San Francisco Chronicle - Tuesday, September 5, 1989
Torri Minton, Chronicle Staff Writer

In her spare time, she runs, walks, swims, bicycles, kayaks. She has been to law school and earned a master's degree, among other things.

Yet Reid is just about the an tithesis of upwardly mobile urban professional.

She lives in an old one-room schoolhouse in her mother's back yard in East Oakland (a place she finds time to return to about five nights a month). She cares little for her own money. Her salary: a flat $550 a week.

Reid is executive director of the Whitney Young Child Development Center in Hunters Point -- a secret garden of children from all over the city, one-third of them disabled, praised by city child-care experts as an example of the best that day care can be.

Her life has been so full, she says, that if she died today that would be just fine.

"I feel like I've been reincarnated about five times," says Reid, 58. "I've certainly lived." She is wearing a "Fabulous Fox" sweat shirt and jeans as she sits on the ground in the sun at the children's center, hugging her knees.

"It isn't about some goal, that I'm going to get something, or be queen for a day," Reid says. "It's about doing something I want to do and being satisfied. . . . I don't think there's a personal God saying, 'She's a good girl.' It's the process. It's every interaction, every touch, that has the potential to change someone's life. If you see people being good to each other, that's enough."

Reid is no Pollyanna goody-two-shoes. She is known to be difficult, demanding, outspoken. Reid knows what she wants and says so.

"If anything I guess I'm obnoxious because I'm very intense," she says. "I am a very difficult person to work with because I always want you to do 50 more things. I don't believe in doing things half-assed or shoddy or marginal. . . .

"I do give most people a pain in the ass. But when I help people, things change."

She is the woman behind the transformation of the Whitney Young Center, which has changed from what some privately describe as a mess when she took over in 1982 to a model.

"It's as good as any center I have ever seen anywhere in the city or anywhere else," says Lynne Beeson, director in the mayor's Office of Child Care. "There's a warmth to it, and a relationship which truly creates a support system for parents and an extended family for children. I think she's a creative genius."

Martha Roditti, executive director of the Children's Council of San Francisco, says, "I think that her assertiveness has been very beneficial for her agency. She's been able to get funding and resources that are difficult to find unless you are very persistent."

The council provides child care information to parents and technical assistance to day-care programs.

"She works incredibly long hours," Roditti says. "The program is fabulous, and I wish we could clone it."

Inside the low beige stucco building on a hill just blocks from the projects, there are fish and birds and snakes and turtles in the hallway. Snapdragons, mint, carnations and a lemon tree grow in the garden.

In a maze of rooms and in the yard, children yell and sing and chant and try to stand still for a lavender-haired teacher who is tak ing their picture.

About 150 children, ages 2 to 12, have been coming here every day from 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. from worlds as far apart as Pacific Heights and the Tenderloin. Starting tonight, the center will stay open 24 hours.

They play tennis, swim, dance, ice-skate, roller-skate, draw, plant in the garden and more. They performed an opera for the 100th birthday of the Bayview Opera House. Three of the kids in the opera were picked, along with three others from the center, to be in Pepsi commercials. Reid is extremely proud of this and mentions it several times.

There are no separate classes for the disabled.

In room after room, children jump, paint, drink pretend tea in a playhouse, fit blocks together, gather for tennis. Reid is sitting cross-legged in a circle of preschoolers, singing, "My mama makes good apple pie," touching her nose, doing jumping jacks, buckling a shoe.

A visitor might never know that several of these kids have parents who are HIV positive. Some of their parents are addicted to crack cocaine. Others come from abusive families. It is difficult if not impossible to tell who is hearing impaired, legally blind or emotionally disturbed.

The philosophy is that anyone can learn.

"The hope," says Reid, "is that some child will find a talent. The object is to give them something really solid to live up to . . . to get them to be confronted with really hard things."

STILL A TEENAGER

Now Reid sits in an office in a short chair the size of a television set, saying she plans to become a full-time tennis groupie. Her 22-year-old grandson, Malcolm Allen (named after Malcom X) plays professionally. He is competing in the U.S. Open in New York.

"Inside I'm still 14," says Reid. "I pass by a mirror and I'm surprised to see my mother's face looking at me."

In her various incarnations, Reid likes to keep reminding herself what it is like to learn something new.

For example, two years ago she took a long walk by herself -- to Sacramento.

It took her four days to get there, including periodic interruptions by the California Highway Patrol, which kept shooing her off the highway. She did it because she had never done something all alone.

Last year, she learned sea kayaking in Sausalito. Then it was off for more of the same along the coast of Baja California at Thanksgiving. She dined on fresh lobster and sushi. Much preferable to sitting at home with a dead turkey, declares Reid.

" I can't think of anything worse than keeping house, cooking for someone, doing laundry and watching TV," says Reid. "I think you could lull yourself to sleep doing that. I could lull myself to death doing that."

HER OWN UPBRINGING

Reid, reared in Berkeley, graduated from Berkeley High School in 1949 and was married for 31 years. She raised two children while making a career out of being a student.

It took 20 years, but in 1969 she finally earned a bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary social sciences from San Francisco State University. Then she got her master's degree in the same subject and a teaching credential.

In the late 1960s, she also went to law school. But three years into it, she says her husband threw her school books out of bed and said, in effect, either be married or go be a lawyer. She quit school. They were divorced many years later, in 1981.

Reid has also been a Ph.D. candidate in higher education at the University of California at Berkeley and taught secondary education at San Francisco State University.

Of all the challenges, Reid says the most difficult were during the 9 years she spent running a residential home for emotionally disturbed teenage girls in San Francisco, called the Fillmore Fell Group Home. The girls' skills were limited and it was nearly impossible to earn their trust.

"That one kicked my ass for sure," says Reid. "Because the bad habits were entrenched to the max."

When she was offered the job running the Whitney Young Center, the place was so disorganized the staff had not been paid in six weeks.

"I didn't think I wanted to do this," she says.

That was seven years ago.

Now she is talking of retiring and taking up tennis, or maybe kayaking down the Amazon.

"Maybe," she says, "I don't like not feeling."

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A CHILD'S SUCCESS STORY

Ken Ullman and his wife, Dailin, had such a difficult time with their first-born they thought they did not want any more children.

Their son, Jules, was born with a small brain and communicated by screaming, hitting, crying, scratching and biting.

When he started at Whitney Young Child Development Center in Hunters Point two years ago, he did not talk. They threw him in with all the other kids anyway.

Something happened.

At first, "all he would do is scream," says Careth Reid, executive director of the center. "Eight months later, the kid is talking, loving and has a funny sense of humor. He greets every staff person by name. He knows a lot of parents by name. He is a busybody into everything.

"Every day this kid comes in and says, 'Hey, Reid, where are you, Reid?' . . . He signs himself in, looks through the drawers for my keys. I don't have normal kids here with the insights he has."

Now his parents want Jules, 7, to be integrated into regular kindergarten. They say treating him like anyone else was key to his success.

"Everything we were told about Jules was that he would go into special-ed classes to learn the necessities of life. . . . That's it," says his father, Ken, 33. "Mrs. Reid doesn't believe in special education or being handicapped, unlike the school district, which put him in a separate class. Jules basically learned to talk from the other kids."

The way Reid puts it, "He looks at normalcy as a model and attempts to emulate that."

The Ullmans are having another child in September. ---------------------------------

PHOTO CUTLINE: (1) Careth Reid with one of her charges. Disabled kids are fully integrated into the program., (2) Careth Reid, 58, works 16-hour days for her kids at the Whitney Young Child Development Center. 'The object is to give them something really solid to live up to,' she says. / BY DEANNE FITZMAURICE/THE CHRONICLE

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