Miami Herald; Sunday, November 3, 1991
Margaria Fichtner, Herald Staff Writer

"Sometimes," says Mary Louise Cole, "the police find them living with their mother in a park, or they end up at Jackson, and you can tell it's abuse. They may be picked up in a drug raid, or sometimes they're found walking in the streets, 2 years old, 3 years old. Any hour, and no one's looking for this child. Or they find them in a parking lot or at the airport. The airport's a favorite place."

As executive director of the Southeastern Division of the Children's Home Society of Florida, Cole is pledged to preserve family life.

"But some of the babies who come to us don't even have names," she says. "The moms wander into Jackson in the last stages of labor, when the pain finally gets through the haze of the drugs. They're giving birth, and nobody has time to get much information, and what you get is usually wrong. Then when no one's looking, the mothers are out of there. They don't even stay around long enough to give the baby a name."

Dumped, neglected, abused. Little legs and arms twisted until little bones snap. Tiny palms burned by cigarette lighters. A brother and sister, barely older than toddlers, already playing sex. A 14-year-old pregnant with her second child. Infants in methadone therapy. Three-month-old babies stunted to the size of newborns by their mothers' alcoholism. Children brought in filthy, starving. Children whose AIDS- enfeebled mothers cannot care for them. Children plucked from ugly custody battles. Children who scream in the night. Children too traumatized even to whisper.

Officials of Florida's Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) say there were 4,438 confirmed incidents of maltreatment resulting in the abuse and/or neglect of children in Dade and Monroe counties during the fiscal year ending June 30. Another 2,766 incidents were reported for Broward, and Palm Beach had 2,080. "It doesn't get better," says Cole. "You don't get used to it. You don't get tougher. I thought I would. I thought I'd get to be like the nurses in the hospitals, but. . . ."

In any given year, Cole's Southeastern Division, the largest of the society's 14 regional offices, will assist approximately 1,500 children, teen-agers and their families.

"A drop in the bucket," says Cole. "I know that. But better some children get help than no children."

Better than the days when youngsters were legal chattel in Florida, unshielded by child labor laws, compulsory education or a juvenile court system. Even after the private, nonprofit society was founded in 1902, change was slow. Second-graders still were sent to reform school for so trivial an offense as loitering. As late as 1909, a child was hanged in Deland while 3,000 people watched. When the Miami division opened in 1925, its mission seemed uncomplicated: Find new homes for illegitimate and abandoned babies, runaways and those youngsters who had lost their birth parents to death, poverty, bigamy or drunkenness. "A Home for a Child, Not a Child for a Home" was a pretty slogan, and by the 1960s, the society was processing almost one adoption a day. For a time, The Miami Herald published pictures and mini-profiles of some of these children in a feature called "Do You Want This Child?"

But now, "I've got children so sexually abused no one wants them," says Cole. "Seven, 8 years old. They're darling kids, but there's nowhere for them to go. And what do we do with these little ones, the children of severe drug addicts? They run these parents through a 21-day miracle program, and they're cured, and we have to send the children home. And then, in a little while, maybe a week, maybe a day later, they're back again. It's a tough balance. How long do you keep a child away from a mother who's trying to get off drugs, and when do you give up on her?"

Although Cole favors efforts to preserve parent-child bonds, "how many times does that mother get another chance? Some of these kids go back and forth four and five times. The mothers get dressed up nicely, and they go to court with a really good attorney who convinces everybody that this time she means it. I wouldn't want to be a judge."

There was a time when Mary Louise Cole did not much want this job, either.

An educator with a Ph.D. from the University of Miami, she has worked within the nurturing environment of a genteel private school as well as junior-high classrooms so overcrowded students perched on windowsills. At UM, she ran a program to train Head Start teachers.

Born into a comfortable Philadelphia family, Cole has been a Miamian since 1961. She and her husband Sam were early supporters of community cultural efforts and made sure their own three children received the benefits of American-dream educations and foreign travel.

"We did for our children what our parents did for us," Cole says. "And in truth, that's what I see here. These parents are doing for their children what their parents did for them. To them. And that hurts me very much."

Cole says she was lured to the Children's Home Society job by her influential and insistent then next-door neighbor, former Florida first lady Donna Lou Askew. The Askews adopted their two children from the society and have been supporters ever since.

"Well, I thought I'd do it for three years, because I felt I could help," says Cole. "But then you can't walk out. It was the end of my tennis. We moved to Miami Beach, because I couldn't stand the drive from Kendall anymore. It has just changed my whole life, and I don't even begin to do anything else. It's a trap. It's a trap."

By 1981 when Cole took over, liberalized abortion laws and changing attitudes toward single motherhood had slowed the society's adoptions to a trickle. Cole's predecessor even boasted that he reported in for only two hours a day, wore shorts to the office and brought his dog along. Piece of cake.

"Well, that didn't appeal to me," says Cole, "But the fact was there weren't many babies to place. This building, they were planning to sell it. When I came here, the back half was rented to epilepsy, and every year they took over more office space. There was just nothing much for us to do."

Things were so ho-hum only five members attended Cole's first board meeting, "and they were totally bored," she says. "They all came out of loyalty."

Board member Eugenia Thomas, who administers a teen parenting program for Dade County, was there that day. She was not bored. "I thought she was a live wire," she says. "I just had no idea she would go wild like she did."

Almost immediately Cole set about to recast the Children's Home Society from an adoption office into an agency trying to patch some of South Florida's darker ills.

"I was just finding out about child abuse, and I was just distraught," Cole says. "None of us had really known about it, not any of my friends. It was happening all over the place, and we were looking the other way. When I would be asked to speak at a woman's club, they would say, 'Please don't talk about the abused children. Talk about the adoptions. We don't want to hear about it, because it upsets us,' and that's just what I wanted. I wanted you upset."

Cole's first major undertaking was to expand and remodel the society's old offices on the fringes of the Jackson Hospital complex into a bright, two-story emergency shelter for children. Financed largely by $750,000 from Pillsbury and Burger King, the building was named for Burger King founder James McLamore whose wife, Nancy, had been on the society's board.

"By the time we opened, there was a lot more awareness of abuse," says Cole. "Country Walk had happened, and it sensitized people. But those children had parents to fight for them. Our children are being victimized by their parents, and there is no one to fight for them."

Today, the Southeastern Division has an annual budget of $4.25 million and a goal to raise $10 million in endowment funds through a separate foundation by the end of the century.

Its programs include shelter and residential care for dependent, abused, neglected or unwanted children and teen- agers; various adoption and adoption-related services; in- home services to parents of severely mentally handicapped youngsters and therapeutic foster-care arrangements for HIV- positive children.

"At first when I would go to state board meetings and start talking, the other people would roll their eyes," says Cole. " 'Cocaine babies? Only in Miami.' That's what they tried to tell us. 'AIDS babies? AIDS?' Now they realize they have those things, too."

Seventy-two percent of the Southeast Division's budget is generated from HRS contracts. United Way contributes about 8 percent. Private donations, adoption fees and income from other sources must fill in the rest.

HRS pays about $56 a day for each child it places with the society. Operating expenses are a little more than $79 per child, and Mary Louise Cole's job in this tight-fisted, cut- back, recession economy is to make up the difference.

Glenn Broch works with Cole as HRS' District XI program manager for children, youth and families. "She's a tenacious advocate for kids," he says. Others cite Cole's seemingly unlimited energy, willingness to work slavish hours, well-oiled connections and gently powerful persuasion with volunteers and donors.

"I think," says Eugenia Thomas, "she could sell ice to Eskimos."

"And I think," says Cole, "there's no point in putting all your money into symphonies and museums if you're raising populations now that couldn't care less. . . . To me, if you don't help these children, you're missing the point."

And there is no denying that Cole's fluency in Spanish -- acquired as an exchange student to Mexico -- has been a strong lever into the Hispanic community. Last December, Gloria and Emilio Estefan hosted a party that raised $350,000.

But the news not always has been so bright.

In January 1990, David Lindsey, one of the first single men in Florida to adopt children, received a 15-year prison sentence as part of a plea arrangement in which he admitted sexually abusing three of his 11 adopted sons and another boy.

Lindsey had acquired his boys through the Southeastern Division's American Children's Home in South Dade, a therapeutic group residence for older children.

"That was a nightmare," says Mary Louise Cole. "Nobody had a clue. Not a clue. I mean, it wasn't like he came out of the blue. He had a mother, a girlfriend. Everybody knew him. Every Saturday he drove all the way down from wherever he lived, and he was wonderful. He volunteered for a long time before he started taking adoptive kids. And the kids loved him. He did great things with them, and never, never any kind of funny business there."

Pedophiles always have been a threat to any institution that harbors children, "and they fool social workers, psychologists, community leaders and parents," says Cole. "We're very careful. We do get them in here as volunteers, and I had one who was a child care worker. But here it's a little hard to get away with anything. There are too many people around, and everyone's watching."

Nevertheless, the Lindsey case cast a gray shadow over the society and its work. The veteran caseworker who had placed the boys with Lindsey was reassigned to other duties. Spirits sagged.

"You never forgive yourself when a child's been sacrificed," says Cole. "But you have to go on. You just have to go on. That's the thing. You can't just close up and say, 'We're not going to do this anymore.' It's the risk we all take. You have to think about this as, 'This is risk-taking every day.' It' s human error, and it's not like a human error you make anywhere else. I guess it's like doctors. It's heart surgery. But if you're not a risk-taker, and you're unable to go on, you're useless."

Then in December, a South Florida couple went to court to have the adoption of their teen-age daughter annulled. The parents said the child, whom they met at the children's home, had become impossible, skipping school, stealing, drinking, lying that her adoptive mom and dad had beaten her.

Mary Louise Cole has a term for such a child: time bomb.

"What we are finding," she says, "is the children we're getting have been moved around so much that they are very emotionally disturbed. So we're becoming much more therapeutic, to the point that we're doing therapy with the child before they're placed. They need to go through a healing process and our foster parents need to be trained to be like mini- psychologists, so that treatment is not just when you're in therapy but continues.

"And we've had some real numbers. I remember one child I just loved. She was really a pretty, talented little girl. We got her into ballet and aerobics, and she was doing well in her therapy. She never got to be nice, warm and fuzzy about things, but she was a nice little girl. But boy, when she got into the adoptive home, she was like the bad seed. The family's married daughter came to visit with a baby, and I think she set fire to the house, and the baby was inside. I mean, this kid. . . .

"But the family didn't give her back. They loved her. Isn't that tough?"

JEFFERY A. SALTER/Miami Herald Staff

RECENT VISIT: Mary Louise Cole motions to a toddler during a visit. Cole's division helps 1,500 children, teen-agers and families each year.

JEFFERY A. SALTER/Miami Herald Staff

BETTER CARE: Director Mary Louise Cole plays with a child at the Children's Home Society, which Cole has recast from an adoption office into an agency trying to patch some of South Florida's darker ills.

CAPTION: PHOTO Mary Louise Cole with a child (n); photo: Mary Louise COLE reach for a child

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