Jerry Beker: Colleague and Friend F. Herbert Barnes Youthorizons/ILEX
I thought it would be hard for me to write a professional article about my long-time colleague and dear friend, Jerome Beker. A personal article, I immediately thought, would be so much easier. But it would rapidly become the former anyway, focusing on areas of our shared professional concerns, for that is the glue that has cemented our relationship over 30 years of good times and bad times, times of high productivity and really believing that good work can make a difference, interspersed, happily only occasionally, with times of doubt and gloom. But those were the times that most clearly defined the core of our relationship—a common, shared interest in enriching the lives and experiences of children and youth in residential care through enriching the perspective, role, and practice of their direct care workers—and it was that core that sustained us in low moments we shared and directed us in high times of great production. We always said we wanted to work together, then discovered that we always had actually worked together; it was just that we never were employed together at the same place. Nothing made the sustaining value of our shared professional interests and the close relationship that grew out of sharing these interests more clear than a unique moment in time when each of us, rather than employed together, were unemployed together. Aside from appointments with each other, our calendars were pretty empty, but these appointments were critically important. They had identity-preserving value. However uncertain or frightened I may have felt in-between, with two boys to raise and no job, those appointments with Jerry sustained me. Years later, in reflecting back on such times of uncertainty, almost all of them shared in some way with Jerry, I discovered that the power of his support encouraged me to stay focused so that I could later say: “While I have not always been sure what my job is, I have always known what my work is.” I know that Jerry would say that about himself. I suspect I learned it from him.
Correspondence should be directed to F. Herbert Barnes, ILEX, 106 Lafayette St., Yarmouth, ME 04096. Child & Youth Care Forum, 29(3), June 2000 2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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Successful careers are probably more the result of serendipity than of careful planning flawlessly executed. When I first knew Jerry he was struggling with decisions he needed to make about the job he was in at that time in New York. There was potential that looked promising and suitable to Jerry’s interests. But there were realities that looked impervious to resolution and ultimately he had to make a change. While already a published author, he was not envisioning himself then at all in the way many professionals have come to know him since, as the editor of two important journals that play uniquely significant roles in the field (the second was Child and Youth Services which began Jerry’s affiliation with the Haworth Press, about five years after the inauguration of CCQ, as we called it in those days). But when the opportunity came to be the founding editor of the first of these journals, Child Care Quarterly, Jerry elected to do that, giving him a most appropriate base for expressing his vision of what the field of direct care practice with children and youth could be and also giving him the vehicle with which to promote communication and invite people to think and share and, together, improve “the field.” The mission of the Quarterly made it clear: . . . a professional publication committed to the improvement of child care practice in a variety of day and residential settings and to the advancement of this field. Designed to serve child care practitioners, their supervisors, and other personnel in child care settings as well as instructors in the field of child care, the Quarterly provides a channel of communication and debate including material on practice, selection and training, theory and research, and professional issues.
That was the mission of the Quarterly (now CYC Forum) because it was Jerry’s design and that is what Jerry does, that is what he promotes and precipitates. That is what he means to many people and surely to me as well, for this is the core of my relationship with Jerry, the commitment to the improvement of child care practice. It is how it began and the underlying theme that has sustained it for thirty years. Certainly there are other aspects. We each raised two boys at the same time. Watching the boys playing blocks in Rockland County, playing football with them in Dutchess County, and family visits all along the way are all fond, personal memories. Jerry’s ability to seize the craziest moment for a pun always caught me up short and made me feel competitive—because I could never do it. My two sons loved to tease him and always, in the end, were surprised when somehow they lost the upper hand they were sure they had going in. Mainly they loved to tease him about his attention to detail and often sought to prove him fallible. When they were both in college, and the Syracuse boy was visiting the Macalester boy, they decided to pay a visit to Jerry at his office.
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They immediately resumed teasing their good friend, this time about the condition of his office with stacks and stacks of papers on all shelves, commenting that it was crazy to keep all that stuff because he couldn’t possibly have any idea what was there. “No,” said Jerry, “that’s not true. I pretty well know what’s here.” “Well,” they said, “let’s test that. Dad wrote a paper for the Quarterly awhile ago. Do you have the manuscript?” “Yes, I believe I do,” said Jerry. “You know I don’t throw anything away. It should be about here.” And reaching into the middle of one of the stacks, he said, quite matter-of-factly: “Yes, here it is.” Both boys were astounded and, as soon as possible, reported the results of their teasing adventure to me saying, “Boy, Dad, we always knew Jerry was amazing, but he’s actually infallible!” Yes, that’s it. In some ways Jerry is infallible and they had tried to catch him in his most infallible area—the scholarly accumulation and dissemination of knowledge, and the belief that a worthy enterprise deserves clarity and integrity in the details. Those two boys had discovered that what they were teasing, a presumed preoccupation with minutiae, wasn’t that at all. Instead they had tapped into something far more complex and comprehensive and were in awe of what had confronted them in response. The infallibility the two boys spoke of is caused by an undeviating focus on quality and accuracy: in thinking, in conceptualizing, in reporting, in communication in general. I know that aspects of my relationship with Jerry are a direct result of my confidence that with Jerry I can absolutely depend on that, and sometimes that extends to whether I like it or not. I would expect that this is a quality that others have noticed also, and they too may have grown in their ability to depend on that in their relationship with Jerry. I am certainly sure that this applies with all the many practitioners that Jerry has encouraged to become authors, me among them. For many of us busy in practice, running agencies, with boards, with negotiating reimbursement rates, with overhauling programs to meet new needs with inadequate resources, there is no time to write. Many practitioners feel they know how “to do” but that writing is something else. Writing derives from knowledge and articles are written by those who know in order to instruct, in order to improve practice. But Jerry has always had an additional message: It is not a one-way street, that practice derives from knowledge. What creates knowledge? Where does it come from? His message has always emphasized that if people will share what they are doing in practice, that builds knowledge. So it’s not just the one-way street of practice deriving from knowledge. It is in fact a reciprocal process in which knowledge derives from practice as well, and this then includes all of us involved in the field. Jerry’s voice has been a consistent source of encouragement to the legions of
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practitioners with whom he has been in contact that this is an important professional opportunity. Indeed, he has never limited his message to noting this merely as an opportunity. For many of us, he has been the primary agent provacateur for writing, urging us to see this as a responsibility, with many a good argument for those of us who have said: “I am too busy ‘doing’ to write about it.” There are many in the field I am sure who, like me, have been told to: “Get a box and a bunch of 3 × 5 cards. Write down events, incidents, ideas, regrets, mistakes, super successes—just write it down on a card and throw it in the box. Later you can organize it and it will be a valuable article.” It’s all part of the commitment to improving the quality of child care practice. And this was how I met Jerry in the first place. It was through a perception of similar professional interests by another person that Jerry and I became colleagues first, then friends. The perception was that of Henry Maier, whom I had met at an “Ortho” conference (American Orthopsychiatric Association) in San Francisco. He saw right away that, in addition to being the administrator of a children’s residential facility, I was seriously interested in how the daily life experience of children in residence and the interaction with their direct care workers could be the primary therapeutic influence of the institution. He called me to suggest that I go to Switzerland to an international meeting on European education for milieu workers. I went. It was a life-changing experience. But Henry wasn’t finished. When I returned I called him to report back and he then said that I should get together with Jerry Beker “who is concerned about the same things that you are.” Little did I know that this “middleman” had written to Jerry in New York to tell him the same thing about me. It worked. On getting together, we discovered that Henry was absolutely correct, we were “concerned about the same things” but on our own we also discovered that we were concerned in many similar ways. Jerry had begun working with kids in the Jewish community centers and summer camps that his father had directed in Pennsylvania. He came to considerations about child care work from deeply held convictions about experiential learning and building relationships with kids from a history of campfires, camp dining halls, cabin groups, healing homesickness, resolving temper tantrums, healing cut fingers and hurt feelings all in the setting of 24/7 summer camping with kids. He once said, “Every child care worker needs summer camp experience because that’s where residential treatment has its best roots.” What he was talking about was a concept of the basic foundation for working with kids in groups in 24-hour care: The investment the worker must make in relationship building, the planned use of activities to involve kids and groups productively, the conscious elevation of workers’ responses to kids from the ordinary reaction to the disciplined
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response until the disciplined response becomes the new level of spontaneous reaction. And this became, as he continued, a foundation for informing the work that needed to be done in transforming the orientation of residential group services from custodial care to what began to be called “the therapeutic milieu,” and the redefinition of the facility from a children’s institution to a residential treatment center. That highly sophisticated construct, reflective of the new medical and illness orientation that came ultimately to dominate the field, was not the ideal model for Jerry, who was always more educator than clinician. But he recognized it as a significant step and one that served the field well for some time as an articulate model, well grounded and teachable, thus making more possible the improved residential life for children and the more responsible role for workers that Jerry had always visualized. My point of view was similar though derived differently, from combining education and social work. I had never worked in summer camps as Jerry had, but I had been summer staff in a children’s residential program (in an agency for which I later became executive director) and had been taught well during those summers by gifted “progressive education” teachers whose standards about teacher-child relationships and the value of dynamic curriculum in promoting experiential learning were uncompromising. These beginnings were very similar to Jerry’s. We both learned that care was more dynamic involvement with kids and activities than it was custodial oversight and keeping order. Following those summers with a graduate program in education, teaching experience in a private, progressive school and ultimately, because of my growing interest in working with disturbed kids, enrollment in a school of social work set me on a course of interest very similar to Jerry’s at that time. Residential services for children and youth presented the working environment that allowed us to stretch the limits of what we knew to be the established focus of our respective disciplines. To be not just educators but to be milieu educators, teachers in the here and now, or not just social workers but to be milieu therapists, not clinically focused but clinically aware, was what we saw the work demanding and we were enthusiastically experimenting. Those were the interesting elements of commonality—beyond Henry Maier’s observation that we were concerned about the same things— that Jerry and I discovered and which became essential aspects of definition in the “what and why” of our having worked together all these years. We have always known that real child care work is complex and demanding, and its very nature requires it to stretch the bounds of one discipline because it is, in fact, transdisciplinary. We have always
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believed that when properly conceptualized, implemented, and supported, it can be exciting and rewarding professional work, not necessarily a sure ticket to “burn-out.” This wonderful career journey of working philosophically with Jerry had two marvelous “moments” of actually doing that. Soon after meeting Jerry I was leaving my director’s position to start an experimental/ demonstration project in residential treatment based on my emerging concept of the milieu worker as a transdisciplinary professional. I asked Jerry if he would join this adventure as a board member. I had first asked him—in fact urged him—to apply for my soon-to-be vacated position as agency executive director, because I knew that he understood and appreciated the work that we had started there in redefining the child care worker as the key professional and that his vision and inspiration could carry it on. But he decided against agency administration as his best choice for career direction, though he did agree and became a board member (a relationship that continues today) and an important source of collegial support in this new, demonstration program. Always attending board meetings, which we held as often as possible in those days, he was also always available for phone consultation made more valuable because of an uncanny ability he had to always stay abreast of the issues—that same quality that my two boys had mistaken for preoccupation with minutiae and learned was actually a commitment to clarity and the conviction that it was essential to proper development. The other “moment” was an invitation to prepare a proposal for a federally funded project to introduce the European concept of milieu professional (the educateur) across the country as a model for developing a new vision of child care work as the complex, responsible, competent, exciting profession we wanted it to be and knew it could be. But the experimental residential program had funding problems, and the federal agency sponsoring our by then completed proposal on the educateur had run out of funds to support that priority. We always wondered “what if” either one had succeeded, what would things be like now? The agency that we founded, Youthorizons, continues but now with a different focus from the direct service demonstration project that we organized initially. Now the agency’s primary work is the administration of the ILEX program (International Learning Exchange in Social Education), and Jerry continues to serve as a Board member. From a slow beginning when it was very fortunate to have as its academic base Jerry’s Center for Youth Development and Research in Minnesota, this program has evolved into a very successful way to continue to share new ideas about child care work and to promote interest in its continuing development as vital work of the highest professional order.
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Jerry and I have always worked together on the improvement of child care practice in a variety of day and residential settings, from our respective points of view. With just the few opportunities for working together, the knowledge that Jerry was there and that we shared in common an understanding of what this work truly is, has been for me a major, sustaining influence. From the time of our first meeting in Philadelphia I recognized him as a kindred spirit, a comrade-inarms—a feeling that has never diminished but has only grown in depth and warmth as many shared experiences over this length of time have made their mark.
