Before and After

by Judy Christie

  I’ve found Smiley’s performances online. They are filled with singing and jokes. They’re old-fashioned and funny. He pauses during one set to mention his children, calling each by name, clearly proud, as Stephen has told me. “Smiley Burnette is happily married,” he says in a long-ago performance in Fort Worth. Smiley goes on to talk about each of his children with affection. Listening to Smiley’s material helps me see where Stephen acquired the open and engaging personality that carried him through an interesting life.

  But even in the closest families, parents and children can have their differences. At age sixteen, wanting to be independent, Stephen runs away from home and ends up joining the Navy for four years. A paradox arises: he has left his adoptive parents behind, but his father’s name continues to open doors, and Stephen is forthright about how references to his famous father benefited him through the years. Being Smiley’s son helps get him into the Navy and college and saves him a traffic ticket or two when officers see his driver’s license.

  “It’s kind of funny how who you are makes a difference,” he remarks. He tells a story about dodging a run-in with the law while sharpening his knife as he was having his boots shined near Waco, Texas. A passing policeman thought that was peculiar behavior, possibly even threatening, and told Stephen, “Come with me, young man.”

  Ordered to identify himself, he pulled out his license, and the policeman inspected it. His middle and last names raised a familiar question: “Are you related to Smiley Burnette?”

  “He’s my dad.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us that?” the officer asked, and left him alone.

  He carried his dad’s picture in his wallet after that.

  Stephen is living in Texas, making fifty-two bucks a week at a gas station when Smiley comes through during a tour. His dad asks if Stephen wants to earn twice that by going on the road with him.

  At twenty-one, he is reunited with his adoptive family and traveling with his father. He marries once in the early 1960s, has two children, and delays a divorce, in deference to Smiley. “He didn’t want me to get divorced, so I didn’t.” Eventually, though, the couple splits up. Stephen never remarries.

  To please his father and to earn a better paycheck, he sets up the show and helps in whatever way is needed. They do one-nighters, often traveling four hundred miles in a day to make the next performance. While describing this part of his life, he tosses out an unexpected piece of information: “During that time, I found out who my real mother was.” Between shows in Minneapolis and somewhere in Louisiana, Stephen stops in Memphis, goes to the Vital Statistics office, and tells a clerk he wants his birth certificate. “She’s got it in her hand,” he says with a spark in his eyes.

  But she will not turn it over.

  “You’re illegitimate. I can’t give it to you,” she says.

  With his charm and connections always at the ready, he finagles a copy.

  It is 1962 when he decides to look up his biological mother, with a need that has haunted him for years. “I knew I had a mother out there…adopted kids have an intuition they don’t understand,” he says, a sentiment I’d heard from other adoptees. When he sets out on his search, he has been on the road with Smiley, and it is between midnight and one A.M. Police pull him over in a small Arkansas town and want to know what he is doing. He produces his license, and his name works its magic. They ask him about Smiley, then proceed to escort him halfway to his birth mother’s house. He had contacted his biological grandmother before coming, and his mother, Ruth, a hairdresser, is still up.

  The late-night reunion clearly rocked him. “She was waiting for me because her mother had called her. She only asked me one question. I’d gone through years of trying to find her, and she asked me when I was born.”

  “April 20, 1940” is his answer. Her expression turns to joy. He and his mother share a birthday. April 20. His answer and their connection finally solve his lifelong mystery.

  She cries. He doesn’t. “I was too tough. I was twenty-one,” he says dryly.

  He also meets his grandparents and great-grandparents. His birth father is dead: a man, he is told, who was a relative by marriage. One more detail he finds out: he was conceived in a cornfield not unlike the one next door to his home now. After giving birth to Stephen and being trapped in the Chattanooga Home for Wayward Women for two years, Ruth turns eighteen and is unceremoniously shown the door. She is on her own. She winds up moving to California, completely unaware that the son taken from her when she was sixteen is growing up nearby. Along the way, she has another child and puts him up for adoption, too.

  After she and Stephen reunite in Arkansas, the relationship matters more to him than perhaps he had expected. He wants more time with her and decides to stay in the small town. “All at once, I decided I wanted to live near her,” Stephen says, and a hint of the searching young man he was shimmers just below the surface. Smiley, ever the good father, gives his blessing. “He was one to always let me do what I wanted to do.” Stephen leaves Smiley’s road show and remains with Ruth and her fourth husband for six months.

  When Stephen cannot make a living in the small town, however, he joins back up with Smiley at the Seattle World’s Fair. Ruth gives him her car to haul his trailer. After that, they call and write, and he visits her once a year. “They wanted me to put them in show business,” Stephen remarks. The words sound wry.

  Dallas also writes to Ruth after Stephen’s reunion. “I had two mothers corresponding with each other,” he says in a “that’s odd” tone. He calls each of them Mom, and both matter to him and to his family, in different ways. They are part of his story, an example of the many lives unpredictably intertwined by a Tann adoption.

  Stephen’s daughter, Elizabeth, is close to his adoptive mother and grows close to his birth mother as well. She speaks compassionately of Ruth, her biological grandmother. “I had a great relationship with her…I knew her quite well. I got to ask her all the questions I wanted. She didn’t want to give him up. That was her first baby.”

  Ruth told her, “I just prayed I would see him one day.”

  Elizabeth tells me that her father is the spitting image of his biological mom, right down to the red hair he hated as a child because he thought it was the same color as the carrot cake at his birthday party.

  “You couldn’t miss the resemblance between her and Stephen,” Elizabeth says. Many things, like the red hair, now make sense. Old questions finally have answers. Yet when Elizabeth investigates other family ties, she’s warned off by her father. “My dad told me to get out of that can of worms.” And, as it turns out, not all the biological family members want to form attachments.

  It’s a very personal decision, and the reason, Stephen says, he ultimately chose not to pursue connecting his adopted siblings with their birth families. “When I found out who I was, I also found information about the birth parents of my two adopted sisters and brother. When I came back—I was on the road with Dad—I asked them, and they didn’t want to know.” He burned the information, convinced it was not his place to interfere.

  Stephen develops a career in Hollywood: acting, working in production, painting, and being a stuntman. “It makes a living,” he tells me. When Smiley is on Petticoat Junction, Stephen is working on a Western that future president Ronald Reagan directs. Reagan remarks to Stephen, “Did your dad ever tell you I was best man at his wedding?” Reagan then describes traveling along when Smiley and Dallas eloped to Santa Ana in the late 1930s.

  “I didn’t know it till Ronald told me.”

  I could listen to the stories of this man’s unusual life for hours. But our time together is almost over. As I prepare to leave, we walk through the living room, foyer, and dining room, looking at items that tell of both Stephen’s and Smiley’s vibrant careers. One of Stephen’s talents is the fast draw, and he points to the other sid
e of the room, saying, “That’s one of my holsters over there.” For a particularly memorable job, the opening of Gunsmoke, he critiqued how the draw was done. He re-creates the scene verbally: “He draws and fires. That’s horrible!” Stephen’s advice, learned from a famous holster maker: “You don’t throw your elbow out.”

  My Petticoat Junction coloring book springs to mind when I see a framed picture of Smiley in the show’s signature locomotive.

  Stephen’s cowboy life makes him happy, and he is proud of being Dallas and Smiley’s son, declaring, “I am a cowboy.” He lets loose with a rakish grin, a glimpse of the young, redheaded stuntman who was quick on the draw, and tells me, “I’m a ‘reel’—r-e-e-l—cowboy.”

  AN UNWRITTEN SCRIPT

  A bit of movie-star magic clouds my vision as I wind through the hills of Tennessee. After losing myself in the Smiley Burnette memorabilia and tales of Old Hollywood, it’s easy to forget that the upcoming reunion will play out according to an unwritten script. Our gathering is now merely three days away, with six adoptees confirmed. So much else about it remains a question mark.

  A nondescript tin utility building with a simple sign out front catches my eye, and I’m happy for the distraction. A good barbecue shack can cure a multitude of ills. I swerve into the drive-through, order a pulled-pork sandwich topped with signature Tennessee coleslaw, and find a spot to eat in the shade of a tree. I ponder how this state with so many things to boast of could have let these children down so completely.

  From the Grand Ole Opry to the Smoky Mountains, Southern charm, and a lot more, Tennessee is known for so much good. And yet it kept the ugliness of Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society as much a secret as possible, never fully addressing the wrongs done to so many. Even as I conduct these interviews, those who want their records from TCHS adoptions are asked to pay fees that are too steep for aging people on fixed incomes.

  For years, Tann survivors have made their own pilgrimages to this region in search of their roots. Perhaps in some way, their lives can never be fully separated from Memphis, from what happened here. I wonder if we are doing the right thing in inviting them back. Are we merely pointing them, once again, toward a pain they dealt with long ago?

  This isn’t Hollywood, after all. We don’t get to write the script.

  Who gets the last line? What does it say?

  By this time next week, we’ll know.

  CHAPTER 10

  LEFT TO DIE

  “I need to tell you that we got you from a woman named Georgia Tann.”

  VIOLA AND HAROLD PARKER MAKE their way to the orphanage on Poplar Avenue, not far from their Memphis home. The weather is chilly enough for a jacket, but the sun shines brightly on this February day in 1947.

  More than twenty years ago, the couple had suffered the loss of a daughter at birth, leading to a virulent infection and a hysterectomy for Viola. They still long for a child.

  Today they have an appointment to get one.

  With World War II behind them, they are now financially secure, the owners of a modest but thriving engineering firm and a small house in east Memphis. They realize, however, that they have waited too long to be eligible to adopt a child conventionally. In their mid-forties, the Parkers, like many older couples, have decided to turn to Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society to build their family. Harold, a civil engineer, works with civic employees at Memphis City Hall, a place where the well-known adoption matron has superb connections.

  When they open the door to the orphanage, Tann herself greets them and exclaims that she has a wonderful baby for them. She leads them to a side room and shows them a healthy baby boy in a crib right near the door; there are several other cribs in the room.

  Viola and Harold are overwhelmed by how rapidly events are moving. Tann has chosen this son for them. She picks up the child and shows him off with pride, giving one of her typical sales pitches to the eager customers.

  But while she goes on about the virtues of the boy, a mewling sound drifts from a crib on the far side of the room. It’s strange, almost like the cry of an animal.

  Harold is distracted. “What’s that noise?”

  Tann, a strong-willed woman, does not hide her annoyance. Few people interrupt her, and even fewer thwart her. She attempts to direct Harold’s attention back to the bouncing baby. “That’s nothing. Look at this fine boy!”

  The father-to-be, kinder than Tann is arrogant, elbows past her and the child in her arms. He is gripped by the faint distress call coming from the other side of the room. His wife follows. But they are steered away by Tann and an assistant.

  Again the unsettling sound comes from the corner.

  Shaking off Tann and her helper, Harold changes direction, insistently. Moving closer, he sees an infant quite different from the robust boy Tann has offered up. The pitiful, tiny thing lies untended in a corner crib. Her face and hairless head are covered with a crusted rash, and as she cries, Harold sees that the tip of her tongue is attached to her front gums. She appears too weak to move.

  Harold, of a good heart, picks up the distressed baby. Tann tries once more to steer him back to the boy she’s picked out. “Every man wants a son,” she insists.

  Harold will not be deterred. He looks more closely at the days-old infant, clearly neglected, her frail, strange-sounding cries deemed unworthy of attention. Overcome with pity, Harold and Viola declare that they’ll take the girl: “We want this one to go home with us.”

  They pay five hundred dollars for her, more than seventy times the regular rate for a Tennessee adoption.

  Lillian

  “THE NOISE WAS ME,” SAYS Lillian Roberts, a lifelong Memphis resident. “I was in the crib. I was thirteen days old. My tongue was tied. I was covered with a crusty rash and crying weakly.”

  Tiny, sick baby Lillian is saved from the clutches of Georgia Tann by compassionate adoptive parents who choose her over a healthy child.

  She is gracious when she returns my call requesting an interview. “I am a Georgia Tann baby,” she says in her gentle Southern accent on my voicemail. “I’m seventy-one years old, and I’d be most delighted to speak with you.”

  I call her back, and we set up a time to meet. Since she’s in Memphis and I’ll be heading there for the reunion, I schedule our interview for a day before others start arriving. She is quick to invite me to her home.

  The sun is hot overhead, but Lillian’s street is shady when I pull my rental car into her driveway. My pre-reunion nerves have reached maximum potency with my arrival in Memphis. I’m suffering from a mix of anxiety at asking yet another stranger deeply personal questions and wondering if the weekend activities will come off in the spirit intended.

  But seeing the ranch-style house, the front door open, and Lillian awaiting me, I relax. She could be the lady in the next pew at church or the mother of a friend. She makes me instantly at home, a warm hostess who answers questions with grace and soft-spoken candor.

  Although she has not moved far from TCHS through the years, the abandoned baby matured into a smart, caring woman who uses her experiences to help others. She has centered her life on faith and family; two children, one adopted and one biological; and grandchildren who live close enough to use her babysitting services. The welcoming home she and her late husband built together has aged nicely, in a well-established neighborhood with oak trees that own the yards. She leads me through a hall and into a cozy den decorated with family photographs. A container of fragrant white gardenia blossoms highlights the coffee table. A gardenia bush was growing in a neighbor’s yard when Lillian was adopted. When she and her husband built their own home, they took a cutting and rooted it.

  Like Lillian, it blooms still.

  She is a retired advanced-math teacher who influenced many a student during her teaching years. A mastery of math is, after al
l, a valuable thing. Even in her retirement, she devotes her life to serving. She regularly uses her cooking skills to prepare food for others, such as two hundred fifty pigs in a blanket for an upcoming bridal shower and homemade orange cake for Vacation Bible School. She’s saved some of that cake for me and presents it with a pretty napkin and a china plate. She leads the homebound ministry for her church and escorts older friends on trips. She continues to help students with the ACT.

  “I stay super busy,” she says as we get to know each other.

  Her daughter, Jill, has told me in a phone visit that she appreciates the way her mother gives and does things for others. “She’s a Christian. That goes along with the Christian faith, to be a giver. She was raised to give.” Jill has seen the gradual process of her mother adjusting to her troubling birth story. “I think she was definitely supposed to be with the family she was with. They shaped her into the person she is…me, too.”

  Lillian’s adoptive parents were quietly religious, involved in a local church. “They took me to church every time the doors opened,” she says. Through the years, that religious upbringing anchors her, although she is wary of preaching, choosing to show her faith through actions. “When you love God, he’ll watch over you,” she says. “Regardless of being rejected by people, I’ve been accepted by God…That helps make up for a lot of things in my life.”

  Taking a breath, her expression calm, she leans back against the sofa and opens the adventure of her life with “This is the story my dad told me…”

  * * *

  —

  SHE WAS GIVEN THE NAME Rosie when she was born, on February 9, 1947, but her name is changed to Lillian after Harold and Viola wrest her from Tann’s clutches. The name is chosen in honor of Viola’s mother.