\"Early Childhood Education\" Alice V. Keliher Hand Signed 2X5 Card COA For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Early Childhood Education" Alice V. Keliher Signed 2X5 Card. 

ES-4484

Alice V. Keliher, whose

experiences as a lightly trained teacher of ill-prepared first graders led her

to become a renowned expert on early childhood education and a champion of

giving children unreserved respect and affection, died on Tuesday at the Tucson

Medical Center in Arizona. She was 92. A longtime professor of education at New

York University, Miss Keliher cherished her unofficial title as the

"grandmother of day care." In the 1930's, she conducted seminal

research on childhood development with Arnold Gesell at Yale University. In the

1940's and 1950's, as a member of N.Y.U.'s faculty, she served on virtually

every city, state and national conference devoted to children and wrote widely

on the subject. And in the 1960's, while winding down her wide-ranging academic

career as a professor at Wheelock College in Boston, she became the

Massachusetts regional training officer for Head Start, the Federal program

designed to provide disadvantaged children with the preschool enrichment Miss

Keliher had been preaching to parents and educators for decades. Although she

trained teachers at N.Y.U. from 1936 to 1960, World War II provided her with

her major platform. As director of child and youth services of the New York

Office of Civilian Defense, and secretary of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia's

Committee on the Wartime Care of Children, Miss Keliher helped make day care an

accepted staple of American life. Her campaign for day care may have made her a

legitimate feminist heroine, but Miss Keliher, who also helped lessen the

burden on mothers by spearheading the development of kindergarten and nursery

school, made it clear that her focus was not women, but their children. Instead

of talking about what "working mothers need," she said in 1949, the

emphasis should be on "what makes a good next generation for

America." A native of Washington who received her teacher's certificate

after two years of training, Miss Keliher was only 20 when she became a teacher

in 1923. After four years in the Washington school system, she decided she

could serve children better by teaching their teachers how to teach. Obtaining

bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in three years at Teachers College at

Columbia University, she joined Dr. Gesell in 1930. She secured the job with

the renowned child psychologist, she later confided, because she was the only

applicant who knew how to operate a movie camera, a skill needed in research

based on close observation of minute changes in infant behavior. For all her

dedication to her work, Miss Keliher's aoffering passion was opera, and for

decades she was a fixture in the center of the first row of the first balcony

at the Metropolitan Opera (at just over 5 feet tall, she needed an unobstructed

view), where her frequent guest was Eleanor Roosevelt. The two women, who

became friends when Mrs. Roosevelt took an apartment in Miss Keliher's building

near Washington Square Park, enjoyed trading favors: Mrs. Roosevelt let Miss

Keliher take her N.Y.U. students on field trips to the Roosevelt estate at Hyde

Park. Miss Keliher, who had the larger oven, let Mrs. Roosevelt roast her

turkeys in her kitchen. Miss Keliher also shared Mrs. Roosevelt's devotion to

human rights. In a little-known chapter of her life, her lawyer, J. Dan

O'Neill, said yesterday, Miss Keliher helped several Jewish families escape

from Germany and Austria in the late 1930's. Her lawyer said the enterprise was

organized by the love of her life, a shadowy American intelligence agent whose

death in World War II led Miss Keliher to vow to remain unmarried. Miss Keliher

later created a furor when she refused to attend an education conference at a

club known to exclude Jews. And she was such an outspoken champion of women,

including their need for birth-control devices, Mr. O'Neill said, that she

became a virtual pariah to her own Roman Catholic Church. For all her books,

like "Life and Growth" and "A Critical Study of Homogenous

Grouping," Miss Keliher stressed a single theme, one she summed up in

1955: "If I could say just one thing to parents, it would be simply that a

child needs someone who believes in him no matter what he does." She

leaves no immediate survivors.