CHARLESTON -- Barbara Bayes said it may be easy for some West Virginians in their 40s or younger and for older residents who haven’t spent their lives working or living among the poor to discount the myriad benefits put in place by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.

But Bayes, the executive director of a Charleston non-profit, cautioned not to discount too much too fast.

Growing up in eastern Kentucky, 60-year-old Bayes got her first glimpse of LBJ’s anti-poverty initiative when she and fellow teens began to spot Volunteers In Service To America, or VISTA, workers in their community.

“We started noticing these young college kids coming around who didn’t talk like us or look like us,” said Bayes, a lifelong social worker who heads the Good News Mountaineer Garage, the statewide program that provides motor vehicles to low-income West Virginians. “They’d come through asking for directions, and we loved to send them off the wrong way. Our reaction was, ‘Who are you to look down on us because we’re different? Because we have an outhouse?’”

But with each repaired roof, free meal program and other project completed by the young people involved in the VISTA program — a domestic version of the Peace Corps created through Johnson’s Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 — Bayes said she and her neighbors began to see these visitors in a new light.

“We saw how much good they were doing for people who were really struggling,” she said.

Now thanks to the range of programs begun with the War on Poverty and Johnson’s Great Society, low-income citizens, seniors and others can live more dignified lives, Bayes said.

“So many of the programs begun in the 1960s have become so integrated into society that we don’t think about what life would be like without them,” said Bayes, who has lived in Charleston since 1984. “But before the War on Poverty, there was no mechanism for low-income senior citizens to have nursing home care paid for. Grants and loans weren’t available for low-income students to go to college. No job training for a displaced homemaker trying to get back on her feet. No legal aid for a woman trying to leave an abusive marriage. No money for winterizing an elderly person’s home for fuel efficiency. It’s a long, long list.”

The payoffs of Head Start, the War on Poverty’s effort to provide preschoolers with a leg up, in particular stand out to Bayes, who landed an internship with the program soon after its introduction in her hometown in 1968. Bayes had just completed her freshman year at Berea College.

“This was a way to say to these very young children, ‘We value you. We value your future. We’re going to help you get ready for school,’” said Bayes of the program that debuted in 1965 as an eight-week summer outreach. “I mean this was a culture where many children never heard the message that they could succeed, that they could accomplish whatever goal they set for themselves. Most of the girls in my class didn’t go past the 8th grade. It was such an isolated world, and the thinking was, ‘What do you need an education for?’"

The internship was life-changing, said Bayes, who grew up with five siblings in one of the town’s more well-to-do families. Her parents ran a market with a gas pump along U.S. Route 1 in Willard in Carter County along the road toward Hazard.

“It’s amazing when I think back on that summer working with Head Start — to be dealing with kids who were hungry,” she said. “They’d just gobble up their lunch, just gobble it. They were hungry. We served juice and many of the children had never had juice before.

“If nothing else, the War on Poverty made us realize that we’ve got to start looking out for the poor. To do what we as a society can to provide for people who do not have enough to meet their basic needs.”

Poverty today isn’t a life sentence, Bayes said.

“As I’m getting ready to retire, it cheers me to see that people don’t stay on welfare,” she said. “Things will happen — an illness or a job loss — and someone will need help for a while, but then they get out of poverty. The recession has hurt everyone including the poor, of course, but maybe not to the degree that you’d expect. There are still fast-food jobs; it’s the higher-paying jobs that have disappeared.”

Bayes remembers the children at Head Start were also hungry to learn.

“My mother had gone to college, and she read to me every day in the years before I went to school,” she said. “But a lot of my neighbors, nobody in the family knew how to read. When I would read to the children at Head Start, they were just enthralled. The world was opening up to them — literally, a world of possibilities.”

While it’s impossible to measure the precise impact that Head Start and other anti-poverty efforts may have played in the lives of the more than 22 million preschoolers who have gone through the program so far, Bayes said she’s certain those initiatives have made a difference.

“You can’t say the War on Poverty hasn’t worked on the basis that poverty still exists,” Bayes said. “It’s not the same kind of poverty. It’s not as stark. We wouldn’t want to go back to life before those safety nets were in place. But wars aren’t won sometimes in five years or 10 years or even 50 or 100 years. Fixing the problem takes time and money and a lot of thought.”

More than four decades ago, President Johnson’s focus on reducing poverty provided help and also offered incentives to strive for a better life, Bayes said.

“Nobody, nobody wants to see someone laying around on the dole,” she said. “But I don’t see that that often. Most people want the satisfaction of working and being able to take care of their families. These programs dangled that carrot in front of them — it gave them hope you really can change your life.”