The little old lady walking down Commonwealth Ave. stopped under every tree and made an entry in her thick notebook. English elm. Nearly dead. She went on to the next tree.

A few weeks later, she and eleven others met to compare notes. When the numbers were totaled up, the results were surprising enough to touch off a public debate. "The streets of downtown Boston are a treeless wasteland," began a story at the top of the Globe's front page. The Parks Department had to admit it had no idea how bad the situation was. Almost 75 per cent of the city's streets had no shade at all.

The twelve women--who certainly weren't trying to be controversial--were members of the Civic Center and Clearing House, a tiny organization occupying three upstairs rooms near the State House. It has no paid help, and its director, John W. Putnam '33, pays a fair share of its shoestring budget out of his own pocket.

Mapping the Plaques

Occasionally the Center's programs makes headlines, but it prefers inconspicuous projects, like mapping the City's historical plaques. It would be easy to dismiss most of its work as trivial.

But as Putnam sees it, that would be unfair to the Center's aims. His group, he says, is not trying to provide ordinary opportunities for voluntary service, and many of the would-be volunteers who inquire at the office are referred to more conventional organizations--the Red Cross, the hospitals, the slum schools.

The 'Leisured Citizen'

The Civic Center itself works primarily with retired men and women who come in with time on their hands and no productive way to apply it.

Putnam speaks in general terms of the problems of the "leisured citizen" and the challenge of putting free time to work. But he is not particularly concerned with the well-educated "leisured citizen," who usually finds his own avocations. On the other hand, opportunities for those who never finished school or once held menial jobs are much more limited, and the Center's aim is to develop those limited opportunities as much as possible.

"The group of people that most needs the service we offer is the hardest group to reach," Putnam says. "They don't join organizations. They don't quite know how to find activity for themselves."

Once these people leave their jobs, they fade out of what he calls the "public sector" of life. Many of their friends are dead. Most of the time they are alone. Convinced that community service is a pastime for the educated or the rich dilettante, these people take little interest in volunteer projects, Putnam says.

And in turn, most of the standard volunteer organizations aren't geared to placing these people. Either the work requires special skills, like the Peace Corps or VISTA, or it is dull routine, like cleanup jobs at Mass General. Since over half the Center's volunteers have never gone to high school, almost none to college, those that try these other organizations usually wind up with the worst jobs.

One fellow, who had been in volunteer work in a hospital and had quit, told Putnam that he didn't want to be "uncomfortable for nothing." "He wasn't looking for money," Putnam explains, "but he felt that he was wasting his time. These people need to feel competent and useful."

When he organized the Center in 1961, he decided to focus the work of his volunteers on the problem of the city environment--its history, scenery, and public health--because, as he says, "it includes so many different ways to get involved." In addition to the survey of Boston trees, volunteers from the Center have tabulated all the historic markers in the city and have compiled a calendar listing the anniversaries of Boston's historic events.

One woman is now trying to locate an elm tree supposedly planted in Boston Common by John Hancock. Several other volunteers are concentrating on the problem of air and water pollution, filing literature on the subject as it appears in newspapers and magazines, and operating a library and Environmental Information Center in one room of the Civic Center's office.

And on Washington's Birthday the group will open a tourist information booth in the State House.

Work like this is useful, but de- liberately "marginal" in importance so that it probably would not get done without volunteer help. It is the kind of work that people without special training can do.

Most of all it teaches something to its participants. Volunteers for the tourist information center are urged to take at least one course in Massachusetts history, literature, or natural history each year from the Department of Education's Extension Service which has agreed to provide the instruction without charge. To train volunteers working on pollution problems, it organized a special course in City Conservation.

Hundreds Are Lost

It might be argued that such programs are so much "busy-work," supplying an artificial goal to people who don't have one. Putnam and the volunteers working in the Center's office deny this. "After all, two hours' work a week is hardly a large demand," he says, "certainly not enough to rehabilitate the confused. There are hundreds of people who are really lost. These people need some kind of professional handling--I can't do it."

Nor does he think that the Center is pushing people into his own personal projects. "John Putnam is the genius of nothing," says John Putnam. "I'm not a program driver; I'm just a catalyst," bringing together people with similar interests who can help each other.

In fact, if people felt that they were being manipulated it would destroy the whole worth of the program. "You have to be careful not to lower their self-esteem," he cautions. "All you can give is a kind of avocational counselling."

The Center now has about 125 volunteers on its mailing list and is planning an expansion of its programs. It wants to study the parks in the Boston area to see how they are used and how they might be improved. It plans an inventory of public art work in Greater Boston, and a survey of historic buildings. If its guide service in the State House proves successful, it would like to add an international welcoming office at Logan Airport.

These are all valuable services, but obviously none will solve Boston's problems. As Putnam puts it, that doesn't matter very much, for the Civic Center is oriented toward people rather than causes.