Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407100074
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LYNCHBURG LENGTH: Long
The family pictures were passed gently around. Yes, Patty has her father's dark wavy hair, his dusky eyes. She has her mother's slender hands.
Through old photos, a little nervous storytelling and people glancing shyly at each other, a new-found family began to get acquainted down on Cabell Street on Saturday afternoon.
Patty Emrick, 29, came all the way from Alabama to meet her mother. She brought her four gifts - three boys and a little girl, four grandchildren Margie Brown never thought she would see.
It was, all in all, a day Margie Brown never thought she would live to see.
Margie Robinson Brown was a ward of the state for much of her youth.
At 13, she had been taken to live at the Lynchburg Training School in neighboring Amherst County, a place where Virginia used to warehouse and sterilize some of its most unwanted citizens - orphans, mentally disabled people, epileptics, petty criminals and the homeless poor.
Margie's mother had been sent to a state farm for women in the 1950s. There was no one back home in Christiansburg to care for Margie or her 10-year-old half-sister, Betty, so they went to the training school.
Though many children were forcibly sterilized at the institution once called the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, Margie escaped the sterilizing knife for nine years of her incarceration there.
School officials arranged a series of live-in domestic jobs for her - caring for a couple's two little girls in Lynchburg, then the elderly parents of a training school nurse, then the babies of a couple who were doctors there.
Margie had a sweetheart from the training school, Ollie Brown. They had a long courtship, and Margie got pregnant by Ollie when she was 21.
She was shipped back to the training school. In September 1964, she gave birth there to a 5-pound baby girl she named Tammy.
"When I come to myself, I asked to see her, and they said no, I couldn't see her," Margie, 52, said last week.
She was outraged. "They had let me out to take care of other people's children, when I felt like I could take care of my own children."
But under Virginia's system of social controls at the time, the unmarried Margie was deemed unfit to have children.
Her baby was placed in a room near where Margie convalesced. When no one was around, Margie would sneak in to see her. "She wasn't but two days old, but you'd talk to her and she'd laugh at you. She'd giggle. I'd say, `Shhhhhh. You'll get me in trouble.' "
The baby was taken away and adopted by a Christiansburg couple. They renamed her Patty.
Back at the training school, officials pressured Margie to undergo sterilization. "They said if I wanted out of that place, I'd have to be sterile; and if I didn't, I'd have to stay there a lifetime."
She chose the surgery. Released from the training school, Margie and Ollie got married. He became a Lynchburg city garbage collector.
They tried to find their daughter. A welfare worker told them they would never be allowed to see her.
What Margie Brown didn't know was that her daughter's adoptive parents died when she was a little girl. Patty was raised near Newport News by her adoptive parents' son, 22 years older than she.
When Patty was 8, her brother's wife told her she had been adopted. Later, Patty found a slip of paper at the bottom of a cedar chest bearing her birth date at the training school and the names of Margie and Ollie Brown - her birth parents, she reckoned.
She repeatedly called the training school looking for them. A few months ago, she tried again, and someone at the institution, now called the Central Virginia Training Center, helped lead her to Margie Brown.
In February, Margie got a phone call. "She says to me, `I'm Pat.' I said, `I don't know no Pat.' She said, `I'm your daughter.' "
They've talked many times since then. Margie, who was taken out of school at an early age and still can't read or write, was pleased that Patty has gone to business school.
"Oh, she's smart," Margie said the day before Patty's visit. "She can play drums. She can play piano and play flute."
She learned that Patty is staying home to raise her children, that her son-in-law, Rick Emrick, installs heating and air-conditioning equipment in Oxford, Ala.
Margie hoped that Patty would look like Ollie. "My husband was a good-looking man."
Margie Brown's only regret is that Patty didn't call sooner. Ollie Brown, 54, died in January. He longed to meet their daughter, Margie said, but "after Ollie got sick, we didn't talk about her anymore. It upset him so badly."
Sometimes, though, when Margie would step out of a room, "I'd hear him say, `Well, I have a beautiful girl out in the world somewhere, but I don't know where.' "
Margie wanted to die when Ollie did. "I told God the morning he took my husband, `Take me, too.' "
But now, she has something - someone - to live for. "I can't get over this," she said Friday night. "I have a whole made family, a family I thought I'd never lay eyes on."
She is bitter at the institution that took her child away and prevented her from having any others. "That training school ought to be sued, the way they treated us. That place was awful. I wouldn't put a dog in it."
All last week, she cleaned and cooked for her new family. "I got a big ham, I got 'tater salad. I got macaroni, green peas, watermelon, Kool-Aid."
Her daughter's big green car pulled into Margie Brown's driveway at lunchtime Saturday - but all were much too nervous to eat a thing.
There were hugs all around. Margie's dining room table was laden with dolls and stuffed animals for her grandchildren - major purchases for a woman who lives on $436 a month in disability.
Margie has battled cancer three times and looks after her mother, Lucille Blankenship, and her half-sister, Betty Crigger. They were there Saturday and did their share of hugging, too.
The Emrick children - David, 10, Joey, 9, Stephanie, 5, and Ricky, 4 - seemed overwhelmed by three women so desperate to touch them and give them presents. They retreated to sit on the living room floor and watch a horror movie on cable TV with their father.
The young family left after a few hours. They were on their way to see Rick Emrick's ill grandfather in Tidewater.
Patty promised to keep calling and writing. She said she'd come back if her mother ever needed her. Margie's expecting them to come through again at Christmas.
Saturday evening, Margie digested the whole day - how much Patty looks like her beloved Ollie, how adorable all the children were, how Margie has hope now.
"I had gived up to die with my husband," she said. "I didn't think I had anything to live for anymore, but it winds up I do.
"I got friends that brag about their grandchildren, and Lord, I will now."
by CNB