Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Helen Allen

  Journalist and Children’s Advocate

  August 16, 1907 – November 9, 2006

  FOR THREE DECADES Helen Allen was a news-hen for the Telegram, a Toronto newspaper. She was stuck in the women’s pages until a chance assignment turned into a life-changing vocation: finding parents for needy children. Her newspaper column, “Today’s Child,” featured pictures of orphaned children and heartrending tales of their deprivation, culminating in a naked appeal for people to come forward to adopt them.

  We are used to seeing that kind of thing on late-night cable television — for dogs and cats and children from famine-ridden and war-torn corners of the Third World — but Allen made her adoption pitches for children right here in Canada. Bizarre as these public appeals may sound today, in an era when protecting personal privacy is a primary concern of child welfare authorities, her column was an innovative force in improving the lives of thousands of emotionally needy and often physically damaged children.

  In the early 1960s, having a child “out of wedlock” was socially and morally unacceptable. So, at a time when reliable contraception and legal abortions were virtually unprocurable, many young women with unplanned pregnancies left town to “visit an aunt” when their baby bumps began to show. After giving birth, the young women, willingly or not, typically gave up their babies for adoption and returned home to resume their lives as though nothing had happened. We now know how traumatic that socially acceptable practice was for mothers, children, siblings, and grandparents.

  The ranks of healthy infants available for adoption were swelled by older children, who had been abandoned by parents unable or unwilling to raise their own offspring, or who had been apprehended by child welfare authorities because they were living in unhealthy or even dangerous situations. Many of these “hard-to-place” children had been trundled from one foster home to another or had marked birthday after birthday in orphanages and other residential institutions.

  Helen Allen believed that all children deserved parents and a home to call their own. For nearly twenty years she devoted her energies to the task through her column and the long-running television program Family Finder. Although nobody knows for certain how many of those adoptions were successful, there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that many, many children were happier and healthier because of her actions.

  The late media mogul John Bassett, who was the last publisher of the Telegram, considered Allen’s long-running adoption column “her real life’s work.” She “has helped this country enormously by giving new hope and new opportunities to the nation’s richest resource, our children,” he wrote in a tribute to her in 1982, and “nothing has given me greater pride than being associated with her in this task.”

  HELEN KATHLEEN ALLEN was born on August 16, 1907, near Saskatoon, the only child of a Presbyterian minister and a schoolteacher. Her father moved from one congregation to another, until the family eventually settled in Aurora, north of Toronto. He died of meningitis when Helen was five, and her mother worked as a supply teacher to support them both.

  Allen thought her childhood was happy, although she did regret that her single mother never had enough money to buy her the bicycle she craved. Later, looking back as an adult, she realized that it had been tough to grow up without siblings or a father, but she never exploited her own situation as a motivating force in her crusade to find adoptive parents for needy children.

  After high school she did a four-year degree in modern languages (French and German) at University College at the University of Toronto, financed with $2,000 from her mother’s savings. Allen joined the German Club, which turned out to be a lively collection of people, including Professors Geoffrey Holt and Barker Fairley, who got together on a weekly basis to sing German songs.

  An older cousin who worked on the student newspaper, the Varsity, introduced her to its editor, a young man named Charles Stacey. A year older, he was destined for a stellar career as a military historian and biographer of Mackenzie King. His revealing study A Very Double Life, based on the stuffy and politically astute former prime minister’s diaries, showed the lifelong bachelor to be a mama’s boy who walked the nighttime streets of Ottawa imploring prostitutes to abandon their trade, and a spiritualist who communed beyond the grave with Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, among other historical giants.

  Stacey and Allen dated but went their separate ways after graduation — he to Oxford and Princeton, she to a reporter’s job at the Telegram after earning her BA in 1929. For the next three decades she did general assignment reporting, reviewed movies, edited the women’s pages, and covered select political events, criminal trials, and the 1939 royal tour of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

  What made her name, however, was the adoption column, an assignment she had taken on reluctantly. The idea came about in a confluence of incidents, experience, and inspiration dating back to a front-page story in the early 1960s, about a young boy being publicly beaten by his father on a downtown street corner. Telegram publisher John Bassett assigned reporter Andrew MacFarlane to investigate and write an article on child abuse — a foreign concept in an era when many parents, especially fathers, thought beating their offspring was a routine part of child rearing.

  MacFarlane contacted the office of James Band, the deputy minister of welfare in Ontario. Band supplied huge amounts of information on child protection services and took MacFarlane to visit an orphanage that housed dozens of children three years of age and under. The journalist quickly realized that many of those children had short attention spans, played aggressively, and, despite being “cuddled” by volunteers, appeared to lack warmth and curiosity. Both the reporter and the civil servant believed the children needed families and permanent homes if they were to have any chance of growing up emotionally healthy.

  A few years later, in 1964, Band sought out MacFarlane, who by then was the Telegram’s managing editor, and suggested he run an “advertising” feature to make the public aware of the plight of those forgotten children. Both MacFarlane and Bassett took up the idea enthusiastically and assigned the column to Allen, telling her to contact the more than fifty regional Children’s Aid Societies that operated in Ontario under the Child Welfare Act, find some children who were waiting for families, and run their pictures and write about them in the paper. The plan was to run “Today’s Child” for a few weeks and check the response.

  Children’s Aid Societies, which are protective by definition, were largely horrified at the idea of parading children along with their physical and emotional problems in a public newspaper. To them the column reeked of “freak shows” at carnivals. Only three were willing to participate: Hamilton, Kenora, and Toronto. Although disappointing, the response was sufficient to give Allen enough children to produce a daily column for three weeks.

  The first child was a fifteen-month-old girl of mixed race named Hope, a difficult placement in those homogeneous days before immigration rules were relaxed and Canada had an official multiculturalism policy. Nevertheless, forty prospective adoptive parents wrote in response to Hope’s story. Their letters were passed along to the Children’s Aid Society for screening, assessing, and processing. “I wrote about twenty-three children in those first Today’s Child columns that summer,” Allen recalled years later, “and when the results were finally assessed, eighteen of those youngsters found homes.”

  After three years of daily columns, “Today’s Child” expanded to other daily and weekly papers throughout Ontario. The following year, Allen proposed doing a television version of the column based on a California program that delivered commercials for a variety of products, reserving one day a week for children wanting to be adopted. Armed with a tape of the American show, Allen and social worker Victoria Leach, then Ontario’s adoption co-­ordinator, approached CFTO, the Toronto television station that was partly owned by Bassett. “It took them all of fi
fteen minutes to make up their minds,” Allen reported later. Family Finder, which ran commercial-free, debuted in the fall of 1968 and became the longest-running program on the channel.

  When the Telegram folded in 1971, the Ontario government hired Allen as an information officer in the Ministry of Community and Social Services. She continued to write the column three times a week — it was syndicated by the government to more than twenty daily newspapers, including the Toronto Star — appear on the television program, and speak about adoption to community and service groups.

  In the early 1970s, television and newspaper reporters publicized the plight of the many children who had become victims of the ongoing conflict in Vietnam. The orphanages in Saigon were overflowing with abandoned or parentless children. Social changes, including the widely available contraceptive pill and the zero-population-growth political movement, had decimated the baby surplus of a decade before in the West. That fact, plus the human desire to help needy children, had lots of North Americans flying to Vietnam and trying to pick up babies in exchange for cash or services.

  The local adoption agencies were floundering, so the Ontario Ministry of Social and Community Services sent Leach and Allen to Saigon to work with the Vietnamese. As the north Vietnam army advanced and the Americans were pulling out, the two women rescued close to sixty children, brought them to Canada, and found homes for them.

  Allen received many honours, including being named to the Order of Canada (OC), an honorary doctorate from York University, and the Award of Merit from the City of Toronto. In the late 1970s she was at an OC reception when she encountered Charles Stacey, a fellow laureate and her beau from back in the 1920s.

  Allen, who had never married, and Stacey, by then a widower, renewed their affection for each other and were quietly married on October 3, 1980. The bride was seventy-three and the groom seventy-four. A little more than a year later, she officially retired from “Today’s Child” and Family Finder, although she continued to spend two days a week answering mail and writing adoption bulletins.

  The Staceys were a very companionable couple. They loved to entertain at small dinner parties, read Jane Austen novels aloud to each other, and travel. After he died suddenly of a heart attack in November 1989, she continued to live in their Rosedale apartment until late in 2002, when she moved into a retirement residence. That’s where she died of congestive heart failure on November 9, 2006, at the age of ninety-nine.

  Lyle Creelman

  Public Health Nurse

  August 14, 1908 – February 27, 2007

  HER NAME IS barely known, but Lyle Creelman set the standard for public health nursing both here and abroad. She led the first nurses into Bergen-Belsen after British and Canadian troops liberated the diabolical Nazi concentration camp in April 1945. They found thousands of unburied corpses and more than fifty thousand prisoners, many of whom were dying of starvation and typhus.

  After the war, Creelman co-wrote a hugely important report on public health nursing in this country that established teaching criteria for two decades, and in 1954 she became the first Canadian to serve as chief nursing officer of the World Health Organization. When she retired from WHO at age sixty, the journal of its International Council wrote in an editorial: “In these fourteen years, she has probably achieved more for nursing throughout the world than any other nurse of her time.”

  Over her long career, Creelman developed and broadcast a vision of health care based on a philosophy of offering medical knowledge to health practitioners in developing countries, rather than imposing her views on their cultural practices. An intuitive and quietly ambitious woman with great intellectual and diplomatic skills, Creelman thrived in situations that combined travel, exchanging ideas, and deploying her medical training and expertise in new and innovative grassroots organizations.

  LYLE MORRISON CREELMAN, who was born on August 14, 1908, was known in her family as the “youngest of the youngest” because she had eleven older half-siblings, the children of her father, Samuel Prescott Creelman, and his first wife, Marianna (née McDonald). The Creelmans lived in Upper Stewiacke, a farming community near Truro, Nova Scotia, where her father was a well-driller. After he was widowed he married a distant cousin, Laura Creelman, with whom he had Lyle, his twelfth and final child. Her father, who was in his late fifties when she was born, moved his reconstituted family to Steveston, British Columbia, a fishing community located at the mouth of the Fraser River, probably during the First World War.

  After graduating from high school in Richmond, B.C., she trained as a teacher, receiving her first-class certificate in 1931. Four years later she realized that her ambition demanded larger scope than teaching successive generations how to read, write, and do sums.

  Her father had left her $200 in his will when he died in 1926. That money, plus her savings from teaching, enabled her to enter the nursing program at Vancouver General Hospital and the University of British Columbia, from which she graduated with a bachelor of applied science in nursing in 1936.

  Older than the other students, she had a commanding, determined presence and, unlike many of them, she was independent-minded and keener on a career than marriage and children. In those days teaching and nursing were the preferred — and often the only respectable — options for intelligent young women. Combining them with marriage and motherhood was not only discouraged, it was usually forbidden by employers. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that married nurses were allowed to practise in hospitals.

  She worked as a public health nurse in Revelstoke for a year and then moved to Richmond as one of two public health nurses at the newly established Metropolitan Health Committee (later the Vancouver Health Department). In 1938 she won a Rockefeller Scholarship to study for a master’s degree in nursing at Columbia University in New York City.

  Equipped with all of the available academic and professional tools, she returned to Vancouver in 1939 just as war was declared. She was eager to serve overseas, but public health nurses and nursing instructors were designated “official home front personnel,” both to train nurses for the front and to care for Canadians in case the country became an active war zone.

  By 1944, when an Allied victory seemed certain and Canada was clearly in no danger of an enemy invasion, she joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which had been formed the year before at a forty-four nation conference at the White House in Washington, D.C. Charged with providing economic and repatriation assistance to refugees in the aftermath of the presumed defeat of the Axis powers, UNRRA (which became the International Refugee Organization in 1948) reported to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) and was largely funded by the United States.

  Creelman was sent first to England and a year later to Germany as chief nurse of the British Occupied Zone, which included the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. This was not a part of her life that Creelman liked to talk about, arguing that it was only one of many aspects of a long nursing career, but it must have been a devastating experience to be among the first medical personnel to see, smell, and care for the thousands of dying and dead victims of the Holocaust.

  The Nazis created Bergen-Belsen in April 1943 as a sorting and transfer centre for labour and death camps. By 1945 it had become a concentration camp, incarcerating thousands of prisoners who were too weak for forced labour. Many prisoners, including the young Dutch diarist Anne Frank, who had been transferred there from Auschwitz, died from starvation and typhoid before the Allied troops arrived in April 1945.

  Creelman’s job, as director of the neophyte International Nursing Brigade, was to care for the physical, social, and mental health of her horribly damaged patients. Their deprivations were so overwhelming that her instinct was to do the hands-on nursing herself, but she quickly realized that the real job was to train everybody else. The nurses reporting to her came from more than twenty countries and didn’t share a co
mmon language, training, or tradition, while the INB itself was too new to have a developed organizational infrastructure. So, after training her INB colleagues, she combined forces with them to offer ad hoc nursing courses to young women in the displaced-­persons camps so that they could provide medical care and also, perhaps, find a way to rehabilitate their own war-ravaged personalities and learn new skills.

  All of her listening and diplomatic expertise was called upon in devising ways to care for her traumatized patients. Many kept “escaping” from hospital because they couldn’t bear to be confined any longer; others who had been severely malnourished hid portions of their meals, convinced that each serving would be the last; and some, especially dissident Russian Jews, were unco-operative and disruptive because they were afraid of pogroms if they were sent home.

  After two intense years, Creelman returned to Vancouver. She was almost immediately granted leave from her nursing job to serve as field director of an extensive study of public health services in Canada that was being conducted by the Canadian Public Health Association. She was co-author, with J. H. Baillie, of a highly acclaimed report that served as a guide to a more open and flexible direction for public health nursing in Canada. It was used for many years as a reference work for public health professionals.

  Her final career, with the newly formed World Health Organization, came through a Canadian connection. Brock Chisholm, a Canadian doctor who was a highly decorated veteran of both world wars, inaugural deputy minister of health in Mackenzie King’s government, and the first executive secretary of WHO, knew Creelman and her work both at home and abroad. A psychiatrist and a strong advocate of religious tolerance and holistic medicine, Chisholm had been one of sixteen international experts involved in drafting the World Health Organization’s constitution in 1948. He invited Creelman to work with him the following year as a nursing consultant in maternal and child health.