
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 11, 1993                   TAG: 9309110289
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RICHARD W. CARLSON
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

A 40-YEAR GOODBYE

A FRIEND asked me if I saw the news photo of Jessica DeBoer sobbing in the back of a car as she was being taken away to meet her new set of parents. ``It made me weepy,'' she said. ``Can you imagine what effect this will have on that child's life?''

I could imagine. The same thing happened to me when I was about Jessica's age. It was the spring of 1943. I was 27 months old and living with my family in a small town in Massachusetts. They were not my ``family'' by blood but by association. More than two years before, I had been dropped off at a Boston orphanage by my mother. It was called the Home for Little Wanderers. The home ran a classified ad in the Boston papers. The headline said, ``Home Wanted for Foundling.'' One person responded.

Florence Moberger, then in her early 30s, was a housewife in the town of Malden, a few miles from Boston. One morning at breakfast she read the ad. She an

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