In many
instances their experience in the club itself has enabled them to
perceive these needs. One day a Juvenile Court officer told me
that a woman's club member, who has a large family of her own and
one boy sufficiently difficult, had undertaken to care for a ward
of the Juvenile Court who lived only a block from her house, and
that she had kept him in the path of rectitude for six months. In
reply to my congratulations upon this successful bit of reform to
the club woman herself, she said that she was quite ashamed that
she had not undertaken the task earlier for she had for years
known the boy's mother who scrubbed a downtown office building,
leaving home every evening at five and returning at eleven during
the very time the boy could most easily find opportunities for
wrongdoing. She said that her obligation toward this boy had not
occurred to her until one day when the club members were making
pillowcases for the Detention Home of the Juvenile Court, it
suddenly seemed perfectly obvious that her share in the salvation
of wayward children was to care for this particular boy and she
had asked the Juvenile Court officer to commit him to her. She
invited the boy to her house to supper every day that she might
know just where he was at the crucial moment of twilight, and she
adroitly managed to keep him under her own roof for the evening
if she did not approve of the plans he had made.
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