Chapter 02: The Children’s Christmas Card Project
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Mrs. Harrison begins by talking about Page Lawson, “the most innovative person in the world” (who served as Director of Volunteer Services at MD Anderson from 1973 – 1991). As an example, she says that Ms. Lawson arranged for the volunteers to have t’ai chi classes as a relaxation technique. She also speculates that the Children’s Christmas Card Project was really Ms. Lawson’s idea, though Ms. Lawson circulated the story that the idea came from an unnamed volunteer who taught art classes for children at MD Anderson and discovered a particular piece of artwork she thought would make a wonderful Christmas card. Mrs. Harrison then explains how Ms. Lawson offered her a job as manager of the Children’s Christmas Card Project; her first main task was to develop a five-year plan to expand the project. She was fortunate, she notes, because MD Anderson was connected to the UT System: she actively promoted the project at all the UT Divisions. She also explains that an important expansion occurred when Randall’s Supermarket agreed to sell the cards at no profit (and continues to sell them today).
Next, Mrs. Harrison talks about how funds from the Project were used: MD Anderson employees submitted requests for funds to a board of volunteers who decided how money should be spent. She notes that the aquariums one can still see around MD Anderson were one of the first projects funded. At the end of this segment, Mrs. Harrison talks about the importance of spirituality in her life.
Identifier
HarrisonK_01_20130528_C02
Publication Date
5-28-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - An Institutional Unit; The Philanthropist/Volunteer; Portraits; Giving Recognition; Building/Transforming the Institution; This is MD Anderson; Industry Partnerships; Beyond the Institution; MD Anderson History; Volunteers and Volunteering
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Karen Harrison:
Page Lawson was the Volunteer Services director, and she was the most innovative person in the world. We would do tai chi or something that she thought would help us be more relaxed and that sort of thing.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why did she want to do relaxation for the volunteers?
Karen Harrison:
Well, she thought it would help them with the patients.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting. Meaning if you were calm, you would communicate that to the patients or—?
Karen Harrison:
I would think so. I’m not sure.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What else did she do? I mean, one of the question areas I have on my list is to ask you about Page Lawson because she came in as Director of Volunteer Services in 1973, which was the same year as the Art Project started.
Karen Harrison:
She was working with Volunteer Services, I think, before that briefly. I don’t know how long. But I met her, and I volunteered under her, and then one day, having worked with her as a volunteer, she offered me a job, and I worked for seventeen years.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. She offered you a job doing—?
Karen Harrison:
A job of working at Anderson.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And what was the position?
Karen Harrison:
It was the Art Project. At that time it was the Christmas Card Project.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And what year was it that you started?
Karen Harrison:
I would have to look to be exact.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s fine. Yeah. I mean, I know it’s hard to remember when it’s been a really long time, many decades.
Karen Harrison:
I wasn’t planning on being interviewed.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No. I understand. Nobody is. That’s one of the reasons why after the fact you can go back and add dates if you need to. Tell me how the Christmas Card Project started.
Karen Harrison:
Page always gave an anonymous volunteer credit for it—that she had been drawing and playing with the children, and they had drawn something, and she brought it down and said, “This is pretty enough to be a Christmas card.” And so Page always gave that credit to the volunteer but not a named volunteer.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
But you don’t know who the person was?
Karen Harrison:
I think a lot of it was Page’s developing something that the person said to her. I think that it was Page’s innovation.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I see. I was curious. I read that story about a volunteer selecting a card and saying it was nice enough to be a Christmas card—or selecting a piece of artwork—and I was wondering how come the person was never named.
Karen Harrison:
We don’t know. No one ever called anyone by name. And I really think that a whole lot of it was Page’s innovation.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So that was in 1973, in the early part of the year, I guess. And it came out of art classes, isn’t that correct?
Karen Harrison:
Actually, I was still floor hostess more at that point. But yes, I think that they began doing art classes.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So when you got involved and when Page Lawson offered you the job of being director of the Christmas Card Project, what was the job you inherited? What was going on? Tell me about it.
Karen Harrison:
My first assignment was to make a five-year plan for where I thought the project ought to go, and I felt that, because the University of Texas had so many locations and innovations and so forth, we ought to include them all. And so they ultimately were sold at the locations, and they supported us in every way.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, when you became director of the project, was that before or after the very first Christmas cards were done?
Karen Harrison:
It was after.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’m just looking. It’s kind of incredible how the project grew. The first sale of cards made about $588, and then the second year it ran, ’74 to ’75, was $1215. Then in ’75 to’76, it was $12,000, so a hundredfold increase.
Karen Harrison:
Again, I don’t know dates, but I was hired to be the manager, not the director. I was the manager. But later I became Assistant Director of Volunteer Services. But anyway— And I’m not sure dates. I just can’t help you with that. Randalls Supermarket came to us and said they would like to sell our cards at no monetary interest to themselves, so we were skipping through the—thinking that was a great thing. And so it put us into the grocery stores. The first year they wanted an exclusion, and after that we were in grocery stores. All of the grocery stores wanted to sell them at no profit.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s amazing. Why do you think people were so excited about this project?
Karen Harrison:
People love anything about children. And secondly, it was really helpful to things they needed, like the summer camp or whatever.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’m trying to get a sense of how the project developed. Page Lawson was the person who most likely came up with the idea to create the Christmas cards. How many different Christmas cards were sold that first year? Was it just one?
Karen Harrison:
The first I remember were two.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Two, okay, so two styles.
Karen Harrison:
And I think that was under Dr. [Charles A.] LeMaistre [Oral History Interview].
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay, so two styles of cards were sold the first year. And then the second year, was—
Karen Harrison:
It was still limited.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It was still very limited. Okay. And still not a whole lot of money made. It was really the third year that it started making more serious—and so at that point, did people realize, “Wow, maybe we’ve got a moneymaker here,” or, “What’s the possibility?”
Karen Harrison:
I don’t know what they realized. I just knew I had to keep on keeping on. The first years of my working with it, I worked in the warehouse, did the dolly, spoke on the radio, did whatever needed to be done.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What did you—?
Karen Harrison:
Radio or television.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So these were ads for talking about the project?
Karen Harrison:
Not ads. They were interviews.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, I see. So you were being interviewed about the project.
Karen Harrison:
Yes.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When was it decided that the proceeds from the Christmas Card Project would fund services for kids at MD Anderson?
Karen Harrison:
As far as I know, immediately. But I do not know.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. And what were some of the first projects that were funded by Christmas card money?
Karen Harrison:
I’m not sure what the first things where. I know early on we did a camp.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Camp Star Trails?
Karen Harrison:
Yes.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. And that was for whom? Who went to that camp?
Karen Harrison:
Any of the children that applied, pretty well.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And these were kids who—
Karen Harrison:
Who were cancer patients.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Cancer patients. Yeah, that’s amazing. It was a summer camp? Or did it—?
Karen Harrison:
Yes, it was summer. I’m trying to think what else might— There was a board out of the volunteers, and you made requests for grants as we were making money.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, I see. So this board of volunteers, they came up with ideas of things that the kids needed?
Karen Harrison:
No, they listened. The employees of Anderson came up with things that they needed in their department. We did things like the aquariums. We did anything pretty well that the departments felt they needed. We listened to them, and then on the board, we voted and determined which direction it would be going.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What were the aquariums?
Karen Harrison:
They are right in Anderson today in the— I was there last week with a patient, and a corner there was all glassed in, and the fish were swimming. It’s supposed to be a very relaxing thing. They’re in the—I’m trying to think of the name of the building now on the south side of the street. They have a piano playing on its own on the south side of the street.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Is that on the first floor of the Mays Building?
Karen Harrison:
Yeah, Mays, that’s it. And— I’ve lost my direction.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
We were talking about the different projects that were funded by the money that came from the Christmas cards.
Karen Harrison:
The coffee that was in the— There’s a volunteer room that people in the building, the patients, can come down and have coffee and rest, and there is even a bed behind one of the doors, where if they really just feel like they need a nap and their next appointment isn’t for three hours or whatever, they can use that. But it was things that affected the whole hospital in one way or another, not just the children.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s interesting, because when I was doing the background reading, it seemed like at first a lot of the initiatives were specifically for kids, like learning tools and a playroom and things like that.
Karen Harrison:
I’m sure that’s true. I’m just jumping forward, I guess.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It sounds like things there were farther along because there were eventually things for adults that were used, but it seems like it’s much broader than I had thought. That’s really interesting. When you took over as manager and made your five-year plan, what did your five-year plan look like? What did you decide was important to do?
Karen Harrison:
Of course, mine was to promote the project any way that I could. I was not involved in the medical side of it anyway. And as I said, we automatically had entry to many facilities because they were part of the University of Texas. So that was my first plan.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So tell me, where were the divisions that you entered?
Karen Harrison:
UT Houston Medical School, Nursing School—I’m trying to think what else. We were in Austin and had volunteer parties there. We got to go to the president’s home and entertain there with the project. Just anything that I or anyone else could think of that would fly, we tried to do it. As I said, we entered the grocery business in a big hurry after the first year with Randalls.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Right. I bet.
Karen Harrison:
So because we were really nationwide, we went to Florida.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, I think it was 1993 it expanded to Orlando—MD Anderson Orlando.
Karen Harrison:
So we were anywhere we could get our foot in the door.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How long were you manager of the project?
Karen Harrison:
I was manager of the project for 17 years.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. Wow. That’s really something. So you really saw it grow enormously.
Karen Harrison:
Yes, I did. I wasn’t looking for a job. I was offered the job, and, as I say, my last one had gone off to college, and my husband was retired and starting to play golf, and so it sounded like a good idea. I really was able to give myself to it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What do you think were the skills that you brought to that position that made Page Lawson say, “Wow,
Karen Harrison:
is the person for this job”?
Karen Harrison:
I’m not sure. I think the fact that I was enthusiastic about it and I don’t have a timid bone in my body. And I don’t know what else.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What made you so enthusiastic about the project?
Karen Harrison:
Because I, as I told you, had been really seeing what Anderson had done and could do. [redacted] I just saw it from the beauty shop on down. And it, to me, was great to go into Volunteer Services under the chapel because I was always affected by the chapel, and I base all of my life on Christ. It was just—sometimes I would get to see the ministers that were volunteers and talk to somebody in there, in the chapel or whatever. I was just very inspired with the whole project in every way.
Recommended Citation
Harrison, Karen K. and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 02: The Children’s Christmas Card Project" (2012). Interview Chapters. 873.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/873
Conditions Governing Access
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