See Grandma after all these years? Teresa certainly had mixed feelings about that, but finally her curiosity won.
She found Grandma ill in the county home. Teresa tiptoed into Grandma’s room with trepidation. The old woman lay in bed. Her skin, shrunken and tight, left her looking more craggy and fragile than Teresa remembered. Grandma stirred, smiled, and held out a hand. This isn’t the same woman who terrorized me so. Teresa walked to Grandma’s side. This is just her shadow. She’s been broken. By life. Like so many. She squeezed Grandma’s hand and sat beside her.
The next day, when Teresa visited again, Grandma pressed the Bieker house key into Teresa’s hand and asked her to find the property deed. “I think it’s in the little trunk under the front window, but if it’s not there, just look around.” Grandma had managed to keep the Bieker house in Schoenchen, even though she had lived on welfare since she unexpectedly lost her farm.
Regina gave Teresa a ride to the Bieker house, then went next door to visit her mother. Teresa stood a moment looking at her old home and the nearby building that once contained the store. How small they seemed! She unlocked the door. When she entered the main room, she almost heard her screams and the sheriff knocking. She hurried to the trunk and threw open the lid.
Bolts of fabric, probably from the store, filled the trunk. Grandma must have saved them for dresses she never made. Beneath the bolts were bed linens, but nothing else. She reached to shut the lid when she spotted papers tucked along one side. She pulled them out: the deed, and next to it, another document, her indenture paper.
She scanned the Foundling Hospital letterhead, the listing of the Biekers’ duties; they were to house her, clothe her, feed her, school her, and treat her as their own child. And look at this! If they died before she turned eighteen, she was to inherit their estate as though she were their own child! Imagine them agreeing to that. She rubbed the indenture date: June 29, 1910, nearly two months after she’d arrived from New York.
She started to fold the paper, intending to put it back, and then read where the Biekers agreed to write the Foundling twice a year. But they hadn’t done that. As soon as she could read and write, she wrote all their letters, and she never wrote to the Foundling for the Biekers. She smoothed the paper over her knee. Then she realized the Biekers’ signatures were missing. They hadn’t signed.
“I wonder,” she spoke aloud. “Did they really indenture me? Or did they just keep me.”
She folded the paper and put it in her purse alongside the deed. She intended to ask Grandma if she could keep the indenture paper, but when she returned to the county home, Grandma was sleeping so heavily Teresa dared not stir her. Within a few days, she was dead. Teresa had given the deed to Regina, but she kept the indenture paper.
•
One morning soon after Grandma’s funeral, as Teresa walked her little dog, Sunshine, he leaped so vigorously to catch a squirrel that he yanked the leash from Teresa’s hand. Free, he dashed into the path of a swift-moving automobile. Teresa screamed. The car braked. Its distraught owner carried Sunshine to the curb and laid him on the grass. Teresa tried to stop wailing long enough to thank the owner for his kindness, but she could not muster her speaking voice.
As the car drove away, Teresa ran to the nearby home of an animal-loving friend, Virginia. The two women took Sunshine to Teresa’s veterinarian, Steve Mosier, who confirmed that the little dog was dead. Dr. Mosier, who knew Teresa, offered to cremate Sunshine at no charge. Grateful for his kindness, she could not bring herself to leave her little dog. She kept stroking his long beautiful Sheltie hair as she had stroked Fanny day after day by the river bank. Finally, Virginia placed a strong arm around Teresa’s shoulders and turned her toward the car.
“You must get a new dog,” Virginia said as they drove away.
“I can’t. Saint John’s only allows pets that you bring in with you when you move in.”
“Nonsense. We’ll find just the dog for you today, and they will be none the wiser.”
With that, Virginia headed out of town. “I know the woman who owns a restaurant right off the Interstate. You know the one?”
“In Ellis?”
“Yes. And she told me her $400 pedigreed bitch, a bichon frise, had an ‘unfortunate encounter with a dog of uncertain ancestry.’”
Teresa laughed.
“So she’s giving away a parcel of pups. We’ll take a look.”
The only pup left was the runt, as ugly a dog as Teresa had ever seen. He was small and sturdy, as bichons frises are, but his thick wavy coat was gray and white instead of pure white. His ears did not droop properly and his tail didn’t curl up, but when the pup licked her hand, Teresa melted.
“You two will be good for one another,” Virginia said.
On the way home, Teresa held the pup, fondling his ears as though they were velvet. That night, she named her dog Timi because he was so timid. And Virginia was right: in the following days, not one Saint John official noticed that a new dog tugged at Teresa’s leash.
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“An Endangered Species”
In 1988, Teresa received a mailing from a new national organization, the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America (OTHSA). Based in Arkansas, it published a newsletter, Crossroads, which contained stories of individual riders. Teresa joined and attended the First Annual OTHSA Reunion that October.
The stories she heard as rider after rider stepped to the microphone riveted Teresa. Big-jowled Fred Swedenburg said his first caretakers didn’t let him sleep inside the house, but his second caretakers, Hazel and Arthur Swedenburg of Clarks, Nebraska, treated him well. Mrs. Swedenburg even wrote the Children’s Aid Society, asking for information about him. She learned that the society had taken him from his home because of “scandalous neglect.”
“You wonder what scandalous neglect would have been in those days,” Fred said. “It don’t take much for that today.”
Teresa (seated third from right) with other orphan train riders at OTHSA’s first national reunion in Springdale, Arkansas, 1988. (Courtesy of OTHSA)
When Fred returned from serving overseas during World War II, he found two letters, one from his birth father, Frederick Engert, a farm hand, and one from his birth mother, Irene Brown. Fred threw both away, thinking “the Swedenburgs are my real family.” But the next year he traveled to New York and spent Christmas with his father. Then he went to Canadiagua, New York, where his mother lived.
“I drove past her home, but I didn’t stop,” he said. “I just couldn’t make myself do it.”
Teresa understood Fred’s hesitancy. What would it have been like to see Rosie, not the mother of her dreams but the actual flesh-and-blood Rosie?
When Mary Ellen Johnson, OTHSA Founder, introduced Toni Weiler, she mentioned that Toni often spoke to organized groups about the orphan trains.
“That’s right,” Toni said as she took the mike. “And my speeches aren’t complimentary. For one thing, I’m convinced that the indenture system was just another form of slavery.” She detailed her argument at length, and Teresa almost believed her, but not quite. I was indentured, but I wasn’t a slave.
Teresa felt proud, and extremely surprised, of the number of orphan train riders who made something of themselves. Particularly successful were Andrew H. Burke, a governor of North Dakota from 1890 to 1892, and John Green Brady, appointed governor of Alaska Territory for three terms, from 1897 to 1905. Other orphans became members of Congress, district attorneys, sheriffs, mayors, a justice of the Supreme Court, judges, college professors, clergymen, and high school principals, members of state legislatures, railroad officials, journalists, bankers, physicians, lawyers, postmasters, contractors, teachers, and civil engineers. And a medical librarian! With pleasure, Teresa counted herself among those who succeeded despite inauspicious beginnings.
•
At home weeks later, Teresa opened up her new issue of Crossroads to read that she was a “short perky little lady with a smil
e and a kind word for everyone.” That pleased her. “Short and perky” made her sound like Rosie.
Mary Ellen Johnson, editor of Crossroads, reminded readers to tune into the TV show Unsolved Mysteries January 25, 1989, to hear another rider story. The night of the broadcast, Teresa watched orphan train rider Sylvia Wemhoff tell her story. At first, it seemed ordinary. Sylvia was three years old when she rode from the Foundling to Nebraska in 1921. The John Miick family, farmers with two sons, took Sylvia. In 1943, she married a farmer, George Wemhoff; they had four sons and one daughter.
Then Unsolved Mysteries took an unexpected turn. When Sylvia’s daughter, Laura, helped her mother find her birth certificate in 1988, Sylvia discovered that she had a sibling. Who was this person? That was the unsolved mystery.
Studio portrait of Teresa in her early eighties. (Courtesy of Teresa Martin)
Teresa turned off the set. She envied Sylvia. Even though Sylvia didn’t know who her sibling was, she knew she had one. That was more than Teresa knew.
Sylvia hoped to hear from that sister or brother after the TV broadcast, but she didn’t. However, when the TV rebroadcast Unsolved Mysteries in August, her brother, Joseph Wolk, contacted the show. Five days later, the show united Sylvia, then seventy, and Joseph, seventy-two, in New York City. Teresa watched as the siblings pieced together their history.
The television broadcasters made a spectacle of filming the reunion, and disgusted, Teresa shut off the TV. Such a hullabaloo. Why their story is no more interesting than mine!
•
In October 1989 at OTHSA’s second reunion, Teresa met Phil Coltoff, head of the Children’s Aid Society, and his wife. They were mutually pleased to discover they all were Jewish, so Teresa told Phil about Arthur and later told Arthur about Phil.
That December, Arthur stopped in New York to look up Phil. The two men visited the New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center (once the Lying-In Hospital where Rosie gave birth to Teresa) to see if they could find any additional information about Teresa or Rosie.
With the help of Dan Cherubin, assistant archivist, they discovered Rosie had given birth to Teresa at 11:26 in the morning on May 25, 1906, after thirteen hours of labor with no complications, although she required three stitches. Discharge papers on June 3 described both mother and child as “well.”
Arthur and Phil also found out that Rosie had been in the hospital for thirty days before giving birth to Teresa. Just as Teresa had suspected, Rosie was no pioneer. She was ill—with a lung infection.
Teresa refrained from telling Arthur, “I told you so.”
•
In 1990, OTHSA and the Children’s Aid Society co-hosted a national reunion in New York City, a homecoming, really, for orphan train riders. What would it be like, Teresa wondered, to have the city of her birth, which had so cheerfully rid itself of her and tens of thousands of other children, welcome her back home? Naturally, she planned to attend; nothing could keep her away.
When Teresa arrived on November 19, she found the Penta Hotel lobby jammed with orphan train riders. More than one hundred riders or descendants, ranging four to eighty-four years old, lined up to register. Mary Ellen and Leroy Johnson of OTHSA, who greeted the riders, counted Teresa among the eighty-four-year-olds.
That evening, journalists crowded a festive reception. Television lights, cameras, crews, and reporters from Channels 4, 7, 9, 11, and the Associated Press edged around the tables or conducted interviews with orphans in the foyer. Teresa could scarcely believe the fuss. In her lifetime, attitudes about orphans had changed so much that riders like her were now novelties rather than scum.
After dinner, following custom, the orphan train riders, including Teresa, rose to share memories. Robert Petersen told how his father left him, then four, and his brother, Archie, thirteen, in a New York City park. Eventually, a Children’s Aid Society agent placed him in Nebraska on a farm with a “big red barn just like pictures I’d seen,” he said. There Jens and Pearl Petersen adopted him and educated him well; he became a lawyer.
“The day I was abandoned on New York City streets turned out to be one of the luckiest days of my life,” Robert said.
On another lucky day, Robert, then twenty-one, sat in a barbershop, leafing through a 1939 Look where he read about a carnival man, Archie Gayer, who froze a woman in a cake of ice for the New York World’s Fair. Since Archie Gayer was his brother’s name, Robert wrote this man and found his brother.
Next Art Smith, a big fellow from Trenton, New Jersey, told his renowned story: he had been left in a basket at Gimbels department store. He was a healthy baby wearing good-quality clothes; the New York City Department of Welfare named him “Arthur Field.” Art hadn’t known his mother left him in a basket until a Children’s Aid Society agent told him. Crushed, he refused to discuss it.
“I don’t feel bad about my mother,” Art said. “I assume she was in circumstances beyond her control.”
But the mystery of his parents’ identities haunted Art. He felt as though a “great door” had “shut and locked” when he realized he’d never know his original family.
Then a tiny red-headed lady, Marguerite Thompson, who sat next to Teresa at dinner, talked about mistreatment in her foster home. Teresa identified with her. They were nearly the same age, and Marguerite rode to Nebraska in 1911, a year after Teresa had gone to Kansas.
Marguerite lived in a beautiful ten-room house with the upper-class Larson family in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Larsons made her use the outdoor bathroom and sleep on the front-room couch. Marguerite had to scrub the three bedrooms the Larsons rented. They whipped her frequently, sometimes with a rawhide whip, and they never gave her enough to eat.
When fifteen, Marguerite joined a carnival, but her caretakers caught her and put her in a convent. The convent dentist told her that he had never seen a young person with such bad teeth.
“You certainly didn’t get the right kind of food,” he said, “or enough milk to drink.”
That was true. After she turned five, the Larsons had given Marguerite no milk, even though they kept two cows and gave plenty to their sons.
When Teresa’s turn came, her palms were sweaty at the prospect of facing such a large, important audience. She’d considered what to say, choosing to emphasize the positive in her story, so she described Volga German customs rather than detail her abusive home life.
Tens of thousands of children had ridden the orphan trains, but not many riders remained. Orphan Harold Williams called the still-living riders “an endangered species,” which they were rapidly becoming.
After the banquet, the riders posed for a photo, then said their goodnights. Teresa’s roommate, Toni Weiler, the woman who believed indenture was slavery, seemed happy to see her.
“My foster parents were lovely,” she told Teresa as they got ready for bed, “but a little old—forty-two and forty-three—for raising a toddler.” So she got into trouble. She tipped over the church collection plate. At her mother’s party, she kept the little dish of peanuts instead of passing it. One night, in her prayers, she said, “God bless Mamma, and God bless Daddy’s little honey bunch.” She saw her father take off for the closet with a big smile on his face, but her mother scowled.
Years later, on Mother’s Day, Leo, Toni’s husband, helped their six-month-old son, Bobby, give a box of candy to Toni. She cried as she realized her mother lived somewhere in the world, but she couldn’t even send her a card.
“There has never been a mother that was loved more than I loved my birth mother,” Toni said.
Like Toni, Teresa loved her mother unreservedly.
“How do you know she was so nice?” Doris once said. “Maybe she met someone and thought, ‘To hell with this little bastard, I’m going to give her away and marry this man.’”
But Teresa didn’t believe that for an instant.
•
The next day, the orphan train riders toured Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home. They rode back to Grand Centr
al Station on a train reserved for them. Journalists interviewed some riders who described how they felt riding away from New York so many years ago. Some wept as they described their youthful apprehension and wonder at sights beyond New York City streets. Teresa sat quietly, but riding on the train with the other orphans made her unaccountably sad.
As the train pulled into Grand Central Station, Teresa saw a crowd of journalists waiting for them. Teresa’s hands flew to her hair as lights flashed, shutters clicked. A journalist interviewed her and several other riders, making VHS tapes for OTHSA to house in its library. Then Children’s Aid Society representatives welcomed the riders with a proclamation from Governor Mario Cuomo declaring November 19–24 “Orphan Train Homecoming Week” in New York.
Next, orphan train riders chose among several possible trips. Some went to a special Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, but Teresa chose not to go; she had gone there during her 1970 visit, and now she wanted to see the Children’s Aid Society Community Center. After all, the orphan train movement really started there. When she arrived, the Center’s huge size, including hundreds of files on orphans it had placed, startled her. She hadn’t realized the organization’s scope.
Next, Teresa went to Ellis Island to view the museum’s list of people who had immigrated to the United States from the 1860s to the early 1950s. She wanted to find her mother’s name. What a mass of names were listed! But no wonder. She knew that by 1910 when she rode the orphan train, three out of four people in New York City were immigrants or children of immigrants.
Teresa searched first for Volga German names on the long metal Wall of Honor, but found none. Then she looked for any of the Feits or Breitowichs as well as for her husband Jess’s people—Binders who came from Düsseldorf, Germany. Teresa found only one name she recognized, Sid Feit, Arthur’s cousin. She ran her finger over Sid’s name. All my other relatives must have arrived at other ports. The metal cooled her fingertip. “My relatives.” I still don’t believe it.
Mail-Order Kid: An Orphan Train Rider's Story Page 22
