Board of Child Care honors supporters with building names
The Board of Child Care honored 29 individuals who have supported and provided leadership for the agency over its 138-year history at a buildings dedication ceremony on October 13.
All buildings on BCC’s 30-acre campus, as well as several community-based group homes, are now named in honor of present or past supporters of the Board of Child Care.
Honorees include many prominent Baltimore-area residents, both past and present, who have served BCC in various capacities, including current and former Board Members, current and former staff leadership, and members of the United Methodist Church.
“The Board of Child Care has been blessed to have the wisdom of these individuals in moving this agency forward,” said Thomas Curcio, the BCC’s President and CEO, during the event. “Definitely the honorees today have changed the world and they’ve done that by changing the lives of children, one child at a time.”
BCC Board Member Sally Ransom Knecht, for whom the BCC’s Welcome Center and Archive Building is named, said the honorees “are not only part of our heritage, but part of our success today. All of these buildings are bricks and mortar, but it goes a lot further than that for the care of children.”
Other individuals honored are Board Members Gordon Fronk, Jim Mathis, Rev. Dr. Stacey Nickerson and Julie Wernz. Past Board Members honored are Richard Adams, John I. Barnes, W. Thomas Barnes, F. Duncan Cornell, Ted Jackson, W. Gibbs McKenney, Rev. Dr. Lewis F. Ransom, and Arthur R. Ransom.
Past founders, supporters and leaders within The United Methodist Church honored are former Baltimore-Washington Conference bishops Joseph Yeakel and John Schol; George and Ella Albaugh and the Rev. Dr. David H. Carroll who helped found the former Strawbridge Home for Boys; George W.F. Swartzell, benefactor of the former Swartzell Methodist Home for Children; Jesse P. King, a trustee, treasurer and benefactor of the Strawbridge Home for Boys; Mary Ware Hynson, an administrator at Swartzell Methodist Home for Children; Thomas Kelso, founder of the former Kelso Home for Girls; Joseph and Magdalena Singlewald, former supporters of the agency; and Eleanora and Rev. C. Gordon Clews, friends and providers to the children served by BCC.
Thomas Curcio and past BCC Executive Directors Claude Libis and Rev. Dr. F. Reid Isaac were also honored for their combined 77 years of leadership at the agency.
About 200 people attended the buildings dedication ceremony, many of them friends and family of the honorees.
“I feel blessed that he touched so many lives,” said Ann Walsh, the granddaughter of the late Rev. Dr. F. Reid Isaac, BCC’s first Executive Director. “It makes me proud he did God’s work.”
Vince Clews, whose parents Eleanora and Rev. C. Gordon Clews lived close to BCC’s Nicodemus Group Home and took many of the girls who resided there under their wings in the 1970s and 1980s, said that BCC became his parents’ passion.
“Being available to these kids who were disadvantaged was a very special time in their lives,” he said.
Anne Humphrey similarly said of her father, former Board Member W. Thomas Barnes who passed away earlier this year, that he “relished” his volunteer work on behalf of BCC, and was very touched to learn, just before he passed, that a residential house on BCC’s campus was going to be named for him.
