Rose Kleiner

'I believe that it is a holy enterprise to understand the needs of people, and to help them, yet at the same time leaving them with their dignity and their pride." Rose Kleiner pauses to gaze out of the window of her basement office in the Los Altos Hills home that she shares with her husband, Eugene. Outside a torrential spring rain all but obliterates the view. For perhaps half a minute Kleiner is silent, and then she resumes the story of her life.

Born Rose Wassertheil, the eldest of three children, in the little town of Katowice, not long after the region had voted to become a part of Poland, she remembers the strength of her family's values.

Her father was a prosperous textile merchant, "a kind and generous man with a profound love of humanity and of every living creature. He was a wonderful example for me."

She remembers, too, the great respect in which her grandfather was held, and "how there was absolutely no resentment or feeling of burden" in the family's assumption of responsibility for his welfare. "I grew up with a love of the elderly, with a notion that they've coped for many years, and that there should be no diminution of respect when they grow older."

In the fall of 1939, the entire family set out across the Atlantic to see the New York World's Fair. In mid-ocean, war broke out, and the atmosphere grew suddenly somber. "They didn't know what to do with us," Kleiner recalls, "so they put us all in Ellis Island, until my great-uncle who lived in New York said that he would vouch for us."

At the age of 14, Kleiner found herself in a world that was new to her: a third-year student at a Brooklyn high school. English now supplanted German and Polish, but fortunately foreign languages came easily--though the spelling of Shakespeare's name proved "a challenge."

Her parents were "old-fashioned" and didn't encourage higher education, especially not for a girl, so she enrolled herself in Brooklyn College, where she founded an "Excursion Club" as a sort of social support club for European emigres.

The first applicant was Eugene Kleiner, a mechanical engineering student at N.Y. Polytechnic University. Eugene and Rose struck up a friendship.

In her final year, she sent him tickets to an operetta that she was producing, and walking home after the final performance, Rose spoke of the plans she was forming. "Those with life problems are the most underserved in our society. I plan to become a social worker." Eugene quietly responded by asking if she would begin her life's work by first helping him--as his wife. The wedding took place in January 1947.

The years passed quickly. Rose put her bachelor's degree in sociology to use doing social work at Quaker House in mid-Manhattan. Her first child, Robert, was born in 1952.

Four years later, Eugene received an offer from Nobel Prize-winning scientist William Shockley, who was setting up a group of young engineers on the West Coast to produce his new invention, the transistor.

For the Kleiners these were "unbelievably good times," but there was one problem. Shockley, "a genius when it came to invention," proved to be "no manager."

Within a year his hand-picked team pronounced the situation untenable and found themselves another backer: Fairchild Semiconductor.

In September 1959 the Kleiners' second child, Lisa, was born, and for the next 15 years Rose's life centered on her family. She became involved in "school things"--car pools, the PTA. At home, the Kleiners did a fair amount of entertaining, and they managed to travel with their growing children.

But when the children celebrated their mother's birthday in 1974, one year shy of her half-century, they presented her with a leather briefcase. At long last, the mother bird was being encouraged to leave the nest.

Kleiner entered Berkeley's School of Social Welfare and received her master's degree in gerontology in 1977. She promptly took a job working directly with the frail elderly as the first program director of the Senior Coordinating Council's Senior Day Health Program.

Kleiner had lost her father in 1968, and the following year her mother's health began to decline. She consequently found herself, not so much studying as experiencing first-hand the demanding role of long-distance caregiver.

With characteristic perception, she used her own experience to identify a broader societal need: surrogate care for the elderly. In 1982, she founded Older Adults Care Management. In effect, she was not merely founder and president of OACM, but also a client, using the support system offered by her own organization to help her mother, now transplanted to California, and herself through the trauma of her mother's cancer surgery.

As a community leader, Rose Kleiner has a distinguished record. She has served on the boards of El Camino Hospital Foundation and the Career Action Center. She has also been a member of the Citizen's Advisory Committee at Duke University Council on Aging & Human Development, and of the Geriatric Advisory Council at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, N.Y.

In addition to serving on the board of her family foundation, she is currently a member of the boards of the International Tremor Foundation, Respite & Research for Alzheimer's Disease and U.C. Berkeley's Center for Aging Research. For her distinguished service, she has already been honored: with a Woman of Vision award from the Career Action Center, with an Athena award from the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce, and with the Adele Elkind award from the National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers.

Underpinning this life of service has been a deep spiritual faith, to which the engraved medallion she wears around her neck bears silent witness: "Universal, Benevolent, Abundant Energy--All around us and within us."

Looking out at the rain-swept hills, she quietly sums up her lifelong philosophy in a single sentence. "I have always tried not to complain, but to see what I can do about something, to embrace life no matter what it brings."

--Peter Craske

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