Interview with Christina Kline Baker --- Top Ten book club questions (on YouTube)
http://christinabakerkline.com/book-club/#tenquestions
There are quite a few related videos on You Tube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=orphan+trains
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The claddagh is important to Vivian -- here is some info on Irish symbols, and some images ...
http://www.theirishstore.com/blog/2014/10/03/know-claddagh-celtic-knot-ultimate-guide-irish-jewelry/
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http://www.irishindeed.com/page.cfm/Blog/claddagh-cross.html
What is the Claddagh Cross?
Jan. 30th, 2015
Celtic knot crosses, Trinity crosses, St. Patrick crosses, and Claddagh crosses. The Celtic and Irish traditions carry much meaning through their four-cornered symbols. Crosses, knots, trinities, claddaghs, shamrocks, and shields all hold a special meaning and part of the Irish heritage that have lasted centuries of story-telling, Irish jewelry representation, and artwork. It is through these symbols we are able to gain a glimpse into the past and truly understand the motives and hearts behind the Celtic people. Those named at the top are just a few of the crosses represented throughout Celtic history, and though their names differ, the one main area they have in common is their symbolism stemming from a faith-based origin and their belief in the unity and interconnectedness of life in an everlasting realm.
When viewing each of these crosses, you will notice each cross’ meaning is identified through the central identifier, usually a symbol that can be found in other jewelry, clothing, art, etc. At the center of each cross you may find knots, rings or circles, or even the claddagh symbol. The claddagh symbol has been recognized for centuries as that which was created by a man enslaved by a Turkish Gold Smith in the 17th century. In waiting for his release and reunion with his one true love, he created a symbolic ring featuring two hands holding a heart with a crown placed above. The two hands are symbolic for the friendship he felt for his true love; The heart symbolic of his love; The crown symbolic of his loyalty to her. When finally released the man who created this beautiful symbol was reunited with his long lost love. In discovering she, too, had been loyal and waited for him, he presented her with the ring and they were wed. Where do you believe this young man was enslaved? A small fishing town named… Claddagh!
The claddagh cross meaning is the same as that of the claddagh ring, however it’s significance is emphasized by the placement on the cross as opposed to another piece of jewelry such as a ring, necklace, or bracelet. With the claddagh symbol being placed on the cross, the symbolism is demonstrating how the love, friendship and loyalty are based, not simply on earthly understanding, but on the everlasting love of Christ. This fusion of symbols in the Irish tradition is widely used as people continue to find the interconnectedness of their friendships, love, nature, art, jewelry, and passions throughout life. It’s a beautiful connectedness that many treasure, honor, and continue to use to demonstrate their rich heritage.
======================== Orphan Train Historical Background
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1929 TRAIN ITINERARY FOR VIVIAN DALY Character in ORPHAN TRAIN
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Q & A with critically acclaimed writer Roxana Robinson
RR: What was it that was most compelling to you about the idea of an orphan train?
CBK: I think I was drawn to the orphan train story in part because two of my own grandparents were orphans who spoke little about their early lives. As a novelist I’ve always been fascinated with how people tell the stories of their lives and what those stories reveal – intentionally or not – about who they are. I’m intrigued by the spaces between words, the silences that conceal long-kept secrets, the elisions that belie surface appearance.
My own background is partly Irish, and so I decided that I wanted to write about an Irish girl who has kept silent about the circumstances that led her to the orphan train. I wanted to write about how traumatic events beyond our control can shape and define our lives. “People who cross the threshold between the known world and that place where the impossible does happen discover the problem of how to convey that experience,” Kathryn Harrison writes. Over the course of this novel my central character, Vivian, moves from shame about her past to acceptance, eventually coming to terms with what she’s been through. In the process she learns about the regenerative power of claiming – and telling – her own life story.
Like my four previous novels, Orphan Train wrestles with questions of cultural identity and family history. But I knew right away that this was a bigger story and would require extensive research. The vast canvas appealed to me immensely. I was eager to broaden my scope.
RR: What sort of research did you do for the book, and did you interview people who were connected to the Train? What was that like?
CBK: After finding articles online from the New York Times and other newspapers, I read hundreds of first-person testimonials from train riders, orphan-train reunion groups, and historical archives. That research led me to The New York Public Library, where I found a trove of original contemporaneous materials. I devoured nonfiction histories, children’s novels and picture books, and conducted research at the New York Tenement Museum and Ellis Island. I also traveled to Galway County in Ireland to research my character’s Irish background.
In the course of writing this book I attended train riders’ reunions in New York and Minnesota and interviewed train riders and their descendants. There aren’t many train riders left; those who remain are all over 90 years old. I was stuck by how eager they were to tell their stories, to each other and to me. In talking to them and reading their oral histories, I found that they tended not to dwell on the considerable hardships they’d faced; instead, they focused on how grateful they were for their children and grandchildren and communities – for lives that wouldn’t have been possible if they hadn’t been on those trains. I realized that in fiction I could do something that is difficult to do in real life: I could dwell on the stark details of the experience without needing to create a narrative of redemption.
RR: What was the most surprising thing that came out of the research – what was it that you hadn’t expected?
For decades, many train riders believed that the train they rode on was the only one. They didn’t know that they were part of a massive 75-year social experiment. It wasn’t until their own children and grandchildren got involved and started asking questions –there are more than two million descendants, according to some estimates – that they met other train riders and began sharing their stories.
RR: You use two teenage girls as characters, and though they are widely separated by time and circumstances, they share some things. Could you talk about that?
When you write novels you go on instinct much of the time. As I began writing about Molly, a 17-year-old Penobscot Indian foster child, believe it or not I didn’t immediately notice parallels to Vivian, a wealthy 91-year-old widow. But as I wrote my way into the narrative I could see that in addition to some biographical parallels – both characters have dead fathers and institutionalized mothers; both were passed from home to home and encountered prejudice because of cultural stereotypes; both held onto talismanic keepsakes from family members – they are psychologically similar. For both of them, change has been a defining principle; from a young age, they had to learn to adapt, to inhabit new identities. They’ve spent much of their lives minimizing risk, avoiding complicated entanglements, and keeping silent about the past. It’s not until Vivian – in answer to Molly’s pointed questions – begins to face the truth about what happened long ago that both of them have the courage to make changes in their lives.
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Page County, Iowa -- Orphan Train
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Children’s Aid Society, New York
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National Orphan Train Complex
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ORPHAN TRAIN MYTHS AND LEGAL REALITY By Rebecca S. Trammell*
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It took trains to put street kids on the right track out of the slums
Smiths
onian, August 1986
onian, August 1986- Born: June 19, 1826 in Litchfield, Connecticut, United States
- Died: August 11, 1890 in Campfer, Switzerland
- Nationality: American
- Occupation: Founder (Originator)
It took trains to put street kids on the right track out of the slums
Noah Lawyer is 86 and his arthritic hips force him to navigate on crutches, but there is nothing feeble about him. He has small hard eyes, a bull neck and the pile-driver grip of a man who has shoveled coal on steam locomotives and wrestled bears in a Wild West show. His senses are sharp and his memory is strong and free of sentimentality. Noah Lawyer (p.100) was and is a tough hombre. He's a survivor.
He is also a kind of human artifact. Lawyer is one of only a few hundred elderly Americans alive today who, as children, traveled to the West on "orphan trains.' The trains ferried orphaned and abandoned kids from the congested East to new families and new lives in the heartland. Operated from 1854 to 1929 by New York's Children's Aid Society and other pioneering child-welfare agencies, the "placing-out' or "free home' programs aimed at giving deprived youngsters a fresh start in what was viewed as a more wholesome atmosphere. When the trains chugged into a preselected town, farm families and townspeople looked the passengers over and made their choices.
Some of the transplanted children took root in the prairie and some didn't. Many were treated well and eventually adopted; others were shuttled from one family to another; some were abused and forced to work like oxen. In effect it was an indentured system without strings: the child (through the agency) or the foster parents could end the arrangement if they chose.
By today's standards the orphan trains and the traumatic, auctionlike lineups at journey's end seem callous and even barbaric. But in fairness they should be judged in the context of a time when the law treated ten-year-olds as adults and boys sweated beside their fathers in coal mines. In its own day the placing-out program, though controversial, was generally accepted and applauded as a reasonable solution to a painful dilemma. Like many orphan-train veterans, Noah Lawyer is ambivalent about his experience. He feels grateful that he was rescued from a scuffling, hand-to-mouth existence in Middleburg, New York, but resentful that his foster family treated him more like a hired hand than a son.
His blind father took Noah and three of his four brothers to an orphanage after their mother left home with the youngest child. The Lawyer boys were so poor that they wore gunnysacks, shared a single pair of boots and scavenged the streets for food. In 1907, when Noah was seven, the Children's Aid Society gained custody of the boys and put them on a train bound for the little town of Savannah in northwestern Missouri.
"The trip was a great adventure,' Lawyer recalls. "We couldn't get done gawking out the windows. Boys were in one compartment and girls in another. We had no idea where we were going. At Savannah they took us to the courthouse and lined us up, you know, like they was going to mow us down with a machine gun. People walked up to us and said a few words and moved on. My brothers were all picked the first day, but I wasn't taken till the second. People came up and felt our arms and legs, and mine were kind of spindly. I was hoping that whoever picked me would have plenty to eat, that was my main goal.'
Young Noah was chosen by a man who lived with his sister and mother on a large farm. Food was plentiful and so were the chores. "I was eating good, so I thought I had the world in a downhill pull, but they had me milking and working in the fields and tending the stock. They sent me to school for about three months out of the year.'
He remembers that his schoolmates shunned him and called him a bastard. A girl he fancied agreed to run away with him, but her parents scotched the plan "because of my background, I think.' His foster family was stingy with affection. "There was no hugging or kissing and they never said they loved me. I never got nothing at Christmas, but they didn't give anything to each other either.'
In his teens he ran away repeatedly, only to be caught each time and brought back to be punished, but as 18 he left for good, finding work as a railroad fireman and later as a wrestler with a touring carnival. He believes now that the trip West, despite the severity of his years on the farm, saved his life. "If I'd stayed East I'm sure I wouldn't have made it,' he says. "I would have starved or wound up killed or in jail. I learned right and wrong on the farm.' His small eyes shine. "I'd-a been a humdinger otherwise.'
The father of the placing-out program in the United States was an idealistic theologian-turned-social-worker named Charles Loring Brace. Shocked by the spectacle of thousands of youthful "street arabs' sleeping in doorways and stealing to survive in the New York City of the early 1850s, Brace joined several other reformers in founding the Children's Aid Society. Orphan asylums and similar institutions, Brace believed, did nothing to liberate street kids from poverty and hopelessness. What they needed, he felt, was a chance to grow up strong and self-reliant as part of a family.
"The family,' Brace wrote, "is God's Reformatory; and every child of bad habits who can secure a place in a Christian home is in the best possible place for his improvement.' Especially in the West, where there were "many spare places at the table of life.' Like many Easterners in mid-19th-century America, Brace was smitten by a romantic vision of the sweeping plains and their large-hearted people. Farmers, he wrote, were our "most solid and intelligent class,' and Westerners possessed "a peculiar warm-heartedness' and sense of equality that ennobled them.
After a year of dispatching children individually to farms in nearby Connecticut, Pennsylvania and rural New York, the Society mounted its first large-scale expedition to the Midwest in September 1854. Forty-seven boys and girls between seven and 15 made the memorable trip from New York to Dowagiac, in southwestern Michigan. Their chaperon described their excitement when the city kids beheld an apple orchard from the train window: "Arms stretched out, hats swinging, eyes swimming, mouths watering, and all screaming--"Oh! oh! just look at 'em! Mister, be they any sich in Michigan?'' Arriving at the small-town depot before dawn on a Sunday, they slept a few hours on the floor and then trooped to church en masse. Homes were found for all 47 within a week.
As the western trips multiplied and expanded, each orphan-train mission followed a tightly organized scenario. First, legal guardianship of the children was established; if the parents were alive they had to relinquish custody to the Society. The agency's western agents found likely towns, and committees of local leaders were formed to pass on applications from potential foster parents. Sickly, retarded or incorrigible children were scratched from the passenger list.
An advertisement appeared in the local paper a few weeks prior to a train's arrival. "WANTED: HOMES FOR CHILDREN,' the ad in the Lebanon, Missouri, Daily Record began in 1909. The notice said the children were "of various ages and of both sexes' and "well-disciplined'; listed the Society's terms--education, religious training and treatment "in every way as members of the family'; and noted that "distribution will take place at the opera house.' The local screening committees were a weak link in the system, since small-town ministers, editors or judges were reluctant to reject a potential foster parent as unfit if he were also a friend or customer..
The clangorous arrival of an orphan train and its rambunctious, wide-eyed passengers was a spectacular event in a four-block-long prairie village. The local journal in Hebron, Nebraska, reported that the 22 waifs shipped there in the winter of 1890 attracted an audience that packed a local church. "There was not a dull, apathetic boy in the lot,' the paper declared. "All were bright and self-reliant, and most of them had good faces. The greatest contest was for the possession of a sweet-faced, modest girl of 14. There were as many as a dozen wanted her.' After listing 19 children who found homes, the story added that three others were "overlooked in the distribution.' The unlucky ones were usually escorted to another town.
The agreement that the new parents signed with the Society obliged them to care for their charges "in sickness and in health,' to send them to school full-time up to age 16 and to church, and to pay the boys for their labor when they reached 17. They were to notify the Society if a child proved "unsatisfactory'; the Society, on the other hand, could remove a youngster if his home conditions were judged "injurious to his physical, mental, or moral well-being.' This provision necessitated follow-up visits by the agents, normally once a year, but some unhappy youths complained that the agents never appeared.
The "worst-tempered boy' he ever saw
The Children's Aid Society rated its transplanted wards successful if they grew into "creditable members of society,' and frequent reports documented the success stories. A 1910 survey concluded that 87 percent of the children sent to country homes had "done well,' while eight percent had returned to New York and the other five percent had either died, disappeared or soiled the record by getting arrested. Two boys had become governors, one in North Dakota and the other in Alaska territory; both had been plucked from the Randall's Island orphanage in New York and sent to the same town--Noblesville, Indiana--on the same train. Other high-achieving alumni included a Supreme Court justice, two congressmen, 35 lawyers and 19 doctors. Only a few of the letters from foster parents and children that appeared regularly in the Society's annual reports contained bad news. One from an Ohio farmer in 1862 called his charge "the worst-tempered boy I ever had anything to do with' and fumed that at school he would only "kick the little boys and call the girls bad names.'
But if imitation connoted success, the program was a smash. New York Catholics, who had attacked Brace for sending Catholic children to Protestant homes and even charged that they were enslaved, began transporting kids from the New York Foundling Hospital to new homes in the country about 1875. The hospital's system differed from the Children's Aid Society's in that children were assigned to specific families before they boarded a westbound train. Institutions in Boston, Chicago and other cities launched their own versions. A Chicago agency advertised children "free on 90 days trial,' and provided winsome descriptions: "One boy baby, has fine head and face, black eyes and hair, fat and pretty; three months old.'
Brace and his successors (he died in Switzerland in 1890) were flayed by critics on several counts. Some Midwesterners suggested darkly that the program was a plot to pollute the prairie with delinquents. An investigation in Minnesota concluded that emigration didn't work well with kids over 12 (Brace agreed). Stories that children were abused by their "parents' surfaced periodically. Brace replied loftily that "we hold [the stories] to be bosh,' but nevertheless he did send investigators to check.
By 1910 the ranks of homeless children placed with rural families by the Children's Aid Society had grown to a legion more than 105,000 strong. Placements by the Foundling Hospital and other agencies, together with the Society's additional trainloads before the program ended in 1929, may have swelled the overall total to as many as 150,000. The Society's peak year was 1875, when 4,026 kids rode the heartland express.
Another clutch of statistics indicated that the orphan trains contributed to the fulfillment of one of Brace's major goals, the reduction of juvenile crime and vagrancy in New York. The number of juveniles arrested for both petty larceny and vagrancy dropped sharply during the program's first 25 years.
Orphan trains eventually puffed to a stop because they no longer reflected the accepted wisdom among child-welfare workers and because new laws made them obsolete. State and local governments were funding foster care for orphans by the 1920s, compulsory education and anti-child-labor statutes were on the books, and social workers had agreed that keeping families intact was generally best for all concerned. Fewer street arabs prowled New York's avenues, and the demand for farm labor had declined. The high-spirited bands rattling west on the Erie, Burlington and Missouri Pacific tracks became smaller and smaller; and finally disappeared altogether.
While the trains clattered into history, those who had ridden them settled quietly into adult lives as farmers and housewives, small-town merchants and schoolteachers. Except at an occasional reunion they rarely spoke of their experience, and many preferred to forget it. But in recent years a dogged Missouri researcher-genealogist named Evelyn Sheets began tracking down survivors and interviewing them. Mrs. Sheets, who recently suffered serious injuries in an automobile accident, was particularly affected by the poignance of those long-ago lineups at the courthouse or church or opera house. "It still gives me goose bumps,' she told an interviewer. "Imagine the church emptying out and one child still standing there. A lot of them are still trying to convince themselves that their parents didn't abandon them.'
Aided by a $3,800 grant, Mrs. Sheets teamed up with folklorist Michael Patrick, who is with the University of Missouri at Rolla, and volunteer Evelyn Trickel to organize the first reunion of Missouri orphan-train veterans in her hometown of Trenton. Last fall, Noah Lawyer, his brother and several others joined a crowd of 200 people at the Grundy County Museum to see a slide show and reminisce about the old days. Subsequently, in separate interviews conducted throughout Missouri and Nebraska, a number of other survivors and their relatives talked about the way it was.
The first hazy recollections usually have to do with tenements, orphan homes and sudden desolation. Rose Cranor of Albany, Missouri, who died a month after attending the reunion, told her daughter Bedonna that her father turned her over to an orphanage after her mother deserted them. "She remembered getting buckets of beer for her father at a saloon in New York,' Bedonna says. "She said he cried when he left her at the orphanage.' Rose was three years old. Susie Schulz (pp.102,103) of Vandalia, Missouri, now 84, recalls Saturday outings with other orphans. "We'd walk on the Brooklyn Bridge and go to Coney Island, and later we'd have gingersnaps and milk. There were geraniums at the home. I still think of it whenever I see them.'
The day the youngsters boarded a train and headed west was both thrilling and unnerving. Eighty-eight-year-old Irma Schnieders (p.98) of Jefferson City, Missouri, a Foundling Hospital orphan, recalls she was playing with a boy named Charlie when the nuns told her it was time to go. "Charlie wasn't coming, and I didn't want to leave him. I had a numbered tag--I remember my number was 36. There were 25 or 30 of us on the train.' "They gave me a bath and combed my hair,' says Susie Schulz. "My twin sister and I cried the whole time. We didn't want to go.' Jim Kaup (p.99), now 66, was sent from the Foundling Hospital to a family in Stuart, Nebraska. "We rode the train for about two weeks,' he recollects. "My foster mother said it took two more weeks to get me clean after I got there.'
When the children reached their destination, their prospective new parents were waiting to inspect them. Mattie Darnell Stroker, whose late husband, Howard Darnell, rode an orphan train to Bowling Green, Missouri, in 1910, remembers her father-in-law describing their appearance at the courthouse as resembling a show-and-tell class. "He said that each one had a little act. It was like a show. One boy told jokes and did acrobatic tricks. The Darnells didn't know about it until a druggist told them. They went over and Howard came up and hugged Mr. Darnell's legs. He said no at first, but came back and said he wanted the little fat boy.'
Eight-year-old Susie Schulz and her twin sister, Dorothy, were afraid they would be separated, but the Society agent J. W. Swan insisted that they be kept together, and they were. Gus Jahne of St. Joseph, Missouri, who died last year, told his son Gary that he felt like he was part of a slave auction. "They stood on the courthouse steps at Savannah and people felt their muscles,' Gary Jahne says. "A lot of folks were looking for free farm labor.' Gus and his brother John went to the same family. Dorothy Davidson (above) of Mexico, Missouri, who at 61 is an ingenue among orphan-train riders, bit the hand that was soon to feed her. "The man that chose me kept encouraging me to go to his wife,' she says, "but I didn't like her. So I bit her.'
The Society tried to place brothers and sisters together or at least close to each other, but in practice it didn't always work out that way. Sometimes the foster parents didn't want the children to know about their siblings. Lester Studer (p.99), now 72, didn't know he had a brother living near his Nebraska home until both were grown, when his brother found him. He was even more surprised when he discovered later that two older sisters had remained in the East. "We got together much later,' he says, "and we were strangers.' But cheeky Dorothy Davidson, after a short stay with the woman she had greeted so rudely, wound up in the same household with her brother Woody and sister Phyllis. Their foster parents, both lawyers in Trenton, Missouri, adopted all three of them.
For some, life on the farm was full of toil and deprivation. Mary Goth, a 93-year-old resident of a Clinton, Missouri, nursing home, was kept out of school after the third grade so she could devote herself to full-time cooking and housekeeping. "My foster mother was cruel--oh, she was a crackerjack,' she says. "They wanted one of the sons to get me pregnant to I'd stay home and work. How could they do that?' Jim Kaup longed for the love and affection he was denied. "They never touched me or said they loved me, and they didn't want me to call them Mom and Dad. Think what that does to you. They weren't mean, they were cold, and they showed no feeling toward me. When I was 15 or 16 I decided I'd live in a garbage can before I'd stay there any longer.'
Others were raised as Brace hoped they would be, as fully assimilated members of warm and generous families. Irma Schnieders remembers being "petted and pampered. I was spoiled. They gave me a good life. It worked out for the best in my case.' And Robert Turner, 83, was reared by a couple in Franklin, Nebraska, who accepted him as the equal of their natural children. "I was family,' he recalls. "They were salt-of-the-earth and never mean to me. My real father remarried and had a second family, and I was better taken care of than those kids were.'
An old man who sat alone and cried
Many orphan-train children were shuttled to several families before they found a permanent home. Rose Cranor stayed for varying lengths of time at eight different places. In a memoir she wrote for her daughter Bedonna she recalled one where "a young woman taught me dance steps,' another where "a man beat me with a razor strap' and a third where an old man sat alone at the dinner table and cried. Dorothy Davidson's sister, Phyllis Jesse, was sent back to New York from Missouri because of suspicions she had "mixed blood,' but then her foster family had a change of heart. "They gave me some shots in New York and I thought that was the reason I was sent there,' Phyllis remembers. "I found out later that it was racial.'
The transplanted youngsters viewed the annual visits by Aid Society agents with mixed emotions. "My mother said she got scared every time Mr. Swan came by,' says Bedonna Cranor. "She was afraid he might take her away again.' But 81-year-old Terah Marie Harrelson of Bellflower, Missouri, who lived with a wealthy farm family near Bowling Green, remembers agent Swan as a "wonderful, kind person who took me fishing with him and had dinner with us.' Jim Kaup recalls no regular visits by his Foundling Hospital sponsors, but he has a vivid memory of a well-dressed, richly perfumed woman--"I can still smell her'--who came to the farm twice and lifted him up. "I'd never been picked up like that. I wondered if it was my mother. Nobody ever told me.'
Many orphan-train voyagers never stopped wondering about their parents. Some tried to find them. Others deliberately chose not to. In some cases the real mother or father made the reconnection. However they confronted the unanswered questions in their past, the emotional cost was high. Many still weep openly as they talk about it 60 and 70 years later. Long before the last orphan train had completed its run, critic Henry W. Thurston took a shot: "It does not seem fair to the relatives,' he wrote in 1919, "that they be compelled to surrender a child permanently in order to get whatever care he may need temporarily.' Thurston called Brace's idea "the wolf of the old indenture philosophy of child labor in a sheepskin disguise of a so-called good or Christian home.'
Ethel Lambert, archivist for the still-flourishing Children's Aid Society in New York, says, "When I first read the records I felt haunted by the feelings those children must have had. It seemed frightful. But when I looked into the conditions and lack of services in those days I came to see the placing-out program as a solution, and a good one.' Scholar Miriam Z. Langsam concluded that despite "many weaknesses in Brace's system, successes were impressive. Most of the children sent into the West apparently enjoyed better and more useful lives than if they had remained in the slums of New York as delinquents and dependents.'
The survivors interviewed for this story seem to share several common values. Most of them could be called fatalistic. "It's strange how fate sets you up,' Rose Cranor told her daughter. "Whatever fate gives you, that's what you've got.' They are strongly committed to marriage and family; divorces are almost unknown. They believe in accommodation, making the best of it, playing the hand you're dealt. "The way I think of it is that I was chosen. Most parents don't have a choice, but mine did,' Jim Kaup concedes. "And they took me.'
Photo: Agents of Children's Aid Society accompanied a dozen well-dressed youngsters to Missouri in 1909. Started in New York in 1853 by a pioneering social worker, the Society initiated the orphan-train concept.
Photo: Society's founder, Charles Loring Brace, was convinced the West had "many spare places at the table of life.'
Photo: Irma Schnieders, who brandished a broom when she was not quite three, ended up in Missouri with parents who pampered her. "I was spoiled,' she remembers.
Photo: Not long after Lester Studer was photographed in a "pageboy,' he was adopted by Kansas couple that took him in. "They had lost their first son,' he recalls.
Photo: At four, Jim Kaup (right) held hands with foster sister, Anna, in the yard of their home in Nebraska. Before retirement, Kaup worked as a mechanic.
Photo: Posing with foster brothers and friend, Noah Lawyer (far left) stood next to real brother, who was visiting. Lawyer, 86, says he was treated like a hired hand.
Photo: Dorothy Davidson liked her doll but not her first foster mother, whom she bit. She ended up in home with her sister, Phyllis (in jacket), and brother.
Photo: Susie Schulz recalls leaving New York orphanage and fearing separation from twin, Dorothy (opposite).
Photo: Buttoned and bowed, Susie (left) and Dorothy embody orphan-train spirit, holding hands, smiling bravely.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1986 Smithsonian Institution.
http://www.si.edu/
Source Citation
Jackson, Donald Dale. "It took trains to put street kids on the right track out of the slums." Smithsonian Aug. 1986: 94+. Biography in Context. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.
URL
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A4371493
