Honors for Olympic Workers, Parents Anonymous : Volunteers Get Presidential Salute

The President’s Volunteer Action Award may not have the immediate name recognition of, say, the Oscar or the Congressional Medal of Honor. But if you are a volunteer worker, it is the most prestigious award you can receive for working long hours without pay.

And it is probably the only chance you’ll ever get to have lunch with the President of the United States.

Two Southern California-based organizations, along with 16 other volunteer groups and individuals from across the country, will be honored Monday by President Reagan for outstanding achievement in volunteer work.

They are the 1984 Olympic volunteers, the 30,000 people who worked sometimes around the clock without pay to bring off the Los Angeles Summer Games, and Parents Anonymous, a worldwide volunteer organization based in Torrance that aids both the victims and the perpetrators of parental child abuse.

“Think of all those kids who practiced for hours in the hot sun to be in the Opening Ceremonies,” Olympics volunteer services manager Vilma Pallette said recently. “They were all volunteers. The medics and the nurses were all volunteers. If you think about all the services that were available in the villages . . . they were all provided by volunteers. The timekeepers, the ushers, the press aides, the translators, they were volunteers.

“That’s why this award is not for ‘a person.’ It’s for the volunteers. The volunteers are the story of this Olympics,” Pallette said. “It’s the first time that volunteers were used in the Olympics, period. We had no prototype. Not only was it the first, it worked.”

Work is over for the Olympics crew, but it continues for Parents Anonymous, which operates the world’s largest network of treatment programs for abused children and their parents. The organization has 1,500 self-help groups in five countries, said Leonard Lieber, who helped found Parents Anonymous in 1970.

“We feel very good about the award,” Lieber said. “We’ve been doing some very serious work for a long time and it’s nice to finally receive some recognition in a special way such as this.”

The awards, which were initiated in 1982, are co-sponsored by VOLUNTEER--The National Center, a private nonprofit organization, and ACTION, the federal agency for volunteer service. The winners were chosen from more than 2,000 nominations in 10 categories.

First Names Only

Parents Anonymous, like Alcoholics Anonymous, deals only in first names. Parents who physically or emotionally abuse their children are given the opportunity to talk once a week with other parents who have the same problems in an informal and relaxed setting.

“You can’t talk about child abuse with your priest, your social worker, or even your shrink,” Lieber said. “We have a very simple process, and it works quite well. It gives them the sense of being in a family.”

Lieber’s organization uses professional and paraprofessional volunteers to provide treatment and services to abused children and also to lead the weekly parents’ meetings.

“The most gratifying thing,” Lieber said, “is that many of the children of our first families now have children of their own and they have been able to break the cycle of child abuse, a cycle that in some instances goes back five or six generations.”

Lieber will go to Washington this weekend to accept the award.

So will Pallette, a San Marino housewife whose impressive reputation in volunteer work has been cemented with equal parts of charm and savvy. She is involved in a myriad of volunteer organizations, from the civic and social to the arts and education.

Recruiting Guidelines

Pallette worked her way up from a volunteer file clerk with the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee to manager of its volunteer services, and had been involved in preparations for the Olympics since 1981, when she helped develop recruiting guidelines for volunteers.

But Pallette quickly and adamantly points out that the award is not for her, it is for the 30,000 Olympic volunteers, including retired Navy and Army officers, postal workers, teachers, show business people, college and high school students, 85-year-old grandmothers and Vietnam veterans.

There were people like Julia Wark, a public information volunteer who was the only clerical staff worker at the X Olympiad in 1932, which was also held in Los Angeles. She was the last employee to leave the Olympics office in 1933, and she was one of the first to volunteer for the XXIII Olympiad in 1984.

“Whenever I needed help, Julia was there,” Pallette said. “She was a stalwart. She worked the full Games, and her grandson worked too.

‘Colorful Characters’

“We had a lot of colorful characters,” Pallette said, grinning. “There was Sid Levine--he was fabulous. Sid was about 14 or 15 during the 1932 Olympics. He wanted to get in, he wanted to see it, but he couldn’t afford to buy a ticket. So he sold hot dogs during the Games in the Coliseum.”

In the 1984 Olympics, Levine worked in access control as a volunteer. “He was a people person,” Pallette said. “You should have heard him on the phone dealing with people. He was terrific.”

The LAOOC employed 12,000 paid staff members, 30,000 people under contracts for services and 30,000 volunteers who drove from as far away as Santa Barbara, San Bernardino and San Diego at least three times a week before and during the Games to work 10- to 14-hour shifts with no pay.

Traces of Olympic euphoria and sentiment still remain for Pallette.

“At the Closing Ceremonies, when (the announcer) declared the Games officially over, there was an ooohhhh that went up from the crowd. It was a moan. There were volunteers with tears streaming down their faces,” she said, her voice breaking and a few tears of her own falling down her cheeks. She stopped to regain her composure, failed, and went on.

“That was because they knew they had done a superlative job,” she said, still crying. “A truly superlative job.”