The Cradle

All over the land last week thousands of adopted children were growing up to be strong, healthy boys & girls. In Chicago Charles Gates Dawes could boast of a grown adopted son, a grown adopted daughter. In Santa Barbara, Calif., the John J. Mitchells (Lolita Armour) could likewise boast of two adopted children. Down the Coast in Hollywood, many a cinemadopted youngster rested securely in his crib, or romped beside a private pool. There the visitor could read about Wallace Beery's 4-year-old Carol Ann, Gloria Swanson's Joseph, Harold Lloyd's Peggy, Constance Bennett's Peter, Morton & Barbara Bennett Downey's Michael, Barbara Stanwyck's Dion, Fredric March's 3-year-old Jacqueline, 1-year-old Anthony.

Last week in Evanston, Ill., a dark Semitic-looking man and his beauteous brown-haired wife hastened out of a little red-brick cottage behind a nurse carrying a basket. In the basket was a baby. The foursome climbed into a cab, were whisked to Chicago's County Court. There Al Jolson, famed publicizer of motherhood, and Wife Ruby Keeler, who for two years had wanted a child, formally adopted a 7-week-old black-locked son. Father Jolson had rushed from Manhattan, Mother Keeler from Hollywood for the adoption. Soon as they signed the papers, each rushed back to his respective home, she with the new baby in the basket and babbling: "We're simply thrilled. Isn't the baby scrumptious? His daddy thinks so too. I think he takes after Al a little, with that dark hair."

To the Jolsons and to the world the adoption was an event. But to the managing director of the famed Cradle whence he came, Al Jolson Jr. was merely Baby No. 2640.

It was a dozen years ago that five Chicago tycoons sat down in an Evanston living room to listen to an energetic, bright-eyed little woman expound an idea. Mrs. William Bradley Walrath was talking from experience. Few years before, a relative who had lost a child at birth asked her to find another to take its place. When Mrs. Walrath did so--in a Chicago maternity hospital--other people, for one reason or another childless, commenced asking her to do likewise. When she had placed 90 babies for adoption, she was confronted with a discovery that has never ceased to cause her wonder: there are more people who want to adopt babies than there are babies available for adoption.

And there are a great many of the latter. What Mrs. Walrath wanted of the five assembled men was $5,000 with which she could make the cash payment on a $15,500 house she had in mind as the nursery's headquarters. Then & there Mrs. Walrath's listeners--U. S. Gypsum's Sewell Lee Avery, Pure Oil's Henry Dawes (brother), Franklin MacVeagh's Rollin H. Keyes (since deceased), Carson Pirie Scott's Frederick Hossack Scott, Butler Bros.' Frank H. Cunningham--gave the necessary $1,000 each.

Thus the start, in 1923, of Evanston's Cradle, now most famed institution of its kind in the U. S. The town's best specialists agreed to serve gratis. Maternity institutions agreed to advise when unmarried mothers, unable or unwilling to shoulder responsibility of rearing their children, were giving them up.

The children sent to The Cradle (usually a week or ten days old) are not long in finding homes. Come rich & poor alike, from every U. S. state, from many a foreign land--from South America, China, Japan, India where a missionary has adopted first one, then another. Although not demanded of any foster parent, those adopters who can afford to do so send yearly donations. A knitting school, a cafeteria for 75-c- lunches, a layette shop are popular socialite centres for eating and shopping for baby clothes. When news of The Cradle reached Hollywood, where most would-be mothers find little time for childbearing, Mrs. Walrath got her share of the business. Some applicants she turned down flat. But, usually reticent about names of her patrons, Mrs. Walrath is proud to admit that from The Cradle to Hollywood have gone Gracie Allen's Sandra Jean, Joe E. Brown's youngest child, Mary Elizabeth, Pat O'Brien's year-old Mavoureen, Miriam Hopkins' curly-mopped Michael, now 3.

Like all other foster parents of Cradle babies, the Jolsons last week could rest assured that their son had normal expectancy to live. Mrs. Walrath permits no child to be adopted unless it is healthy and normal. Congenitally-diseased babies, babies with syphilitic tendencies, are sent to institutions soon as the customary Cradle stay--usually about five weeks-- has elapsed. All parents are given the record of the real mother, and whatever information concerning the father the mother will supply. Mrs. Walrath has had great luck in wangling the truth out of them. She tries to match the children with their new parents as to coloring, general conformation, size, religions or racial origin. To the Jolsons went a child half Jewish, half Irish.

That Cradle babies are well babies is not a matter of chance. In 1927 a nationwide epidemic of summer dysentery pushed the Cradle death rate up to over 12%. Twenty-seven infants died. Desperate, Mrs. Walrath was ready to quit. But she had reckoned without a great & famed Evanston friend.

The world had already heard of Dr. Gladys Rowena Henry Dick who, with her Doctor-Husband George Frederick, had in 1923 isolated the scarlet fever germ and discovered a serum for the disease. The Dicks were thinking of adopting two Cradle children, which they later did, a boy and a girl. To The Cradle came Dr. Gladys to make bacterial examination of the food. Her chief discovery: that the powdered milk, the babies' chief basis for nourishment, unboilable and hence unsterilized, was carrying the germs that caused the epidemic of dysentery. It was through her report--subsequently made public in the Journal of Diseases for Children--that the manufacturers changed their formulas, made powdered milk boilable.

Mrs. Walrath still was not satisfied when, in 1928, the death rate dropped to 5%. Back came Dr. Gladys, this time to propose that the unit system of nursing be instituted. Today every one of the 24 cradles is partitioned off with glass. Beside each crib is the child's individual table, on which stand that child's individual bathing basin, bottles, swabbers. Each baby has its own supply of diapers (previously soaked for two hours in sterilizing solution) and no nurse may borrow diapers from one baby's stand to dress another. None but nurses and visiting doctors may enter the rooms. Out of 281 babies cared for in 1934, one died.

Aside from her lawyer-husband, her four children, her six grandchildren (one of whom was adopted from The Cradle when her own daughter's baby died), and an occasional cigaret, Mrs. Walrath professes to have no interests outside The Cradle. Long ago she found she could not attend social functions without encountering a foster Cradle parent, with whom she was obliged to gossip about the foster child's heritage, health, behavior, future. Now Mrs. Walrath seldom attends such functions at all because, she admits with a twinkle, she cannot do so without meeting a real Cradle parent. But the records of Cradle parentage are sealed when a baby is adopted. By agreement the mother never knows where it goes. And Mrs. Walrath's amazing memory, the only other complete record of the 2,640 fosterlings, will die when she dies.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.