From Fear Grew Understanding and 16 Years of Service to Retarded

Marilyn Foreman said it was “frightening” the first time she met and talked to severely mentally retarded children.

“My daughter was a teacher’s aide in high school then, and she really wanted me to see those kids,” Foreman remembered. “She was always like that. She would bring kids home who didn’t seem to have any other friends.”

Daughter Robin Brooke, now 33 and a first-grade teacher in Tustin, had told her mother that she was thrilled with what the children could do “and wanted me to see.”

Foreman admitted: “I didn’t know how to act when I met them for the first time at a school open house. I never was involved with handicapped people, and I thought you had to act differently when you talked to them. It was frightening.”

It didn’t take her long to learn that she didn’t have to act differently. “You really don’t,” she said.

That was 16 years ago. Foreman has just received the Sally Gerich Award for outstanding contributions to special education for the severely handicapped in the Tustin Unified School District. (Gerich taught tennis to retarded children in Tustin schools for 14 years.)

“The award is one of the most exciting things in my life,” said Foreman, an Irvine resident who owns and operates three businesses but finds time to teach ballet, jazz dance and body movement to severely handicapped children.

At the beginning, Foreman recalled, “I didn’t think this was for me.”

“It took several months to learn they are just like everyone else, only slower, and their handicap is not just mental retardation. Many of them also have respiratory, eye and motor problems.”

As a former dancer, Foreman said, she knew she could help shape the motor skills of the youngsters.

“They need movement, and I knew I could help because music and dance is very natural to them,” she said. Through the years, she has taken groups of the students to dance at the Performing Arts Center, the Special Olympics, the Very Special Arts Festival and various workshops.

Today, she said, she sees retarded children as “very loving people with their own personality. I look at them as everyday normal kids.”

But despite her acknowledged success with the children, “I always have an evaluation time for myself to ask if I’m accomplishing anything. It’s not always easy to go in there, and it’s not all fun and games.”

But Foreman, 60, said helping the handicapped “is just something I do, and it’s really selfish of me.

“I have to believe I get more out of it than I give, especially when they come up and embrace me and say ‘Thank you for teaching me ballet, Mrs. Foreman.’ ”

A talking robot fielded some difficult questions from the fifth- and sixth-graders at a mock presidential rally at Turtle Rock Elementary School in Irvine, coordinator Jill Shannon said.

The voice of the robot was an off-stage actor who told jokes between some of the questions. Shannon said that didn’t go over, noting that the kids were more interested in talking about taxes and nuclear weapons.

After her hip was replaced, Heddi Lotto decided that she didn’t want to sit around. So with her surgeon’s approval, she started to play golf again.

Golfing keeps up her spirits, she said, adding that it’s a good idea to be out in the air and get some exercise.

“Sometimes walking is not so easy,” said the 92-year-old Laguna Hills Leisure World resident, “so I ride around in a little cart.” She plays Tuesday mornings with the retirement community’s Women’s 9-Hole Golf Club and sometimes one other day during the week.

“Everyone tells me I tee off pretty good,” Lotto said. “Actually, I’m not too bad and not too good.”

Sometimes she has trouble finding a game. “There are so many younger women golfers here, you know, and they really don’t want to play with an old person,” she said.

Lotto played in a club tournament recently and won a couple of dollars.

Does she wager? “Not me,” she said. “I’m not a gambler, even though my name is Lotto.”

Acknowledgments--Fullerton’s Sunny Hills High School honored four graduates by placing bronze plaques containing their names on its Walk of Fame.

They are psychologist Thomas K. Craik, Class of 1973; anthropologist Delores Pharris Klump, Class of 1963; physician Robert P. Gabriel, Class of 1968, and prosthesis maker Randall McFarland, Class of 1970.