Why I love social work.

My mother was a caseworker at the Cook County Department of Public Aid in Chicago. Her best friend, my calabash auntie, was the Associate Director of the agency. My parents were very progressive, “parlor pink” members of the Communist Party in the 1930’s. So, I had a very liberal/progressive childhood, full of tales of fighting oppression and concern for those who had to struggle to survive. Chicago was very oppressive to minorities in those days, so I attended some demonstrations while I was in high school, commonplace today, but so atypical then that I never talked about it with my friends. I decided I was going into social work one day when I was walking across the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana when I was a sophomore. I cannot recall the exact circumstances; maybe I was hit by a bolt of social work lightning or something. But that afternoon I made up my mind; I was not only going to be a social worker in order to help people who were discriminated against and had to struggle their whole lives. I was going to be a social work professor so I could spread “the word” many times over. And I did. My first real job was as a caseworker at the same Cook County Department where my mother had worked; I then received my MSW at the University of Illinois in Chicago; I worked for three years as a clinical social worker for the Veterans Administration in San Francisco; I spent three years earning an imaginary brain tumor and a doctorate in social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley; and I completed my career as a professor for 40 years at the University of Hawai`i, Manoa, School of Social Work. It ain’t that easy, loving social work. It’s kinda hard to admit, but over the course of my career, the disappointments about social work far outnumber the times when I felt proud about our profession. Take my first disappointment. My first job was as a caseworker at Cook County, where my mother also had been a caseworker. In those days—the good old days—we had almost no technological support. We were supposed to write our notes about each client meeting, and then bring them down to the typing pool and dictate them into a primitive recordingmachine so they can be typed up by the workers in the typing pool. This, of course, required a briefing. Accordingly, on the first day of my new job, there I was talking with a woman who had been working at the typing pool for many, many years. She asked me my name, and of course, I told her: Joel Fischer. She paused, then looked aroundwith her eyes turned up to the ceiling in what I now know was her trying to remember something. Turns out, she was trying to remember ME! Back down to earth, she said, “We used to have a woman in the pool, over 20 years ago, whose name was Ruth. She had a baby while she was working here, and we all went over to her apartment to see him. I’m pretty sure his name was Joel, too. What a coincidence.” My eyes got bigger than hers. “That was my mother,” I exclaimed! “I’m that Joel!” JOURNAL OF EVIDENCE-INFORMED SOCIAL WORK 2018, VOL. 15, NO. 1, 14–22 https://doi.org/10.1080/23761407.2017.1422074