LITTLE ROCK — As a teacher, Earnestine Camp heard the growls of the empty stomachs of her poverty-stricken students, which fueled her lifelong passion for improving school meal programs.
“She was one of the first ones [to say] ‘You are what you eat,’” said her sister, Jean Pope. “If you don’t eat well, you can’t do well, and a hungry child cannot learn as [well as] a well fed child.”
Virginia Earnestine Camp of Little Rock died Thursday at Baptist Health Medical Center-Little Rock from various health complications, her sister said. She was 92.
After graduating from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1942, Camp taught high school home economics in Yellville.
“She had a special way of communicating” with her students, her sister said. “She built [up] their self-esteem.”
In 1943, the women who provided student meals as part of the Works Progress Administration program went to work at plants to help the war effort, and Camp volunteered to take over the program, her sister said.
Along with her teaching duties, Camp cooked nutritious meals for the students for eight years, with the help of a group of women from the area.
“I hated to see the children not ... have food, because we had about 500 children in that school,” Camp said in a 2004 oral history interview conducted by the National Food Service Management Institute.
Originally, the lunch program was set up under the bleachers in the basement of a school building. Ten washtubs were used as storage for dough made the night before.
“I remember ... seeing the dough that had risen up and just gone over the side of the tub onto the table,” Camp said in the interview. “The Lord blessed us that we didn’t kill a bunch of children that way.”
Camp documented the history of the school lunch program, including providing newspaper clippings and about 500 photos of students.
“The extensive collection of children at lunch over the years ... is one of her national legacies,” said Wanda Shockey, director of child nutrition for the Arkansas Department of Education.
In 1953, Camp became an area supervisor for the school food service section of the state Department of Education. During her 34-year tenure, the National School Lunch Act was passed in 1946,and special funds were set aside to raise the bar on lunch programs, while Camp and others helped work out the glitches.
Meal requirements were characterized in three types, including one that required at least two teaspoons of butter per student, which the cooks put on the students’ plates in little squares.
“One day I had butter on my skirt, and I wondered where in the world it came from,” Camp said in 2004. “And in this school at that time, the teachers were stressing a clean plate. ... When I looked under the table, the children had put their little pats of butter up under the table.”
The policy later was changed to allow the butter to be used in meal preparation.
In 1963, Camp helped establish manager training for school meal programs that still are implemented today.
On a national level, Camp was southwest regional director for the American School Food Service Association, and attended state and national conferences as recently as October.
Cheerful and strong in her Baptist faith, Camp made three mission trips to Brazil in her 70s to teach Bible lessons, another way she enjoyed helping children, Pope said.
“She dedicated her life to making the life of little children better, be it church or work or family or just one-on-one contact,” her sister said. “She always loved and was interested in the children.”
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 12/08/2012