Sally Kelley Stansberry, Geoffrey Birnbaum, and Erin Williams

[00:01] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Hi, my name is Erin Williams. I'm 52 years old. Today's Monday, June 6, 2022. We're here in beautiful Missoula, Montana, and I'm with Jeffrey Birnbaum and Sally Stansberry, both formerly from the youth homes. And both Jeffrey and Sally were my bosses over many, many years at the youth homes. I'm Sally Stansberry. I'm 73. Today's date is Monday, June 6, 2022, in Missoula, Montana, my home. My partners today are Jeffrey Birnbaum and Aaron Williams, and we are friends and colleagues. We worked together in youth homes for many years.

[00:47] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: And I'm Jeff Birnbaum, and it's Monday, June 6, 2022. I'm 74 years old. I forgot to tell you that because I'm that old. And we're in Missoula, Montana, and I'm here with Sally Stansberry and Erin Williams, who were my partners with the youth homes.

[01:07] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: So, Jeff and Sally, can you tell us a little bit about how and why you came to the youth homes?

[01:16] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: I can take that one first, since I'm the oldest. I worked before the youth homes in a number of different government agencies in Montana, mostly with working with systems serving youth and families, so helping programs be developed. When the job came open that the youth homes was hiring an executive director, I decided I was tired of trying to get people to do it right and decided, how about if I tried to do it myself and see if I could do it? I was the fourth employee of the youth homes when I was hired. The corporation only operated one boys group home, and it was run by the board of directors, which you can imagine would be insane. So I was the fourth person to be employed by them.

[02:09] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Thanks, Jeff. Well, my path there was pretty different. My husband, William Stansberry known by all as Stans, excuse me, was just applying to guidance and counseling program here at the University of Montana, and we were working different jobs. We'd both graduated in psychology at the University of Montana. And I was frankly, really tired of being inside and working on papers and writing. And so I was working as a house painter, and he was working as a janitor. And our schedules were very different. In one, many days in a row, I go downstairs, he'd read the newspaper, and there'd be an ad circled, and it was an ad for house parents, for the youth homes. And I'd look at it, and I'd think, that's interesting. That'd be a good job for somebody. And then it kept reappearing in my morning routine. And so finally, I said, what's the deal with this? And he said, I think we should apply. And so I was skeptical, but we did, and we got the job. We were actually offered a part time job and we declined because that was not going to really work for us. And they hired us full time, and that was, we embarked on quite an adventure for many, many years of our lives. Was very good for us.

[03:36] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: If I could add. It was an interesting choice, because when we advertised the job, I was working with a state group home set of house parents to support them, and they applied for the job. Seemed obvious that that would happen. And yet, when it all came down to it, it was easy to pick stans and Sally to do it. And I think it gave me confidence going forward as we grew and hired people, that I probably did a pretty good job picking these guys.

[04:08] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: I think you were pretty good at hiring. That's my sense of it. I mean, here we are. But maybe we're biased. Yeah.

[04:15] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Yeah.

[04:18] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: So do you want to talk, Jeff, about how and why the program grew or.

[04:22] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Sure.

[04:22] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Yeah, let's do that.

[04:23] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: So the reason the youth homes decided to hire an executive director or a director was because the community agencies wanted a new program that they had heard about, which was called attention homes. And it was emergency care for kids particularly, that were coming out or involved in youth court. They were runaways and people, kids like that, that were having those kinds of issues. And the agencies decided that they would rather see the youth homes grow than to create another organization, but on the condition that we would hire an executive and the board would stop trying to run the group home and actually be a board of directors. So we added that program. It was a twelve bed shelter at that time. And what that happened for us was we then all of a sudden had a living, breathing needs assessment. If you want to know what kids weren't getting in this community, you would find out when they were in shelter. So that's what really generated the growth of the youth homes over the next 2030 years.

[05:42] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: And when Stans and I came in, you were having a changeover, in house parents in a co ed group home of eight. And so they were all adolescents. They came from the kind of backgrounds that contributed to kids getting in trouble. And I totally lost my frame of reference. Sorry about that. That's the trouble when you look down at your notes. And so it was a real submersion for me in a different world than books, ideas, and very shortly into our time with the kids, which I frankly found to be pretty challenging, like I thought they liked my cooking, for example, because my friends liked my cooking. But no, that was. Well, it apparently didn't matter if they liked it or not. They were not welcoming of it. And I came to understand those sorts of things. But the time was improved for us. Oddly, we had some time off. We worked ten days on and four days off, but we lived all the time with the kids. And we had some time off, and it was summer, and we were going to go swimming out of town and blew a tire on the interstate and had a really nasty little accident and returned to the home. And the kids were so kind to us, where they had been so rejecting and unpleasant, and they were so kind to us. And I actually think the accident was a blessing in that it allowed us to be people with these kids, which is what I have learned over the many years of working with them, is that you have to be real people with these kids and develop real relationship with them for them to be able to trust you and move forward. So that was a big deal for me. It was a big deal to be cared for. I remembered them, the girls helping bathe me because I had all these horrible lesions on my back from having skidded across. I was thrown from the car. They were so kind. They were so good to me. It was really touching. I mean, touched by it. Now.

[08:05] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Did you ever think maybe every year she had an accident? No.

[08:09] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: No, I did nothing. It was kind of hard on me.

[08:11] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Just checking.

[08:14] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: No, it was a good deal. What sorts of things do you think would be important for us to talk about in regard to that?

[08:22] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Well, I mean, I think as we're talking about how we adjusted the vision and how we did those things was what we wanted to talk about a little bit. And I think it was a different time when we first started and the notion of house parents that people actually wanted to move in and live with teenagers, that were going to be difficult. And when you and Stan realized after, what was it, six and a half years in the group home, we never found anybody else. I mean, we hired somebody, and it wasn't real. It didn't work. And at some point, you have to say, we can keep looking for house parents, but I don't think they exist anymore. And it forced us to kind of not rationalize, but have a rational idea or response to how do we fix that? And the realization was that maybe the issues of our kids that were going to be in group care needed the people who work with them needed a separation from those. And it really was sort of the definition of why we do foster care and why we do group care in this world, because everybody thinks we're going to put kids in foster care and that's going to work out great. But kids who aren't ready to have a relationship don't trust adults. They usually, I don't mean physically kill foster families, but they kill a lot of foster families because the kid isn't ready for that kind of intimacy, which was true for the group home staff that were living in the group home. They were no longer able to really tolerate the. So I think it led us to, we still needed group care, but we needed a different model. And that, I think, drove us toward using shift staff, where staff could give everything they could give and then get distance so they could actually come back to work the next day and keep it cleaner that we're here to take care of the kids and not because the house parents need you to take care of them. Not that you don't have to take care of your staff, but it's a lot more when you're living with kids.

[10:30] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: I remember when we were considering that, and I was very leery about giving up. I mean, I was done. I wanted to. It had been a lot of kids and a lot of giving to them and receiving from them, and I felt kind of saturated, and yet I really liked the effort. And I remember, Jeff, when we were moving forward with the ideas of it, you and I looked at all of the kids that we had had removed from the home. We looked at all of their circumstances, and almost all of them, there were a couple, but almost all of them left because the house parents just couldn't, didn't want to deal with them anymore. They would say, they either go or we're going to go. And that's not fair to the kids we've thought of. We can do better than that.

[11:20] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: So just a personal story was my wife and I, in addition, prior to becoming the youth homes at the age of 23, we took in a foster kid, and we did that, including taking a long term foster kid when our kids were really young. And then we realized when our own kids got to being adolescents, that we needed to clean the deck, take care of our own kids. So we weren't doing it for a while. But one of the kids that was in treatment with the youth homes in a group home was the speaker at our fundraiser that year and was on her way into a foster family that I knew, not that I recruited them. And after. So she moved in, and after about a month, they came to Erin and said, this doesn't work with our lifestyle, which you kind of wish they'd have figured out before they took her. And so I said to Erin that it was right before Christmas that we would be willing to take her temporarily and so that we don't do it during the holidays when people get puppies and then give them back in January. And once she got there, she wanted to stay. And we weren't really wanting to continue to do foster care, but she kept, and she was, to be honest, she was, well, broken down. She was housebroken by the time she was in group care. And we've had great success. She's 38 years old in our family, and we actually have her kids as our grandkids. But the point of it was, if we'd have taken her before she went to treatment in a group home, we would have given her back. Watching what she did, she had, I think, eight tickets in her first month of oppositional, and she had every reason in the world and every right to be that man. So I think that was a big change, a huge change in the organization to be able to better understand what foster cares about and what group cares about and what adoption may be and what it isn't. Yeah.

[13:32] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: And we very quickly learned, we didn't as quickly learn how to deal with it, but we very quickly learned that the kids needed to have some motivation. It needed to matter to them to make changes, because they were, they came by their dysfunction, honestly. They came from situations that they developed coping skills that worked for them there, but they didn't work at school. They didn't work. You know, it was kind of sad, really, because most of those kids could have been identified much earlier in their development, but they weren't until they were a problem for others, which often, you know, those things get externalized in adolescents. And so we had to figure out ways to coax them along to try these things out. You'd think, well, the layperson might think, oh, you know, you know what to do now. It'll be better, but not to kids who have coping skills that dealt with all sorts of dysfunctional problems. It didn't feel better. Even if it looked better to you and me, it didn't feel better. It felt weird. It felt foreign. It felt, I can't think of the word I want to use because I'm old. But anyway, it took time to figure out how to best impact that. So we kept the kids which to keep them close to us and do a lot of things with them, and we did things that we thought would be fun, because we also very quickly learned that they were not going to agree on what would be fun, and it might not be. So we hiked with them every weekend, and we taught them to ski, cross country ski, because we couldn't afford the downhills for them. We just kept them very involved with us. And as they relaxed in our care, then we could give them a little more room to go out and operate independently. We also provided the kind of care for them that they had what they needed. So there was a comfort, a physical comfort level. We made sure they had good food. We made sure that they ate it at regular times. We got them to bed so they were well rested. Made it a personal crusade to make sure all the beds in the youth homes were sleepable. You know, I can go lie down on my taught staff to lie down on them, make sure they're okay. You know, if something's poking you, it's gotta go. And I worked out with the community a deal where they would funnel us demonstration mattresses out of. Out of stores that were, you know, display mattresses, which was. So they. Some of them had these really cushy mattresses, you know, and so we tried to make them really comfortable, give them what they needed, and show up for school on time, be there when we said we'd be. And I would tell staff, it isn't about you getting to trust them, it's about them getting to trust you. And that takes time. And it worked pretty well, I think.

[16:44] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[16:46] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: It's a lot of hard work. It is staff to get the kids to trust them. Oh, man. It's a lot of hard work, and it sometimes takes longer than we want it to. Yes. And sometimes it feels like it's never going to happen, and then you find out that it did. You know, it's wonderful.

[17:04] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: I think one of the things we did. So when I first came to the youth homes, the board had raised $135 the year before. Yeah, yeah. Their budget. The budget on the district youth guidance home was $32,000, which was $24,000 from Montana Border crime control, an $8,000 match. That was the budget. Adding the shelter was doubled, or more than doubled. But it was. There are two parts of why I decided I had never done fundraising. I'd done grant writing, but I had never done fundraising was. It was a double benefit. One was to get more resources, particularly more resources to give kids opportunities. You know, nonprofits tend to be poverty funded. I've said about being an executive director, if I didn't golf and downhill ski, I might be able to retiree. So I started raising money because I wanted the community to know our kids. Part of connecting to kids is connecting them to everything, connecting them to school, building relationships for our kids with the schools. We had a coordinator that worked with the schools, and that was important. And by raising money and making our kids stories public, not directly to them, but what their stories were to build support for them, and the resources that came back were not so much just money, but it was things I remember. One of my favorite events was two women decided that they wanted to have a wine and cheese party, or whatever it was, that they were, chocolate and cheese, whatever it was. And they asked each of their friends to come, and what they needed to do was bring a backpack built for school. And these were wealthy women. These were women that had nice backpacks and nice things for school, and they took on that job, and then that, for our kids, was incredible. It was such a difference than if we just bought a bunch of backpacks at Kmart and sent them to school. So everybody knows who the poor kids are. So raising money became a big part of my job, and it had benefits, not just the money, but the support that the community had. And I think staff felt the same way about it as, too, when they told people they worked there, the community, people were proud of them, and they got. And I think that helped them in staying with what was really a hard job. Tough hours, tough days. Yeah.

[19:50] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: I think that the helping the kids feel really special has always been something that's really unique about the youth homes and helping them feel like they can have things that other kids can have, even if maybe they didn't get those things with their family. And we thought, Jeff, you did a really awesome job at fundraising, and you, Sally, too. Connecting the kids to the community and giving them the opportunities that they might not have had otherwise. Yeah, that's valuable. I think that many of the kids actually developed a belief that they were supported by the community and wanted to give back, which. Super cool.

[20:28] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Well, we've had kids that were in our care that became foster parents.

[20:35] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: That's right.

[20:36] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[20:39] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: We had a. Well, I'll leave that. What's that? I don't want to do. I suddenly thought I might be trading on privacy, and so I just dropped that one.

[20:52] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: We don't trust your judgment.

[20:54] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: No, I don't trust my judgment sometimes, but, yeah. How would you guys describe the kids that were in our care those first years? And, Jeff, what year did the youth home start.

[21:06] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: They started in 71. I joined in 76. Glenn Welch was a deputy probation officer at the time. Jerry Johnson was the chief. Chief. And so he was. A lot of our kids were at the time that we opened the attention home, there were 1200 kids in the county jail over the last year. Today there's less than 20 every year. But we would reminisce about the early days. And one thing we both agreed on is that the original girls that came in attention were the toughest kids. Just the girls I'm talking about. They were just big personalities, big bodies. They were tough. Yeah. And the early days were crazy. You never knew what they brought home. But there was something about those kids, one of the kids that. It was really interesting. We got a call. I got a call. You know, sometimes the job doesn't feel like you're getting anything done. But two of the graduates of the youth homes called me from Utah because one of them was working in a restaurant, and they recognized each other and they went out and they called to tell me that we were listening.

[22:26] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Oh, how nice is that?

[22:28] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I. So the early days, I don't know. Well, I think part of it was nobody was talking about emotional disturbance. They were just talking about good and bad. And to sort of go off on that a little bit is one of the changes in our system was we started looking at kids emotional disturbance, and it made some sense to better understand the kid. Although I was with a consultant from Denver, and he made a comment that how we define kids tells you a lot about how you feel about them. And he said, some people think they're sick, some people say they're bad. I would suggest they're neither. But if I had to be one rather than the other, I'd rather be bad than sick, because you can be good, easier than get well. And it really made a lot of sense. So one of the things I continue to argue with the state about when I retired, not argue, but with mental health and the state mental health, was that the best way to qualify kids for treatment should be based on trauma and not a diagnosis, which is usually what the therapist has, not what the kid has. And it's much more treatable because it's about relationship. It's not about being crazy, it's just about being hurt. And I haven't won the argument. And I think it's unfortunate because I think it takes you down the wrong road. I think the best road is to look at relationship, because when we look at our kids that have succeeded, it's all been about finding a relationship, whether it's one of ours or it's somebody else that they found. Maybe it's a school counselor. It's anybody.

[24:25] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Yeah, I completely agree with you about that. When my husband died, one of our kids, one of the kids that he had worked with, drove all the way from Seattle through the night to attend his service. And I just was so incredibly touched by that and then became a big supporter of the youth homes, and that's all about relationship. And interestingly, I think part of the reason he keyed in so much to us was that he had had an accident, and we took. He really hurt himself badly. And when we took excellent care of him, and this was during shift staff. My husband was a therapist then, and this was in a therapeutic group home, but they took such good care of him, and he had, frankly, little choice but to relax into it because the damage was pretty significant. It's funny how little things can help. And I think part what I want to take from that is that if you pay attention, you don't want to have accidents. I didn't want to have more. I'm sure he didn't. But if you pay attention to the things that happen in life, you can find the moments when you can really be there for somebody, and it makes a giant difference for everybody.

[25:52] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Well, it reminds me of Sarah and maybe one of my most famous alums who had an accident and how it impacted on him that he was taking care of by the staff, that he had never had that at home.

[26:06] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's really powerful to have someone take care of you. It is. I know. And then to allow yourself to accept the help is very hard for our kids. It's very hard. Yeah. But once they are able to do it, they start to feel it. Yeah. They internalize the help and the feeling. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about something that is near and dear to my heart and is kind of a sensitive subject. I don't like that.

[26:45] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: It is.

[26:45] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: So bear with me. Over the years that we worked with kids, kids who had harmed others sexually or acted out sexually, kind of. They were all over in our system, but they weren't necessarily identified for the needs that they had. And then they were often sort of villainized. They were really looked down upon, and people started referring to them as sex offenders. And they're actually, which is sad. There actually are really good services and people who are knowledgeable that can be helpful, and there are assessments that can be done to figure out just where a child is. And I found that many professionals really leaned away from those because they were afraid the kid would be labeled as a sex offender. And I get that. But still, there's a need. And so we had the opportunity. Oh, lord, maybe 97. Was it 97? We developed a group home to serve kids, and it's a mixed bag, taking them out of the general population, but they have stuff they need to work on that's different. And we developed. Excuse me. We developed a group home, a therapeutic group home to serve those kids. And I feel really strongly that that's an important need and should not be shied away from, and they should not be looked down upon or turned away from. They have an additional bunch of stuff. They happen to act their stuff out in different ways. From the kid who punched you in the face, you know, it's just different. And I really don't want to see that care and respect and quality service go away.

[28:42] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Yeah. Yeah. The other growth of the youth homes was geographically. We actually were contacted by other communities. Kalispell United Way there, asked us if we could open up a shelter there, which we did a long time ago. Dave Deming was the deputy probation officer in Hamilton, and he always wanted the youth homes to have a group home there. We did that after he retired, but we got to do that. And then we. I was actually hired to consult with the Helena group homes to see if we could help them get on their feet. And after we did that, they said, why don't we just give it to you guys? So that's always been good. I think it's given us a great perspective, and. Yeah. And again, I think the growth of the youth homes benefited, and I think we had a philosophy that worked, and I thought it was. I don't think it ever diminished what we were doing here to expand. And one of the more interesting things we did was finding a partnership. And there are parts I don't like about it and parts I do like about it. Intermountain has been over 100 years providing care in this state, and the executive director at that time and I were in Vista training together, so we knew each other. We kind of lived the same life separately. I came to Montana, and he went. I was in Colorado, in Vista. He was in Montana. I went to Montana, he went to Colorado. But he came to tell me that they were going to expand their younger kids program in Missoula. And thinking that that's going to be tough. They're going to be tough competition in terms of fundraising, they have 150 year history of raising money and so I was listening to him and thinking, oh, how am I going to deal with this? It's competition. And then at the end he said to me, so I think we should do it together. And it was a weird process. I mean, it was in a lot of ways. And there are things that made it were great. There are things I would not have done again, I think one of the things. So we, we formed another corporation so we could equally share the ownership of it. But what we, I think one of the things that Erin would definitely agree with me was, I think we made a mistake by developing mental health services to support those kids rather than keeping it in the youth homes, because I think it did diminish a little bit our efforts, especially in terms of recruiting foster care, because, Jeff, why did you.

[31:32] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Decide to go to recruiting foster homes and get licensed as a foster care and adoption agency? What prompted all of that?

[31:39] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: You mean us like this part?

[31:42] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Yeah.

[31:43] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Well, I mean, I think that obviously every kid ought to have a family. It doesn't mean they're ready. It doesn't mean that it will work. Why wouldn't we want to have that option? Why would you say? Well, because if you've invested yourself in this kid and they are ready to go, I guess, to be honest with you, I don't want to give it to somebody else who's going to screw it up. And I think we wouldn't screw it up, honestly. And certainly I had a good audience in you because you really wanted to do foster care. Part of it was, it makes sense and we're good enough, we have the talent to do it.

[32:25] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: And it was, that was kind of the, for youth home sort of reaching into working with younger children.

[32:30] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Right.

[32:30] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Because we mostly work with adolescents before we did foster care. And then that really expanded the developmental age to younger kids, which was a mixed bag for me because I was all, I was all in on, let's get this done, because we were seeing, in residential group care, we were seeing kids go maybe back to their previous homes or to a home that was really not prepared for them, and then they would become so discouraged because it didn't go well and they'd blow out. And so that was, we were really eager to have in residential care, to have places for these kids to go that we knew they would be supported and that we could have, you know, a nice avenue of sharing information between staff. And I think we did that really well, you know, and then sometimes I think, well, but they're just giving those homes to little kids. What about but I remember Stan's and I working on placing a number of kids out of the therapeutic group homes, and a lot of those kids did. Most of those kids, I think, did super with their families, and their families were really loving having them. And it was. It was a really good. It still is a good effort, but it was a really. It was a really good move, I.

[33:47] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Think, for the thing that I found taking a kid out of the group home was they were housebroken. They. They knew to bring their stuff into the kitchen as opposed to leaving it all over the house. I mean, my own kids couldn't do that.

[34:00] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: You're welcome.

[34:01] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: You're welcome. Seriously, it's like, wow, give us another.

[34:07] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: And, you know, I remember, Aaron, you individually recruited families. I mean, what a beautiful thing that was. Yeah. Made great associations. Yeah. Yeah.

[34:22] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: It was a lot of fun. And I do. Before, you know, I know we're close to time, but I have to comment about the people, you know, that. So we're working in the private nonprofit sector when dealing with public workers, and Greg Burham comes to mind. But I do want to at least recognize that there are people in the child welfare system. They get a lot of people beat up on them a lot for what they don't do. And we've had such incredible social workers who have gone the extra mile for kids. And Greg was a good example. He was almost a staff member of the youth homes, more than a youth probation officer. And so I think we certainly didn't do this alone. And the cool thing going back to fundraising is the community joined us, and that's a big deal when there's a run that's run for kids, and it's for kids in the youth homes, and people run the marathon, raise money for the youth homes. It's not just the money. It's the fact that they believe in it, and our kids are the best. Cheers. At the marathon.

[35:33] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Right? Right. Yeah. I think that's one of the secrets to success of the youth homes, is just being. Having so many staff be involved in the community for the kids, to help the kids be successful and feel accepted and integrated.

[35:52] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: So I know we've got a little bit of time left, but I want to at least make sure I say, this is one of the things when you move toward retirement or you get an award, or people come up and say some really nice things to you, and they thank you for what you do. And my honest response to it is that, actually, I really believe I did it for me, I needed to do this. I didn't need. And I think one of the things that people who work with these kids is you don't. You don't if you want them to thank you. You have the wrong plan, the wrong goal, you know, and you're more likely maybe even to get it if you don't ask for it. So I just feel so lucky I got to. Yeah, it just was. It was clearly what I needed to do. And the fact that I left the east and came west and joined Vista and found out that playing with kids who were in trouble was fun to do, and it gave me a lifelong career that.

[37:02] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: And what about you guys? When it wasn't fun or it didn't feel like the kids were progressing, I mean, how, Sally, did you keep. Keep going? We supported each other. I mean, you know, Stans. When Stans and I were house parents, one of Jeff's biggest roles was to calm us down, you know, and help us see what was okay. You have to look to each other. You just have to look to each other. You can't expect the kids to do it for you. But there are things that did happen. Shortly before I retired, I got a call from Patrick, who I had not seen since he left our home. He was 14, I think. I won't tell you his story, but he called me. I had the last thing I ever expected. He called me, and he said, I need to tell you something. And I said, oh, okay. He said, well, and he had heard that my husband had died as well, so he also shared his condolences. But he said, I need to tell you something. He was an inveterate bed wetter when he was a little kid in our care, and he got out of school early one day, and he thought he would bring his friend home with him, and I didn't. Stanz and I were in his bedroom, and we were putting a plastic sheet on his bed because, you know, when we were wanting to do it unobtrusively, we didn't want to embarrass him. And he came in the house and thought, well, I'll just go back to my room, and they won't even know I'm here. But little did he know, we were in his room, and he got to his room with his friend, and he was just like, oh, my God. They know I wet the bed because it had not been an open subject matter at that point in school, really. So he said to me, I was so blown away. I thought, I'm going to be in so much trouble. It's going to be so bad. They're going to be so mean. And we never said anything to him. We just said, hey, Patrick, we'll be out in a minute. Why don't you just go? And he was just, like, undone by that. There was no pain. No pain on that one. He had to be in his forties when he called me to tell me that. Yeah, well, that's all the thanks I need. You know, that wasn't even a very thoughtful matter for me. Yeah, great. It was so nice to have this conversation, Jeff and Sally, with you today. And thank you so much for all of your years of service to our community with the kids of the youth homes, and you as well, dear.

[39:48] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: And thank you for carrying it on.

[39:50] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: Yeah, of course.

[39:51] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Yeah, yeah. This was fun. It's a great program, the story corps.

[39:56] SALLY STANSBERRY STANSBERRY: It is a great program.

[39:58] GEOFFREY BIRNBAUM: Yeah. So thank you.