Brooks House Workers Provide Vital Aid to Settlement Groups

Over 250 University Students Engaged In Varied Program

By George S. Abrams, October 21, 1952

Of course, the biggest event each year is the Annual Christmas concert by the Harvard Glee Club and Band. Eight hundred settlement house youngsters crowded into the Rindge Tech Auditorium last year to hear the concert and a like number is expected this Christmas.

Some settlement house volunteers combine their PBH work with their thesis writing. "It's a natural for social relations theses," according to Mundheim and Crawford. "For example, Sumner Cohen, who was a senior last year, worked with a group of eight and nine year olds at Hale House in South Boston, and received a magna plus thesis grade based on his work there."

PBH settlement house workers take special pride in the achievements of their groups, particularly along athletic lines. Almost every athletic group is entered in a league of some sort. Basketball, of course, is the easiest and least expensive league sport, and PBH workers concentrate on this--some with outstanding success.

The Trinity House basketball team, coached by Mundheim, won the Boys of Boston League in 1950 by winning ten straight games in the annual round-robin tournament. This gave Trinity House the first leg on the only triple crown in the history of Boys of Boston Settlement House Competition. The softball and boxing titles followed close on the heels of the basketball championship.

Climax to the PBH basketball season is the Boston-New Haven Inter-Settlement House play-off, held each year in the middle of March. Top players from the PBH and Timothy Dwight (Yale's counterpart to Brooks House) settlement leagues meet alternately here and at New Haven for the inter-city championship. A two-day week-end is planned with the games themselves as highlights.

The Social Service Committee, however, does not restrict itself solely to settlement house work. Programs have been set up in such places as the Youth Service Board Detention Home in Boston. Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Children's Aid Association. Boy Scout Groups, and inter-racial projects.

Two hundred and fifty college and graduate students are presently engaged in the Brooks House Social Service program. Mundheim and Crawford, however, are quick to state that the needs are always considerably greater than the number of volunteers.