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I was aware that they suffered very much from poverty. One of the girls was in the same little class in Sunday school that I was. Her name was Eliza. I was aware that they had sufferings that I didn't have and it disturbed me.

I had a little friend named Allie Higgins whose family was very poor. To this day I don't know how I knew her. They didn't live very far from us and I expect I picked her up going to the drugstore. At any rate, she once asked me to her house. I had asked my mother if I could bring her to play with me and my mother said, “Certainly. Oh yes, indeed.” Mother liked poor people. Allie Higgins' family, I saw, was obviously poor. They lived in poor quarters.

I'd heard about people living in basement tenements. Why that should stick in my ear, I don't know. I never saw anybody living in a basement tenement until much later when I was a social worker. I was touched by these things. I think I was in college before I read How the Other Half Lives. I think I read it one summer vacation. There was nothing in my college background to bring this out. They didn't teach economics, sociology or anything else in that day.

I wasn't the only person impressed by this. There was a whole generation impressed by it just at the same time, I didn't think about the fact that other people had read the