Biography

It seems as though no matter what it is that you take to the dump, there is always someone standing by to take it home. Thus, the title of my story.

Back when one of the few rights a woman had was the right to have as many children as her body could produce, my mother waited for my father to come home from his job on the railroad. She waited for weeks and he never did show up. We were on a farm in Missouri, and I was only a baby, the baby of a large family.

After several weeks a banker came to the farm and told my mother she would have to take her children and leave as my father had sold the farm and the new owners wanted to move in. Not being too worldly-wise and in a financial bind, my mother found places to put my three oldest brother and sisters. She took the five youngest of us to her sister's place in Louisville, Kentucky. How? I don't know. Anyway, my aunt, who was raising three children of her own, took all five of us to the orphanage and put us there. She told my mother we must all have gotten lost.

That's how this story came about. The year was 1929. My two older brothers, who were with us, were put on an orphan train going in the opposite direction. This is how I've been told the family was separated.

One of my earliest recollections goes back to the time when I was three years old. I was on a train full of children from Lyndon, Kentucky orphanage, and it pulled into the station at Owensboro, Kentucky. I can still remember stepping, or rather turning around and crawling down those big train steps with my eight-year-old sister on one side and my five-year-old brother on the other.

I had on a little camel's hair colored coat and a little hat with a bill. My hair was a platinum blond, cut in a "Dutch boy" bob. A man in the crowd yelled "Isn't that a cute little boy?" He was looking directly at me. My reply was "I ain't a cute widdle boy, I'm a cute widdle girl."

Automobiles were brought to the train station and my sister Evelyn and my brother Carl and I were put into one of the cars and taken to a huge, to me, hotel. Up in an elevator, which I had never seen the likes of before, and into an enormous ballroom which was filled with adults and children of all ages. They were going to find homes for all of us because these big people wanted children,--children to love and cherish and children to use as slave labor on the farms.

An old man and woman had their arms around the shoulders of my brother and sister. "We'll take these two," they said. "What about my little sister," my big sister asked them. "She's too little to milk a cow," the old man replied. Then they were all gone.

The ballroom was emptying rapidly and there I was--three years old with no one. Then the tall, dark, nice-looking man who had made the remark about me at the train station stepped up to me and said, "Do you want to be my little girl?"

That's all I remember about that episode, but I do remember living in the hotel, having a nursemaid to take care of me and getting anything and everything I wanted, for the man was the manager of the hotel, and he and his wife had never had any children. I was the only child living in the hotel.

The hotel had several suites of rooms with permanent guests who were mostly childless, and I was their substitute child. At Christmas and birthdays there were so many gifts lavished on me we had to call the Salvation Army to come and pick up the extra gifts. That taught me about sharing.

I was brought around to reality a couple of times a year by being taken out to the farm to visit my brother and sister for the weekend in Petit, Kentucky, a few miles from Owensboro. They were only a few years older than I was, but they had to do many chores. They chopped tobacco, killed off tobacco worms, milked 24 cows, and did chores around the house, barn and garden. I can remember trying to help them, but I only seemed to get in the way.

My sister told me our real father and mother were probably dead and she never mentioned our having any other brothers and sisters.

Since my foster father was Catholic, a "Christmas and Easter Sunday Catholic," and my foster mother didn’t seem to have any particular religion, I was sent to a private Catholic school, St. Francis Academy. There the nuns took me in hand and taught me everything they could. St. Francis is the patron saint of animals and I attribute my deep, sincere love of animals to my teachings.

I was a very good student and tried to do my very best to prove to Louise and Andy Wade that they had not made a mistake in taking me in. My name was changed on that first day from Gladys Marie King to Betty Lou Wade. Since my own parents had never signed any papers, I could never be legally adopted. Thus, one of the major complications of my life. Any legal papers must be signed Gladys, but since I have been called Betty all my life, all of my friends still call me "Betty."

The year I was 11, in June, my foster father died and my life was changed again. Since he had committed suicide and drowned himself by jumping off a bridge into the river (he had never learned to swim), I was left alone again with only my foster mother. Since he had committed suicide, the insurance company would not pay off and we went from the "lush life" to poverty stricken. Destitute again!

We moved in with my foster mother's parents, and I was put into public school when I went into the seventh grade. I was twelve years old and life went on. That September my mother received a telegram!

My oldest sister, age 26, had been to visit our real aunt, my real mother's sister, in Louisville, Kentucky. They were looking through her family album and in the album was an old yellowed newspaper clipping, showing a picture of her little sister, me. It was taken soon after I had arrived in Owensboro. I had been entered in a cute child contest and had won for the state of Kentucky. Since my aunt had been the one who had put the three of us children into the orphanage and had not told my real mother where we were, she recognized me and cut out the picture, with the caption showing my new name and the name of my foster parents underneath. If not for that picture, I might never have been found.

My oldest sister and her husband drove from Centerville, Indiana, where they were living at the time and to their surprise found, not one but three, of her younger siblings. She had found us all.

The following Christmas she had a family reunion and Evelyn, Carl and I went to Centerville on the bus. The bus driver had been given directions as to where we should get off. There, as we got off the bus, were all of these strangers. My real mother, three more brothers and two sisters. There were eight of us children in all. That was the first time we had all been together in ten years.

We all grew up, got married, had children of our own, but have always kept in contact with each other. One of my brothers, all three of my sisters are gone now, but as long as I live I shall always remember standing alone in the great big ballroom and wondering what was going to happen to me........... and a lot of things did.