She’s Made a Lifetime Commitment to Helping Others and to Learning

Hattie May Young is a tribute to her last name. At 82, she walks two miles to and from her Compton home to the Willowbrook Senior Center to take and teach classes. She does aerobics three days a week, swims on the fourth and takes a handful of girls from her neighborhood into her home every Friday to be part of a group she calls “The Learners,” instructing them in everything from self-confidence to sewing.

Young’s lifelong commitment to helping others and to learning prompted the California State Consortium for Adult Education to honor her with the state’s Senior Adult Student of the Year award this month.

At the center, she teaches a class on how to can, dry and cold-pack fruits and vegetables, and spends most of the rest of her days there taking classes in everything from exercise to macrame.

She said she feels most proud of her work with the neighborhood girls, some of whom were born addicted to drugs. “Some of them run a stitch as fine as a sewing machine,” she said. She also instructs them on manners.

“They learn to walk, talk and be careful of things they say and do. I’m fulfilling a role parents don’t have time to do anymore. I’m doing what every grandmother should be doing for her community.”

Young has spent a lifetime volunteering with young people, said Lauren Corralez, Young’s exercise teacher at the center. “She seems to be motivated by her strong faith,” Corralez said. “She has a desire to keep giving to others.”

The desire comes from her deeply religious family, Young said. Her father, a deacon in the Baptist Church, and her mother, a social worker, moved the family from Mississippi to Illinois when Young was 3 to escape the racism of the deep South, Young said.

In her first year of college during the Depression, Young dropped out to help support the family when her father lost his job in a steel foundry. She was able to take over her mother’s job as a social worker and began what became a lifetime of helping others.

After World War II, she separated from her second husband, moved to Los Angeles, worked in a variety of jobs and continued volunteering with local youth groups. The kids keep her going, she said.

“All the things I’ve taught them grows in them,” she said. “I got youth all over the U.S.A.! I have teachers, nurses, you name it. They come back and say, ‘If it weren’t for Miss Hattie, I’d a never gotten this far.’ ”

Exercise teacher Corralez is impressed with Young’s energy. Along with regular swimming and walking, Young does 1 1/2 hours of low-impact aerobics daily to music ranging from rap to swing. “She’s a role model for our other members,” Corralez said.

Young keeps the honors in perspective. “I don’t do it for praise,” she said. “I do it because it should be done. As long as I can do, I’ll just keep on doing it.”

Long Beach activist Isabel Patterson received an award last week for her public service. “Straight Talk,” a weekly one-hour show in Long Beach, gave Patterson its annual community service award for her “extraordinary contribution to the Long Beach community,” said Art Levine, the show’s executive producer.

Patterson started the Cal State Long Beach Child Development Center, which bears her name. She also donated money to build the clock tower that faces Long Beach City Hall and is establishing a day-care center for low-income families in the downtown area.

Paul Lewis has been named director of the Cal State Long Beach Center of International Education. Lewis came to the center three years ago and became the International Programs and Exchanges director in 1990. He replaces Maurice Harari, who became secretary general of the International Assn. of University Presidents in Palo Alto.

Also at Cal State Long Beach, two journalism students won honors in the recent William Randolph Hearst Foundation’s Journalism Awards program. John Canalis and Rebecca Thompson won $500 each for feature writing.

And in the university’s Art Department, Elisabeth Hartung, an associate professor of art, was named California’s Outstanding Higher Art Education educator of the year.