Sandy Socolar was a loving family member and friend who lived a remarkable life spanning nearly 105 years. She inspired all the people around her with her lifelong commitment to working for a more just world. She made her mark developing innovative programs and serving as a dedicated advocate for child care excellence and access for New York City’s working families.  After working as a union organizer and then as a social worker for decades, Sandy found a new niche in advocacy late in life. In her “retirement,” she volunteered for 28 years as a child care policy analyst. She also co-chaired the child care committee of the citywide Welfare Reform Network.

On May 31, 1916, Sandy Socolar came into the world as Ethel Bliss Beach.  She spent most of her early years in Fuzhou, China, where her parents were Congregational missionaries. They had each received a master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, and gone to China in the early 1900s to help set up schools and teach.  She was the middle sister of three sisters. (Her younger sister Betty grew up to be a pioneering biochemist.)

Sandy, along with her sisters, was home-schooled by her mother until 8th grade — and fondly remembered the opportunities with sister Betty to run around exploring the hillsides of the university where her parents worked. She then went off to boarding school at the Shanghai American School, where she won top honors, excelling in academics and in field hockey. She didn't want to leave China without more exposure to the country and its people, so she spent her first year of college at Yenching University in Beijing before returning to the U.S.

After a year at Oberlin College in Ohio, she transferred to Smith College in Massachusetts, where she earned a BA in psychology. In college, she picked up a clever nickname, something she had always wanted and that stuck with her for life — becoming "Sandy Beach."  Sandy moved to New York City in 1937 to enroll at Teachers College, planning to study elementary education, but then deciding instead to earn her master's degree in group work and worker education.

In a 2010 interview, Sandy described becoming influenced by and involved in the social movements of that period. "Japan was making war in China and Franco was making civil war in Spain and there was a lot of union activity here with sit-down strikes in General Motors…I had been concerned about all of these social things up at Smith and...I found people at Teachers College and at Columbia that were real interested and concerned." After grad school, she worked for the YWCA and, for a decade, mainly in New York City,  as a union organizer for the United Office and Professional Workers of America, CIO. Organizing a diverse array of workers for UOPWA, the nation's first white-collar union, she developed a reputation with management as a tough negotiator.

Making a big career change, in 1950 she went to the University of Chicago, where she earned an MSW in pediatric medical social work. There she met and married Sidney Socolar, Ph.D., a professor of physical sciences. They had a daughter, Debbie, and a son, Paul. In 1957, they made a big move: to Morningside Heights in New York City, where Sid worked at Columbia.

Sandy was hired as an assistant kindergarten teacher at her children’s school in 1960. That was the start of her 50-plus years of work in child care and early education, most of which focused on helping parents get good child care. In 1964, a small Upper West Side agency, Children’s Health Service, received a grant and hired her to set up the first family day care program in New York City. Designed for working mothers (in contrast to previous family child care programs designed for children needing protective or preventive services), her program set quality standards for family day care homes, and matched them with families needing child care. Through this work, she got to know many in the neighborhood; her children recall that a walk with Sandy on Columbus or Amsterdam Avenues would be interrupted by many warm greetings and conversations. For the next decade, she worked as a director in city-funded family child care programs.

Sandy became a diehard New Yorker, and dedicated to the city's children. When Sid's lab moved to the University of Miami in 1971, the couple decided they would keep their base in New York, with Sid commuting back every other weekend, so she could continue doing a type of pediatric social work not feasible in Florida. It was an early professional long-distance "commuter marriage."

In 1976, the Preschool Association of the West Side (PAWS) hired Sandy to develop a pioneering child care information service that assisted New York City parents in finding quality affordable child care. This was one of the first child care resource and referral services in the country.  She learned to use a personal computer and, with some technical help from Sid, she created the first computerized database of New York City child care centers and preschool programs. PAWS’ child care information service led to the founding of Child Care, Inc. in 1982 (later called the Center for Children's Initiatives), which became the largest and best-known of the city’s state-funded child care resource and referral services. She served there as director of the child care information service until her retirement in 1987. She earned their "Lifetime Children's Advocate Award" in 2009.

In her retirement, Sandy developed new skills and a focus on child care advocacy. She became proficient at preparing and presenting public testimony. Year after year, she testified at city and state public hearings on child care funding and subsidies, quality and regulations. She learned to use Excel and did detailed analyses of budget appropriations for child care and their impact in each City Council district — determined to find ways to make quality, affordable child care available to more families. She continue this involvement well into her 90s. Her advocacy work was featured in a New York Daily News profile in 2011.

Her retirement career also enabled Sandy to return to working with unions — District 65 UAW, TOP Local 2110 UAW, and DC 1707— this time on their members’ child care needs. Throughout these years, she continued doing research and working with other child care advocates to protect and strengthen New York City’s unique system of quality, publicly-funded child care.

Sandy's activist involvements weren't limited to child care. For example, she and Sid took Debbie and Paul to early demonstrations against the Vietnam War and to walk the picket line at a New York dime store chain in a civil rights protest. She served for a time on her local Health Systems Agency, a health care planning board. When fiscal crisis hit New York City in the mid-1970s, she joined the effort to prevent closings of public library branches and was part of a neighborhood group that sat in and slept in to keep the Columbia University branch of the library open. She and Sid were not afraid to engage in mass civil disobedience protests. They were arrested in the 1980s for a sit-in protesting the U.S. war in Central America and again in 1999, protesting the killing of Amadou Diallo by New York City police. She also had a keen eye for clear, accurate writing and volunteered for years as a proofreader for the Guardian newsweekly, the New York-focused journal City Limits, and the education newspaper Philadelphia Public School Notebook (a publication founded and edited by her son).

Sandy felt fortunate to have seen much of the world. Traveling to the U.S. from China in her youth, she twice made the journey by boat through the Red Sea to the Mediterranean —seeing the pyramids, Lebanon, the Bosphorus, and more. Sandy and Sid greatly enjoyed traveling in their senior years, occasionally with Elderhostel but most often with Sandy meticulously planning independent itineraries and activities in trips to Europe, Asia, Canada and the U.S. In 1981, Sandy made a treasured return to China, visiting several cities, including Fuzhou, where she had grown up, with the family, her sister Betty, and friends.

Although mostly homebound for the last decade of her life, and using a wheelchair since 2015, while struggling with failing eyesight, Sandy very rarely complained. She continued to follow the news avidly, with the help of friends and volunteers from the neighborhood organization Lifeforce in Later Years (LiLY), who came regularly to her apartment to read the New York Times to her. With loving care from Debbie, who moved back when Sandy began to need more help, Sandy was able to spend her final years at home, supported by a dedicated and caring team of home heath aides. Sandy was determined to live long enough to see Donald Trump voted out of office, and she cast one of the 81 million votes that contributed to that goal.

Increasingly limited in her last months, Sandy died at home of COVID-19 after a short illness. Sid had passed away in 2018. She is survived by her children, Debbie and Paul, daughter-in-law Sukey Blanc, and grandchildren Robin Socolar Blanc and Elena Socolar Blanc.

The family invites gifts in her memory to Community Change Action, which will be directed to their Childcare Changemakers campaign, or to Lifeforce in Later Years (LiLY) for their work with elders in New York City. Plans for a memorial are in process. 

Please feel free to leave a memory of Sandy in the Tribute section below.

                                                                                                      -Debbie and Paul Socolar