4 Sets of Twins--and Their Other 2 Siblings--Come Home for Reunion

The Fourth of July family reunion at the Burbank home of Margie and Kermit Lee could have hopped off a canvas by Norman Rockwell.

And made a quick stop at a photocopying machine.

Starting in 1933, the Lees went forth and multiplied, mainly in duplicate. Without fertility drugs, test tubes or other modern conveniences, the Lees begat four sets of twins.

For good measure, they also threw in two individual babies--the kind somewhat frostily described by multiple-birth aficionados as “singletons.”

Although most of the brood lives in Southern California, career and family moves had kept everyone from getting together for about 20 years--until Saturday.

Tradition of Twins

Margie Lee had grown up with eight brothers and sisters, including a set of twins. Kermit Lee, who became an engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, had nine siblings, including a set of twins.

Neither was surprised when they were blessed with twins in Salt Lake City 54 years ago. But the twins kept coming--in 1939, 1943 and 1945.

People started to talk.

The gang achieved notoriety in the 1950s. They waltzed off with “Most Twins in One Family” honors five years running at the Southern California Twins Convention in Huntington Beach. They once were guests on the old “Garry Owens Family Show.” Margie Lee, citing a need for a dining table as big as a corner lot, once successfully competed to become “Queen for a Day.”

“A few weeks after the show, Jack Bailey came out here and visited with us,” she recalls of the TV show host. “It was quite a thrill.”

However, the emcee who conferred nobility on countless housewives would have been lost in the crowd on Saturday.

The 10 grown-up siblings cavorted and carried on in the house designed by Mom and built by Dad. The brood hauled along a couple dozen of their own 40 children--not a twin in the bunch--as well as a few of their parents’ six great-grandchildren.

Margie Lee allowed that she was “in a dither”--not unusual for a mother of 10.

Remembrance of Photos Past

Keith Lee, 42, owner of a Burbank graphic-design firm, choreographed the day’s highlight: a group pose of family members on the Lee staircase in the same positions they struck for a photographer from the now-defunct Los Angeles Mirror 37 years ago.

“Suck it in!,” someone yelled.

“Is the stairwell stressed for this weight?” asked Wallace, an engineer who owns an aeronautical-parts firm.

Margie, at 37 the youngest, a mother of six and a foster-care specialist in Irving, Tex., could no longer sit on Mom’s lap, as she did in the old photograph. Kent, vice president of a high-tech engineering company, had lost some hair.

No twins wore identical clothing 37 years later; no two bore identical smiles. All 12 family members could as easily have been seated in a jury box or on a bus-stop bench. The only resemblances here, beyond the nearly universal choice of art and engineering as professions, seemed purely coincidental.

Even while growing up, the twins, all non-identical, did not present a vision of startling similarities.

‘Didn’t Known I Had a Twin’

“A lot of kids didn’t even know I had a twin brother in the same grade,” said Keith.

Warren, a free-lance illustrator living in San Francisco, concurred. “It wasn’t like you tried to hide it,” he said, “but you didn’t try to point it out either.

“Essentially, we were 10 kids, more than four sets of twins and a brother and a sister.”

And they did what any talented bunch of 10 kids with an age span of 17 years and a set of tolerant parents would do.

“We built stuff,” said Warren, who is half of the oldest set of twins. “We built soapbox racers and invented a precursor of the skateboard. We strung a good majority of the trees on the block with telegraph equipment and spent a lot of time closing circuits and making lights blink.”

Childish High Jinks

With that many children in proximity, there always was someone pursuing and someone pursued. On one occasion, Margie Lee recalled, she snatched a water pistol from a youngster on the prowl, whipped open the door for a shot at the aggressor and accidentally squirted the postman full in the face.

Familial high jinks had no place at the annual competitions for twins, however.

“There was a chain of command based on age,” recalled Warren, 54.

“You had to get up early in the morning and make sure that everyone was duded up and respectable, to the extent that the public demands respectability. You had to constantly be corralling everybody. You never knew when the family would be called up to the stage or when a photographer would wander by.”

From 1949 to 1953, the family had garnered as many trophies and plaques as they wanted and retired from competitive twinning.

World Record

As it turns out, they hardly would have been contenders in the national or world arenas.

According to Helen Kirk Lauve, an authority on multiple births, a Sioux woman named Mrs. James Big Crow may have earned the U. S. twins-in-family record. Mrs. Big Crow, who had her 24th child in Rapid City, S. D., in 1964, bore eight sets of twins and eight other children, Lauve said in a telephone interview from her Galveston, Tex., home.

“There are so many families with more than one set that I can’t keep track of them,” said Lauve, who said she has amassed five rooms’ worth of clippings on multiple births, as well as scholarly works, medical treatises and memorabilia like a brand of soap commemorating the birth of the Dionne quintuplets.

She said that a set of twins appears once in every 90 American births, and that 100 million twins now roam the world.

Bottom of Roster

Two of them, Ross and Norris McWhirter, compilers of the “Guinness Book of World Records,” would rank the Lee family close to the bottom of the roster of families with an unusual number of twins.

According to the McWhirters, the greatest twin-bearer of them all was a Mme. Vassilyev in the Russian village of Shuya, 150 miles east of Moscow. This long-suffering woman is said to have borne 16 sets of twins between 1725 and 1765--not to mention seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets.

The Lees had never set out to break any records. They barely acknowledge that their family is unusual, except for its size.

“I have no basis for comparison,” muses patriarch Kermit Lee, always the level-headed engineer. “I don’t know how it would be otherwise.”