The Times Welcomes Mr. Childress to Job as Superintendent of Welfare for Children, Aug. 6, 1919

From the Raleigh Times, as reprinted in The University of North Carolina News-Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., Aug. 6, 1919

Wake County Welfare

To county Superintendent of Welfare Children, The Times would extend its best wishes. He has something of a job; it is gratifying to learn that he is much of a man.

Mr. Childress has been supply pastor to ta church near Wendell. That’s fine! No man can be too good to be a county superintendent of welfare. He is a graduate of Wake Forest, which again is fine; his new job requires vision and should be held by an educated man. He has in times past been connected with the Old Fellows’ Orphanage, and this is even better; a man without warm sympathy with and understanding of children would be an utter failure in a position which makes him chief truant and probation officer for the county.

He is to receive $2,000 per annum as salary. He will be worth vastly more or not that much, and if he deliver the goods, he can expect to have his salary raised.

We are not sufficiently temerarious to attempt to advise the new official as to his specific duties; in a general way everybody at all familiar with the new laws governing compulsory education, child labor and juvenile courts knows that the prime prerequisite of an efficient county superintendent of welfare is an intelligent interest in the well-being of others.

This, we are quite sure, Mr. Childress has. If he receive, as he must receive, the support of the rest of Wake’s sentiment folk, he should be able to polish and brighten the community’s uncut and tarnished gems till they gleam like those of Cornelia, mother of the Grachii.