It didn’t take very long to see that a senior social worker and the Center for Justice were a perfect fit for each other.
By Tim Connor
One of the first things you come to appreciate about Bob Rosen is that he can talk your socks off. From gadgets to philosophy, from dry cleaning to unwritten chapters in American history, if there’s a subject on which he’ll disappoint, we haven’t discovered it yet. As a natural conversationalist and living encyclopedia of facts, wisdom and humor the 72-year-old Rosen can remind you of George Burns in his prime, although with his tightly trimmed, graying beard he looks more like Ernest Hemingway.
What you likely wouldn’t know about him until you really needed him is etched on his face on a gloomy, cold and rainy day in mid-February. It’s his game face, the look you’d expect to see from a surgeon scrubbing up to take on a difficult operation. For a week Bob has been wrestling with the challenges presented by the predicament facing a new CFJ client. As he talks about it, his slate-blue eyes tighten. He speaks grimly.
“His grief was almost overwhelming,” he says. “He broke down the first time he had a chance to talk about it.”
Cases at CFJ don’t get any tougher than this one.
The young man, his resources all but depleted, had come to the Center seeking help for what, on the surface, was a bookkeeping concern. The state’s office of Adult Protective Services had questions for him about how he’d spent the state funds to help care for his brother-in-law. Yet, this small problem was dwarfed by other tragedies.
Rosen’s voice flattens as he tells the story.
The client, not yet 25, had married his high school sweetheart. Lurking in the genetic code of her family was a strong predisposition for a progressive disease that causes physical disabilities with life-threatening and shortening. His wife’s brother was already afflicted with the condition when she became pregnant with twins. The baby boys spent their short lives in the hospital, where both tragically died before reaching their first birthdays. Moreover, the pregnancy itself initiated the onset of symptoms in the young man’s wife.
“He cried through all this,” Rosen says, looking down at the table in front of him. “He was genuinely unable to handle the grief.”
People come to the Center for Justice for all sorts of reasons, and Rosen kept listening. Within the anguish there was a lot of anger about the inept care his struggling young sons had received in a local hospital.
“He was very conversant in sophisticated medical regimens,” Rosen observed. “I got the idea early on that he was going to get to the issue: that he wanted to sue the hospital.”
But that wasn’t it. Instead, the tearful client told Rosen that his ambition, now, was to study to become a pediatrician. That would take years. Rosen’s concerns for him were much more immediate. He took the challenge up with Suellen Pritchard, who coordinates the Center’s Community Advocacy program, where Rosen works as a volunteer case worker..
“Suellen and I consulted,” he says. “This is one of the most complicated cases because the issue is more complex than what the client came here for.”
Yet, as Pritchard understood, it was the sort of extremely difficult problem that her program actually had the capacity to help solve, especially now that she has someone with Rosen’s rare passion, creativity, and experience to call upon.
“It’s amazing to watch him with people,” she says, and the she slowly repeats this word for word, for emphasis.
“Kelly Owings and I talked to him for a little while and I thought, ‘okay, I’m going to give this to Bob.’ And, you know, Bob could have a conversation with that guy. And he could do it, literally, without insulting or having the guy feel like he was being insulted.”–Suellen Pritchard on Bob Rosen.
Every day Rosen shows up for work at the Center, his presence is an almost giddy reminder of our good fortune. He’s already led an extraordinary life, acquiring decades of experience in the nitty-gritty work of social problem-solving. He has a Master’s degree in social work but he’s also worked in the upper reaches of state government in and with many of the state agencies that the Center for Justice regularly works with to try to solve problems for our clients. To say he knows his way around is pure understatement. He uses a telephone the way a rodeo star uses a lariat.
Rosen had heard about the Center for Justice but he didn’t know about the Center’s involvement in social work until he responded to an invitation last spring to come to an open house event where potential volunteers could learn about the Center’s work. He missed the open house but followed up with the Center’s Development Director, Heather Beebe-Stevens who, within minutes of meeting him, realized just what a rare person Bob Rosen is.
Part of what Beebe-Stevens grasped is that Rosen’s experience might be invaluable to the undergraduate and graduate social work students who do their practicum work under Pritchard’s direction.
“Suellen was really busy then,” Heather remembers, “and I really encouraged her to meet with him soon, because I didn’t want to lose him.”
Marcus Ransom, an Eastern Washington University student who’s been doing his practicum hours alongside Rosen for the past several months, chuckled when I asked him what he gets from Rosen’s mentoring.
“It’s like I want to put a straw in his head and take in everything he knows,” Ransom says. “The thing I like about Bob is that he offers himself. Whenever he sees us working on a file or hears us working a case and we’ve got to work with, say, Child Protective Services or the Division of Development Disabilities, he has input, because he’s been through it. He knows how it works and that gives us invaluable insight as to how we need to proceed.”
Much of what’s fascinating about Bob Rosen’s path to the Center for Justice are the choices he made, long ago, that started him in this direction. He grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York, a young boy who would sleep in his father’s laundry truck on the way to making linen deliveries to barber shops and hotels in the Catskill Mountains. Then came World War II. His father enlisted in the Army and was sent to the Philippines while his mother went to work as a riveter in a shipyard.
Rosen’s father was badly injured in an airfield accident during the war but returned to civilian life with a flourish. He went from delivering laundry to heading up one of the most successful laundry/dry cleaning businesses in the country, eventually landing large contracts with IBM, McDonald Douglas, and other large employers that, due to manufacturing , had especially stringent demands for work clothing. Among other things, Rosen’s father pioneered a dry cleaning process to remove radioactive contamination from clothing.
Rosen joined the Navy right out of high school. His interest, then, was in music and he had become proficient on the trumpet. Because of its ceremonial traditions, the Navy not only has a continuous demand for musicians but it trains them very rigorously at the Navy School of Music in Anacostia, Maryland, near the nation’s capital. That was Rosen’s first stop. He was then dispatched to the Kodiak Naval Air Station in Alaska where, to win a bet, he asked one of the very few women on the base, the chaplain’s daughter, to go out with him. He not only won the bet, but the chaplain’s daughter became his first wife.
When he left the Navy, Rosen went to work in his father’s rapidly growing dry-cleaning business, and became expert in the special techniques the company continued to perfect for speciality manufacturers. NASA became a client. The government contractor at the vast nuclear reservation in Hanford tried but failed to convince his dad to move from the more industrialized East coast to the Northwest.
Rosen was making very good money in the ”Big Apple,” but he wanted to set out on his own. After a short stay in New York City he and his wife decided to move to the Northwest, where her family was from. This was 1960. They landed in Port Townsend where he was looking to buy a dry cleaning store. In the meantime, he traveled to Seattle where, with his dry cleaning skills, he had no trouble finding work. When the prospects of the dry cleaning investment soured, Rosen saw an ad from a state juvenile detention facility located on the tip of peninsula, north of Port Townsend. He applied and got a job as a cottage parent at the former military post, which still carried the name Fort Worden. The pay was low, but the scenery–from a high bluff overlooking Admiralty Inlet and the Strait of Juan De Fuca–was stunning and the living quarters were splendid, similar to the large and elegant structures at Spokane’s Fort George Wright.
As a cottage parent, Rosen worked with twenty delinquent children at a time. He has nothing but scorn for the methods the state used to punish juveniles at Fort Warden. But he’s proud to point out that, a decade later, he drew an assignment from then-Governor Dan Evans, to come back and help close the diagnostic and treatment facility. It’s now a state park.
“You can now rent my house for a couple hundred dollars a weekend,” he says with a grin. “I used to pay $36 a month to rent it.”
The other silver lining in the Fort Worden chapter is that he found that he really enjoyed helping the kids in his care. It was the spark not just for his remarkable career in social work, but for a life that is deeply enriched by his intimate work helping people who struggle with disabilities and misfortunes.
Before long, Rosen’s work at Fort Worden came to the attention of a prominent University of Washington expert on child development, Dr. Henry Maier, who periodically offered teaching clinics at the site. In a sense, Maier discovered Bob Rosen and became the first in a line of eminent mentors who encouraged him to pursue social work as a career.
Rosen was alone with five seriously retarded, non-verbal residents, leading them down a path at the Woodland Park Zoo when “I heard a clunk behind me.” It was the helmeted head of one of his patients slamming against the asphalt of the path. As he rushed to administer first aid to the bleeding patient, he was very anxious about whether others would stay nearby or walk off.
“They all stopped, sat on a bench and waited,” he recalls. “Then they all walked with me to the van parked a quarter mile away. What an amazing thing. They knew I was having difficulty and needed their help.”
Along the way, Rosen had a rather bizarre brush with the legal system. It was all because he casually decided to start letting his beard grow over the Fourth of July holiday in 1966.
“I wanted to see what was like,” he says. “I was thirty years old and thought it was kind of fun.”
He was working as a social worker in the King County juvenile court system at the time, still working toward his Master’s Degree.
“The director of the juvenile court asked me when I was going to shave,” Rosen recalls. “And I said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to shave, Dick, I kind of like it.’ It was the sixties, I didn’t think anything of it.”
But a slender majority of the twenty or so Superior Court judges in King County thought Rosen’s beard was a very bad idea. In their letter explaining why they were firing him, Rosen says, they wrote that his beard “would incite already rebellious” youths in his care to be more rebellious.”
The professional and public outrage over Rosen’s firing made him a King County cause celebre and although it was not attention he was seeking, it was attention that opened doors for him. People offered him new jobs. Charles Brink, the prestigious Dean of the University of Washington’s School of Social Work contacted him and offered him a full scholarship to complete his studies at the UW. Big Brothers hired him as a supervisor over higher-degreed personel.
Among those who reached out to Rosen was Charles Z. Smith, one of the King County Superior Court judges who’d dissented from the vote to fire him. As the controversy heated up, Rosen was walking past Smith’s chambers one day when the judge saw him and called him in. Smith would later become Washington’s first black state supreme court justice, but he was already well known by then not only for his record on the bench but for his work as a mob-busting federal prosecutor under former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Rosen was one of Smith’s many admirers.
It was clear, Rosen says, that Smith was appalled at the vote of his peers.
“Let me show you something,” he recalls Judge Charles Z. Smith saying. Smith motioned him to come behind his desk where he’d opened a large book with photographs of prominent American superior court judges.
“And he [Smith] asked me, ‘what do you notice about them?’” What Rosen noticed is that most of the judges sported beards.
“Isn’t that interesting?” Smith said.
“That’s the way things were then,” Rosen says. “Well. There I was. I knew I was going to be without a job. And I knew I couldn’t shave. I mean, I found out something about myself. I just couldn’t do it. They were wrong.”
There were other things Rosen was learning about himself in this period of his life, including just how much personal satisfaction and fulfillment he reaped from his work with disabled people. One of his early social work jobs was at the Fircrest School, a large institution for the developmentally disabled in Seattle. There he was assigned to a large group of severely disabled non-verbal men, none of whom, once committed, had ever been outside its walls.
“They were put there when they were children and they were going to stay there until they died,” Rosen says. ” It was a life sentence far beyond what is often meted out for murder.
Rosen says he and some of his younger colleagues had different ideas and began to work with the patients to teach them new skills that would allow them to be more independent.
One boundary he wanted to push was to get at least some of them outside the walls. This experiment led to an outing with five of the patients to the Woodland Park Zoo, a day that’s fixed in Rosen’s memory.
He was alone with five seriously retarded,non-verbal residents, leading them down a path at the zoo, he remembers, when “I heard a clunk behind me.”
It was the helmeted head of one of his patients slamming against the asphalt of the path. As he rushed to administer first aid to the bleeding patient, he was very anxious about whether others would stay nearby or walk off.
“They all stopped, sat on a bench and waited,” he recalls. “Then they all walked with me to the van parked a quarter mile away. What an amazing thing. They knew I was having difficulty and needed their help.”
There were more field trips after the zoo outing but what Rosen eventually learned is that his and others’ successes at helping patients become more independent and more interactive posed a threat to Fircrest’s prison-like culture of control.
Ultimately, he says, he was summoned to the office of the superintendent and asked, squarely, “What the hell are you trying to do to MY institution?”
“It’s like I want to put a straw in his head and take in everything he knows. The thing I like about Bob is that he offers himself. Whenever he sees us working on a file or hears us working a case and we’ve got to work with, say, Child Protective Services or the Division of Development Disabilities, he has input, because he’s been through it. He knows how it works and that gives us invaluable insight as to how we need to proceed.”–EWU Social Work student Marcus Ransom.
If the resistance he was meeting was the downside, the upside is that he knew he was making a positive difference and his work was getting recognized. When he finished graduate school, he went to work for the state, and his career took off. Before long he was drawing top level state assignments, including being tasked to close Fort Worden and other notorious state institutions for the developmentally disabled, delinquent,dependent and mentally ill.
By the mid-1970′s, Rosen had risen to the upper echelons of the state’s social services bureaucracy. Ultimately, he was asked to help guide a high level committee, selected by then-Governor Dixie Lee Ray to reorganize and consolidate Washington’s sprawling social services agencies.
Years later, in the aftermath of a divorce, Rosen was looking for a change at a time state officials sought his help in resolving two of the state’s thornier social service problems. One assignment would involve trying to reform the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation’s operations in Seattle which were in disarray. The other was the Spokane office of the Division of Development Disabilities, which was badly in need of reform.
He accepted the special assignment to come to Spokane and to his own surprise quickly “kind of fell in love with this part of the world. ”As Bob puts it: The webs between his fingers and toes dried out and fell away.
At work, however, the problems were even deeper than he expected.
“They brought me here to help modernize an old-fashioned, institution-oriented system where if you were born with broken genes you would go into an institution at six months of age and stay there,” Rosen says.
Among other things, he found that hundreds of children with Down’s Syndrome and other development disorders had been institutionalized at Lakeland Village and Interlake School at Medical Lake.
He quickly went to work changing that.
“There were 750 people that I literally stole from Lakeland Village,” Rosen says. “I didn’t head up the institution because they had another kingdom out there. But I had control over who came in and who came out of the institution. They had control over them when they were there.”
By stealing them, what Rosen really means is that he worked tirelessly to find them foster homes, apartments and group facilities.
“That’s what we did,” he says. “That’s how we got folks placed in the community. And we did it. We stole them out. I fired fifty-two people in the Developmental Disabilities office when I came to Spokane. And we did more work with the twenty who were left than with the seventy who there before. It was just an old, good ol’ boy system.”
As remarkable a career Rosen had in state service, there is one irony: his savvy and hard work propelled him so quickly into the upper echelons of state government that it essentially removed him from the one-on-one interactions with patients that led him to be a social worker in the first place.
There is also a notable disappointment, in the form of the mega-bureaucracy–the Department of Social and Health Services–that he helped to restructure in the 1970′s.
DSHS was born of good intentions to try to address the balkanization of the state’s social service agencies that were disconnected and balkanized.
“We created this monster, which was my dream, one-stop shopping,” Rosen says ruefully. “Well, here it is. We’re forty years later and when you go to your parole officer, or you go for alcohol or substance abuse counseling, or you go to pick up money for child welfare, or you go to get a foster home, it’s like going to six different agencies. They really never did integrate. Now you can talk to a developmental disability case worker, and they don’t know what adult protective services does. And yet, they’ve got a whole caseload of thousand of adults who are developmentally disabled people that often need adult protective services. But they don’t realize that that’s in another section of DSHS. The people in Adult Protective Services don’t know that the Division of Developmental Disabilities is a division of the Department of Social and Health Services. They’ve actually built those walls so tight. When we created that agency, DSHS, we had a different idea in mind.”
Rosen’s last position with the state was as the eastern Regional Administrator for the Division of Developmental Disabilities. When he retired from his state position in 1989, he became a consultant in the area of disability andhead injury services and then got deeply involved helping children with mental and physical hanicaps learn to ride horses, something he both enjoyed and found to be a very useful form of therapy for the kids.
What attracted him to the Center was the positive buzz he heard about CFJ’s work on high profile cases like the Otto Zehm civil rights case. He says he was curious about whether the organization would have use for someone with his social work experience but had no idea the Center operates a program–Community Advocacy–that is actually ideally suited for his talents and experience.
“It tickles me, obviously,” Rosen says. “I drive fifty miles a day just to come to work here. My gas bill runs about several hundred dollars a month. And people ask me, ‘what do you do that for, you’re retired?’ And I say, ‘because I like it. I feel like I’m doing something.’ I mean, I feel like a kid about it. It’s nice. I can do these things.”
It’s also true that the satisfaction Rosen gets from the work is because it manages to call upon every tool and skill he possesses. He says he admires the Center’s non-bureaucratic culture because it gives him and others a lot of flexibility and creativity to solve complex problems for people. From mid-July to the end of last year, Rosen had logged 354.5 hours at the Center for Justice, the most of any Center volunteer.
“Some of the cases we have are really difficult, complicated cases,” he says, “and we tend to take them on, and they’re pretty tough.”
One example Suellen Pritchard notes is a recent case where a man sought the Center’s help but was having a very hard time communicating. One element of his disability, she says, “is that he had all these channels of information coming into his head and it was all coming out of his mouth at the same time.”
“Kelly [CFJ intern Kelly Owings] and I talked to him for a little while and I thought, ‘okay, I’m going to give this to Bob.’ And, you know, Bob could have a conversation with that guy. And he could do it, literally, without insulting or having the guy feel like he was being insulted.”
What Rosen learned is that the rambling client was actually very wealthy, except that his assets were controlled by a family-member trustee. The client had a communication disability, but he was otherwise competent to control his funds. Rosen successfully worked to get the needed medical opinion to establish his competency. Today, the man controls his own money, his own life.
“It’s just amazing what he’s accomplished in his life for people,” Suellen says. “And how he figures out how to get those needs met, for them.”
Among the harder cases are those of parents and guardians having to work through the prolonged and sometimes life-long struggles to take care of a seriously disabled loved one. In the low points of such struggles people often feel as though no one else can understand what it’s like.
But Bob Rosen does understand. In 1972, his 12-year-old daughter fell as she was walking on a frozen lake and hit her head on the ice. She suffered a concussion, and because of a previously unrecognized anomaly in her brain structure, fluid from brain swelling became trapped, causing serious brain damage. She’s had serious health problems ever since, and Rosen has taken on a large share of her care. Although caring for her is not the reason he got into the social work field, it certainly has informed him about the burdens and obstacles, and in trying to comfort people once in a while he will share that he’s walked a mile in similar shoes.
“Every once in a while it’s appropriate,” he says. “Typically, that’s a no-no. But sometimes, if you really want to relate to people in order to deal with their pain or their grief, you have to let them know that you’ve been there. ‘Here’s what I had to do. Here’s what worked for me.’”
“I drive fifty miles a day just to come to work here. My gas bill runs about several hundred dollars a month. And people ask me, ‘what do you do that for, you’re retired?’ And I say, ‘because I like it. I feel like I’m doing something.’ I mean, I feel like a kid about it. It’s nice. I can do these things.”–Bob Rosen.
When he’d gotten out of bed in Newman Lake on that grim, rainy morning in mid-February, the most important question on Bob Rosen’s mind that day was whether the beleaguered and shaken young client who’d lost his two young sons would get help for his obvious grief. The Community Building complex is bee-hive of people with lots of skills and experiences. One of the former tenants, well remembered, was a forensic psychologist and when he was contacted for advice on this case he offered six names of local psychologists he thought might be able to help the young man.
Rosen called the first name on the list. It turned out to be an old acquaintance who, twenty years earlier, had been a young psychology student at Eastern State Hospital. The former student well remembered Rosen. He had since become a specialist in “catastrophic depression,” and opened a counseling service in the Spokane Valley. He was precisely the rare sort of specialist the young man needed to see. At the same time, Rosen alerted the psychologist to the fact that the struggling client didn’t have much money.
“Send him over to me,” Rosen heard him say, “we’ll figure something out.”
So now the question was whether the client would agree to the generous offer to help.
“A typical reaction,” Rosen noted, “is ‘not me, I’m not crazy.’”
He had to broach the subject lightly, but also offer his advice that this would be of great help to the client in helping him cope with the trauma of what he’d been through. And the client agreed.
“So now we’re set,” Rosen said. “I was just overjoyed.”
—CFJ
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