A full- functioning citizen — and a good neighbor to boot
On the day Edna Council turned 88, she dressed for an awards ceremony that she thought was to honor her granddaughter, Janai Smith.
Had Ms. Council known that the July 22 award was really for her, she may have resisted the attention, so her daughter, Janicee Williams, misled her to get her to go. Ms. Williams even had to persuade her mother to do an interview with me.
“She said, ‘ That’s not why I do what I do,’” Ms. Williams said.
Known as Miss Edna, the lifelong Hill District resident embodies what it is to be a full- functioning citizen.
She fields an accolade by slapping the air and says, “I just couldn’t keep quiet if I saw something I thought was wrong.”
Miss Edna is the first recipient of the McAuley Ministries’ Sister Susan Welsh Good Neighbor Award, for her devotion to the health and well- being of her neighborhood. The award’s namesake is the retired president and CEO of Pittsburgh Mercy and a founding member of McAuley Ministries.
“The first time I got involved in community was because our water was bad,” Miss Edna said in a recent interview, citing her days as a housewife in the 1950s.
“We went Downtown and were told it would be all right. I can’t remember which mayor it was who got on TV and said the water would be all right. But it wasn’t. So I got some other housewives and we took a Mason jar of the water to his office and said, ‘ If you think this is OK to drink, then drink it.’”
A few days later, the city cleaned the reservoir in the Hill District.
In the late ’ 60s, she went to work as a teaching assistant at an
elementary school in the Hill. She wouldn’t name the school “because I don’t want to point fingers, but I didn’t like the way they were teaching reading.”
She didn’t have a college degree, but she knew instinctively the mindlessness of making children memorize what they read: “You weren’t learning anything,” she said, explaining why she “raised Cain about it.”
“There was a teacher who told me she barely passed her exams, and I asked why she got the job, and she said it was hard to get teachers to come to this community. I fussed about that, too.”
That cost her the job, but she soon was hired as a clerk in the radiology department at Presbyterian Hospital, now part of UPMC.
“They asked me to leave there because I started asking about the radiation we were exposed to. We didn’t have the monitors that doctors wore,” she said.
In the 1970s, Miss Edna began working at the nonprofit Hill House Association, which is in the process of dissolving after 55 years. As a developmental tester in its Healthy Start program, she evaluated children for developmental problems. The program was run by mothers in the community, and children were tested in their homes. Those deemed at risk got into the program.
She also recruited volunteers for Hill House programs for the elderly.
“I went into the community and found ladies who were doing nothing and drug them down there to volunteer in arts and crafts and in the lunch program,” she said.
When the Hill District Consensus Group formed in the early ’ 90s, Miss Edna joined the fray, fighting a proposed casino in the Hill, demanding more affordable housing in new developments, and “worrying people” about funds to pay for flower pots and holiday banners to hang from light poles.
When Terri Baltimore arrived in 1992 to direct the Hill District Community Collaborative for women in recovery and their children, Miss Edna got to her early.
In her award nomination of Miss Edna, Ms. Baltimore, who was most recently a vice president at Hill House, wrote:
“Her patience helped me to find my way — as a woman and as a leader. Miss Edna and her contemporaries shared stories of supporting each other and making things happen with limited resources. Those narratives became the inspiration for the way the collaborative functioned.”
Ms. Williams said everything her mother did after leaving the hospital job was “to help other people, fighting for causes. We need more people like her out there.”
Miss Edna slapped the air.
Asked if she has ever been hauled off to jail, she grinned.
“Nope. I was smart enough to leave before the police came,” she said.