Mother Hale’s Solution : Children: Love is what Clara McBride Hale recommends for drug- and AIDS-afflicted babies. She should know; she’s taken care of hundreds.

Mother Clara Hale ordered a bowl of chitterlings, dug in and smiled her little smile, which is beatific one minute, mischievous the next.

“I’m glad my daughter isn’t here,” she said, dousing her meal with red pepper sauce. “She only lets me do this once a year, on New Year’s,” as a reminder that chitterlings (hogs’ intestines) were once slave fare.

She and her party had arrived in style at Alexander’s, a soul-food restaurant in Compton, in a chauffeur-driven stretch limo. Seated in its gray velour depths, Mother Hale was an incongruous vision, an unassuming woman in sensible shoes, assuring everyone that any place for lunch would be fine--”We don’t need fancy.”

A month short of her 85th birthday--an event that will be celebrated April 1 with a party at Gracie Mansion, home of New York Mayor David Dinkins--Clara McBride Hale is something of an American icon, many times honored, hailed by former President Ronald Reagan in his 1985 “State of the Union” speech as “an American hero.”

She is the founder of Hale House, a five-story brownstone in Harlem, where, since 1975, she and a small staff have cared for hundreds of babies born addicted to drugs and a handful of children who contracted the AIDS virus in their mothers’ wombs.

A soft-spoken, bespectacled, gray-haired woman--”You remind me of my grandmother,” said more than one young woman who met her here--she had come to Los Angeles at the urging of Patois De Sandies, a member of the black community who had visited Hale House in October, and, as she tells it, had been “kind of adopted” by Mother Hale.

De Sandies, with the sponsorship of the Black Employees Assn., had organized around this star visitor a symposium on drug babies Tuesday and Wednesday at the First AME Church.

It was an odd mix: heart-wrenching testimonials by young women in a local program for recovering mothers and their babies; a lecture on the evils of meat and dairy products, white flour and preservatives (this after a buffet lunch of frankfurters, cold cuts, white bread and processed cheese), and an appeal to black churches to fight the drugs that are decimating their communities.

The audience of about 60 included social workers and others on the front lines in caring for drug-addicted babies.

But if they had come seeking concrete solutions from Mother Hale, they were disappointed.

She had come to talk about babies and love.

The gospel according to Mother Hale: “It wasn’t their fault they were born addicted . . . love them.

“Help one another. Love each other.”

The message had been the same on Monday when she visited the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science Head Start Project in Compton, where 40 children under age 3 are in a federally funded demonstration project for drug- and alcohol-exposed infants. It is one of six in the nation and has a waiting list.

Seated in a rocker, in a circle of 20 women, most of them staff members, Mother Hale recalled how Hale House was born:

It was 1969 and, having raised 40 foster children, a mission she undertook to make ends meet in the ‘40s when she was widowed with a 6-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter, Mother Hale was, at 65, looking forward to retirement. She had earned it; orphaned at 16, she had finished high school, then worked as a domestic.

But one day, a young woman appeared at her door with a drug baby. “I said, ‘You must have the wrong house,’ ” she recalled.

The woman, however, had a note from Mother Hale’s daughter, Lorraine, who had seen the woman on the streets. Mother Hale recalled, “I said, ‘I don’t want a junkie baby because I don’t know anything about them.’ ”

She had excused herself for a moment and stepped inside. But, she said, “when I went back to the door, the girl had put the baby (girl) on the floor and gone.”

A few days later, the mother reappeared with two more children, boys. Soon, other young mothers brought their babies. Word got around quickly, Mother Hale said, that “there’s a crazy lady up in Harlem . . . and she won’t charge you nothing” to care for babies.

Since that fateful day, her agency has cared for 800 drug-addicted babies.

As she sees it, she is simply doing God’s work in the best tradition of the black community. She reminded the women in Compton, “Years ago, when we first got out of slavery, we would take our sisters’ children,” when those women were in trouble. “They never went into institutions.”

Hale House, formally The Hale House Center for the Promotion of Human Potential, is not an institution. It is a home where 22 infants, including one AIDS-infected baby, live as siblings in an environment that includes big doses of hugs and kisses, bedtime stories and a wolf-like dog that spurns baths.

It is a nonprofit agency supported through private donations. “People take care of us,” Mother Hale said. “In 21 years, I never bought a piece of clothing for my children.”

She added, “They say black people don’t stick together. Don’t believe that.”

One of the AIDS babies who lived at Hale House died; another appears to be in remission. His mother died of the disease, and he has been adopted.

Mother Hale treats the AIDS babies much the same as she does the drug babies. A 22-month-old girl infected in utero and brought to Hale House soon after birth is Mother Hale’s roommate, and, she emphasized, “I haven’t got AIDS.”

Crack was the drug of choice for most of the drug babies’ mothers. Most of the infants are developmentally delayed; typically, they are passive, withdrawn at first. Mother Hale rocks them to reassure them, holds them up to a mirror to see “the pretty baby.”

Having sent her mother that first drug baby, Lorraine Hale, a child development specialist, is now executive director of Hale House. She and her brother, Nathan, a Brooklyn jeweler, helped with start-up funding.

Mother Hale also has a son, Kenneth, who was born to a 15-year-old and adopted by Hale as an infant.

She is one of those people who instinctively seem to relate to children. On her visit to the Compton facility, she stopped by the Head Start classroom, where two tables of youngsters were eating lunch.

“Do you say the grace?” she asked. “Let’s put our hands together and say the blessing.”

A small boy, slightly puzzled, said, “We did.”

But Mother Hale was unfazed, plunging ahead with “Thank you for the world so sweet. Thank you for the food we eat. Thank you for the birds that sing. Thank you, God, for everything.

“You’re beautiful children,” she said, then she was gone.

Though licensed by the city of New York to care for 15 children, Hale House does not turn babies away. “Sometimes we have 30 or 40,” Mother Hale said. When city inspectors pop in, she said, “we hide them. They say, ‘Oh, Mother Hale, don’t you give us any trouble.’ I say, ‘Not if I can help it.’ ”

She smiled the mischievous smile.

One day, she recalled, John Lennon walked in off the street, and, when he saw her babies, he “cried like a baby. He was so nice. And six months later, he was dead. But he left us a check for $2,000. And his wife (Yoko Ono) gives us $20,000 every year.”

Hale House is a temporary haven for children whose mothers are trying to put their lives back together. There are no contracts, no red tape. When the mother is ready, Mother Hale said, “we just give them back.”

There is no court involvement.

She added, “We’ve never had a parent come and take a child out before we say (everyone) is ready.” (A child may stay until age 3). Nor, she said, has she ever had a child returned. A few have been abandoned at the house, but, in most cases, a grandmother or other relative took them in.

Of the 800 babies who have come to Hale House, she said, only 14 have been placed in foster homes because reuniting them with their mothers was impossible.

Only last week, two days after Mother Hale had cataract surgery, Hale House, with the help of city and state funding, opened “Homeward Bound,” a complex of 30 apartments for women undergoing drug rehabilitation and working toward reunions with their babies.

Mother Hale (who earned that affectionate nickname years ago from her children) loves talking about her babies. But asked to tell a few success stories, she said simply, “I think they’re all success stories. We’ve never heard of any of our children being in jail, and I think that’s success.”

She would like to see Hale House go national, but said, “I wouldn’t like to go with it.”

There are no plans for more Hale Houses.

Over and over, she told people in the black community: “If we don’t take care of these children, we’ve lost a generation.” If someone wants to start a Hale House-type operation here, she said, she will help.

She smiled and said, “Sometimes people say (of me), ‘She’s old and she forgets’ . . . I am forgetful about a lot of things, but not about these children. I’m Mother Hale, and I know what’s going on” at Hale House.

She is a woman who believes that life was meant to be hard. She hasn’t forgotten that she was once a domestic--”a terrible job”--and she wants better opportunities for her black sisters. And for her babies.

Monday’s full day in Los Angeles included a stop at City Hall, where she received a proclamation and some nice words from Mayor Tom Bradley. It was getting late, and she had had a long day but was hanging in there.

Heading down a City Hall corridor to a small reception in her honor, she insisted she was feeling just fine.

“When I get to heaven, I’m going to rest,” she said. “God put me down here to work.”

She added, “I don’t understand why people are always tired.”

The next day, at the drug symposium, she and other speakers zeroed in on the problems at the root of drug-addicted babies--poverty, under-education, racism, the changing face of industry, cutbacks in affirmative action programs.

What’s needed, speakers agreed, is not more jails or police gang sweeps but a network of community-minded people demanding resources. Forty years ago, one woman observed, a young black man could drop out of high school, get a job and support a family. Today, the dropout rate has escalated, but there are no jobs for the unskilled.

Cynthia Newbille-Marsh, director of the Drew University Head Start program, spoke of the explosion of births to drug- and alcohol-exposed mothers in Los Angeles County--from 915 in 1986 to an estimated 6,000 in 1989. She called it an “epidemic.”

The Rev. Ron Wright, associate pastor of Ward AME Church and himself a recovering alcoholic and addict, suggested that it is time for black churches to stop worrying about “sheep stealing” from each others’ flocks and start working together to address drug and alcohol addiction.

Finally, Dr. Ernie Smith, associate professor of pediatrics at Martin Luther King Hospital, spoke. He had been watching, somewhat amused, as the audience of social workers and their ilk had listened to Mother Hale’s words of love, finding little to jot down on their note pads.

“Mother Hale comes as a missionary today,” he said, “and it’s a powerful thing she said.”

Unfortunately, he observed, the government doesn’t fund plain old love, preferring to give grants to projects heavy on “pseudoscientific psychological jargon.”

Well, Smith told them, Mother Hale didn’t have a Ph.D. or an M.D. or “any other kind of D,” but she took in that first drug baby back in 1969. “All she had was a rocking chair.”

And look what happened.

What she had told them today, he said, was just “what your grandmothers told you.” It’s loving that counts. “We have to really go back and learn how to do that.”