A Way With Children : Parenting: Longtime foster mother and hospital volunteer Mae Dedrick Prelow approaches her 99th birthday. Her vast extended family is invited to the party.

Mae Dedrick Prelow has spent most of this century watching over children. She cared for more than 70 youngsters when she ran a foster home in South-Central Los Angeles. Later, she nurtured hundreds of infants as a hospital volunteer.

Today, those children are grown and scattered to parts unknown. Now, with Prelow’s 99th birthday approaching Friday, her family hopes that a few of her former foster children can be found to join in the celebration.

“It would be nice if we could get some who were under her care,” said her daughter-in-law, Leona Prelow, who is helping organize a birthday party Saturday.

Prelow lives in Carson with her son, Clifford Prelow, and daughter-in-law. Her health is good, but her hearing and memory are fading. In an interview, she downplayed the dedication needed to care for scores of needy children.

“It did the children good, and made me happy to do it,” she said simply.

Those who know Prelow describe her as a quiet, unassuming woman with a rare power for rearing children.

“She’s almost an icon,” said Pastor James S. McKnight of New Hope Baptist Church in South-Central Los Angeles, where Prelow founded the children’s choir and still attends services. “There’s a charisma about her. Little kids just kind of look up to her. They cling to her--’Miss Prelow, Miss Prelow, Miss Prelow.’ ”

Prelow was born in 1894 in Texas and moved in 1922 to Los Angeles, where she married and had one son. After her husband’s death, she supported herself by operating a foster home for more than 20 years.

She cared for six or seven children at a time, from infants to school age, her family said. Some were in foster care because their parents had abandoned them; others were born into families with drug or alcohol problems.

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Prelow took them to church regularly and tried to encourage their creativity. In a handwritten report dated 1977, she described her efforts to help a young, hyperactive boy by putting him to work with a set of building blocks.

“He was very interested in building a tall building,” she wrote, “and he would sit for hours trying to place windows in that building. It was really educational to watch him. He never did solve his ‘window problem.’ But this activity went a long way in helping to solve his hyperactiveness.”

After Prelow retired and closed her foster home in the early 1970s, she volunteered in 1974 as a foster grandparent at Los Angeles County Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Willowbrook. There, she spent 20 hours a week caring for infants, especially the premature and high-risk babies in the special-care nursery.

She held the babies, fed and changed them and bonded with them, recalled Bernadette Bowman, the hospital’s director of volunteer services. Before she ended her volunteer work in 1991, Prelow was honored twice with county Golden Volunteer Awards.

“She had a presence about her that was very grandmotherly,” Bowman said. “Mrs. Prelow was the best of the best.”

Prelow has been a well-known figure at New Hope Baptist Church, where she organized the children’s choir and directed it for 50 years. She favored traditional songs of praise rather than contemporary music. And she proved to be a strict taskmaster: Choir members had to refrain from earrings, braids and unusual hairdos.

Her approach, said Pastor McKnight, “is what we’d call today stern and authoritarian, and yet, they respected it. She had this knack with little children. She just touched them.”

A choir reunion to honor Prelow in the mid-1980s drew a crowd of 200 that overflowed the choir stand, McKnight said.

“You just mention the name of Mae Prelow, and they come back,” said the pastor, who has no doubt that children from throughout her life will reappear for the birthday celebration.

“The whole world,” he predicted, “is going to be there.”