s foster care system.

These services are not so different from the temporary assistance programs the Browns provided for families at the turn of the century, Cline said. Even then, breaking up a family was seen as a last resort.

“The mission today remains as it was then, to help children thrive,” said Wayne Rounseville, regional vice president for Eastern Washington. He spoke at an open house in Spokane last week celebrating the centennial.

Two of those children were Pauline Carlson and Barbara Brown of Spokane. Now in their 60s, these two sisters lived on and off at the society’s Galland Hall on the South Hill from 1946 to 1952.

In those days, the building served as a receiving home, housing children until they could be placed with adoptive families.

Carlson and Brown have memories of spitting cod liver oil pills into their napkins at meals and slipping out to the gas station across the street for bottles of Coke. They’d poke a hole in the cap of the pop bottle with an ice pick and make a single Coke last all day long.

But their best memories are of the houseparents, Helen and Ralph Seifert, whose warmth and compassion gave them a secure base.

Brown vividly remembers sitting on the front steps, sobbing, at age 9 on her first day at Galland Hall.

Ralph Seifert bent down with a smile.

“Here, sit on my foot,” he said. He carried her up and down the hall, perched on his foot, until he’d turned Barbara’s tears into laughter.

During those first lonely weeks, when Brown would cry under the covers at night, Helen Seifert always came to sit beside her bed and comfort her.

The sisters remember songs around the piano, Christmas dinners at the Davenport Hotel, dance classes, chores, lessons on manners, and a kind of security and stability they’d never known before.

“It was not a house of horrors,” said Carlson. “It was a house of love.”

Today the building, located at 43rd and Scott, primarily holds offices. But it may care for children once again.

According to Rounseville, the society has begun to explore the possibility of opening a child-care center there.

As national welfare reform kicks in, more single mothers will move into the work force, dramatically increasing the need for low-cost day care.

Rounseville believes the future for the Children’s Home Society lies in preventing family breakdown.

“We’ve got more glitz than we’ve ever had,” he said. “We’ve got more stuff than we’ve ever had.

“But we really don’t have the supports of family and neighbors and community that we had in this society 30 years ago.”

Rounseville doesn’t believe that building more prisons will keep Spokane residents safe from all the troubled children in its community. It’s the painstaking and often expensive work of mending families that brings true security, he said.

“If you want a day to come when you no longer have to lock your house, lock your car, look over your shoulder when you’re walking, this is how we get there,” he said.

“When we get to the day when we take care of all of our children, that will be the day when we will all be safe.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos

MEMO: To order a copy of “A Century of Turning Hope Into Reality,” call the Children’s Home Society’s Seattle public relations office at (800) 456-3339. The cost is $10. For more information on local society programs for families, call 747-4174.