Browse the original files: Origins, 1965–1992
In 1965 a small group of Montgomery Ward employees began tutoring children from Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing development at the company’s headquarters on West Chicago Avenue. Daniel Bassill joined Wards as an advertising writer in 1973, became a tutor that same year, matched with a fourth-grader named Leo, and became the program’s leader in 1975.
By the late 1980s the program met on Tuesday and Wednesday nights in 24,000 square feet of the old catalog warehouse. Between 1970 and 1983 it enrolled more than 100 children a year on average; in 1988–89 more than 340 adults served over 260 children. Besides one-to-one tutoring there were field trips, parties, writing and reading contests, a library and a computer lab, each year recorded in a yearbook.
In 1990 Dan left the company and the volunteers turned the program into a nonprofit. After seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was killed in Cabrini-Green in October 1992, seven volunteers started Cabrini Connections for 7th–12th graders, and in 1993 the Tutor/Mentor Connection, to help programs like theirs grow in every high-poverty neighborhood of Chicago.
Sources: the 1990 proposal to establish a nonprofit, the 1965–1992 enrollment chart, Dan Bassill’s “45-year journey” and the 1995 slide show.