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Did you have any relationship with the other two?
Excuse me, it's called the National Mental Health Association.
No, I had no connection with the other organizations.
Orin Root was a young Catholic lawyer with good intentions and a gift for speaking, but with no understanding of fund raising or of the mental health field or of what a voluntary health agency should do.
How did he get related to it then?
He was married into the Skouras family and one of the Skouras children had an emotional problem, so the family was interested in the problem, and somehow or another, it was thought, because he had been effective in the Willkie campaign--remember, he was one of the young organizers in the Willkie campaign--some people on the Committee thought that he would be helpful, and he evidently needed a paid job and he got it. It was a disaster for the mental health field.
As a result though, substantial funds had been given by various foundations and I spent $10,000 on getting John Price Jones's firm, which was a fund raising organization, to do a fund raising plan. Very little funds were raised. After about a year and a half the pump had not been primed. Oren Root departed but not before David Hyman, Alfred B , Isabel Leighton and I resigned in complete frustration about the
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