A Lifelong Mission of Nutrition

(by Suzanne Martinson, Food Editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 28, 1997)

It was a freezing February day in 1969 on the back streets of Braddock [a suburb of Pittsburgh]. It started to snow. Mary Chancey knocked on that first door. "I was scared," she says. "but I was determined to make the job last. We had to get 500 recruited, and I was going to do it."
 
Then 38, the mother of two had just sent her second boy off to school and she'd been doing "day work," shorthand for cleaning houses, when she took to the streets, going door to door to drum up business for a pilot program that took people from the community and sent them out to teach about food. They were called "nutrition aides."
 
There may have been more back-breaking jobs in Pittsburgh and jobs that required more education, but it is doubtful that there was a harder job than this. Mary Chancey's job was to change lives. One by one, person by person, over 28 years, she did.
 
On Friday she will retire, but on this day at her house on a hill in North Braddock, she brings out a small, hard-sided suitcase. Still taped to the side is the seal that would change the lot of hundreds of poor homemakers. The round sticker, now a little tattered, proclaims: "The Pennsylvania State University."
 
"I just thank God that Penn State came through Braddock. It didn't only help them, but me and my family," she says, her eyes welling with tears.
 
The nutrition aides drew their pay from the Penn State Cooperative Extension of Allegheny County. Chancey, who was active in her church and community, says they found out about her at the Braddock Library. She was one of 20 whose job was to go into low-income neighborhoods - half in Braddock, half in East Liberty - and teach mothers how to provide nutritious meals for their families.
 
Hitting the Bottom
 
She went alone.
 
Chancey had lived here since moving from Alabama in 1952, but she says she'd never know such a desperate place as "the bottom" existed in Braddock. Some women peered through their windows, but wouldn't let her in. A few told her to come back tomorrow, but she never did get inside. Many suspected she was there to take away their welfare payments. The first client "probably felt sorry for me out there in the cold," she says with a smile. She covered one street a week. "I never forgot to tell them it was free."
 
She'd had 10 days of training. "Now you can feed your children good nutrition and learn how to stretch your food dollars," she told them.
 
"Some didn't even want to get out of bed, they were so depressed. Children would be running around naked, and it was winter. They were peeing out the window."
 
Day after day, she visited drafty, rundown houses with leaking roofs whose landlords "ought to be in jail," she says, for charging rent for such places.
 
The projects were the worst. The smell of urine, even messes, in the elevators. The hopelessness.
 
Self-esteem wasn't built overnight. "Not the first visit, or the second, but when she feels you are there to help her - not there to use her. When they found out you were there because you cared about them, that's when things started happening."
 
Sometimes, Chancey hated to sit on the couch amidst the chaos and the dirt, but she didn't let on. She looked for positive things. "I see you got some new curtains," she'd say, and perhaps a woman whose breakfast had once been only coffee and cigarettes might tell her, "Like you say, that piece of toast for breakfast makes me feel good all day."
 
Chancey says if she succeeded where others have failed, it's because she came from a poor family herself. And, despite the Extension office's admonition not to get personally involved, she couldn't help caring.
 
"Some nights I hit the door boo-hooing," she says. "I never had no rest."
 
Paradise Lost
 
The story of how Mary Wilson Chancey turned despair into determination began outside Montgomery, Alabama, in a rural area known as Hall Quarters. She was one of seven children. Her mother was strict, and the one who did the "whupping" in the family. Mary was good in school, active in church, a tomboy who climbed trees, and she loved to dance. She also picked cotton.
 
"We never went hungry," she says, "but sometimes we didn't get a Christmas present."
 
Her eyes light up when she remembers the one special gift of her childhood: A little metal wind-up dancing doll.
 
They went to town in a wagon drawn by a mule. They'd buy 50 pound sacks of flour, and her mother would then bake biscuits and cornbread and make them school dresses out of the flowered sacks. They had no electricity, but they had "good clothes" for church.
 
She thinks about that life in the segregated South. "We didn't have a lot, but I was happy because I didn't know about a lot of worldly things. Everybody was everybody's mama. We could go to any house and they would feed us. Life was beautiful."
 
When Chancey was 15, things went horribly wrong. She got pregnant. "One time and it happened," she says, anguish in her voice even after all these years.
 
Fifty years ago, having a baby out of wedlock was about the worst thing that could befall a Christian girl like her. The other mothers wouldn't let their daughters associate with her. The school made her drop out, never to return. Her church put her out. She was alone, an outcast. "You can't imagine. You were out there by yourself." Her mother may have been shamed, but "she still treated me nice, she didn't throw me away."
 
Chancey thinks God had a plan for her. "That's what made me stronger. I have to prove to myself that I could do some things - not to prove to other people, but to prove to myself."
 
When her son was born, her mother took over his care. "He called her Mama and me by name."
 
Raising a Family
 
Life took a turn for the better when she met Rush Chancey, now her husband of 43 years. He had gotten wind of steel jobs in Pittsburgh, and they married before they moved here in 1952. When her mother died in 1955, her dad brought her son north. They got as far as Bowling Green, and her little boy said, "I wouldn't have to be coming here if my mother hadn't died."
 
His words may have stung, but Mary Chancey never bit off anything she couldn't chew, "I'm sorry about what happened," she says, "but I'm not sorry about my son being born because he's made something of himself." And she's glad she got him out of Alabama. "My son had a chance to got to school up here."
 
Her son, Dr. Robert Wilson, earned his doctorate in psychology from Penn State and is director of the psychology department at North Carolina A&T University, Greensboro. Although Rush adopted him, he kept his mother's maiden name. A second son, Michael Chancey, a Penn State graduate in business administration, is a machinist and lives in Braddock.
 
Mary Chancey has one granddaughter, three grandsons, one great-grandson, two stepchildren, Lillie Mae Chancey and Cliff Chancey, and one step-grandson. Their graduation, wedding and school pictures adorn the walls of the Chancey's blue and mauve living room in the North Braddock home they bought in 1971.
 
Once in Pittsburgh, Chancey earned her GED at the Boyce Campus of the Community College of Allegheny County and focused on raising sons with manners, responsibility, and spirituality.
 
Touching Lives
 
On this day, when Chancey brings out the Penn State suitcase, she laughs about the stuff she has accumulated. "I save everything. I save obituaries. You want to know when somebody died, I can tell you."
 
She keeps track of the living, too. Most of her kin remain in Alabama, but her sense of family extends to all corners of Braddock, Rankin, and beyond.
 
On the eve of her retirement, she admits that she ignored some of the rules that the Extension laid down to her. She did take her work home with her, and she ignored their warnings not to give out her home phone number or talk religion.
 
She did all that and more for her homemakers. She became their friend. She picked up their kids and took them to Sunday school. These days, she may see a young man working in the grocery store and he'll say, "Hiya, Miss Chancey, I used to be in your 4-H group," or "Remember me? You took me to church."
 
Some of her extracurricular activities did meet Extension expectations. She recruited mothers for homemakers clubs, where they beautified their kitchens with contact paper canister sets and their livers with self-esteem. She encouraged them to become leaders in their communities and sought out their kids for 4-H clubs, where they grew gardens, did demonstrations or learned public speaking.
 
Yolanda Moody of Braddock, who met Chancey through New Hope Baptist Church and joined her Helping Hands 4-H Club, will speak at her retirement party Friday at the Holiday Inn.
 
"She doesn't half-step, not at all," says Moody, a former University of Pittsburgh faculty assistant who's now a full time mother. "You're going to do it right, or not do it at all. To have a positive impact on people's lives, you can't just shove them into a desk like some taxpapers. You have to put your prejudices aside, sit down on a dirty couch, and not scrunch up your face. Mrs. Chancey has a genuine love and concern for these people, to meet them where they are." Moody says Chancey's lack of a formal education "didn't stop her. Whatever is inbred inside of her was her true desire to help other people."
 
Chancey's pride revolves around her clients' children, who became police officers, fashion buyers, supermarket cashiers or bank managers. "The homemakers moved out of the projects," she says. "They got good jobs. They went back to school and bought homes. They don't want to be on welfare."
 
Nourishing and Nuturing
 
She built her homemakers up by showing them they were capable. She toted bags of things to cook with, sometimes even a piece of meat. She talked up the Basic Four, and later the Food Guide Pyramid, and taught them to make Master Mix, which they used for biscuits, cookies and cakes, and how to make dry milk taste palatable by mixing it with whole milk. Many didn't know how to cook or even have the equipment to cook with, so she taught them to improvise. A Pepsi bottle became a rolling pin, a water glass a biscuit cutter.
 
Still she kept a dirty little secret: "I never liked to cook, still don't, but I like to eat, so I did it."
 
She wrote down what the mother had eaten in the last 24-hours, and usually found her lacking in milk, fruits and vegetables. Often, with the mother depressed, the dad drinking, "the children were eating junk food, Kool-Aid - the kids were drinking a lot of that."
 
Of course, she says, you can't save them all. Failure still haunts some, while others' children earned college degrees.
 
The Penn State program has changed, too. Former county extension director Dorothy Smith changed their title to "nutrition adviser." Says Chancey with a laugh: "Dorothy worked to help us all she could. She got us a promotion in name, but not in money." Chancey brought home about $1,000 a month, and the benefits were good. She became a Democratic committeewoman and was the first black woman on the North Braddock and Braddock School District board. In short, Mary Chancey made something of herself.
 
She believes she shared an inner drive with a sister and a brother. She got encouragement, too, from now-retired Extension home economist Isabel Smith of Upper St. Clair, and her former minister, the Rev. Richard Jones, who "kind of pushed me to the front. He brought out a lot of things I didn't know I had in me."
 
Says Isabel Smith, who sometimes accompanied Chancey on home visits: "They welcomed her with opened arms. They were so happy to see her. She was so anxious to learn, so enthusiastic about her work."
 
At the end of her six-month job that stretched into 28 years, Chancey's teaching was no longer door to door, house to house. Today, the 10 remaining nutrition advisers teach at WIC centers, schools, and drop-in centers. It may not be as satisfying for hands-on helpers like Chancey, but she says it's less dangerous.
 
Strength and Hope
 
Although she says her husband, who worked for the Edgar Thomson Works for 37 years, then five years for Woodland Hills School, wouldn't mind moving back to Alabama, she's not so sure. Chancey, who didn't want her age in the paper, says she finds her Alabama contemporaries looking gray and worn out.
 
As for her, with nary a wrinkle and coifed hair that remains black, she's getting together the guest list for her retirement party Friday night, where she hopes to see many of the people she helped and who became her friends. That they could navigate the rough road from poverty to empowerment doesn't surprise Chancey. They weren't "dummies - they had great talents."
 
"Some of them became my best friends. That's how I took them, I didn't take them as outcast people. You can't go by the rules, you have to reach out. They didn't have money or a decent home to stay in, they had low self-esteem and had kind of given up about themselves. "Then somebody came by and gave them hope."

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