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REMEMBERING ELON HOMES: Long-Time Administrator Leaves Legacy of Love

Posted on: Sunday, 12 March 2006, 15:00 CST

By Mike Wilder, Times-News, Burlington, N.C.

Mar. 12--Wilma Williamson went to live at Elon Homes for Children in the mid-1950s. She was 5. She was Wilma Rich then, and her father had been killed in a car accident. Her mother didn't feel she was able to care for the children alone, so Williamson and her five brothers and sisters went to live at Elon Homes for Children. It was an abrupt change. The day she and her siblings were taken there, Williamson said, "We thought we were going to get ice cream." Elon Homes has changed since Williamson was there. It began in 1907 as an orphanage in the town of Elon College, now Elon. Its empha sis changed in recent decades to serve children who had parents, but were from troubled back grounds. Elon Homes closed its opera tions on the Elon campus at the end of 2005. It is working toward a high school on the campus, with a target opening date of fall 2007. Williamson's memories of the place where she grew up are strong. Williamson doesn't necessarily describe a bad life when talking about her first years at Elon Homes. But she does describe an early childhood that was more work than play. "We started doing chores at a young age," she said. "Before we went to school and when we got home from school, we had chores to do. There was not a lot of playing." Williamson said that lifestyle has stuck with her. "I can't sleep late," she said. "I've tried." But, she said, the children were close-knit and felt a common bond from having lost one or both parents. Some of the men and women who were children and teenagers at Elon Homes still get together each year for a reunion. Williamson remembers people coming from community organizations, such as the Rotary Club, to do things for the children. During one of her first Christmas seasons at Elon Homes, "Santa Claus came in a helicopter and we all got a toy." Williamson, who was at Elon Homes for 12 years, said things changed when Wally Snyder arrived in 1960 as the institution's CEO. "He was probably the first person that made us feel loved," she said. "He made us feel valued, and we probably had not had that before." Williamson went to college as an adult and earned a degree from Elon College, now Elon University. She and her husband, Don, have four children. She is administrator at Blakey Hall, an assisted-living facility in Elon. She's on the town of Elon's planning board, and she and her husband have four children. THE CHANGES at Elon Homes' Alamance County campus followed a shift in federal funding, said Fred Grosse, who now heads Elon Homes. That shift was meant to put more children in homes in the community, rather than a group residential setting. Elon Homes still provides residential services to young people on its Charlotte campus, and has a charter school there in addition to working with children in foster homes in different parts of North Carolina. A visit to the current and former Elon Homes property shows a landscape in transition. Williamson and Mike Wise, who was also at Elon Homes during the 1950s and 1960s, met Snyder in late February to have their photograph taken outside of Holt Chapel. The chapel, now on property owned by Elon University, was where the young people attended worship services, and where many of them got married. "Thirty-nine years ago this month, you married me in this thing," Wise told Snyder as they waited for Williamson. The university has put athletic fields and a golf driving range on land near the chapel. Elon Homes used the land for farming. "I got up many a bale of hay off that soccer field over there," Wise said. Elon Homes once owned more than 200 acres, said Snyder, who headed the institution from 1960 to 1990. "I sold about 100 acres before I left, and they sold the rest of it except 20 (acres)," he said. WISE WAS 8 and living with his mother and grandmother in Durham when he went to Elon Homes. His mother, a single parent, had cancer and died two months after he started living at Elon Homes. "I think the good Lord was on my side in putting me here," said Wise, who is coowner of Burlington Pawnbrokers. Wise, 60, said that doesn't mean he always enjoyed life at Elon Homes. Life there was regimented, particularly compared to children's lives today. "We lived on a working farm," he said, which meant getting up early and a lot of work outside. And unlike a lot of boys then and now, he learned how to wash clothes and iron. He graduated from Western Alamance High School in 1964. He met his wife, Linda, there when he was a junior and she was a freshman. Both Wise and Williamson mentioned dating as a good example of how things changed after Snyder came to Elon Homes. It was among the changes that made their lives more like those of young people who lived with their parents. Elon Homes replaced the three large dormitories with cabins so the children and teenagers would live in a more home-like setting. The young people still had responsibilities, but Elon Homes' alumni group raised money to put in a swimming pool, and the institution also put in tennis courts and a gym. "Life began to really mean something to those kids," Snyder said. SNYDER SAID his late wife, Nell, would take the girls shopping for dresses that she sometimes got at a discount from business owners. Williamson remembers being punished one Easter for complaining that she wanted a dress from Koury's instead of material for a homemade dress. Wherever the clothes were coming from, the kids had no reason to be embarrassed by them. Snyder said he was satisfied to hear people comment that they couldn't tell young people who lived at Elon Homes from other children and teenagers at school or in the community. "I had wanted them so much to be like the other kids," he said. "There was no reason for them not to have the kind of things that they ought to have." During Snyder's 30 years at Elon Homes, it changed from being a home for children who had lost one or both parents to being a home for children who came from troubled homes or had gotten into different kinds of trouble themselves. Snyder said he discovered there was something worse for children than losing their parents: when "children have living parents who won't care for them." Those children weren't always from poor families. Many were, but Snyder remembers children of wealthy people ending up at Elon Homes as well. He found children sometimes wouldn't, or couldn't, move on from their backgrounds. "A lot of them did," he said. "But some of them didn't." Success sometimes mingled with tragedy in the lives of the men and women who left Elon Homes, just as in the lives of people everywhere. Snyder mentioned the death in November 2005 of David Howell, who along with his two sisters went to live at Elon Homes after their mother died. Howell was killed when his moped was struck by a car. Howell was convicted five times of driving while impaired, which was why he was driving a moped. He'd started going to church and volunteering at Allied Churches of Alamance County's homeless shelter, where he had spent time. "He'd really turned his life around," Snyder said. ELON HOMES' young people would get a formal wedding in Holt Chapel if they finished high school. They'd still get a ceremony, just not as elaborate, if they didn't finish high school. Snyder performed the ceremonies, and his wife directed the weddings. "Nell made a big difference in what I was able to do there," he said. She died in 2002 at the age of 77 as the result of a rare form of leukemia. Her husband lives at the Village at Brookwood. He still sees some of the men and women who were children at Elon Homes. "I find myself marrying quite a few of their children," he said. Mike Wilder can be reached at mike_wilder@link.freedom.com or 506-3046

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Copyright (c) 2006, Times-News, Burlington, N.C.

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Source: Times-News

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