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  THE FAMILY NOBODY WANTED

  The Family Nobody Wanted

  HELEN DOSS

  with a new introduction by MARY BATTENFELD and a new epilogue by the author

  Northeastern University Press

  BOSTON

  Published by University Press of New England

  Hanover and London

  NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS

  © 1954 by Helen Doss

  Originally published in 1954 by Little, Brown & Company.

  Reprinted 2001 by arrangement with Helen Doss.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Members of educational institutions and organizations wishing to photocopy any of the work for classroom use, or authors and publishers who would like to obtain permission for any of the material in the work, should contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766.

  ISBN–13: 978–1–55553–502–5

  ISBN–10: 1–55553–502–X

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Doss, Helen Grigsby.

  The family nobody wanted / Helen Doss ; with a new introduction by Mary Battenfeld, and a new epilogue by the author.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Boston: Little, Brown, 1954.

  Includes biographical references.

  ISBN 1–55553–503–8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 1–55553–502–X (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Doss, Helen Grigsby—Family. 2. Doss, Carl—Family. 3. Interracial adoption—California. 4. California—Biography. I. Title.

  CT275.D8653 D6 2001

  306.85—dc21 2001037018

  ISBN: 978-1-55553-849-1 (e-book)

  TO CARL

  Without Whose Help This Book Could Never Have Been Written, and Without Whom It Never Would Have Happened

  Contents

  1. IN THE BEGINNING

  2. BLIND ALLEYS

  3. AND THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

  4. LIKE TOPSY, WE GROW

  5. SNOW COUNTRY

  6. TARO

  7. THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

  8. ALL THE WRONG SIZES

  9. FARMERS IN THE DELL

  10. GROWING PAINS

  11. THE SKY LARK

  12. ALL GOD’S CHILDREN

  13. LITTLE BEAVER AND THE WAR ORPHAN

  14. SO THIS IS Life!

  15. MERRY, MERRY CHRISTMAS

  16. THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN

  17. DADDY SENDS MOTHER TO COLLEGE

  18. THE FULL QUIVER

  EPILOGUE

  Introduction*

  In my prayers, I give thanks that we never had children of our own, after all. Of our own blood, I mean, because children couldn’t be any more my own than these. Somehow I feel that our family was meant to be just this way.

  Helen Doss, The Family Nobody Wanted

  THE NIGHT BEFORE they are to finalize the adoption of the last of their twelve children, Helen Doss turns to her husband, Carl, and affirms the central message of The Family Nobody Wanted. “Our family was meant to be just this way,” Doss declares, claiming her children, adopted at different ages and from a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds, as “my own.” For the original baby boom audience of The Family Nobody Wanted, and even for many twenty-first-century readers of this new edition, that declaration is likely to sound perplexing, if not absurd. The cultural belief that adoptive families are “less than” biological ones is so entrenched that Doss must sidestep the biological connotations of the phrase “children of our own” with the qualification “Of our own blood, I mean, because children couldn’t be any more my own than these.” Despite that powerful declaration, others doubt Helen Doss’s claim. Even in the last chapter of The Family Nobody Wanted, a neighbor known as “Mrs. Pickles” tells the Dosses as they leave for the county courthouse to adopt three more children, “I’ll admit I don’t understand what you’re doing” (266).

  Nearly fifty years have passed since the original publication of The Family Nobody Wanted, but it is clear that a majority of Americans still “don’t understand” adoption. The Evan B. Donaldson Institute’s 1997 Benchmark Adoption Survey found that half the Americans polled felt that adoption “is not quite as good as having one’s own child.”1 The survey confirms conclusions of scholars such as David Schneider, who contends that Americans ascribe to the biological family an “almost mystical commonality and identity.”2 Such views have helped to create a contemporary America that, according to Elizabeth Bartholet, a law professor and adoptive mother, “glorifies reproduction, drives the infertile to pursue treatment at all costs, socializes them to think of adoption as a second-class form of parenting to be pursued only as a last resort, and regulates adoption in a way that makes it difficult, degrading, and expensive.”3 Bartholet’s comments were borne out by two cover stories in popular magazines that appeared during the week this essay went to the publisher.4 Although both articles included positive points, these cover stories also encouraged readers to regard adoption as an arduous and questionable way to form a family. Thus, U.S. News and World Report’s “The Adoption Maze” reminded readers of the “difficult, expensive and potentially heartbreaking” side of adoption, while People’s cover tag line, “How Stars Find Their Babies,” commodified and objectified those babies, and linked the lives of both birth parents and adoptive parents to the far-from-normal lives of celebrities. These articles, like most reviewed for a 1988 survey of film and print stories about adoption in the mass media, ultimately depict adoption “as a troubling and troublesome issue.”5

  Transracial adoptive families such as the Dosses are met with even more suspicion, in part because they continue to constitute a small minority of adoptive families.6 Research on transracial adoption is limited, and the most recent statistics available suggest that only about 8 percent of adoptions occur across racial lines. The continued rarity of transracial adoption can be traced to concerns about appropriate support of a child’s racial identity, as well as to more general fears about interracial relationships. Even the 1994 Multiethnic Placement Act, which removed legal barriers to transracial adoption, has not resulted in demonstrably greater numbers of transracial placements. For example, in 1998 only 15 percent of adoptions from U.S. foster care were transracial.7

  Discomfort with transracial adoption also has roots in the widespread cultural belief that “real” children look like their parents. The author of a recent Salon.com “Mothers Who Think” column describes what is to her the self-evident value of birth over adoptive children. “Like everybody else, I just want a child who looks like me and talks like me and fits into my family—just as if he or she was born into it. Is that a crime?”8 While not a crime, the views of this “mother who thinks” do suggest the extent to which she and our culture still see adoption as acceptable only in cases where a family can “pass” for one linked through the double helix chain of DNA. Indeed, a recent survey showed that social workers continue to believe that it is valuable to match physical and mental characteristics of adoptive parents and children.9 The beliefs of these contemporary social workers mirror those of adoption practitioners encountered fifty years ago by Carl and Helen Doss. One social worker dismissed the couple’s request for a mixed-race child because, she said, “I would rather see a child raised in an orphanage, than by parents who look so different” (30). Given these widespread and enduring attitudes, it is no wonder that adoptive families today continue to face intrusive questions from strangers, neighbors, friends, and family who doubt that parents and children “who l
ook so different” constitute a “real” family.

  The Family Nobody Wanted offers emphatic, vivid, humorous, and loving evidence that adoptive families are as valid as those with “blood ties.” Readers who, like me, are members of the adoption triad (birth parents, adoptive parents, and adopted persons), will find in Helen Doss’s story a much-needed affirmation of ourselves and our lives. Doss’s 1954 memoir also continues to bring an important message to those many Americans whose views of adoption have been shaped by decades of secrecy and silence, broken intermittently by sensational news stories featuring degenerate birth mothers, desperate adoptive parents, corrupt adoption agencies, and victimized children. As 2001 began, the public face of adoption was represented by a bizarre and tragic transatlantic custody battle involving a birth mother, two sets of adoptive parents, a dubious adoption facilitator, and the six-month-old twins at the center of the dispute.10

  Such distorted media images have tended to go unexamined, since scholarship on adoption has traditionally been the province of social workers and psychologists, whose interests are clinical rather than cultural. The research that has been done, as Katarina Wegar argues, has “served to perpetuate rather than correct dominant stigmatizing biases against adoptive families.”11 Scholarship has been particularly limited on transracial adoption, which, as Susan Ito, a transracial adopted person, notes, “has existed far too long with neither academic attention nor practical support.”12 Only recently have scholars begun to analyze the historical and cultural meanings of this important method of family formation.13 Given this context, it is hardly surprising that many continue to see adoption as a strange, unnatural, and inferior way to create and live in a family. In showing readers that the Doss family is normal and “meant to be just this way,” The Family Nobody Wanted, both in 1954 and today, thus performs the vital cultural work of legitimizing and normalizing adoptive kinship relationships.

  Helen Doss begins with the poignant utterance “All in the world I wanted was a happy, normal little family” (3). At this point, as the Dosses struggle with infertility, a “happy, normal” family means to Helen Doss, and to her readers, a blood family. Yet by the end of The Family Nobody Wanted, the meaning of family has changed. Helen Doss’s intelligent and eloquent personal account convinces us that a family formed by adoption can be, as another book by Doss says, a “really real family.”14 Against all odds, Doss creates the happy, normal, although far from little, family she wants. Against even greater odds, readers come to accept that this international family, made up of white parents and twelve children whose heritages span much of the globe—from Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Burma to France, Spain, Mexico, Hawaii, and the Native American Chippewa, Blackfoot, and Cheyenne nations—is in fact a normal and happy American family.

  As Doss wrote, “It is the outsiders who imagine that our family is made up of incompatible opposites” (165). Helen Doss recognized that “outsiders” would find her family alien and unwanted, a view alluded to in the title. In fact Doss’s first choice for a title, All God’s Children, was demonstrably more positive than The Family Nobody Wanted. Yet the irony in the title is clear. The stories of how Donny, Laura, Susan, Teddy, Rita, Timmy, Alex, Diane, Elaine, Gregory, Richard, and Dorothy became Dosses demonstrate emphatically that each child was a wanted child. Indeed, almost every page of The Family Nobody Wanted offers proof of the title’s fallacy. By the time nine-year-old Richard says, “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else” (265), we as readers have to agree. Helen Doss’s insider’s view of her diverse, happy, and successful household has transformed the Dosses into a family that anybody would want.

  America first met “the family nobody wanted” in Helen Doss’s August 1949 Reader’s Digest article.15 The appeal of the Doss family was evident in initial responses to that article. Helen Doss reported that “we were flooded by letters from all over the United States, and clear around the world, asking for the rest of the story in a book.”16 By the end of 1951, Life magazine had featured the Doss family, and a nationwide NBC radio show had named them the “Christmas Family of the Year.” Intense interest in the family’s story led publishers to ask Helen Doss for a book. Initially reluctant to publish a story that would put her children in the spotlight and keep her from writing a novel, Helen Doss was finally convinced that a book about her family would have value. That book, composed in spare moments between dishwashing and diaper changing, was The Family Nobody Wanted.17

  Helen Doss may have questioned the appropriateness of making “our own family . . . the subject of my first book,” but her readers have never had such doubts.18 Since its original publication in January 1954, The Family Nobody Wanted has inspired, instructed, and engaged the hearts of two generations of American readers. Although the book never achieved “blockbuster” status, its publishing history, like the Doss story itself, is one of persistence, loyalty, and love over the long haul. Other books can boast of more immediate sales than The Family Nobody Wanted, but few have achieved such longevity. The book went through more than two dozen printings and was translated into seven languages before going out of print in North America in 1984. McCall’s serialized the book, while a number of book clubs, including the Sears Peoples Choice Book Club and Scholastic Books, sold The Family Nobody Wanted. These inexpensive editions made the book available to a large and diverse audience. Two film versions, one made soon after the original publication and the other in 1975, provide further evidence of the book’s enduring and widespread popular appeal.19

  Even after going out of print, The Family Nobody Wanted has continued to inspire a passionately loyal readership. Comments of readers who have posted reviews on Amazon. com suggest this, as do the high prices and limited availability of out-of-print editions of the book. A reader from Idaho echoed the sentiments of many Internet reviewers when she described the book as “one that I will always treasure. I would like to scream to every person, ‘Please read this book!’”20 If these loyal readers wanted to buy The Family Nobody Wanted, they could expect to pay more than one hundred dollars for a copy in good condition.21

  The enduring appeal of The Family Nobody Wanted can be traced in part to the composition of its original audience. Recommended by libraries and educational associations, and sold through Scholastic Books, The Family Nobody Wanted was soon required reading at many elementary, middle, and high schools. The Horn Book Magazine placed its review of The Family Nobody Wanted in a section that highlighted “books of interest to high school students.”22 In giving its endorsement to the 1975 ABC television version of The Family Nobody Wanted, a National Education Association press release noted that although “prime time TV specials have been given the NEA Seal, this marks the first time it has been awarded to a prime time television movie.”23 Helen Doss even today continues to receive letters from teachers who use tattered copies of The Family Nobody Wanted in their elementary or secondary school classrooms.24 Thus, a large group of readers first encountered the Doss family as preteens or teenagers. Moreover, much of that younger audience read the book along with teachers in the institutional context of American public schools. For example, a classroom teacher described how “I would read it to my class as literature. Every now and then, I had to stop reading to fight back the tears. One of my students must have fallen in love with it too because it disappeared one day.”25

  Helen Doss envisioned The Family Nobody Wanted as a book for adults. Yet I, along with almost everyone I have asked, can date a first reading of the book to the late elementary- or middle-school years. Three-quarters of the Amazon.com reviewers of The Family Nobody Wanted mention that they first read the book as a child or young adult. Many note that they have read and reread the book numerous times, both as children and as adults. These readers recall that the initial appeal of The Family Nobody Wanted lay in its charming descriptions of family life. A Maine reader described it as “wonderful, full of love and triumph, through some very trying times, as well as a lot of fun!” Another reader fear
ed that the book would be filled “with big words that nobody understood.” Instead, The Family Nobody Wanted captured her interest so completely that “I couldn’t wait to finish this book.” A Massachusetts reader who claims to have read “this book about 100 times as a child” remembers it as “great to read—full of details of life with a houseful of kids and not much money!”26

  This original baby boom audience of The Family Nobody Wanted could find in Helen Doss’s story of a woman raising twelve children a reflection of the traditional nuclear family enshrined in popular situation comedies of the era. Yet while the size of the Doss family links it to dominant images of the family in the postwar years, in most ways the family is far from typical. Recognizing this, readers have particularly stressed the importance of the book to shaping their views of adoption. As one reader said, “I’m sure this book was an inspiration to many people to adopt children that ‘nobody wanted.’” Another Amazon.com reviewer credited The Family Nobody Wanted with influencing her decision to adopt several Asian children.27

  The family’s adoptive status is not the only thing that sets it apart from dominant images of the postwar American family. Unlike the affluent Cleaver and Brady families of television fame, the Dosses, as the Massachusetts reader quoted earlier realized, had “a houseful of kids and not much money.” The Dosses are so far from the consumerism urged by the affluent fifties that one of the children responds to the overabundance of goods given the family for being “the Christmas Family of the Year” by observing, “Santa Claus brought you too many things” (219). And while television rarely if ever showed its housewives hard at work, Helen Doss gives us scenes in which she wallpapers a room with children underfoot, copes with a broken furnace in her husband’s absence, and does backbreaking, financially needed labor in a family garden. Perhaps most important, unlike the same-race families that even today set the standard for popular images of the American family, the Doss family was visibly multiracial. In such ways The Family Nobody Wanted opened important cultural fault lines, providing its original readers a glimpse at difference during a period in which dominant images of the American family stressed and promoted its homogeneity.