“Well, why don’t we take in some of these girls and see if we can’t give them a better home and turn them around.”
Mary Moon Wilson founded and ran two group homes in Boston: one for runaway teenage girls, the other for mentally challenged adults.
According to her Boston Globe obituary, she “rescued and raised maybe 1,000 children.” One of them – using a literary device we learn, understatement – said: “They don’t make too many folks like Mary Wilson.”
The obituary offers the vocabulary commendation, maternal, and haven. And savvy, too, which Ms. Wilson demonstrates here:
She was able to get employment at the Pentagon as a cryptographer by inflating her resume, saying she was able to speak several different languages (knowing only the English language) but the interviewer did not ask her to speak any of the languages she claimed to know and eventually got the job.