Julius Richmond | Ex-surgeon general, 91

Julius B. Richmond, 91, a pediatrician whose work on cognitive development in poor children led to his being the first national director of Project Head Start, and who as surgeon general under Jimmy Carter was a fierce adversary of the tobacco industry, died of cancer Sunday at his home in Chestnut Hill, Mass.

He produced a 1979 report that set out, for the first time, health objectives for the nation. A vigorous antismoking campaigner, he produced another report as surgeon general that declared there was "overwhelming proof" that tobacco caused lung cancer.

Head Start was a focal point of Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty and an extension of work by researchers like Dr. Richmond. In the late 1950s, he and a colleague at the State University of New York College of Medicine at Syracuse, Betty Caldwell, began studying the interactions of parents and very young children in poor families.

"We discovered that around 18 months there was a decline in cognitive function and responsiveness to adult guidance," Caldwell said.

The two sought money to conduct an experiment with children, putting half into an early day-care program. The view then was that any separation of a mother and an infant was harmful, so they had to agree to study children already being cared for outside the home. "All of a sudden we were running the first infant day-care center in the United States," Caldwell said.

That was in summer 1964. By the beginning of 1965, the results led Sargent Shriver, Johnson's new director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, to ask Dr. Richmond to oversee the new Project Head Start, to give educational day care to preschoolers from poor families. It was envisioned as an eight-week program with a few thousand participants.

Dr. Richmond brought it to fruition in six months, staffed by thousands of volunteers serving more than 500,000 children. Head Start has served more than 20 million children. - N.Y. Times News Service