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Tuesday November 20 1973 Editorial She was a true 'friend outside' Rosemary D. Goodenough of Los Altos had a very keen concern for suffering people. It was a sensitive concern, too - one directed toward doing things with people, not for them. Out of this concern, as Mrs. Goodenough expressed it in action over the last two decades, has grown an important organization: Friends Outside. It began in Santa Clara County, for she worked close to home, and in recent years has branched out in more than a dozen other counties. Friends Outside was formed to help county jail inmates and their spouses and children and other relatives help themselves. It did so through simple yet well-planned methods, such as:"friendly mothers clubs" to offer a social outlet to impoverished and stigmatized inmates' families. The clubs generated nursery schools and day camps, tutoring, big sister and big-brother programs, a giant clothes closet where families in need could trade their volunteer labor for apparel, food baskets and many other services. Mrs. Goodenough recognized that although Friends outside could do little about the real poverty of the families it helped, it could genuinely help them break out of their "psychological poverty" as outcasts. Hunger was one of the forms of suffering that most moved her, and she frequently called it to the attention of relatively affluent North County people who should have seen its obvious existence with their own eyes. In a letter to the Times written just after the Watts riot, Mrs. Goodenough revealed much of her own approach. "The only way to solve (the problems of those left behind in America's growth) is to sit down with our fellow citizens who are suffering and let them tell us how to help them to help themselves. Let us - and it does not take college degrees to know how to - sit down and talk over problems. It just takes people physically, emotionally and let's hope spiritually frightened enough to know that all the police, guns and gas solve nothing. There is no solution in hate. Each of us has but a short time to live. Let us leave this country a better place for our efforts, in exchange for the wonderful gift of life itself..." Rosemary Goodenough's short time ran out last Friday, and she did indeed leave this country - certainly out part of it - a better place. It is most appropriate that the memorial services for her will he held Wednesday morning at the Elmwood Correctional Center in Milpitas, and that her family prefers that memorials be gifts to Friends Outside, 712 Elm St, San Jose. |
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