Tonic & Telescopes

Principal Joe Harrell of the Thomas A. Edison School in West Dallas, Tex. keeps a barber chair just outside his office door, and a bottle of bright red hair tonic on his desk. "It's real loud-smelling tonic," says he. "That brings them in." It does, sometimes at the rate of twelve a day--pupils who might wait a long time for a haircut if it weren't for the little shop right there next to the principal's office.

For the last five years, Principal Harrell has been worrying a good deal about things like that. A twangy, kindly man of 56, raised on a Texas farm, he has become a sort of patriarch to the people living in some of the more dismal patches of West Dallas. Statistics tell part of the West Dallas problem. Spread out along the bottom lands of the Trinity River, it is a dreary settlement of native whites, Negroes and Mexicans jammed into row upon row of one-and two-room shacks --some 25,000 people--mostly without plumbing of any kind. In West Dallas, clean water costs 50-c- a barrel.

The Fine Art of Soap. Joe Harrell doesn't think he can change all that, but at least he can do something for the kids that reach Edison. Joe sees the job at Edison (and at the Benito Juarez school, of which he is also principal) as more than just teaching boys & girls to read & write. One of the extracurricular activities Joe started as soon as he realized that the cost of soap was largely responsible for the grimy looks of his students: practical soapmaking, out of lye and cooking fat brought from home.

When Joe needs money for his projects, he drops into Dallas and makes a little speech at one of the service clubs. He always comes back with $25 or $50. He has a few special contributors, among them a policeman who regularly shows up with stacks of tablets and boxes of pencils for students who cannot afford them. Last week, Joe got something he has been after for a long time: a local club offered to buy him a plow so that he and his students could start a garden of their own. Another club had already provided the seeds, and a dairy company the fertilizer.

Health & Books. For Joe, all that is only the beginning. "Man," he says, "I wake up nights with new ideas." He wants a health clinic and a park for West Dallas, a community library, and a dairy barn for his school. He wants bee colonies, rabbit hutches, fruit trees and an amateur weather station--not forgetting a telescope to study astronomy ("That will get them a long way out of West Dallas"). He also wants to keep his school open all through the summer. "That way," says he, "a lot of these youngsters whose folks take them off cotton picking in the fall can get their full nine months."

It looked as if some of Joe's dreams might come true. Dallas was at last building a big new school combining Edison and Juarez, complete with gymnasium, dining room and auditorium. When it is finished, he will have room for more students than ever before. "Then," says Joe, who still commutes from nearby Oak Cliff, "I'm going to move out here to West Dallas. And I want a house with a big front porch where I can sit and talk to all the kids."

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