Family Reunion: One Man’s Long, Hard Quest : Siblings Separated 52 Years Ago Hold Get-Together at Indiana Farmhouse

The last time Ben Walters saw his eight brothers and sisters together, he was a 14-year-old in bib overalls, kicking and squirming in the grip of “a big ol’ whiskered farmer” as two cars disappeared down the dusty main street of a small Kentucky town. One car carried his mother to “an insane asylum.” The other headed toward Louisville, taking the boy’s five younger siblings to an orphanage. Walters and the older three remained.

For Walters, that memory became the seminal scene in a lifelong saga--one part detective yarn, two parts tear-jerker--which finally reached a conclusion here last weekend.

“Somewhere, wherever she is, momma’s not hurtin’ anymore,” Walters said, fighting back a sob as cars arrived from New York and Texas, South Dakota, Kentucky and California, reuniting the five brothers and four sisters on an Indiana farm, about 200 miles from the town where they had all cried so hard almost 52 years earlier.

Walters, who lives in the Orange County city of Cypress, was the central figure in reuniting the family. His story began a half-century ago when the Walterses were sharecroppers, farming 80 acres outside of Hardin, Ky. The family had always been poor, and the Great Depression didn’t improve their lot.

“But we were never hungry,” Walters said in a voice made for Bluegrass tunes.

George Walters, the father, was a “called-upon” preacher who worked the land and hunted to feed his family. Eula Walters, the mother, cooked the meals the family ate around a big kitchen table: beans, peas, sorghum with molasses, rabbit stew with dumplings--whatever the farm and the woods yielded.

When darkness set in, the family usually gathered on the front porch of their small farmhouse to sing hymns. The children slept under handmade quilts on straw-stuffed beds in the two bedrooms they shared.

Ben’s mother always managed to keep the house in order. But as far back as Walters can remember, his mother had her quirks.

“She would laugh when nothing funny had been said, and she’d say foolish things. She felt that inanimate objects had a strange influence on her.

“Her symptoms were mild and transitory. She was never a danger to herself or anyone else. But she was an embarrassment to several of her relatives, and she had a brother who took it upon himself to do something about it.”

The brother contacted Judge Homer Rayburn, a blacksmith “who got elected judge because he was a good banjo picker,” according to Walters. Rayburn agreed to commit Eula Walters to the state hospital in Hopkinsville, 60 miles to the east.

“Well, poor ol’ George, what’s he going to do with all of them nine young’uns?” was the unanswered question, Walters said.

“So it was soon decided and so ordered that we were all going to be sent to an orphanage.”

Father Locked Up

When George Walters got word of what was afoot, he said, “I’d just about kill a feller before I’d let ‘em take my young’uns.” So, Ben said, “the judge ordered him locked up.”

On the morning of Sept. 6, 1934, relatives brought the nine Walters children, ranging in age from 17 to less than a year, to the Marshall County Courthouse in Benton. But the Model A that was heading for Louisville couldn’t hold them all.

“So they decided to take the five younger ones and leave us four older children” with dad.

” . . . There’s no use in me telling you what it’s like to go back to a house that had always been full of little children laughing--little feet on the floor and everything,” Ben continued. “We tried to take up life where it had been interrupted, and we couldn’t. After that, Dad wasn’t right in his head. “

In January the family sold everything they had--”a cow, some pigs and chickens and the corn that was in the crib”--and they hitched a ride to Louisville. “We expected the children would be there. But we went out to the orphanage . . . and the children were gone. They’d simply been given away.”

Last weekend, in the yard of brother J. T. Walters’ white farmhouse, just outside New Washington, the family got together again. Twenty-seven of Eula Walters’ great-grandchildren batted Wiffle Balls around the wide sloping lawn and fired bottle rockets into the cornfields. Her grandchildren rocked on creaking lawn swings and ate fried catfish, fending off the steamy heat with cold beer and lemonade.

Tears, Hugs and Talk

And the five brothers and four sisters who’d been at the Marshall County courthouse that day hugged and cried a little, then sat under two tall sugar maples and talked.

They discussed nuclear war and noodling for catfish (“Ya just reach down under the river bank and tickle ‘em up into your hands.”). They cracked jokes and argued politics and religion (some are “triple D Democrats,” some “staunch Republicans,” and among them they represent eight Christian denominations).

Mainly, though--as is the fashion at reunions--they talked about their lives, honing and polishing the details and trying to piece it all together into a meaningful story.

Except for the one who was an infant, each has his or her own view of life on the Kentucky farm. Some believe their poverty and their father’s violent temper had reached the point where “something had to happen.” But none believes the family had to be traumatized as it was.

And, although some quibbled with Ben Walters over details of how the family got back together, all expressed admiration for his perseverance in bringing the reunion about.

“You can’t just take brothers and sisters and give them away,” Ben Walters said. “I couldn’t live with that.”

But Walters knows the family was naive in thinking they could simply reclaim their five missing kin. The orphanage said its records were confidential, and no one in Kentucky’s myriad bureaucracies was eager to help.

Fifteen at the time, Ben “made a pest” of himself for six years. Then he was drafted.

From his Army post in California, “I made phone calls. I wrote letters. I went back to Kentucky on leave and interviewed people. I did everything I could think to do. . . . And I came up with zero.”

Then, eight years after the family broke up, a letter arrived forwarded from Hardin, Ky. It was from Lalah, his oldest missing sister, who had been 8 when the family was pulled apart. Lalah told her brother that a couple had stopped by to see the orphanage, and on the spur of the moment said, “We’d like that little yellow-haired, curly-headed one.”

‘Kept Rattling Cages’

“Well, we kept rattling cages,” Walters said, and over the next 13 years, another brother found his way back to the family, and a sister who had been adopted by a “good, hard-working couple” got wind of the extensive search and reintroduced herself.

Finding the last two missing brothers, however, proved more difficult.

One big break came in 1944, when Walters received an envelope in the mail containing a picture of a little boy riding in a pedal car. On the back were the words “Jim Crowe.” Walters recognized his younger brother, who’d been 6 when Ben saw him last.

Walters and his wife, whom he’d met on Catalina Island in California, scrutinized the snapshot. It showed the boy behind a chain-link fence with a factory in the background. By identifying the hardwood trees also in the background, they determined that the photo had to have been taken somewhere in a narrow swatch of the southeastern United States. The factory indicated that a sizable city was nearby.

With those clues, Walters began sending out thousands of letters to sheriffs’ departments, chambers of commerce, churches and factories. Following the leads that came back, he tracked the boy from the Ford Motor Co. in Louisville to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

Disheartening Response

“Then I got a letter. It was signed by Jim Crowe, and it took me severely to task for my trying to interfere in his life. He said he was happy, and considered my attempts to find him an intrusion.

“Well, I was devastated.” He gave up on Jim Crowe.

For her part, Eula Walters had withdrawn into her own world after her family splintered. Her older children say that when they would take her from the hospital on visits, she’d stop cars in the street and ask, “Have you seen my children?”

In 1957, she died in the hospital.

Walters decided that Jim Crowe should know about his mother’s funeral. So he picked up the trail where he’d left off and followed his missing brother through some unexpected terrain--from the Navy to the University of Washington at Seattle, back through a civilian post at the Navy and then to the IBM Corp. in New York.

Walters sent another letter. The brother wrote back. He said he hadn’t known Walters was looking for him.

‘Living in Hell’

Crowe told Walters that the orphanage had been “like living in hell.” Separated from brothers and sisters, he had cried uncontrollably. In attempts to quiet him, the “ward mothers” beat him and immersed him in steaming hot water.

Then a man named William Crowe, who claimed to be a wealthy philanthropist, asked for the boy. In fact, the man was a pedophile, Crowe said, who raised him in a fleabag hotel in Louisville’s red-light district.

To this day, Ben believes the mysterious photo was sent by a prostitute who had somehow heard of his search and sympathized. He speculates it was William Crowe, pretending to be Jim, who wrote the rebuke to throw him off the trail.

“That only leaves the baby,” Walters said.

The family stayed in touch, and they all worked on finding the missing brother in their own ways. When his job gave him time (“I supervised the building of about half the freeways in greater L.A.”), Ben continued his long-distance detective work. But the trail grew colder by the year. People who might have been able to help him died. The orphanage went out of business.

Near Giving Up

Meanwhile, Walters’ own health faltered. After two heart attacks, he was making less money, and he couldn’t afford to mail 500 letters at a time.

“It became apparent to me that I was going to die without finding the baby.”

About this time, Walters got the idea that perhaps, if he put the family’s story in a book, someone might read it and provide new leads. He called his story “The Glass Snake,” a reference to a creature in Southern folklore that shatters when struck, but can put itself back together if the head collects all its pieces.

Publishers were not interested, but finally a Xeroxed copy “touched the heart” of someone with the right connections, Ben said, adding that he “took an oath before God” not to reveal who that was.

But that person read some files--illegally--then took Ben aside in the hallway of a government office. He opened his hand, and written in felt tip pen on the palm was the name “Archie Hillman.”

With help from friends, the family combed the country.

“And this computer hacker, bless her heart, came up with the information that my brother was a Realtor in Houston, Tex. . . . This was 49 years, 9 months and 28 days after he was taken from Momma’s breast.”

Each of the siblings has his or her own view of life after the family breakup. Perhaps the most remarkable story is the one told by Jim Crowe.

For six years, rather than return to the torment of the orphanage, Crowe endured life with a man who beat and molested him, he said. Then, when he was 12, he ran away, earning his keep by “bailing hay and pitching manure.” On his own, Crowe enrolled in high school, then joined the Navy and finally paid his way through college on the GI Bill. Today he is a senior engineer at IBM Corp. His designs have led to numerous original patents for the corporation and a computer memory cell was named in his honor, he said.

Crowe, who was 6 when the family broke up, is uncertain what his past may have had to do with his present success. But he pointed out that psychologists say the first six years of a person’s life shape his character.

“Just look at my brothers and sisters, they’re all good, moral, generous, forgiving, thoughtful folks,” he said.

‘Ran Hot and Cold’

For his part, Arch Hillman--”the baby”--said he has no way of knowing what his life might have been like if Judge Rayburn hadn’t literally had him pulled from his mother’s breast. What he does know, he said, is that he lived his life knowing he was adopted and considering the folks who raised him his real parents.

About the reunion, “I ran hot and cold,” Hillman recalled. As he stood anxiously observing the happy chaos on Saturday--an only child looking at his eight brothers and sisters for the first time--he allowed that he still felt somewhat adrift.

“It’s strange. It’s very strange,” he said. “Suddenly I have these 50 or 60 family members I never had before.”

By Sunday, as everyone was getting teary-eyed again, Arch made plans for fishing trips and future visits. He said he is glad he could help write the climax to Ben’s story.

“Ol’ Ben’s in hog heaven,” he said, nodding at his older brother and new-found friend. “Just look at that skunk-eatin’ grin.”

Still Hard to Accept

But still, he wasn’t completely sure what had just happened to his life.

“It’s been real, real enjoyable meeting all these people. I haven’t met anyone who was a real turkey,” he said, grinning.

“But ‘brother’ and ‘sister’--it’s still hard to accept those terms. . . . Family is more than just blood. When I think of ‘family’ I think of people who have had common backgrounds, common experiences. . . .

“Now this is the kind of thing that cements people together” he added, scanning the carnival of new-found relatives--hunched old men, adolescents with rebellious haircuts, squalling toddlers.

“Maybe some day, when we get together again, we’ll look back and say ‘Remember that weekend we were all out at J. T.’s farm? Wasn’t that something?’ ”