The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

These three men left town even though they practiced professions that in most cities would have made them relatively invulnerable to political pressure. Local city workers were even more tightly bound to Crump. And the sad truth is that many of these workers—most of whom were parents themselves—were led, by fear of Crump and an understanding of his and Georgia’s relationship, to help her steal the babies of their neighbors.

  I find this fact more damning than the refusal of local adoptive parents to investigate whether their children had been stolen from their birth families. This is encouraged by my less-than-ideally objective viewpoint. But there has to be a difference between those who averted their eyes to keep children they loved, and those who, for political reasons, participated in Georgia’s roundups.

  Roundups were conducted by groups of varying sizes that included her and/or one or more of her subordinates. They were accompanied by an ever-changing assortment of Memphians—Juvenile Court employees, social workers, and deputy sheriffs. Armed with papers signed by Judge Camille Kelley, the groups descended upon the apartments, homes, farms, even houseboats of poor parents, rounding up their children, looking them over, and carrying off those Georgia deemed most marketable. (The reason most often cited in Judge Kelley’s authorization was that their parents were providing a “poor home environment”; Georgia wasn’t required to explain why she often seized only the youngest members of a sibling group, not all.) The children most vulnerable were newborn to age five, although Georgia sometimes took children as old as sixteen. Some of her clients preferred adolescents; among the more disturbing entries in Tennessee docket books are those indicating the adoptions by single, out-of-town men and women of sixteen year old boys and girls.

  Georgia, search expert Denny Glad had told me, “aimed to please.” So much so that she sometimes stole children to order, I learned from a 1939 habeas corpus suit. The subject of that suit, four-year-old Kirby Gribble, had been sighted by a spotter.

  By 1939 Georgia’s spotters included not only her staff of six women, certain nurses, physicians, attorneys, and Judge Camille Kelley, but also social workers employed by agencies other than Georgia’s own. One, an employee of the Memphis Family Welfare Agency named Sarah Semmes, had long been counseling a thirty-one-year-old widow named Grace Gribble on providing for her six children, who ranged in age from three to ten.

  Grace trusted Sarah Semmes, was accustomed to her visits and, when she dropped in that hot day with a middle-aged woman named Helen Rose, assumed that Helen worked for the Family Welfare Agency, too.

  Grace signed the six papers that Sarah Semmes claimed would get her children free medical care under the Widow’s Assistance program. But to Grace’s surprise Helen Rose pocketed the papers and said matter of factly, “I’ll take the three youngest children now.”

  Grace screamed as she realized Helen Rose was employed by Georgia Tann. She almost fainted when she realized she had signed relinquishments surrendering her children for adoption.

  Anywhere other than in the Memphis of the time, Grace’s surrenders would have been deemed null and void. But as Grace cried that day and the two women and a driver carried her three babies off to Georgia’s limousine—Helen Rose carried four-year-old, red-haired, blue-eyed, weeping Kirby and said, “We have an order for a boy of this age and type”—she realized the futility of fighting. Still, she rushed to Juvenile Court and, spying Georgia Tann, grabbed her arms.

  “Where are my babies?” she cried.

  “They’re on their way to a much better life than you could provide them,” said Georgia. “You should thank me.”

  Crying, Grace pleaded for her children.

  “Forget them,” Georgia said.

  It took Grace seven months to find a lawyer willing to take her case. Meanwhile her three youngest children attempted to adjust to new homes in three separate states. Doris Ann, aged six, had been placed with an Orlando, Florida, newspaper publisher and his wife who wanted a companion for their biological daughter.

  Three-year-old Cricket, the luckiest of the three, was adopted by a Memphis physician and his wife, who loved him.

  Hand-picked, four-year-old Kirby was rejected within a year by the Blytheville, Arkansas, couple with whom he was placed. Returned to Memphis by train with $1 in his pocket, he was transferred to Nashville, where he spent seven years in foster homes before being adopted by a heavy-drinking Saginaw, Michigan, couple.

  The trial resulting from Grace Gribble’s lawsuit against Georgia Tann, which took place on April 29, 1940, was an exercise in warped thinking. The issue at hand, which should have been whether the young widow had willingly surrendered her babies for adoption, was transformed into whether Grace’s finances equaled those of their adoptive parents.

  In vain, Grace’s lawyer protested that the issue was not who could provide the children with more comfortable lives but “Who is their legal parent?” The overriding issue—“How much can Georgia get away with?”—was never publicly articulated. But it was answered in the presiding judge’s order, which stipulated that Grace’s children would remain with their adoptive parents. Regarding the children’s grieving mother, he said, “[T]his is one of the sad tragedies of life that even a mother must endure for the best interests of her children.”

  Grace was a particular person, one who had previously enjoyed a meager but reasonably satisfying existence in her one-story stucco home on a neighborly street named Media, and ever afterward was so bitter and angry her friends eventually stopped visiting. Regarding her inability to get back the children Georgia had stolen, however, Grace resembled virtually every targeted parent.

  I know in fact of only one parent besides Josie Statler—the young woman who shortly after Georgia’s death distracted an aide at the Home on Poplar Avenue, rescued her stolen daughter, and fled to Massachusetts— who retrieved a child Georgia had kidnapped. In a documentary produced by a Nashville television station a woman named Vickie described coming home from school in the 1930s to find her parents near collapse. Vickie had an eleven-year-old brother named Luther. “They got him,” her father gasped. But somehow he learned the location of the boarding home in which Georgia was hiding Luther, and after watching the home for days spotted the owner taking her charges for a walk. Hiding in the bushes, he whistled “whippoorwill,” a family signal. Luther ran to his father, who spirited him home and, that very day, moved his family to Arkansas.

  I was unable to locate Vickie, and so I don’t know how her father succeeded where so many other parents failed. Was he unusually loving, or resourceful? Did someone tell him where Luther was being held? His story ended happily, yet it leaves me with a lingering despondency. I imagine the tone with which Vickie’s father choked out, “They got Luther.” It is a tone so quintessentially, sadly, of Georgia’s time in its contradictory mix of shock at the randomness of the raid and acceptance of its inevitability.

  10.

  Georgia’s Adults

  Losing children to Georgia may have been inevitable for many poor Southern parents, but it was never easy. “It was agony,” said Evelyn Quillen, whose four-year-old daughter was kidnapped from a childcare center in 1948. “I prayed constantly that she was alive.”

  For most of us, such pain is blessedly unimaginable; Georgia herself may well have been, as one elderly Memphian described her, “as evil as she could be.” In destroying families, she was also absolutely relentless, stealing babies from playgrounds and houseboats, luring children walking home from school with the promise of ice cream.

  A favorite method was the one that had robbed Grace Gribble of her three babies: duping parents into signing surrenders for adoption. She must have had an easy time with Harry Waggerman. A German immigrant who knew no English, he gratefully signed papers he believed would procure temporary care for his beloved six-year-old daughter. Georgia immediately sent Fannie to Illinois. Despite two court battles the widowed father never saw his little girl again.

  Harry was tricked into signing a surrender in a courtroom, b
ut the most common settings for this kidnapping method were hospitals. Georgia had spotters who worked in the maternity wards of local hospitals, and they alerted her when poor young women went into labor. “Georgia Tann’s workers stood outside the door [of the delivery room] waiting,” Dr. George Lovejoy told me in 1993. “The minute the baby was born they would take the papers in and have the mother sign them, and the baby would disappear.”

  Eighteen-year-old Mary Reed, who gave birth to a baby boy in 1943, was a typical victim. She was still almost unconscious from the heavy dose of anesthesia then routinely given to women during childbirth when she signed a “routine paper” presented by a woman dressed in white. The woman was one of Georgia’s helpers, and Mary’s newborn was soon flown to New Jersey.

  Heartbroken, Mary brought a habeas corpus suit against Georgia. But her own doctor, who was also Georgia’s private physician, testified that Mary had understood the nature of the relinquishment papers she signed, and she never got her baby back. In fact she never even saw him until 1992, when he was forty-eight. A pilot named Steve Popper, he found her after reading my Good Housekeeping article on Georgia Tann and seeking the help of Denny Glad.

  “Oh, honey, I’ve been waiting for this day all my life, ever since you were born I’ve been waiting for this day,” Mary said.

  Few of the separations caused by Georgia have ended in such happy reunions, and she separated so many families, in so many ways. While Georgia sometimes had her own workers trick mothers into signing releases for adoption, she also often had actual nurses tell mothers their babies had been stillborn. Irene Green was one of many mothers who, as groggy from anesthesia as she was, knew this was a lie. “I heard my baby cry!” she insisted. The nurse told her she was wrong. When Mary frantically demanded to see her baby’s body, the nurse told her it had been “disposed of.”

  Irene may have understood the hopelessness of her situation even more fully than did some other victimized mothers. Two years earlier, Georgia had stolen her three other children—Jim Lambert, who’d been adopted after having been advertised in the Press-Scimitar, and his sisters Pat and Betty Jo—and she’d been unable to recover them.

  By the time her four children grew up, regrouped, and searched for Irene, she was dead, having left little behind but her Bible. In it she’d recorded their names and birthdates, and the inscription: “The children of a broken-hearted mother. I have no one to love me now.”

  Parents duped by Georgia were sometimes unconscious for reasons other than having been anesthetized. When a twenty-seven-year-old mother “surrendered” her daughter, Earlene Phillips, for adoption, she resided in the Bolivar Home for the Feeble Minded.

  Earlene’s mother was there only because she’d been impregnated by her older sister’s husband. The husband, “a little country doctor, had my momma committed so no one would know about me,” Earlene said. “Then she had a nervous breakdown.”

  Depression and heavy medication prevented Earlene’s mother from understanding the nature of the papers Georgia’s worker had her sign. But the young mother soon recovered to spend a lifetime mourning the loss of her child.

  Georgia was aided in her kidnapping by more than cruelty and energy. She was a skillful liar, as exemplified by a story related shortly after her death by thirty-one-year-old Edward Russell. A divorced, unemployed veteran with custody of his three children, he traveled from Tiptonville, Tennessee, to Memphis in 1949 to ask Georgia for help. “She was very kind,” he said. “She told me she thought the answer was for me to leave the children with her at the Home, go to California” to look for work “and that she would send the children out as soon as I was located. I remember her exact words: ‘We will send them to you immediately after you have established yourself and can take care of them.’”

  He left for Los Angeles the next day, quickly found a job, and asked Georgia when she could send his children. “She assured me they were in good health and in good hands and not to worry.” Two months and countless phone calls later, he was still childless. “So I finally quit my job and came back to Memphis to get them. I went straight to the Home and asked Miss Tann for my children. And the only thing she said was that she thought it best to keep them.

  “I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it. I begged her to let me see them and she refused.” He hired a lawyer and met with Georgia the next day in the office of her attorney, Abe Waldauer. “I pleaded to see the children. And it wasn’t until then that Miss Tann told me that the babies were placed for adoption [in California] two months earlier. She said two were with one family, and the other with another family. . . .”

  A year later, having remarried his wife and instituted what would be a lengthy habeas corpus suit, he was still stunned by Georgia’s deceit. “I had no reason to believe she would trick me,” he told a Memphis reporter. “I admired her. She seemed so interested in my case. She had a kind, soothing voice and I trusted her.”

  A former member of the famed 32nd Infantry Division in the South Pacific in World War II, Edward Russell had been missing in action for eight weeks and reported dead for five. Nothing he’d suffered during the war, however, was as painful as what Georgia had done to him. “We’ve just got to get our children back. They’re the whole world to us,” he told the reporter.

  But he’d lost them forever. The children remained with their adoptive parents.

  In her quest to obtain marketable children Georgia was also aided by circumstance. At least one irresponsible parent simply abandoned her daughter to her. In 1991 the daughter, Barbara Davidson, described one of the worst days of her life. Her mother, who had divorced her alcoholic husband and married a man who hated children, told six-year-old Barbara to don her prettiest dress.

  “I remember her taking me to this mansion,” Barbara told me. “We walked up the outside steps and I tried to keep hold of her hand: I could hardly reach her fingers. She told me to play upstairs with the children; she had business to take care of, and then we would go home. But when I came out no one was there and no one was going to take me home and I began to cry. A woman in a black dress told me, ‘Shut up, shut up, you are never going home. Shut up.’”

  Shortly afterward, Barbara was sent to the California home in which her adoptive father would sexually abuse her.

  Barbara Davidson’s mother was an aberration: the only parent I learned of who simply, callously, gave her child away. The other parents who surrendered children to Georgia didn’t do so willingly, but were compelled to by poverty and the betrayal of the social agencies that should have helped them. Such forced relinquishments increased during the Great Depression.

  Georgia’s range of interest was narrow: her babies, her clients, and her family. Her attentiveness to local politics was motivated only by self interest; national issues concerned her not at all. So while she profited greatly from the 1929 Wall Street crash it’s likely she did so instinctively— but, unfortunately, to great effect.

  The city’s economy depended upon cotton. The stock market failure reduced demand and caused a worldwide glut of the fiber, decreasing its value from 29 cents to 6 cents per pound. The collapse of the cotton market, which sharply reduced riverboat trade, devastated poor Mem phians. The Fisher Body Company closed its local plant, throwing twelve thousand men out of work; the Ford Motor Company suspended operations. Employers cut workers’ hours to 20 per week and fired six thousand Memphis women, giving their jobs to men.

  The city’s financial problems were exacerbated by the influx of thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers from Missouri, Arkansas, western Tennessee, and the Mississippi Delta. Many soon joined desperate native Memphians in application to the city’s welfare organizations, often seeking help for their children.

  But by 1929 these institutions were honeycombed with Georgia’s spotters. Instead of providing parents with vocational advice, they urged them to surrender their children to Georgia for adoption. Some parents relinquished their babies rather than let them starve. Others agreed to board
their children with her while they searched for work, only to suffer the same fate as had Edward Russell.

  They were left suffering not only the loss of their children but guilt over their gullibility. “She knew how to spot the dumb ones,” one robbed mother told me sadly. But these parents weren’t dumb, and probably would have lost their children even if they hadn’t boarded them with her.

  Once Georgia knew the parents were poor, they were doomed. And almost anything gave them away, such as application for the free milk that was routinely given to the needy. Former investigator Robert Taylor told me that the man who distributed it, Aubrey Clapp, was a spotter. Clapp gave Georgia the names, ages, and addresses of any children whose parents applied for assistance.

  Georgia robbed every birth parent she could, but she most often victimized single mothers. They were made vulnerable both by their single status and Georgia’s identification with them.

  The young women had no obvious similarity to Georgia. But both they and she were part of a socially unacceptable group, whose members were excoriated in similar terms. Unmarried mothers were “moral deviants possessed of ‘excessive sexual equipment.’” Lesbians were “sexual deviants, genetic anomalies of the ‘intermediate’ or ‘third’ sex.” Georgia never publicly acknowledged her homosexuality, but she must have been aware of it, and, in the repressive climate of the time, may have felt shame and anger at being gay. I believe she displaced those emotions onto single mothers and, by robbing them of the children that made them outcasts, symbolically expunged part of herself.

  That Georgia’s identification with single mothers also caused her to envy them is suggested by an incident related to me by Vallie Miller, the former Supervisor of Adoptions for the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare who had been brought to Memphis from Nashville after Georgia’s death to help make plans for Georgia’s last twenty-two wards. During that time she spoke with an adoptive father who had received his new child at Georgia’s private residence on Stonewall Court.