The Godmother For Decades, Vivian Winston Has Dedicated Her Life To Helping Support Spokane Organizations Like Planned Parenthood

On more mornings than she cares to remember, Vivian Winston would start her car in the icy pre-dawn dark, and with snow slapping across the windshield, creep down the South Hill to the Spokane airport.

Alone, she’d cross the frozen parking lot, head bowed and dress flapping against her legs, to board the first flight to Seattle or Olympia. She’d spend the day in meetings, defending her stand, producing numbers, waiting, waiting, waiting: for take-off, for meetings to begin, for people who did not want to see her side of things to see it.

Waiting for the last flight to Spokane, where in the dark, she’d drive home to where her husband and two daughters also were waiting.

“Some days, I’d think why am I doing this? I don’t have to do this. This isn’t a job.”

It wasn’t a job. It was a calling.

For nearly 50 years, Vivian Winston has been the godmother of Spokane.

If you want to raise money, shelter abused children or educate poor women, she will open her home, her checkbook and her suitcase to help do it.

To imagine Spokane without Winston is to imagine Spokane without Planned Parenthood, the League of Women Voters, Women Helping Women, the Crisis Residential Center, the Department of Social and Health Services, and the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute, all of which she worked to establish here.

“Half the lights in the city wouldn’t be on,” says Mary Ann Murphy, manager of the Regional Center for Abuse and Neglect. “She has left her mark.”

Saturday night, Planned Parenthood will award the Margaret Sanger Award to Winston for her lifelong commitment to women and children. Dr. Henry Foster, former nominee for U.S. surgeon general, will present it.

Winston was among the handful of women and men who founded Planned Parenthood of Spokane and Whitman Counties in a broom closet here 25 years ago.

Now in her 80s, Winston looks like the kind of gracious, genteel lady who spends her days playing cards. But she has no time for bridge. A campaign for more affordable housing in Spokane needs support. Letters to Sens. Patty Murray and Slade Gorton await in her word processor. Congress is threatening to end the earned income tax credit which gives working poor families a break.

“I am opposed to any cuts in economic support that will damage the life of our children,” she says.

Winston’s unpaid work in Spokane has stretched from the presidency of the United Way to the Women’s Job Corps, from advising Girl Scouts to several governors. Her influence is as obvious as the SIRTI offices on the Spokane River. It is as subtle as Mari Clack biting her tongue.

“Just before I make some dig, I think, ‘Would Vivian say this? No, she would let it go,”’ says Clack, a Spokane training consultant and founder and president of the Women Helping Women Fund. “I often say, ‘Today, I’m going to be more like Vivian.”’

How can one be like Vivian Winston?

Be more curious. (Winston takes college courses every year; now she’s studying short stories and Southern writers at Whitworth.)

Tell great stories about your friends. (“Then Connie Kuney said, ‘We wouldn’t have juvenile delinquents if everyone put the front porch back on their house.”’)

Reach out. (On Christmas, she’d call Gonzaga University and invite strangers who were alone to dinner.)

Shun the limelight, shun taking credit, shun the press (“I don’t like to talk to reporters about myself but about this program …”)

Think. Think. Think.

“I can’t paint the beautiful pictures my friends can paint or write the wonderful stories they write, but I can make things better,” Winston says. “That’s my creativity.”

Vivian Marie Downey was born at the family home in Spokane and raised in Seattle, where her accountant father had sought work. As the Great Depression darkened the family’s future, her mother went to work in child welfare. Each day, she told of children hungry, unwanted and abused.

Young Vivian, independent, ambitious and determined not to get married, enrolled in the University of Washington to become a doctor. But there was not enough money, and what money she’d scraped together ran out by her senior year.

She went to work in Olympia at the state Department of Labor and Industries, where she met a much-sought-after attorney who was writing the new state highway code.

Patrick Henry Winston shared her sharp wit and love of Shakespeare and seemed smitten by the one woman in town trying not to land him.

They did land together in a Unitarian ceremony in 1937 that shocked their Episcopal relatives who believed the wedding was a feeble screen for their living in sin.

They moved to Washington, D.C., where he served in the Selective Service. After World War II, as he toured cities looking for a place to settle, he called to say Spokane “may be the best place for us.”

“You’re kidding,” Winston remembers saying. “It was too conservative. My friends all said, ‘You won’t like it. There’s not a liberal thought in the town.”’

They came anyway, settled and raised their two daughters, Karen, now a forensic social worker in Spokane, and Robin, a registered nurse in Port Angeles. Pat Winston rose to senior partner in the firm Winston and Cashatt.

And Vivian Winston got involved. First in Girl Scouts (what about girls who can’t afford uniforms?), as a charter member of the League of Women Voters (always get your facts straight) and United Way (first woman president).

Then it was on to church councils, the Spokane Library Board, the landmark 1974 juvenile justice study, youth committees, poverty coalitions, Project Share, Foundation Northwest, the YWCA and state library and higher education boards.

“I wanted to be helpful in a less traditional way, beyond collecting clothing and food,” she says. “To me that was not exactly the way I wanted to help make a change for the better.”

Early on, studies took her into welfare homes where she learned how complex families’ problems were, that there is no “typical” welfare family and that some families weren’t able to care for babies.

“You can smell the houses where you feel the baby is being abused,” she said. The experience fueled her belief that every child should be wanted and led her to Planned Parenthood.

Winston was already a grandmother when she and others began working on a family planning clinic that would provide information and inexpensive birth control in Spokane.

She put a bumper sticker on her car that said, “Every child should be a wanted child.” Relatives were shocked, and at least one friend stopped speaking to her.

“What does your bishop think of that?” a fellow Episcopalian asked Winston. “My bishop thinks it’s wonderful,” the longtime member of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church replied.

Winston led the Planned Parenthood board from 1972-76 and for a time even dispensed birth control information from behind a borrowed desk.

“She was the first woman I met who was politically involved,” says Clack.

She was so political that one scheduled appearance before the Spokane School Board was canceled because she was too controversial.

“I’ve always been proud of that,” says her daughter, Robin Winston Gay.

Bernie Nelson, regional director of the state Department of Social and Health Services, began working with Winston nearly 30 years ago when she was a citizen adviser to state officials on welfare and medical assistance. Two weeks ago, he looked out after a grueling, all-day conference on housing in Spokane and there she was.

She is the institutional memory, he says, and when he questions a policy, he calls Winston.

“She is a beautiful person. I choke up thinking about her,” he says. “And bureaucrats don’t choke up.”

Winston is among a vanishing breed: intelligent, well-educated women who work only as volunteers. Today, her skills would be used in the Senate or to head a corporation.

“It would have to be a corporation that made things better for people,” Winston says.

And a corporation where the president passes the knowledge on.

Winston is a mentor for many. Mary Ann Murphy remembers being the new director of the Youth Help Association: “You can’t imagine how it was, on my first day on the job at a new non-profit to hear this lovely voice saying, ‘If I can help, let me know.”’

Ask higher education and social service leaders in Spokane whom they go to for counsel, and each would produce a long and varied list.

“But we would all have Vivian,” says Patt Earley, director of Spokane County Head Start. “That’s her uniqueness. She’s been of help and guidance to so many.”

But she has not just been a cheerleader. Winston hounded DSHS on efficiency, on dehumanizing clients and the facelessness of its bureaucracy.

“She was reinventing government long before the popular rhetoric of today, and she did it with great sensitivity, not as a member of a wrecking crew but as a problem-solver,” Nelson says.

Terry Brown, chief executive of Community Colleges of Spokane, agrees.

“She’s the kind of person who asks the question that needs to be asked in a way that’s very acceptable.” Brown says.

The question, more often than not, is: What are you doing for dislocated workers, single parents and people from poor neighborhoods?

The grandmother of eight and great-grandmother of one has always worked for women and children. And that work helped her face her own problems.

More than a decade ago, her husband developed Alzheimer’s disease.

Winston cared for him at home until she could no longer lift him. Moving him to a nursing home five years ago was the darkest day of her life.

A member of the state Higher Education Coordinating Board called, asking that she come to a meeting so the group would have enough members for a vote. She went.

“I think that was what saved me. I had to cry when I had a few minutes to cry,” she says.

Her work continues. Knowing that women need education to leave poverty and low-paying jobs, she opened her home to an Eastern Washington University poet and 30 women friends, and the germ of Women Helping Women was sprouted. Last spring, the annual fund-raising luncheon drew 1,300 people.

Since 1992, the nonprofit organization has raised $387,000 for programs that directly serve women and children in Spokane.

“In this country we are constantly looking for leadership and people we can trust and emulate and honor, and Vivian is definitely one of those people,” says Clack.

“We have a lot of leaders we wish would go home. We just wish we had more Vivians.”

Winston alone tallies her failures: The latest, she says, was a local attempt to limit television violence.

She worries terribly about the lack of hope in young people. She prays that we all become more civil.

How? How to be more like Vivian Winston?

“You keep talking about it; you never let up. Keep writing letters or making phone calls. You never give up; you never let up,” one student says.

Her children say it more simply. They say it the way her headstone will: “Love is something you do.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: AWARD DINNER Vivian Winston will receive the Margaret Sanger Award at Planned Parenthood’s gala dinner and reception Saturday at the Crescent Court ballroom. When: 6 p.m. for reception; 7 p.m. for dinner. Tickets: $75 dinner; $100 dinner and reception. For information: 326-6292, ext. 104. Reservations required.