Clara Hale

Clara McBride was raised in Philadelphia. Her father died when she was a baby and her mother when she was sixteen, and she went out to work. She married Thomas Hale, moved with him to Harlem and had three children. In 1932 he died of cancer, leaving her a widow at twenty-seven in the middle of the Depression. She cleaned houses by day and theatres by night, and then, to be at home with her own children, began taking in other people's.

She became a licensed foster parent and over the next twenty-five years raised about forty children in a five-room apartment. Most of them called her Mommy Hale for the rest of their lives. In 1968 she retired.

The following year her daughter Lorraine, a psychologist, met a young heroin addict nodding off in a park with a baby in her arms and sent her to her mother's address. Hale took the baby in. Within two months word had spread along the streets and there were twenty-two infants in the apartment, all born addicted, screaming and shaking through withdrawal, being walked and rocked around the clock by a woman of sixty-four. Her own children paid the bills until the city took notice.

Hale House was formally established in the early 1970s and moved into a building on 122nd Street. By the time she died in 1992 it had cared for more than a thousand babies, including, in the 1980s, children born with HIV.