Diana Pollard Waldfogel, 86, social worker

DIANA WALDFOGEL

Drawn to helping others even as a child, Diana Pollard Waldfogel at first thought she wanted to be a church missionary and live in Africa, until a friend suggested an alternate path.

"Diana was very serious about everything she did," Joyce Morrison of Sarasota, Fla., said of her older sister. "She knew she was going to be a social worker when she was quite young. Our minister's wife was a social worker and she would tell Diana about that. Diana was very impressed at this opportunity to do good work and do things for people."

As a social worker at Judge Baker Guidance Center, and later teaching at Simmons College, where she became dean of the School of Social Work, Mrs. Waldfogel worked with hundreds of families and through her students influenced the care of thousands more in Massachusetts and other states.

A longtime resident of Belmont, Mrs. Waldfogel died of complications from Alzheimer's disease on Sept. 28 in Episcopal Church Home in Rochester, N.Y., where she had lived the past few years. She was 86.

In the 1980s, while she was a dean at Simmons, Mrs. Waldfogel urged Massachusetts officials to allow gay and lesbian couples to be foster parents. At the time, state policy encouraged social workers to place children in homes with married couples. Critics said the policy's wording implicitly discouraged placement with homosexual parents.

That policy was enacted "without professional investigation and too quickly," Mrs. Waldfogel told the Globe in 1985.

"I felt they operated on information that was more appropriate 15 or 20 years ago," she said. "In the '40s and '50s, the typical case was an intact family with difficulties. The world isn't like that anymore - for good or for bad. In the '70s and '80s, in the agencies where our students work, it's rare to even find a two-parent family."

Stefan Krug, dean of the School of Social Work at Simmons, said in a statement that Mrs. Waldfogel "was unfailingly elegant and gracious, but was also a steely advocate for the social work profession and for social justice. It was largely through her efforts that gay foster care gained traction in Massachusetts."

Mrs. Waldfogel was born in Winnipeg, Canada. Her family was part of an Icelandic immigrant community. While she was still a young child, her parents moved to Detroit, where she grew up and graduated from Cooley High School.

"We were a family of three children - my sister, brother, and I - and Diana was sort of in charge of the group," Morrison said.

At home, Morrison added, "we always had reminders of the Icelandic community because we spoke Icelandic in the home. My grandparents did not speak English."

As a girl, Mrs. Waldfogel learned to play piano, and she recalled in later years that her father took her once to see a concert by the composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff.

For a few months, though, her family wasn't sure she would survive childhood. When she was hospitalized during a diphtheria outbreak, Mrs. Waldfogel was just old enough to realize that some children in her ward were dying.

"She remembered saying to herself, 'I am Diana Pollard and I am going to live,' " her sister said. "And she said this to herself over and over."

Mrs. Waldfogel attended what was then called Wayne University in Detroit, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1944 and three years later with a master's in social work.

While there she met Samuel Waldfogel, who taught psychology at the university. They married in 1944 and the couple moved to the Boston area in 1947, when he began teaching at Harvard.

Initially, Mrs. Waldfogel was a clinical social worker at Judge Baker Guidance Center. Before joining the Simmons College faculty, she also worked for the state Department of Mental Health and at Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham.

She coedited "A Handbook of Clinical Social Work," which was published in 1983, and served as president of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. That organization honored Mrs. Waldfogel for her contributions to social work education, and in 1984 the Massachusetts Psychological Association gave her its Allied Professional Award.

In 1960, Mrs. Waldfogel's husband died, leaving her to raise their children. Her mother and aunt lived with the family in Belmont to help at home and allow Mrs. Waldfogel to continue to work. By 1967, she switched from clinical work to the classroom, taking a faculty position at Simmons.

"She wanted a job so she could be there with her apron on when the kids arrived home from school," her sister said, "so she gravitated to teaching to have the same school hours."

That's not to suggest that Mrs. Waldfogel lavished less attention on her students in order to be home with her children.

"I felt like she just lived and breathed the Simmons School of Social Work," said her son, David, of Northampton. "I once met somebody who was a student there who asked, 'How does your mother like working at Simmons?' My reaction was, 'She doesn't work there, she is the school.' I never thought of her as an employee. To me, it was her life calling."

In addition to her son and sister, Mrs. Waldfogel leaves two daughters, Anne of Port Washington, N.Y., and Kathryn Argetsinger of Rochester, N.Y.; two granddaughters; and two grandsons.

Services and burial will be private.