Allegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities of
Pittsburg and Allegheny. At the head of its Education Department there
was a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children; not beautifully
clean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just children.
Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she couldn't bear
the sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of Pittsburg streets
and alleys. Often she stopped in her walks to watch them, dodging wagons
and automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls, fighting, and shooting
craps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting arrested and being
dragged through the farce of a trial at law for the crime of playing.

"Those children," Miss Kennard told her club, "have got to have a
decent place to play this summer." And the club agreed with her. The
treasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred and
twenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out one
schoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in. There was no
trouble about getting the sixty together. They came, a noisy, joyous,
turbulent, vacation set of children, and the anxious committee from the
club looked at them in great trepidation of spirit and said to one
another: "What on earth are we going to do with them, now that we've got
them here?"

With hardly a ghost of precedent to guide them, the club undertook the
work, and as women have had considerable experience in taking care of
children at home, they soon discovered ways of taking care of them
successfully in the playground.

The next summer the Civic Club invested six hundred dollars in
playgrounds. Two schoolyards were fitted up in Pittsburg and two in
Allegheny. After that, every summer, the work was extended. More money