Senator PERCY. Just one question, Mr. Chairman. Just one question of Betty Breckinridge.

From your own experiences in the State of Illinois, would you want to expand at all on the need for transportation services and the importance of transportation in connection with the nutrition and feeding program?

Mrs. BRECKINRIDGE. I certainly would. We have found this need both in rural and urban areas. Pembroke Township, to which I referred earlier, is an example of the rural situation. It is a black retirement community, with one black-top road, in 58 square miles and no public transportation. With the elimination of public transportation systems in many parts of the State both urban and rural areas are affected.

TRANSPORTATION SERVICES NECESSARY

Some people say you should set up a separate kind of transit program, but what we are doing to meet the immediate need is to fund, insofar as funds are available, small buses adapted to older people, with friendly drivers, with an escort so if they are in a high-rise, one person can help them take the groceries in and so forth. These are scheduled for specific routes at specific times for specific purposes.

One trip may be for shopping. One may be for certain hours for clinic and doctors' appointments. Certain times are for social outings, that kind of thing, getting to church. They are sometimes on a 7-daya-week basis. In fact, we are trying to get almost 24-hour-a-day coverage for emergencies.

We funded a project which included a bus and a station-wagon for the Little Brothers of the Poor out in Lawndale, a ghetto community. There they are taking food and flowers and wine to the old people; but they are also helping them when they have to move, if urban renewal hits them. They will not only help them move; they will paint the apartment, and put the furniture in place; and if another piece of furniture is needed, somehow, in their own mysterious way the Little Brothers find that piece of furniture.

In the Uptown-Lakeview area of Chicago, where we have the densest concentration of old people in Chicago, Hull House provides coverage through its outreach workers, many of whom are senior citizens. There, the workers discovered that there was one building full of older people. They were very isolated in this very crowded city. The building was going to be torn down for urban renewal. Those outreach workers and the other workers at the senior centers found apartments for every single one of those people. They took the buses— they have two buses now up there-they took those buses and they moved them and got them settled in their new homes.

This is a kind of personal service on call. We are trying to ring the city of Chicago with such service and then have buses going into the center of the city. We are hoping we can get a radio communications hookup for better use of buses. We have the same need down in rural Illinois.

Senator PERCY. I would like to just comment to the chairman that just as he went over to vote, Dr. Mayer mentioned that here is an area where young people can be particularly useful and helpful, that

young people relate better to the older generation than they do to the next generation.

They have a lot more in common. Unhappy parts of it; they are both heavy users of drugs, heavier than any other age levels.

Maybe it is the feeling of being lost in society, cannot get hold of it, do not feel needed and wanted and useful and somehow sharing that in common.

MEALS ON WHEELS PROGRAM

I just went out 2 weeks ago on a Meals on Wheels Program and got on the minibus and with a young worker who has been doing this for a number of months, delivered the Meals on Wheels with him without any prior notification to the people at all.

You walked in and sat down in their living rooms-people with broken hips, 80, 85 years old, could not get up to put something on the stove or get it out of the icebox, just rigid in a chair, could not get out really but did not want to go to a nursing home.

They lived in an apartment building or apartment hotel, some of them on Wilson Avenue. You know that uptown section in Chicago. They do not want to go to a nursing home. They wanted to stay there. But this is the only way they could do it.

What it meant to that person-one said, "I look forward more to this young man coming; he sits down and talks to me for 10, 15 minutes." You would like to hear also the stories that the young fellow told me about what it has meant to him to be able to engage in this program and see human need. He said, "I feel needed and wanted every day of my life now. When I came into it, I was not sure what my role in life was."

That is the same spirit the Peace Corps has. Young people have found themselves in Afghanistan that could not find themselves in the cities and towns of Illinois.

This is the kind of program that brings an awful lot of human souls together that can feed each other as well as get a good hot nourishing meal.

I really want to thank all of you very much for being here with us. Yes?

Mr. CHASKES. I would like to add something from our experiences with transportation.

Of course, transportation permeates any service that you can offer to older people. If you cannot get the people to the services or vice versa, it is all a waste of effort and money.

In one community in Michigan, we started a program under Title III, itself as an in-kind support toward the Title III grant-made available to the Council on Aging two station wagons with complete maintenance and insurance and a citizens' band radio in each one and in the home station in the senior center.

They recruited 40 volunteer drivers from the younger old people, the retired people that were in their late 50's or early 60's and the insurance company obliged by putting these people through some kind of a driving test to see that they had reflexes that were up to the job, and it has worked out very, very nicely.

We have given them credit for $11,000 in-kind for these two vehicles.

Well, anything in this field that you try spreads like wildfire. Now we find that there are two or three other communities in Michigan that are doing the same thing. The cities can always come up with a new automobile or lease an automobile and make it available to the center.

We found that station wagons were not the answer, that there should be some station wagons, but that they should have minibuses that are easier for older people to get in and out of, and they should have at least one vehicle with a hydraulic ramp to lift a wheelchair with a person in it.

We are funding a project in a larger city in Michigan now, and I guess all the projects that we are looking at now, we are saying to the people, let's build in some kind of a transportation component.

Usually it is a leased vehicle type of thing with part-time drivers and so forth, but I do not look for any nutrition programs to be funded without consideration for transportation.

NEED DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION FUNDING ASSISTANCE

One other think that I would ask you, Senator Percy, if you would use your influence with the Department of Transportation. Every time a program in Michigan submits an application for a bus or for a transportation program for the elderly to the Department of Transportation, we are always told that it must be a unique system, and that it has to be a part of a mass transportation system. I would hope that you could get the Urban Mass Transportation Administration and the Department of Transportation to see if they couldn't consider funding some transportation components that would be part of this nutrition. program.

Senator PERCY. Thank you, very much, all of you. We appreciate it. I think we probably have to move on to other witnesses. We have delayed. Could you submit your comments for the record?

Mr. O'MALLEY. Very definitely, but I would feel a little guilty on behalf of the State of New York and the largest number of older people in any State if I did not explicitly remark on some of the things that are in the testimony.

As I did with you, I want to congratulate Senator Kennedy on behalf of all of the older people in our State for the work you have done on this bill. And I would like to congratulate you, Senator Kennedy, on the publication of your new book which is going to discuss the health needs in America. And I wonder how related this evaluation of the health needs is to our program today.

There are preventive aspects in the nutrition program-in terms of health and income-and I think what we have touched on is the fact that we have been fighting any low poverty threshold figure being used for eligibility for a program.

You asked earlier about people not going on to public assistance rolls and it is very evident that they do not want to. And so, it is also very evident that this program could be preventive in nature if we allowed the maximum number of older people to use it.

It could help people from having to declare poverty if we set a standard that would be acceptable. The income determination is probably the most serious part of these regulations to which we object.

I will not go into the details on it here because the figures are available in my testimony. I will agree with the other people who talked about target areas.

In the State of New York, we can fund every one of our 62 counties, but out of our 60-or-so cities, we can fund only three: New York, Buffalo, and Rochester.

We have a town, probably the largest town in the United States, Hempstead, with over 800,000 people; of whom 96,000 are 60 and over. Under these proposed regulations Hempstead could not operate a program whether it wanted to and whether it had the financial support or not. The regulations would prohibit it.

I would also caution against changing in the wording with regard to minorities. I believe the wording that the bill itself had with regard to priorities for minority groups was better than the rewording that is now in the regulations. I specifically have in mind groups that now consider themselves as minorities.

There has been a great deal of discussion in New York of the older Jewish community being a minority. The reinterpretation of the law might almost eliminate the possibility for programs to serve these people.

And the fourth vital area which no one seems to have a handle on is continuity and tying in with other programs.

Does the Title VII program absorb all of the nutrition programs that are operated under Social Services, under the Office of Economic Opportunity, and under a variety of other sources, or does it only fund new programs or expansions?

I think the appropriate Federal and State agency people are going to have to get together to resolve what appears to be a conflict at all levels of Government with compounding instead of maximizing on the types of programs we should have available.

In justice to the other people on the program this afternoon, I will finish with that.

Senator KENNEDY. We stand in recess for a vote.

[Recess.]

Senator PERCY. The hearings will resume.

Our next panel will be the directors of local level projects for the elderly, Edward J. Kramer, director of services, Henry Street Settlement, New York City; C. W. McLoud, senior director, Senior Citizens, Dade County, Fla.; Mrs. San Juan Barnes, director of Senior Neighbor and Companion Club, Washington, D.C., that I visited: and Ivan Simonsen, director of Senior Services, Western Idaho Community Action Program.

These witnesses are all operating nutrition programs. They will be the ones who are on the firing line at the local level.

I think for the benefit of all of those in the room, I should explain the great difficulty we have in carrying on hearings in the afternoon. We will probably have more votes though I hope not for an hour so we can go right straight through.

It is a heck of a way to run a railroad, to operate this way, and it is a terrible inconvenience to those of you who have given so much time and thought to your testimony and given up the better part of a whole day. As a weak excuse, I can assure you that it was just exactly this

kind of afternoon when the appropriation bills were on the floor of the Senate that we saved the experimental nutritional feeding bill for the elderly last year.

If I had not given up another hearing someplace else, and said I had to leave and go down on the floor, we would have lost it, and we would have lost $12 million for counseling programs for low-income families this morning, and we would have lost the D.C. Jail this afternoon, I am afraid, if I had not been on the floor.

I hope that you will be understanding of this, but we certainly apologize to you for the inconvenience that this has caused you. I hope we can make it up by giving you an assisting hand someplace along the line.

Go ahead, please. How would you like to organize your testimony? I think, in the interests of yourselves and others, your full text of material will be put in the record; and if you would like to just quickly summarize, we will try to keep our questions as concise as possible to move you right along so we can get to Mr. Martin. We all want to hear from Mr. Martin and his colleagues.

STATEMENT OF CLIFFORD W. McLOUD, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SENIOR CENTERS OF DADE COUNTY, MIAMI, FLA.

Mr. McLOUD. Senator Percy, I am Clifford McLoud, and we have decided between ourselves I would begin and read the statement* made jointly by several of us of the direct programs of nutrition for the elderly.

May I first express my appreciation to you members of the Senate Select Commission on Nutrition and Human Needs for inviting my colleagues and I to testify regarding proposals for Title VII of the Older Americans Act.

I wish to thank Representative Claude Pepper for his authorship of the original legislation as presented to the 91st Congress, and for his total commitment to Public Law 92–258.

Because of the impact these hearings will have on the implementation of Title VII, and because of the millions of older Americans anxiously awaiting a speedy startup, I feel this statement should be brief, concise, and credible.

I am currently the executive director of the Senior Centers of Dade County, Inc., in Miami, Fla., operating one of the largest nutrition programs for the elderly in the Nation.

During this fiscal year the senior centers will serve approximately 180,000 meals to older Americans living in Dade County.

Prior to my current position, I was chief of the Florida Bureau on Aging, responsible for the administration of Title III of the Older Americans Act in the State of Florida.

I have designed, and am currently administering, a research project. for the Administration on Aging, under provisions of Title IV, to determine the effect of nutrition programs on the socially isolated elderly.

*See p. 283