doing welfare here tonight we wanted to ask you about the job you do here at the berkeley cinemas program and what got you interested in wanting to help children i know you come from the juvenile hall on background and can you tell us something else about what got you interested yes i actually do have one story that  was very pivotal in my beginning to work and continuing through my life to work with young people in the early eighty's there were a number of cults in the bay area they were lawyers are sticking snakes in people's mailboxes and and it's getting really bad in the skin and we want we really would we need to take care of this just this particular group of people and so would you come in here and do the tape transcription because i was doing typing at that time by the way i have a good developmentally disabled son at that point he was six years old he couldn't speak and he couldn't turn over and he couldn't walk so what i did was kept him at home and typed  for the university to do all the time so you could be at home which is exactly and then work with him when he wasn't at school and then when when he went to sleep i'd start typing and then the cycle would go over again but  got a call at work asking me to come out to a home that a friend of mine worked at a group home in contra costa county it turned out that a young man had crawled sixteen miles no clothes on no hair nothing no shoes nothing to get to this home he had been in this in this he was in a closet to call in so he just they say he couldn't walk he had two broken arms and me and he  he didn't know where i could really where he was i mean this is a real horror story but this is what was going on in the in the in the early eighty's and late seventy's it wasn't about gangs and stuff like that so much as it was about individual  bad choices individually on the part part of adults which i think with children and that's what i was seeing in the group homes ok this is again this is different from juvenile hall this is another venue group homes but  this kid was in a closet and he wouldn't let anybody and and they let him in the door and he was in a closet and they called me up and said will you please come because the case that i was transcribing was where this kid had come from so i went in i went i left work and came out and went out and talked to him he was in concord and about an hour and a half after we got done talking and got him out of the closet into the into the garage we started playing pool and started talking and that was honor to be given that honor of someone's mind of being able to help someone's mind and help them work out you know things that are not going so well it's been very rewarding and he found a gun cache and they shaved his head and broke both of his legs so that he wouldn't leave and then of course taking their clothes away is just you know that's the wake of the jim jones that's right exactly know how that finally ended unfortunately for so many lives that would destroy behind that that's true and i came into working with children at the very end of that era when we started to try to put it together again so that there were group homes for those children so that there were there were there were places for them to go be there was in their parents weren't functioning that well and so how could you expect children to function as well and but yet they function just great after you know we spent enough time with them but what we did is we took nine kids and we took them most of the kids were put into institutions and so we put in we took nine kids apiece and kept them for nine months and i would work from sunday night to thursday night i would stay at the home and then about eleven o'clock about lot o'clock at night they'd bring a kid they'd drop drive up the ambulance door to the to the head of the house and they'd open the back doors and they'd slide out a kid in a straitjacket right into the door and then they'd and then i'd catch them at the very end when they came in and they'd take the jacket and shut the door and go out and i'd sit on the floor and just hold them until they stop screaming sometimes five hours a night based on the fact that these people that work the most programs there was the same five or six people always so consistency that is really important number one number two everybody had a sense of humor everyone had a sense of humor because you know i mean you have to have a sense of thinking of there how did you wind up a juvenile hall working that's kind of a sad story they are at many of the group homes third started there was a lot of regulation in group homes and running group homes and because there wasn't a lot of regulation you could lose your job by someone saying i saw so and so it such and such and such and such a time doing such and such a thing whether it was true or not and i had it's to save a dub elop mentally disabled son i couldn't fool around and i needed to have a job that was secure and i wanted to do it in something that i loved and so i moved made the move to juvenile hall because i wanted job security and to be able to  continue on in fact my mission was to become director of juvenile hall that was my mission from day one and i made sure everybody knew what i was like i want to be director of this fall i love this kid these kids i love what's going on here i can see where we can teach i can see where we can make teaching i mean this looks like a big gigantic group home to me you know and and in fact i do have to say the you know the month a couple months after i got  there well i worked at the girls camp which then closed and then i worked at the boys camp i was the second woman i think sandro and was the first woman and then i was the second woman to work at the boys camp and then they stopped that and then  became partners in about one hundred eighty six and and we put together an educational program for the kids and and a rewards program that was not based on baby ruth program thing for them so that every day when you know when there was time to write letters or whatever they kids came out they wanted to they wanted to write if you don't want to write a letter read a short story it really or write you know this to two to someone or to this or to that i mean we opened up we tried to open up a world to them because their worlds were so small and so can compact and contain so we did things a little bit off the grid a lot of to work but it worked yeah well like i said a month into it was starting to say it was a write unit when we came in there when we both got that unit it was a riot unit and a month later it was no longer a riot unit there it was probably no longer a right unit staff and your willingness to want to take a day went to their unit people would hate to go into that you know when we arrived they hated it you know and it got to the place where it was like this doesn't make any sense you know because the reality is with the everyone here was here for a reason whether you did something or did not you still here so why you know why not make the best of it and some programming became a fundamental the cessna you learned to stable you know they want to welcome a stable environment well it wasn't just a stable it wasn't just a stable environment although that was a big part of it we have i don't know about that but i think that we didn't basically want to miss a day because if you started in melbourne and i started working with these kids they didn't know what how to read the classifieds and we actually literally read the classified ads and said ok you're ready to go out you're ready all ready to leave fine great whatever can get through the classifieds we'll see bedroom and one one one one half with nothing that's bed that's one and a half bath and when he knew anything about that they didn't know anything about it by the time we were done and they got they were able to do that the one thing one thing that we did that i actually took a chance on we spent a lot of our own we had sought out a lot of our own money there there were so many children who did not have parents on time on christmas or on father's mother's day or father's day we made they had a good father mother's day and good and birthdays and christmases we made sure that so anyway the doesn't a rod of the story that i didn't finish it's about must be about twenty sentences long and we had kids from eight to thirty and there are no eight to eight to thirty eight to eighteen i say thirty to grow the new youngest the oldest girl that we had was a very large and had a lot of problems  she came around she can she could she came around and i guess it was the versatility between madeline and i working with each other and agreeing that each child had its own their own needs and their own importance in their own their own special  this and that we were going to do the best that we could to bring that out in them and because of that the kids knew that and they knew that we were respecting that and they helped us with that so on the just a day that the time the desert erotic came out and said all right you got to tell you what i give you a big mac order fries and and a milkshake but you got to memorize this and you've got two weeks to do it and so i took each group we took each group of kids we talked about it and we had some kids that were very high functioning some kids they couldn't read very well so we give them two or three lines and the kids that were very high functioning the whole thing and then the other kids that you know we you know everybody was at the top of their game  cost me one hundred fourteen dollars and thirty two cents in those days those kids remembered everything i could not believe it they were just so eager to learn and they gave no one any problems everybody was why was this unit like this well it's not because we bribed them it wasn't because of the mcdonald's even they didn't have to do that or that they wanted to do it and they wanted to know and it just became a very beautiful part of what we were doing we were talking about this earlier i used to read to them before bedtime madeline would bring books in sometimes and sometimes i go to the library do you know that there are seventeen difference in well as in the world that vietnam has its own center ellen china has its own cinderella japan  all these different countries have their own fairy tales that we think are completely just american it's not true folks it's not true it didn't start and end here everybody thinks this is america it started it ended here it did not america is that some kids don't know that history you know but you know when you do that you develop a mutual respect yes for each other about was and that was the key you had to have mutual respect and one of the things they're really thought was really important that they were able to monitor their own behavior because we came over a system you know they always had a point and we developed our own because the reality of that system is that no child at all times going to be one  it before it was executed it was thought out it was trouble shot yes in other words we talked about what are we going to do if this happens or that happens we had already covered all that you know so we were going in there just blind and they were word for this was it wasn't just one unit you know there's one girl's unit only one girl's unit but there are other three units were boys units and so in order for the younger boys right and then that was the then there was one other unit but they were so happy to get together yeah but they but they weren't but it wasn't an acting out happy it was a how do we do this how do we talk so i became another chance to learn other way to learn social skills ok let's do that what do we have who is that kid interacting with who was that kid that when he jumped up on the thing and said do you have all that we took the girls over to the boys unit to see to see this one kid that became grew up to become a pretty famous rapper and or emerges name in a second  they all recognized him and then all the sudden all these pagers you know they were talking about pagers and stephanie goes yeah you got my pager you got my pager number all these girls had his pager number almost all the girls are you know that his pager number i couldn't believe it that you could s have to think beyond today yeah because that's true and the what yeah that's true and one of the biggest things that came out of this was our recidivism rate went way down this this and even though it was a measure it was not us out of there so they can go into work and there came a whole other ball of wax but what they were but the reality was there was you know they were having a book called voice control all the time to come in there and break up a fight and you know what that means that's just a war between girls and the counselors and you c create that anywhere any person even any prison or or or juvenile hall whether it's for young people or adults this they can create this you can create this yourself you can create it yourself or you c my gang this is neutral territory yeah everybody is safe i'm not going to tolerate it and we will sit down and talk to so what we did was we begin to have sessions where we will sit and talk using that same type of point system every saturday morning when we break them up into groups and i talk to steph how to talk to the mother so they can express themselves without having to do that and i don't think that would have happened if we hadn't of really taken the chance and gone up against a whole lot of people to take that to do the programs that we did we got support from teachers we got back we got the evidence was there i mean there was no no there is nothing in the book that she talked about is reading the stories sometimes absolutely and that they just they were younger children exactly something so well being so they can relax and go to sleep we did not want those kids to go to sleep with the horrors that were going through their heads that were many times imagined horrors yes many times they were imagined sometimes they were not there but we did not we wanted them to be able to wake up with a clean clean clean mind go to sleep with a clean mind but something that was different so they get greek fairy tales or you know i mean greek mythology not we're not going to get everything terry tales i mean we read we read mark martin luther king during during black history  but you know we're just a really it's soothing period because my son had cancer lymph nodes and so when she would go and be waiting for her her x ray i would just start reading any book and you know