Helen Reid Brown

1925 - 2021

August 4, 1925 - February 4, 2021 Helen Reid Brown, 95, of West LA passed away peacefully on February 4, 2021. She was born August 4, 1925 to Solomon and Hildegard Walrauch in Chemnitz, Germany. In 1934, her Jewish father, already a widower, recognized what was coming in Germany and sent Helen and her younger brother Jack among thousands of unaccompanied refugee children fleeing Nazi persecution who arrived in the United States between 1933 and 1945. The two children were placed in foster care with the Starer family for three years by the Vista Del Mar orphanage. After the Starers relocated to New York, the children returned first to Vista del Mar and then were adopted in 1938 by Moe and Lillian Lehman in Lake Arrowhead, California. Helen was 14 when the US entered WWII and often noted the irony of being declared an enemy alien.Helen attended UC Berkeley as a Sociology Major where she met and married Stephen Reid in 1945. They had two children, Mark and Anthony. After college, Helen and Stephen lived in Vienna for five years where Helen studied and underwent psychoanalysis with the idea of practicing psychiatry in the US. During her studies, US laws changed to require a medical degree to practice psychiatry, so Helen entered the Graduate School of Social Work at UCLA and received her MSW degree in 1961. She worked at Thalians Community Mental Health Center in the Department of Child Psychiatry.Helen and Stephen were divorced in 1964. She and Saul Brown were married in 1970, and their 50-year union lasted until his death in February 2019. Helen's work over her career was honored in 1998 when she was awarded the Daniel E. Koshland Award for California's Best Social Work Practitioner. This honor was given for her lifelong work helping parents and toddlers. She established the Warm Line which was an infant counseling service to provide practical, clinically based guidance to parents by phone. This program grew over the years and lead to the Parent's House and the Early Childhood Center, and in 1982 these programs merged into the Pre-school Infant Parenting Service. The success of these programs led to the Cheerful Helpers training program for graduate level professionals in mental health with an interest in early childhood. In 1989 Helen expanded the program to serve low-income, high-risk families from diverse cultural backgrounds leading to the Day Care Consultation Project. Helen made a life-changing difference for generations of parents and children.She is survived by her son, Mark; her grand-children Alison Plante, Matthew and Cameron Reid; and her great-grandchildren Sophia Reid and Roland Plante all living in the Boston area. Owing to Covid-19 a memorial service will be postponed to a later date. The family requests that donations be made in support of Friends of the Children (Boston or L.A.), a national nonprofit with the mission of mentoring at-risk youth throughout their entire school career, or the Helen Reid Parenting Program at St. John's Child and Family Development Center (Santa Monica).