The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  One of four children stolen by Georgia Tann from their mother, Irene Green, Mary Margolis had reunited with her sisters and brother after a separation of sixty years. By then Irene had died, but the siblings had a warm, close relationship. “How your audience must applaud,” I told Mary.

  She corrected me gently: “They’re usually too busy crying.”

  My comment had been clumsy. But I was often made inarticulate by such evidence of human resilience and common sense. To have transformed a personal tragedy into a vehicle for helping or informing others seemed noble: The recounting of such feats seemed sufficient reason for any book.

  I didn’t know how many of Georgia’s adoptees had managed to use their experience to help others, or even to survive. But I was speaking frequently with one who was desperately trying to survive: my phone companion, Billy Hale.

  Upon taking early retirement from his job in Portland, Oregon, shortly after watching the 60 Minutes episode on Georgia Tann, Billy had returned to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. “Some of the best years of my life were spent there with my adoptive parents,” he told me in explanation. I knew, however, that they were now dead.

  Billy had had trouble finding employment. But a childhood friend hired him to do carpentry work and let him park his trailer on his estate. From this vantage point Billy visited his birth uncle, aunts, and cousins in nearby Duffield, Virginia. They were friendly, but Billy wasn’t able to see them as often as he wished. He sent me pictures of his trailer, and a recent one of himself. When I had met Billy three years earlier he’d had short hair and worn jeans and golf shirts and a small, Native American necklace. Billy’s hair was long now, parted in the middle and swept back over his shoulders. He had shaved his moustache. These changes, including a larger silver and turquoise medallion and an unemotional, stoic expression, connoted a stereotypical Native American appearance that, contrasted with how Billy had looked only one year earlier, seemed disconcerting.

  Was there one, real Billy? I wasn’t sure he thought so. Having been forced to confront memories that he’d been told were false, he was struggling to absorb them. His adult past had disappeared into the void; his dead mother, Mollie, had become more real than any person living.

  Given her poverty and proximity to Memphis, Mollie hadn’t had a chance. Upon the relocation of her parents and three youngest brothers to Ohio, she too left Virginia for Kingsport, Tennessee, where her sister Frances was a waitress. Mollie waited tables also until a middle-aged, married farmer offered her a more lucrative post.

  “He was evil, despicable, a terrible person,” Billy told me repeatedly. His own self-image had never been strong. And when I sensed the additional pain of discovery of the character of the man who’d fathered him I understood why Billy had protected himself by writing his own book in the third person.

  “When Mollie told the farmer of her pregnancy he threw her out,” Billy had written. “She went to a shelter for unwed mothers and on February 10, 1939, delivered a 6-pound, 13-ounce baby boy.”

  Mollie’s prospects were bleak. She was laid off from her job in a laundry, and, unable to find work, brought Billy by bus to visit her parents. But the Depression had hit Ohio almost as hard as Virginia; Mollie not only found no work but discovered her parents to be so poor that she gave them most of her remaining money. Then, unable to afford bus fare back to Kingsport, she got off at a town twenty-five miles outside it, and, carrying eighteen-month-old Billy, walked the rest of the way.

  Mollie’s sister Frances told Billy how, encountering a storm en route, his mother had taken refuge in an abandoned shed, where she sheltered him from the water pouring through the chinks in the tin roof with a blanket fashioned from her sweater.

  Shortly after reaching Kingsport she was offered a housekeeping position with a farming family: a job with prospects greater than its nature or location, on a street called Poor Hollow Road, suggested. The job wasn’t located in a particularly poor area, and her employer didn’t bother her once. He and his wife and children lived in the black-and-white, two-story main house; Mollie and Billy stayed in a three-room clapboard cottage. (This was the cottage that Billy had visited in 1992. It was shaded by oak trees and willows, accessed by crossing a wooden bridge forging a small stream. When he crossed it, a Rhode Island red hen and her twelve chicks traversed the short span with him. On a nearby dirt road children kicked up dust balls, playing tag.)

  The three years Mollie spent here had been her best, he was sure. Her next job was with another farming family who believed the presence of almost-five-year-old Billy would prove distracting. Her sister had moved to Pennsylvania, Mollie had no other relatives close by, and she was forced to board him for six days a week at a small institution called the Faith Home. “It would not be for long, she promised him,” Billy wrote. “She searched desperately for other work.”

  But even a short stay in a Tennessee orphanage tempted fate too much. Billy wasn’t sure when he was spotted. In 1993 he spoke with another former Faith Home resident who, eight years older than he, recalled more detail, including having been driven with Billy and several other children to a Memphis church, to sing. Had Georgia arranged this visit? Were the children auditioning for parts they would never want? Billy would never know. But shortly afterward two of Georgia’s workers arrived in a black, chauffeur-driven limousine and told him they were taking him for a ride. Then on to Memphis, where Billy would experience the things he’d spend the rest of his life trying to forget.

  Mollie didn’t learn of Billy’s abduction until seventy-two hours later, when she went to pick him up on Saturday. Setting on the counter of the reception area the basket of eggs that constituted partial payment for his boarding, she asked to see him.

  “He’s not here,” said Belle Hall, the matron.

  Mollie stared in surprise.

  “He’s gone with the social workers.” As Mollie began to scream, Belle added, “They had papers. It was legal.”

  Billy’s Aunt Frances told him that Mollie had then assaulted Belle, breaking her nose. Records of his mother’s subsequent arrest and imprisonment had been destroyed by the time Billy asked to see them in the 1990s.

  Hitting Belle was the last decisive action of Mollie’s life. Losing him, Billy wrote in his book, left her “broken, without spirit.” On one of her futile visits to orphanages and police stations in Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee she met a trucker named Wallace Harper, who “lived on the wild side. Briefly, Mollie lived on the wild side too.”

  Mollie’s life could be considered wild, Billy added, only in comparison to the one she had lived before: after her marriage she wore makeup and drank beer.

  She does appear, in a photo taken of the couple in the early 1950s, more worldly than before. Wallace, his greasy hair in a pompadour, his collar spread-eagled over what appears a black lounge suit, resembles a gangster. He saw himself, however, as a Lothario: knowledge of his affairs, both in Kingsport and, after he joined the Air Force in 1952, in San Diego and Los Angeles, devastated Mollie. “But she didn’t want a divorce,” Billy wrote. “Wallace was all she had.”

  Even without a divorce she lived a solitary life, remaining in Kingsport during Wallace’s tours of duty both because of his desire for freedom and her own reluctance to leave the town in which she had last seen her son.

  She gardened and kept pets. She also maintained a scrapbook that, Billy said, allowed him to look straight into her soul. It contains the card she would have given him on his fifth birthday, and a postcard of a little boy perched on a rock in a stream, his head averted—did she pretend it was Billy? And there were newspaper articles, carefully clipped, garnered from different papers over a span of twenty years, but always with the same theme:

  “Tyke Survives Snakes, Gators After Being Dumped In Georgia Swamp.”

  “Police Examine Buried Wooden Box Near Nansemond, Virginia, On The Edge Of Dismal Swamp, Where A Thirteen Year Old Boy Was Held Chained For Eight Days. . . .”

&nb
sp; “Kelly Is Better—When Sheriff’s Deputies In Miami, Florida, Found Kelly Puente, Four, In A Cage He Weighed Only Fourteen Pounds; Now He Is Up To Twenty-Four.”

  “Doing Fine—Sharla Johnson, Seven Months, Of Fairbanks, Alaska, Is Recovered From Several Hours’ Exposure to -40 Degree Temperatures. . . .”

  “Knoxville Police Believe Kidnapped Child Still Alive.”

  The scrapbook also contains pictures of Billy as a toddler, and of Mollie, growing older. One, showing her at age fifty, lifting the edges of her square dancing dress to show a peacock fan, heartened Billy: she is smiling. Another shows her at seventy, her hair white and permed, with her favorite big brother.

  She is with Harrison, too, in the last snapshot taken before her death. He hugs her; she is crying: she had been talking, Harrison told Billy, of him.

  Mollie was one of an unknowable number of parents who died without learning if their children had survived into adulthood. Many had not. Georgia seemed immune to guilt, and never publicly expressed sorrow about a single child’s death. She also denied the accusations of local pediatricans that scores of her children had perished, admitting only to two deaths, which she said had occurred in October of 1945.

  She refused even to acknowledge illness in her children, and forbade her boarding mothers from summoning medical help. Faced with desperately sick children, however, some boarding mothers panicked and sent them to the hospital.

  The trip was often made too late. The deaths of most of these babies were presumably recorded, and the children buried in the area of Elmwood Cemetery used by her adoption agency. But Georgia disposed of the bodies of children whose deaths she could conceal in less regular ways. A reporter for the Press-Scimitar passed Georgia’s Home one night in the 1940s and saw someone burying something in the backyard—a child, the reporter believed. Former investigator Robert Taylor told me that Georgia had had the local Thompson Brothers Funeral Home cremate some of the children. “Getting rid of the evidence,” Taylor said. “A grave is proof.”

  No death certificates were issued for many of these children. “There were a lot of deaths nobody knew anything about,” pediatrician Clyde Croswell said in 1950.

  As terrible as these deaths were, they seem sadder upon consideration of their causes, which were usually heat prostration or a combination of starvation and dehydration caused by gastrointestinal infection—painful ways to die. The deaths could also easily have been prevented, had Georgia respected the children’s fragility and medical advice. Charles Carter, a pediatrician who in the 1940s volunteered his services to the Home, was particularly disturbed by Georgia’s overriding of his orders regarding a very sick infant. “I had prescribed penicillin, and learned later that she’d ordered her nurses to stop giving it to the baby, but continue to chart it as if they were,” he told me.

  “Georgia Tann simply would not listen. She would say, ‘I’ll take your words under advisement,’ but she never did. She did what she felt best, regardless of what anyone said. She felt she knew the babies, and what the babies needed.”

  The common practice in the 1930s and ’40s was to hospitalize full term infants for a week, and premature babies until they weighed over five pounds. Georgia, however, sometimes took children only a few hours after birth, and often quickly transported them to adoptive homes thousands of miles away. Babies arrived at their new homes feverish and dehydrated. Some died shortly after their journey, including an infant girl sent to a New Jersey couple to whom Georgia had previously sent a baby boy with a heart defect. The poor health of many of Georgia’s children was such a constant and well-known fact that a Memphis hospital reserved an entire ward for their care. A hospital in Los Angeles also maintained a ward for the many sick babies she sent to local adoptive parents. Physicians in these states and others complained about Georgia to the Department of Public Welfare and the state director of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, but no one curbed her, and she continued to cause child deaths.

  By 1932, only eight years after Georgia’s arrival in Memphis, the city had the highest recorded infant death rate of any U.S. city of over one hundred thousand residents. Over the next two years, the recorded Memphis infant mortality rate soared even higher. And the true number of babies who died was higher than was ever recorded, since Georgia frequently failed to report her children’s deaths.

  The reported rate, however, was sufficiently disturbing that in 1935 the U.S. Children’s Bureau sent Dr. Ella Oppenheimer to Memphis to investigate the cause.

  She found it quickly. “The most striking difference in cause of mortality between Memphis and the cities with which it is compared is mortality from gastrointestinal disease among white infants, which in 1934 was very much higher in Memphis that in any of the other cities except Louisville,” she wrote in her report, “Infant Mortality in Memphis.”

  Georgia Tann dealt only with white children. The most frequent cause of death of the children she boarded was gastrointestinal disease.

  Dr. Oppenheimer also noted that many of the Memphis deaths occurred in Memphis General Hospital—the very hospital to which Georgia’s boarding home mothers, defying Georgia’s orders, frequently sent sick children.

  Dr. Oppenheimer’s search for facts was hampered by Georgia’s lying. “On July 2, 1935, the executive of the [Tennessee Children’s Home Society] in Memphis [Georgia Tann] stated that no infant had died since the beginning of the calendar year,” Dr. Oppenheimer wrote. But she must have doubted Georgia’s truthfulness. In “Infant Mortality in Memphis,” the doctor implicitly criticized Georgia for taking babies from hospitals and maternity residences earlier than was medically recommended, and then often placing them in unregulated boarding homes. She strongly urged that these boarding homes be licensed, and that they be supervised by the state.

  Dr. Oppenheimer’s recommendation had no immediate impact on Georgia, who continued to do whatever she wished. The first real attempt to curb her occurred in 1943, six years after the formation of the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare. The Department’s commissioner was, like virtually every politician in the state, intimidated by Georgia and her attorney Abe Waldauer, a major lieutenant in Crump’s Machine. Some of the Department’s employees collaborated with Georgia. But other social workers were more concerned with the welfare of her children than politics, and they wanted the state licensing of boarding homes that Dr. Oppenheimer had recommended.

  In preparation for this, Roberta Miller, director of the Child Welfare Division of the Department of Public Welfare, conducted a study of ten Memphis boarding homes for children. In 1944, one of her caseworkers, Faye Wallis, reported the study’s results in the Tennessee Public Welfare Record. Nine of the ten boarding homes were overcrowded: one two-room apartment housed ten children. In another, six infants shared a single crib. A third home lacked refrigeration, and newborns were being fed spoiled milk.

  One child suffering from syphilis, and another from tuberculosis, lived in two other boarding homes; Georgia had refused to allow them medical treatment. Sixteen more children lived in the attic of a house that the fire department had condemned as a firetrap. And two-year-old twins lived with a seventy-nine-year-old boarding mother who, nearly blind and too senile to remember their names, addressed them as “Old Man” and “Old Lady” and fed them bread scraps.

  “Tennessee is one of the few remaining states which has no legislation regulating boarding homes for children,” Roberta Miller wrote in “What Do You Know About Tennessee’s Adoption Laws?” published in the Tennessee Public Record in 1944. “We would not go to a beauty shop or restaurant which is unlicensed, yet by our inertia and lack of interest in safeguarding children, we sit back and wink at the commercial boarding homes operating in Tennessee for babies and small children.”

  Roberta Miller and Faye Wallis knew that Georgia Tann was the person using most of these commercial boarding homes. In Tennessee’s boss-ridden environment, however, they were apparently afraid to say so outright, and their articles never me
ntioned Georgia’s name. Nevertheless, Georgia and her attorney were incensed by both pieces. Abe Waldauer wrote several heated letters of complaint to Miller’s boss, Commissioner of Public Welfare William Shoaf.

  But Miller, Wallis, and other ethical social workers forged on, drafting an ordinance requiring regulation of children’s boarding homes, and persuading local newspapers to publicize the need to safeguard children’s health.

  The workers must have celebrated when, in 1945, the legislature passed a law mandating the licensing and inspection of every children’s boarding home in Tennessee. But while the social workers had toiled Georgia and Abe had worked too, exercising their political clout. A subsection of the new law exempted any boarding homes used by Georgia Tann’s agency from compliance.

  She had won again, and children in her boarding homes continued to die. So did children in her Home on Poplar Avenue, which had opened in 1943, and where conditions were possibly even worse than in the boarding residences. “In summer, the heat was unbearable,” said Mrs. Leon Sims of Philadelphia, Mississippi, who worked in Georgia’s Home throughout 1943. “It was particularly hard on the children with fevers.” Georgia called her and the other two caretakers nurses, “but none of us were honestly nurses,” she told me. “I was the only person on duty at night, and cared for as many as twenty-five children. Every one needed attention, but I simply didn’t have enough time. There was a lot of illness—the main problem was diarrhea.”