Disabled mother of five, with no husband to assist her, discusses with auther her progress in secretarial training.

this project are dealing with predicaments that are especially numerous and unyielding because they are rooted in years, sometimes generations, of destitution. They are the tangled problems of the underprivileged in big city slums everywhere. All vocational rehabilitation programs that enlist in the national effort to do away with poverty must come to grips with the difficult problems of people like those we have been serving during the past 2 years from our office in an apartment at Pruitt-Igoe.

There are 2,400 families in this public housing cluster. Many are from Missouri, some from the old houses that were torn down when the new housing was built. Other families came and continue to come from other States, principally Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. They fled from rural poverty to urban poverty.

Most of the Pruitt-Igoe families are headed by a mother, not a father, frequently from economic necessity. Under Missouri law, as in some other jurisdictions, a mother cannot receive public assistance for her children if the father lives at home. When the aid check is the only way to buy food and pay the rent, the father leaves home and the family is henceforth without a "consistent man," as our compatriots in the welfare office express it.

Income is low in Pruitt-Igoe, unemployment high. Education is minimal in most cases, and job skills are scarce. Illegitimacy is commonplace; idleness and hopelessness abound.

These things being true, it is not surprising that the crime rate is high here. The elevators, which stop at every other floor, are handy settings for robberies, rapes, and muggings. The culprit can jam the elevator until he has taken a billfold. Then he can stop at a floor, get out, push his victim back in, and send the elevator on, disappearing in the build

ing long before anybody can catch up with him. There have been enough crime headlines about Pruitt-Igoe to make prospective employers recoil when an applicant gives this address.

The St. Louis Division of Public Welfare and the St. Louis Housing Authority are our principal allies in this effort to overcome as rapidly as possible a complex of problems which these people brought with them when they moved to Pruitt-Igoe. Both agencies, like us, have offices within the project. The welfare staff of about 45 administers public assistance to more than half the families in the center. It also provides varied, intensive social services as part of the special project. The Housing Authority carries on its extensive rental program and also offers supportive services for the cooperative project. These offices are major referral sources for us.

In our part of this project, we provide medical service, job evaluation and training, placement—all the normal functions of vocational rehabilitation, plus very intensive counseling and special help.

We may have a client who is ready to go out for a job interview, except that he has no money for bus fare and, having lived in a ghetto, has no idea how to get around in St. Louis. We provide a bus pass, trace the travel route on a city map, and provide written instructions. Or we may have a mother who has fallen behind in rent payment and, just as she starts a job, faces eviction. We get somebody, perhaps the Salvation Army, to advance the rent.

But mostly our two vocational rehabilitation counselors serve as morale boosters-to encourage hope in clients who may never have worked for pay and who find it hard to believe that they ever can get decent jobs and manage a better way of life for their families than the dreary one they have always known. Discouraged, they just don't show up for regular counseling sessions, or they can't quite get up

A Client Gives Up

Mr. M., a 26-year-old Negro resident of Pruitt Igoe housing development, was referred to the vocational rehabilitation project last spring by the public welfare office. His diagnosis was arrested tuberculosis. He had a pregnant wife and two children and lived on public assistance payments when he had no job.

In the project he received counseling; medical checkup, and 2 months of training in electrical welding. He did well and planned to study arc welding at night after he got a job.

He was placed on a job at $2.50 an hour, or approximately $100 a week. At the time, he was faced with a large hospital bill for his young daughter, who had been attacked by an unknown assailant and seriously injured. There was no hospitalization insurance.

Upon beginning work, Mr. M. was removed from the welfare rolls in compliance with Missouri law. At the end of his first week of employment, he received a notice from the Housing Authority that his $47-a-month rent would be increased.

Before he received his first salary check, so many calls had come to his place of work from the prosecuting attorney's office, seeking support for his children by a former wife, that he was fired.

His situation: A hospital bill, increased rent, no public assistance, demands for child support from his first wife, expecting another child, no job.

"I can't breathe," Mr. M. told us. He fell behind in his rental payments by $110 and was evicted. His present address is unknown.

the courage to venture into the surrounding city to keep an appointment for a job interview. In lives so long beset with misfortune, we and our associates in this overall project have to work steadily to boost a very faint faith in the future.

Some of our clients come from third-generation welfare families. They are unprepared for and unacquainted with the normal accompaniments of holding a job-reporting every work day, getting there on time, sticking on the job. In a rather tight job market, it is not easy to find employment for these people, whose handicaps are not limited to physical or mental incapacity but extend to social and employment inexperience, the stigma of their address, and their black skins.

The maximum caseload for our counselors is 50 clients, and the other agencies in the project have this same limit. When you are trying to overcome the multiple, lifelong disadvantages of people of the slums, 50 clients is a full load, we all agree.

For reasons such as these, we made little headway during the opening months of our project. Referrals were slow in coming, and often the people who were recommended to us had chronic ailments which could not be alleviated enough to make them employable. But many of the drawbacks which seemed insuperable in the beginning of our work are beginning to give way. We are now getting about 20 referrals a month and about half of them are possibilities for rehabilitation.

We have admitted for service a total of 67 persons. Twenty-nine of them have been placed in jobs. Not all have held the first job or even the second or third, but all are susceptible of employment, and we are continuing to help them find jobs.

We have trained and placed a beautician, shoe repairmen, a telephone solicitor for the local Goodwill office, an assemblyline spray painter, a welder, several laundry workers, and several persons to do capstitching on power machines. Training for this latter work and for some of the other jobs was purchased at the Jewish Employment and Vocational Service. Other training was obtained from other sources or took place on the job.

Our medical services are provided by private physicians and by a psychiatrist who is a consultant on our project.

More persuasive, however, than this limited number of placements are other developments which makes us really confident that our part of this little private war on poverty can be won if it is fought hard and for a long time.

The children of Pruitt-Igoe's 3,000 families amuse themselves at playgrounds like this.

One is the fact that understanding and acceptance of our program has been steadily improving for more than a year. At the beginning, children used to start watching me when I got out of my car, locked it, and walked into my office. Sometimes when our counselors were interviewing or testing a prospective client they would look up and see four or five noses pressed to the window and twice that many eyes following their every move. Somebody watched us, uncomprehendingly, all the time.

My car was broken into once and stolen once. Ours must be the only rehabilitation office in the country that has a file labeled "Break-Ins and Robberies." Between October 1963 and October 1964, our offices were broken into five times, there were three additional unsuccessful attempts to break in, three times bullet holes appeared in our office windows, and we lost an adding machine, two transscribers, two typewriters, and two fans.

There is much less of this now. Other agencies in the project are getting better acquainted with our program, and they send us more clients and more promising clients. Besides, word gets around of some of our successful rehabilitations and the PruittIgoe residents themselves are beginning to understand what we are trying to do. Proof of that is the fact that now, for the first time, we are getting self-referrals.

Latent ambition and hope are beginning to show up, fanned by what we are doing and by the family counseling, home management advice, and other services provided by other agencies. Last summer a group of Mennonite student volunteers came to Pruitt-Igoe with a trailer load of recreational equip

ment and organized play for the children, to supplement the activities of the center's one recreation facility. Four ministers, under the auspices of the Metropolitan Church Federation, have recently come to work in the project, offering another good source of guidance and help. St. Bridget's Catholic church, located on the edge of the housing development, has been conducting successful tutoring, and several Pruitt-Igoe people have enrolled and have passed their high school equivalency examinationsa big step toward acceptability in a job.

St. Bridget's has also started the renovation of houses in the neighborhood. A Pruitt-Igoe family was the first to move into a restored house, thus satisfying the often-repeated dream of these people"I would like most to have a house with a yard." This renovation project has also afforded on-thejob training for rehabilitation clients who are interested in the building trades.

A committee appointed by the mayor of St. Louis has formed the Human Resources Development Corporation, which is just beginning a thoroughgoing onslaught against the disadvantages that plague all of the 108,000 residents of Crime Corridor. The corporation will have a branch office in Pruitt-Igoe, and its well-organized and well-financed program can greatly reinforce the work of the concerted services program.

All of these things are bringing about a gradual but perceptible improvement of climate in this housing development. If one were to take our accomplishments thus far in this project and measure them against almost any other vocational rehabilitation program, they would not seem impressive. But a comparison of where we are today with where we were two years ago shows substantial progress.

Not enough social agencies are at work, and those which are need more people and more resources. Well-run educational programs for adults as well as for children would be of tremendous help. So would constructive spare-time activities for this highly concentrated, mostly idle population. Strong community support is needed to provide job training for these people and to help them get solidly established in jobs.

In other words, the problems are still many and difficult, and much must be done before we will feel we have gone far enough toward the solutions that are needed so badly. But a favorable ferment is at work in this congested housing area, and the future looks very much better than the past.