Giving Fund

The glass diamonds on the door to Family Centers CEO Bob Arnold’s office are portals to the Great Depression in Greenwich.

Staff in the 1930s peeked through the windows, which are just large enough to frame a face, to check on children in what was then an infant dorm room.

There’s a porch in the corner of the second-story office, where nurses parked cribs on hot days.

Ivy has crawled like a child over the Arch Street building’s brick during the last 85 years. The fragrance of Christmas wafts over the fence from neighboring McArdle’s Florist and Garden Center.

Then, as now, the work inside focuses on supporting neighbors in need.

A century ago, a shelter in nearby Bruce Park was licensed to host 16 children. This is where children were placed in an era before foster homes. Then the stock market crashed and the shelter was soon serving 65 children. Twenty-five or so shared a single bath. The urgency of the situation was explained in the Stamford Advocate at the time by the president of the shelter’s board.

“Every effort is taken to return the child to its parents. In one case we have had to take the child home and leave it on the front porch of its parents’ home.”

That grim rhetoric to sway municipal officials in May 1930 came from Dorothy Walker Bush. Fiftynine years later, her son George H.W. Bush spoke during his inaugural address of “a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the nation, doing good.”

The future Family Centers was a guiding star for the Bush family. I stopped by Arnold’s office Thursday evening in search of a history lesson. He’s the right teacher, having served as CEO since 1982.

That’s a year before The Advocate and Greenwich Time launched The Giving Fund. We collect cases from Family Centers and Person-to-Person and invite readers to donate support.

Arnold greets me with an offer of coffee or tea. It’s only later, while the two of us are having tea from paper containers in his office, that he reveals the cups in the kitchen, and the tea service on a corner shelf, have been there for decades.

For the first few years after he joined the staff as a therapist in 1978, Arnold got to know Dorothy Bush and other women who continued the tradition of holding an associates’ tea at the site to get updates on the agency’s work. They snacked on finger sandwiches and pastries and sipped from cups ringed with painted flowers beneath the surface of their beverage of choice.

“Some of them were drinking sherry,” Arnold reveals.

It sounds Victorian, but don’t overlook the lesson in the history. These women got things done. To read more about the Giving Fund, and to contribute to helping neighbors in need, see www.greenwichtime.com/givingfund/ The Stamford and Greenwich predecessors of Family Services launched in 1891 and 1895, respectively. Women in the Greenwich AID Society sewed clothing for families. When they delivered the goods, they learned that needs of struggling neighbors far exceeded clothing. Sewing provided a unifying thread between the rich and poor.

In the absence of organized social services, these women were tasked by the Board of Selectmen to screen individuals seeking town aid.

I found little in our archives that credited Dorothy Walker Bush. Then I remembered to search for “Mrs. Prescott Bush.”

The archives yielded dozens of articles, including coverage of her son’s wedding to Barbara Pierce in January 1945. The Arch Street construction drew headlines when her friend “Mrs. Godfrey Rockefeller” hosted the laying of the cornerstone in October 1932. Helen Rockefeller drew support from her in-laws, who drafted an architect who had worked on the New York Public Library for “a little project for you in Greenwich,” Arnold says.

The brick building was reimagined as a preschool, and the Stamford and Greenwich agencies dovetailed until they formally became Family Centers in the mid-90s.

Arnold eventually met George Bush at Dorothy’s funeral Nov. 24, 1992, weeks after Bush lost the presidency to Bill Clinton. President Bush made a stealth visit to his ailing mother’s bedside at her home on Pheasant Lane one morning while his wife was hosting Hillary Clinton. Dorothy died shortly after his return to Washington, D.C. With the Secret Service in tow, East Putnam was shut down for the funeral at Christ Church, creating a “surreal feeling,” Arnold recalls.

Arnold thanked the president for all his mother had done for the agency, and for families. But Dorothy Walker Bush had one final contribution. She directed all donations in her name to Family Centers, so they poured in from business leaders, political luminaries and baseball teams.

The work continues in the brick building, which rose during the Depression thanks to Bush and her friends. During hard times over the past 30 years, Arnold has recognized a similar trend of empathy.

“I’ve been fascinating by the Giving Fund all these years because the years when the economy was down, people were giving more. I think people are sensitized to need when they get a little close to it themselves.”