Countywide : Birth Mother Sought for Medical Data

A former Southland resident now living in Salina, Kan., is looking for the birth mother who put him up for adoption in 1950 and who has made contact with him only a few times since.

Joseph Mark Large said he is frantically searching for her because his 4-year-old son was recently diagnosed with diabetes and Large said he needs information about the woman’s medical history. It is “medically imperative that I find her,” he said.

Large believes the woman, Barbara Ellen Standridge, could be in Orange County because the last time she called him, seven years ago, she used a pay phone in Anaheim. Standridge would be about 58 to 60 years old now, he said.

He has not seen her since 1966, when she contacted him at Baldwin Park High School.

“How she knew where to find me, I don’t know,” he said. “I was called out of class to my counselor’s office, and the secretary said I had a visitor. It was a woman and her sister and a little blond-headed girl. (The woman) said she was my real mother. We spent all of about 30 minutes together.”

He was living in Ontario seven years ago, he said, when she tried to make a call from a pay phone in Anaheim and bill the charge to him. The operator cut him off after he refused the charges, before he could ask to be connected to the caller.

Large was born Jan. 12, 1950, in Mesa, Ariz., and adopted June 8, 1950, in Lordsburg, N.M.

Large lives in Salina with his wife, Kathleen, and their three children, Bryant, 11, Amanda, 9, and Timothy, 4.

He asked that anyone with information on his biological mother contact a local cable television show in Kansas, “America’s Talking,” which attempted to find Standridge for him for a segment called “Have A Heart.” That number is (800) 988-8255.