Mail-Order Kid: An Orphan Train Rider's Story

by Marilyn June Coffey

  •

  Teresa’s job as a medical librarian at Mercy Hospital satisfied her, especially working with prestigious doctors. Whenever a doctor entered the library, she thrilled to watch the nurses stand up as a sign of respect. At first, Teresa’s awe of doctors hindered her. She expected them to act superior, like Mrs. Addison, but they did not. Their grief over lost patients surprised her. Gradually, as she understood they saw themselves as human, she felt comfortable working with them. Then she noticed that the doctors acted like her Hays library children; when they asked for a book, they wanted it instantly. So she decided to treat them as she’d treated her Hays children. Rather than attempt to impress them, she acted naturally. Her tactic worked well. The doctors grew appreciative of her.

  Professionally, 1956 was a year of achievement for Teresa. When the National Accreditation for Schools of Nursing team came to Mercy Hospital, it gave Teresa a 100 percent positive rating. This delighted her, but even more moving were tributes that Mercy students wrote about her in Chart, the school of nursing paper.

  “Small in stature, large in unceasing benevolence,” wrote one student, “she is our guide to the wondrous world of unending knowledge.”

  Teresa wished Sister Rosina could see how well her little orphan was doing in her “rooms full of books.” Clearly, life—except for Frenchy’s drinking—was good.

  Even though she loved working in Mercy Hospital, in 1962 Teresa left. As she saw it, she had no choice. When students used the library, Teresa treated them with the same deference that she treated the doctors, so students came in droves. That created a problem. A pharmacology teacher in a nearby office complained that the students’ noise interrupted her work. The situation seemed impossible to resolve. Teresa couldn’t change the way she treated students, but she feared a confrontation with the complaining teacher. Much as she wanted to blow up, tell the professor what she thought of such niggling insistence on a pristine quiet, Teresa dared not. Who was she to stand up to a professor? Only an orphan with no master’s degree.

  Then, Presbyterian Hospital, at that time the most prestigious hospital in Denver, offered her a position with higher pay. The offer flattered her. It made leaving easy.

  Teresa enjoyed her work as a medical librarian in Denver. Such prestige, doing research instead of reading to children in Hays! (Courtesy of Teresa Martin)

  Part III: Agents of Change

  1

  0

  Orphan Train Riders

  Secular Frenchy respected his wife’s Catholicism. Teresa liked to attend Mass even though her civil marriage prevented her again from being an active Catholic. On cold or rainy days, Frenchy drove her to church. She liked pulling up in the big Buick Roadmaster, waiting while Frenchy rounded the car and opened her door. He still was gallant.

  While he parked, Teresa chose an aisle seat close to the exit. She knew that Frenchy, after the middle of the service, would whisper, “Is it communion?” Catholics could leave after communion and still feel they’d attended Mass, so when Frenchy drove, he and Teresa never stayed for the blessing.

  Then one rainy day while Teresa waited inside for Frenchy to bring up the car, she spotted a slim publication, “Mater Dei,” on a church table. Noticing that the Foundling Hospital published the pamphlet, she picked it up and flipped it open. Inside was a photograph of the Foundling building where she’d lived. The sight chilled her. Then she recognized a photo of the hospital administrator; Sister Teresa Vincent, wearing her odd black bonnet, gazed at Teresa again. When Teresa saw Frenchy’s Buick slide along the curb, she slipped the publication inside her suit jacket to protect it from rain and ran to the car.

  At home, she devoured the pamphlet. It focused on an April 1, 1962, reunion in Grand Island, Nebraska, a reunion of children that the Foundling had shipped there fifty years ago. The pamphlet said fifty-two of the fifty-seven children sent to Nebraska by the Foundling May 20, 1912, came to the reunion from five different states. Teresa was astounded. Fifty-two “children” like her and Pete, and Mary Childs, and Mr. Wilson, people who had experienced being dressed in new clothes, boarding a train, and walking into an unknown world of new “parents.” Not in Kansas but in Nebraska.

  She read that the orphans showed one another “treasured possessions,” the tiny suits and dresses they’d worn, faded photographs, baptismal certificates. Teresa wondered if any had saved a numbered tag. Then the orphans “traded tales” of their lives, but the pamphlet didn’t describe what they said. Had their childhoods been as horrible as hers had? Better? Worse?

  Mrs. Howard Kingdon of Grand Island, an organizer for the event, had written to the Foundling and asked a representative to attend. Three did: Sister Marie Catharine, Foundling administrator; Rt. Rev. Daniel A. McGuire; and Sister Thomasina.

  Sister Marie Catharine, reporting on the event for her Advisory Board, described how the orphans, mostly unknown to each other, had been drawn to the reunion by a common need—the need “to try to fill the void in their hearts created by the absence of knowledge about their identity,” including parents and siblings. For each of them, she said, the Foundling had been “their first known home.” Slowly the nun realized that she, Monsignor McGuire, and Sister Thomasina had become like parents to these people.

  “Eager to be near their parents,” she reported, they surrounded each Foundling representative, “and since we were father and mother to each and to all, they became, as if by one impulse, brothers and sisters of one another.”

  Brothers and sisters? Teresa brushed away tears as she remembered her appendix operation, coming up from the ether and crying, “I’m all alone. I don’t have any brothers or sisters.” Feelings she’d stifled for years leaped to the surface. She sobbed. Thank goodness, Frenchy was glued to the TV; how could she explain her tears? If these people really felt like brothers and sisters to each other, she wanted to be part of their family. Indeed, she felt as drawn to these orphans as a hairpin to a magnet.

  Teresa wondered if this group planned another reunion. The pamphlet printed only the Foundling’s Office of Closed Records address, and she remembered how difficult her correspondence with that office was. Fortunately, she had honed her research skills. Soon she had the address of an organizer, Mrs. Kingdon.

  A reply to Teresa’s letter came swiftly. Yes, another reunion was set for spring 1963. Mrs. Kingdon had placed Teresa’s name on the mailing list. The letter contained a photocopy of a news article about the 1962 reunion. The Golden Jubilee reunion, they called it. And yes, many orphans arrived wearing “Shipping Tags,” which bore their names and the names of their sponsors. For the first time, Teresa wished she had hers.

  •

  Teresa didn’t attend the spring l963 reunion. Frenchy’s older sister, Nettie Starnes, died, throwing her plans out of kilter. Mrs. Starnes, twenty years older than Frenchy and his last living sibling, had visited them in 1956. She called Frenchy by his given name, Lawrence, and spoiled him almost as much as Teresa did. One day when Teresa came home late from the hospital, Mrs. Starnes said, “Where have you been? Lawrence had to get up on a chair and put in a light bulb.”

  Mrs. Starnes liked Teresa, especially the way her care had mellowed her headstrong brother, so she said, “When I die, you and Frenchy will inherit that house of mine in Colby.” True to her word, when Mrs. Starnes died, she left her Colby, Kansas, home to the Martins, so Teresa went to Kansas with Frenchy instead of attending the Nebraska reunion.

  However, in spring 1964, Teresa boarded a train in Denver and headed to Nebraska to go to the Third Annual Nebraska Reunion, this one in Primrose, population about 200. Teresa thought it looked like a Kansas town with its grocery store, service station, bank, and many small square houses, all flanked by two tall grain elevators.

  Since Teresa arrived late, she went directly to bed in the small room provided for her. She slept poorly, especially after a dream woke her about 4:00 a.m., a dream she used to have, the dream where she shook a baby out of a towel. She woke petrified,
her heart pounding. In the dark room, she almost smelled the Foundling laundry.

  In the morning, she rose early, dressed, and slipped over to the big brick auditorium. Someone had cracked open a set of double doors, so she slipped in. The auditorium was huge; it looked as though it could hold everyone in town and then some. She thought she was alone until she noticed someone unpacking brochures and placing them on a table. The woman looked up. What a pinched face she had, but when she smiled, it didn’t matter.

  “Looking for the orphans’ reunion?” the woman said.

  Teresa nodded, “I came from the Foundling to Kansas.”

  “Ah! You’re one of us!” The woman set down the brochures and held out a hand. “I’m Mary Tenopir. I came to Nebraska when I was two.”

  The women smiled and held hands for a moment. Tears dampened Teresa’s eyes.

  “Well,” Mary loosened her hands. “Why don’t you help yourself to coffee and sweet rolls on the table over there? We won’t start for a while.”

  Teresa turned to see breakfast laid on what looked like a linen cloth with a stunning array of flowers in the middle.

  “How pretty the table is!” Teresa walked slowly toward it, taking it in.

  “You like it?” Mary looked up from her brochures. “I learned how to set a beautiful table when I worked in the homes of doctors and judges and a well-to-do ranch family.”

  Teresa stopped, “You worked in people’s homes, too?”

  “I sure did. You learn a lot doing that, don’t you?”

  Teresa nodded and told Mary about snooty Mrs. Brown who said things like “I have place mats for four, but now we are five.”

  Mary laughed. “You never know who you’re going to find inside a house until you work there. Most of my families were good to me, real friendly, like the judge who let me bring my boyfriend in for special occasions. But in the doctor’s house, I had to eat alone in the kitchen after I’d served the family.”

  “How awful!”

  “It was degrading, that’s what it was.” Mary returned to her brochures. Teresa poured a cup of coffee and watched other adults, many about her age, enter the room, greet each other, and help themselves to breakfast. Soon she stood with a group of orphans comparing their lives. Mass was scheduled at 11:00 a.m., but 11 came and 11 went and no one stirred.

  “Are we going to have Mass in here?” Teresa said.

  “Oh, no.” The tall loosely built man who answered her had heavy jowls. “We’ll go over to St. Mary’s.”

  “Shouldn’t we go?”

  The man laughed and patted her on the shoulder. “Might as well wait here where we can refill our coffee cups. Gettin’ places on time isn’t one of Father Fangman’s virtues. He probably heard of a farmer wanting to sell some junk and just had to go see.”

  Moments later, a tiny priest, almost as small as Teresa, stuck his head in the doorway.

  “Here we go.” The heavy-jowled man led a procession of participants down the street to the church.

  Seeing how small Saint Mary’s was, tiny and white and square, startled Teresa. She had expected another Saint Anthony’s, huge and built of stone. How could such a small church serve 200 Primrose people when fifty people in Schoenchen needed a Saint Anthony’s to serve them? As she waited for Mass to start, she looked around. The light, airy interior was pretty with tall stained glass windows. Wait a minute. She squinted. That’s not stained glass, it’s regular glass with something, maybe decals, on it. She understood then how devoted the Schoenchen Catholics were, giving to the church first and themselves later.

  When Teresa and the others returned to the auditorium, a buffet table sat waiting. They gathered their food and sat, eating and chatting, at long tables covered with white paper. The main speaker was a psychologist from Hastings, Nebraska, who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorders resulting from adoption. His topic was “Genealogical Bewilderment.”

  The psychologist stood, a tall thin man with graying red hair and intense blue eyes. “If you are a typical orphan,” he said, “you tend to feel disconnected from the past. That’s because your birth parents left you without clues to your identity.”

  Teresa noticed a general sort of stirring in the audience.

  “You may notice this loss of your parents and your extended birth family at critical times, like birthdays,” the speaker said. “For instance, you may have met your first blood relative when a son or daughter was born.” Teresa jumped, remembering the incredible glow of love she experienced when she first saw Mildred.

  “To lose your parents and your extended birth family like this is more global than a divorce or death. So your search for your parents becomes broadened to a reconstruction of an entire culture, missing for most of your life. When the New York Foundling brought you out here, you not only lost your parents, you lost your origins. Your sense of self has been damaged, and it’s this loss of self that you grieve for.”

  The group burst into prolonged applause. Teresa turned to speak to the man beside her, but she noticed his wet cheeks so she remained silent.

  Next orphans rose, one by one, to tell their stories. No two were alike, and neither were their attitudes. A Mr. Lang had a terrible time as a youth and never got over it.

  Fred Swedenburg, the big-jowled man, said, “Sometimes you hear sad stories during these reunions. As we grow older, many of us research our pasts, only to find bitter secrets, and sometimes children lived in sad homes after they were placed.” He seemed calm about it, almost resigned. Then came an orphan who had been adopted by a banker and had a good life. He was quite cocky.

  Mary Tenopir had asked Teresa to speak. She agreed, and then sat twisting her handkerchief; she’d never told anyone her story. As she listened, she noticed that the orphans who spoke usually told about riding the train and what happened in the home assigned to them. When she imagined standing up in front of all those people and talking about the Biekers, she nearly told Mary Tenopir she couldn’t speak. But before she could contact Mary, it was her turn.

  Looking at the inquisitive faces made Teresa open her speech as she planned in Denver, “I was born on May 25, 1906, the same year as the electric washing machine, the Victrola, milk cartons, permanent waves and Greta Garbo.” Audience laughter reassured her. As she spoke, time passed quickly, like a spring breeze. When she finished, she feared that she’d rambled until Mary Tenopir and others told her how beautifully she spoke, how her story moved them.

  Then Mary Tenopir described the seventeen years she’d worked taking care of mothers and their new babies, washing, baking, and ironing with a flat iron heated on a stove. Just as Teresa ironed.

  Next, up stepped Father Fangman who had celebrated their Mass. Teresa didn’t know he was an orphan, but he was. People in Raeville, an unincorporated village, took him. A skinny little man, Father Fangman didn’t talk long, although he said he was born Jewish but raised Catholic. Teresa stirred. She wondered how he knew he was Jewish. The priest seemed nervous. He shook a lot and rushed through his words. Mostly he spoke about how he never tried to find his folks. Teresa wondered if he thought he should. Those who knew him seemed to love him. They called him Father Paulie.

  At last orphan Mary Buscher rose to great applause. She described, for the new orphans, how in 1960 she read an article about orphans who went to New York to visit the Foundling thirty years after the Foundling had placed them. The paper quoted one orphan as wondering if any other Foundling orphans lived near her Nebraska home.

  “I was so excited, I just tracked down her phone number and called her,” Mary Buscher said. “Together we planned and advertised the 1962 Golden Jubilee, which, as you know, received national news coverage. It seemed like every mail brought the name of some orphan somewhere in the United States. So we made our Nebraska reunion an annual event.”

  After hearing everyone’s stories, Teresa realized that the Biekers weren’t the only caretakers who had good intentions but became sorry they had taken a child. Maybe her life hadn�
��t been so bad after all. True, the Biekers had expected her to help with chores, but she hadn’t worked nearly as hard as some of these orphans had. She always had plenty to eat, even if it was coarse, unappetizing food, and she went to school. Of course, not everyone had to deal with a caretaker with octopus hands like Bappa.

  Then musicians started to play on the stage, and suddenly everyone danced. Oh, joy! Mary Tenopir grabbed Teresa’s hand, and they danced polka after polka after polka. Teresa liked Mary. So friendly, so at ease. She felt like the sister Teresa wished she had.

  Riding on the train back to Denver, Teresa savored her experiences. Mary Tenopir seemed particularly close, but Teresa felt connected with all these orphans who rode to the Great Plains—even the cocky orphan adopted by the banker and nervous Father Fangman. Somehow, she knew them more intimately than she knew most people. In a way, the orphans did seem like family but not blood relatives like Mildred and Doris. These orphans were family of another sort, men and women bonded by their common train ride and by the similar threads in the patterns of their lives. Adopted siblings. Perhaps the brothers and sisters she longed for when she came out of the ether. She no longer felt, as she had then, so alone.

  11

  A Foundling Orphan

  Initially, Teresa enjoyed the novelty of working at Presbyterian Hospital. At that time, Boris Pasternak’s novel, Dr. Zhivago, was the rage. Teresa jumped when she heard Dr. Zhivago paged over the hospital intercom, but then everyone giggled, and so did she.

  As time passed, Teresa grew to dislike Presbyterian. The library holdings disappointed her, she hated the rampant snobbery, and she didn’t trust Mrs. Beaten, her director, a stolid woman whose voice box trouble made her rasp. When she interviewed Teresa, the woman promised to put Teresa in charge of the nurses’ library, housed separately in the nurses’ dorm, while Mrs. Beaten would manage the doctors’ library. Actually, Mrs. Beaten ran both libraries, pressing Teresa into service at any time.