A Season for Helping

It used to be work, or simply play, for U.S. high school and college students in the summertime. Then came the big trend to summer study (TIME, Aug. i, 1960). This time the summer trend is to do something useful to help others.

The impetus is neither a desire to play Lady Bountiful nor a shortage of paying summer jobs, but a useful blend of altruism and self-interest. High school seniors yearn to report a substantial entry in that "Civic Work?" blank on college applications; collegians may want to put sociology lectures to practice. The Peace Corps is the model -but most of the jobs to be done are right at home. Says one delighted Boston mother, whose teen-age daughter is toiling in a hospital ward this summer: "She goes charging out of here in the morning like Florence Nightingale riding Paul Revere's horse."

205-Pound Angel. The Boston girl is enrolled in a zesty enterprise called Operation Kindness, sponsored by United Community Services, which has 4,300 youngsters on duty in 106 agencies and institutions in greater Boston. The unpaid helpers are busy at everything from running bingo games to skinning rabbits for medical researchers at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. At a Massachusetts state mental hospital, a 15-year-old "beautician" cheerily restyles the hairdos of psychotic women and says: "I just love Nantasket Beach in the summer, really I do. But -well, I like this better."

Operation Kindness has 2,000 youngsters at work in San Francisco, 3,800 in Philadelphia. In Manhattan, a towering varsity end from the University of Pittsburgh has worked 16 hours a day to keep tough kids from becoming drug addicts and alcoholics. A volunteer for the Young Life Campaign, Bob Long, 21, can proudly look back on such experiences as the 14 nighs he spent helping one addict to kick the habit. "My man here stayed with me," says Long's grateful protege. "He's my 205-pound guardian angel.''

Taming Cobras. Much of all this began under seasoned adult leadership, but a new wrinkle is the help project launched by students themselves. In the forests of northern Minnesota, 16 collegians representing campuses from Bryn Mawr to Minnesota are living among the Chippewa Indians, who are 75% unemployed and too indifferent to care much. By organizing parties and ball games, the boys and girls of Project Awareness have slashed the Chippewas' usual summer crime wave to a low that startles even the sheriff.

Judy Long, 22, is a pretty June graduate of Northwestern University who enlisted 57 other students to tutor school dropouts (rate: up to 75%) in Chicago's heavily Negro Lawndale area, stomping ground for gangs. One of the students, 19-year-old Elaine Stevens, works 20 hours a week as a summer research assistant in psychology at Northwestern, also coaches a Lawndale teen-age girls' softball team called the Lady Racketeers. Along with batting practice, Elaine teaches baby care -her13-year-old third baseman is five months pregnant, and children of other teen-age players on the team form the rooting section. Pre-Med Student Gordon A. Fuqua, 21, umpires softball games between the Vice Lords and the Egyptian Cobras, who might otherwise be rumbling in a Lawndale alley. Says Gordon: "What I'm doing this summer is making me a better doctor than if I went to the finest medical school."

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