Bootstraps

Will Keith Kellogg, 78, makes breakfast food for children, but he has more than a commercial interest in them. Eight years ago he established the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Mich., gave it $46,000,000 to improve children's health & happiness, soon decided to expand the Foundation's work so it could help grownups, too. By last week the people it had helped were helping themselves so enthusiastically that even Will Kellogg was astonished.

Mr. Kellogg appointed as general director of the Foundation Dr. Stuart Pritchard, onetime president of the National Tuberculosis Association. Dr. Pritchard went to work in seven counties near Battle Creek/- First he persuaded these counties to establish health departments, with the Foundation footing most of the bills. He saw that youngsters got medical examinations and treatment (free, when necessary), that mothers had doctors to help deliver their babies, that sanitary engineers told people how to dispose of their sewage. But he soon concluded that this sort of thing was like patching a rusty roof.

Chief obstacle to the well-being of these seven counties, as of the rural U. S. generally, was poor schools--dark, dirty, manned by ill-prepared teachers whose time was spread over so many classes that some pupils had only two weeks of actual instruction in a year.

To improve the schools, however, Dr. Pritchard saw that he had to educate the adults who ran them. So he provided tuition in universities and psychiatric clinics for groups of teachers, supervisors, school board members, ministers, newspaper editors, physicians, nurses, dentists, veterinarians. The Foundation also offered to help build new schools. At first the inhabitants voted down these offers, were apathetic to this attempt to lift the general level of living of the whole community. But gradually the Foundation saw to it that the schools acquired toilets and electric lights, better instruction and medical attention, and in general the darkened communities began to grow bright, cheerful and happier.

Last September, believing that the time had come to find out how fully the seven counties realized the measure of their improvement, Dr. Pritchard sent to 80,000 voters a report and a ballot. The ballot asked voters whether they were willing to tax themselves 25-c- per capita to continue their health departments, relieving the Foundation of part of its burden. Last week the votes were counted: Yes, 65,329; No, 863.

Now prepared to show the rest of rural America how it is done, the Foundation offers to pay the expenses of physicians, engineers and teachers to come to Michigan to study the remarkable spectacle of 220,000 people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.

/-Allegan, Barry, Branch, Calhoun, Eaton, Hillsdale, Van Buren (pop:220,000)

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