DePelchin marks milestone 125 years of children’s care
Former resident recalls help as ‘a true blessing’
For little Kelmor Teichman, the DePelchin Faith Home in Houston meant a new dress, a warm bed and regular food on the table.
Stranded in Houston during the Great Depression after her father left to find work in California and her mother was injured in an accident, the little girl and her two brothers were turned over to the private orphanage.
Today — known as Connie Wallace — she is celebrating her 90th birthday on the 125th anniversary of what is now the DePelchin Children’s Center, which has grown over the decades into a nonprofit agency offering foster care and adoption assistance as well as other social services.
She is DePelchin’s oldest known living resident, and more than 80 years after she learned the organization’s bedtime prayer, she can still recite it with ease.
“During the Depression, even as other children were starving, we were in Faith Home where we were getting good food and good care,” Wallace said recently. “We were getting baths and nightly medicine. It was a true blessing.
“I’m still thanking God every night.”
Wallace is expected to
make an appearance Tuesday evening at a special gala celebrating the center’s anniversary.
Her efforts lived on
Kezia Payne DePelchin was the matron and teacher at Bayland Home orphanage for school-age boys in the late 19th century, but when three baby boys were dropped off there, she refused to turn them away.
Instead, she secured a room in a friend’s home and initiated a new place for abandoned or unwanted children.
The home was officially christened on May 2, 1892. Though DePelchin succumbed to a brief illness less than a year later, her efforts didn’t die. A group of friends decided to keep the care center alive and chartered the DePelchin Faith Home in 1893.
Over the years, the organization has touched generations of young people in need of care, counseling and confidence, expanding its facilities and its mission to become Houston’s oldest nonprofit family services organization.
Little Kelmor and her family moved to Houston from a log cabin in Missouri during the economic downturn that began in 1929. Her father looked for work, but finally headed west. Kelmor, her mother and two brothers moved into a room in a woman’s house. Then, her mother was hit by a car and hospitalized as she was out looking for work, Wallace said.
That left 4-year-old Kelmor and her two siblings — a physically challenged brother 18 months older and a baby brother — without parents. They were taken to the Faith Home.
She still remembers getting a shampoo and haircut, and believes the new floralprint dress and matching bloomers she was given were her first new set of clothes.
Though her mother recovered from the accident, she was never financially able to support her children, so they stayed at the facility and in foster homes. Wallace vividly recounts the kindness of the DePelchin nurses and cooks, especially during her recovery from tonsil surgery before starting school.
And though she can’t remember the names of the caregivers, she recalls philanthropist Ben Taub — the namesake of Houston’s largest public hospital and DePelchin’s board chairman during Wallace’s childhood.
“Mr. Taub used to come and read the funny papers to us. He’d bring his little peppermint candies,” she said.
Decades of changes
At the beginning of Wallace’s time with DePelchin, hundreds of children lived in a large building on Albany Street near a street car line.
What she calls the “New Faith Home” was the beginning of a campus in the late 1930s on Sandman off Memorial where DePelchin continues to evolve today.
DePelchin initially housed children in smaller buildings, dubbed cottages, that allowed families to drop by with gifts or take an orphaned child home for the holidays.
A shift in services began in the late 1920s when research showed that children developed better in family environments, so DePelchin initiated a children’s bureau to oversee adoption, foster care and child protection.
“DePelchin was one of the first organizations in the community to have foster homes,” said Julie Crowe, vice president of prevention and early intervention. “We’ve made bold changes throughout time and sometimes we’ve had to put ourselves out there to do something different, but it was the right thing for children in our community.”
In the 1930s, DePelchin began taking black children and opened a “Negro Child Center” in Fifth Ward in the 1940s. Mental health became part of the mission in the 1950s. The organization started a unit to place black, Hispanic and special needs children in the 1960s.
By the 1980s, DePelchin had pivoted to provide counseling, maternity care and post-adoption services.
Crowe was hired in the 1990s to counsel pregnant girls when they were transferred from their home school and after they returned to classes as mothers.
That gave rise to DePelchin’s prevention department, which aims to get ahead of issues that can lead to child abuse and neglect, CPS intervention and family fractures by providing counseling in the community and more than 50 Houston-area schools.
“One of the things that I think has made DePelchin able to still be here today is that DePelchin changes,” Crowe said.
Today, the vast majority of Depelchin children are in foster homes. The organization also has a residential treatment center in Richmond and transitional housing on the main campus for teens aging out of the foster care system.
The nonprofit employs 80 people for prevention, and a similar-size staff for foster care and adoption, she said.
DePelchin achieves its “family ever after” slogan with a $30 million annual budget that comes from government grants and fees as well as contributions from United Way agencies, corporations, foundations, families and individuals.
Long and healthy life
DePelchin’s efforts to help teens transition to adulthood stretch back to Wallace’s youth.
After living in an Alvin foster home, she moved to a facility for teen girls in Bellaire. She eventually became a live-in babysitter for a family while she worked retouching pictures in a photo studio.
That’s how she met an Air Force first lieutenant who showed up for a portrait. They married and had a son. Her second husband, former Phillips 66 President Robert Wallace, also was a military man, civilian chemical engineer and energy company executive whose career took the family overseas, including a decade in Japan.
The couple was married for 61 years until his death in 2014.
In addition to raising her son, Connie Wallace has delighted in three grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren. She ventured into temporary jobs as a receptionist and unpaid physician’s assistant, and in her later years, revived her retouching skills to become an oil painter who sold her work.
Wallace’s memories of DePelchin are etched into her heart and mind. On Tuesday, though, the Katy woman will have caregivers of a different sort — a glam squad to do her hair and makeup — before an expected appearance at the anniversary event.
After all these decades, little Kelmor will be the belle of the ball.
“I just thank the Lord for Depelchin Faith Home,” she said “… I’m just sure that’s why I’m alive and healthy today.”