Helen Mary Williams, 86; Led Youths to Nature

As an avid outdoorswoman, Pasadena teacher Helen Mary Williams firmly believed that urban students could benefit from spending time in the wilderness.

In 1959, the Cleveland Elementary School teacher launched a Junior Audubon Science Club at the predominantly black school where baseball great Jackie Robinson was once a student.

Local nature walks soon evolved into overnight camping trips with students, their families and teachers to the Eastern Sierra, Death Valley and Baja California. And in 1963, Williams’ club turned into something much bigger: a nonprofit organization focusing on environmental education and serving at-risk, low-income and urban youths in the Greater Los Angeles area.

Williams, the founder and former longtime executive director of Outward Bound Adventures, died of congestive heart failure in a Pasadena nursing facility Jan. 10, her 86th birthday, said Charles Thomas, the organization’s current executive director.

Since Williams and several others established Outward Bound Adventures more than 40 years ago, about 45,000 young people between the ages of 11 and 21 have been taken on one-day nature-study trips and longer backpacking, mountaineering and white-water rafting treks. The Pasadena organization is not connected to the more widely known Outward Bound, an adventure-based education program that originated in Britain in the 1940s.

In the early years, Williams, who was an experienced hiker, alpine skier and whitewater rafter, helped lead many of the outings.

“She was a remarkable woman,” Thomas said. “She was very outgoing and would talk to anybody, to the point that she’d recruit kids out of some of the worst areas in Los Angeles to go on these backpacking trips. She was absolutely fearless.”

As a teacher, Williams “never gave up on any kid,” he said.

Thomas is testament to that.

In 1968, he was an eighth-grader at McKinley Junior High School in Pasadena, where Williams was a science teacher.

Thomas had been kicked out of every other class but Williams’ for a variety of offenses, including hitting one teacher in the head with an apple and lighting a fire in a classroom.

“I was really quite a troublesome kid,” he said. “Mrs. Williams agreed to take care of me when all the other teachers abandoned me. I stayed with her for six periods that year. Thank God, she never gave up on me.”

Although he went on a 14-day backpacking trip over the Sierra with Outward Bound Adventures, Thomas said, the organization “didn’t change me overnight. I was still in the same neighborhood and running around with the same people.”

But Williams never flagged in her support of him.

In high school, when Thomas spent more than a year in juvenile hall and a boys’ home, Williams trained and hired him to be an Outward Bound Adventures counselor on backpacking trips. She later worked behind the scenes to get him into Southern Oregon University, though he was not aware of her efforts at the time. He went on to earn undergraduate degrees in physical geography and environmental studies, and a master’s in geography.

“We’re talking over 40,000 kids that she has helped; I was just one,” Thomas said. “She believed that every child had value and that you judge a child by their best behavior, not their worst.”

Williams “saw that getting kids outdoors was really transforming, especially for inner-city and low-income urban youth,” he said. “It’s a much slower pace and offers them an opportunity to connect with something that is really tangible but larger than them.”

The goal of Outward Bound Adventures, he said, is to “upgrade academic and social skills through challenging environmental learning trips.”

“One thing Mrs. Williams instilled in me is that you can teach anything in the outdoors. So she’d be teaching haiku and how to calculate the rate of stream flow in the High Sierra.”

The daughter of a banker father and a teacher mother, Williams was born Helen Mary Isabel Knox in 1920 in Chicago.

After growing up in the nearby small town of Milledgeville, Williams graduated cum laude from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1942 with a bachelor’s degree in speech. She volunteered to read announcements at a local radio station and became one of the first female radio broadcasters in the state.

She later became assistant program director and a reporter at radio station WIND in Gary, Ind., and worked as a writer and broadcaster at the CBS affiliate in Chicago. She worked at a radio station in Phoenix, where she was married briefly to a general contractor, before becoming a teacher in Pasadena.

Williams left the classroom in the early ‘70s to devote more time to her organization.

“She inspired not only the children and youth we worked with but also the adults that worked with her,” said board member Camille Dudley. “She had a very positive attitude and taught us to never give up and never take ‘no’ for an answer. She was just one of those unstoppable people.”

A service celebrating Williams’ life is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at Farnsworth Park Auditorium, 568 Mount Curve Ave., Altadena.

Instead of flowers, donations may be made to the Helen Mary Williams Scholarship Fund at Outward Bound Adventures, P.O. Box 202, Pasadena, CA 91102.