
DATE: Tuesday, July 1, 1997                 TAG: 9707010047

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E4   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JO-ANN CLEGG, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   99 lines

FACT-BASED NOVEL SPELLS OUT DANGERS FACED BY CHILDREN IN FOSTER CARE

LITTLE ABOUT Betty Pruden betrays her past.

The fine bone structure, glowing skin and gentle manner of the 63-year-old grandmother reveal nothing of the child who was abandoned, abused and battered by those trusted to care for her 60 years ago.

Cuddling a 2-year-old grandchild in her daughter's Virginia Beach home, she typifies the kind of mature woman who volunteers in the community, stays active in her church and cares deeply for her family.

But the memories of a childhood spent in the foster care system of the 1930s and '40s remain.

Now, in the hopes that it will help others become more aware of the plight of all vulnerable youngsters, Pruden has written a novel about her early years. ``Home Free,'' published in April by E.M. Press of Manassas, is a simply told tale of a child's survival in a foster care system ill equipped to meet even the most basic of emotional needs.

``Every word that I wrote is true, everything in it happened to me.'' said Pruden, ``but I don't want any indication that this is a pity party book.''

Indeed, pity is not something that comes easily to the woman who is the real life ``Mary'' of the book. She is matter-of-fact and even forgiving as she talks of the abuses and abusers she faced after she was abandoned sometime before dawn on a January morning in 1937.

Her mother, for reasons that are still unclear, left her outside a small store. In sub-freezing temperatures, the child waited beside her baby sister's carriage for their mother to return.

She never did.

Pruden was 3 years old. Her sister was 6 months.

Discovered hungry and severely frostbitten several hours later, they were turned over to the local welfare department. Battering and abuse - emotional, physical and sexual - soon followed.

For 14 years, the sisters would cling to each other, ``welfare kids'' taunted by school mates and scorned by adults angry at having to support the children of irresponsible parents when most could barely afford to feed their own.

Of the five homes in which the children were placed, two were nurturing. A third was at least safe.

In the other two placements, the children were subjected to abuse that would today be deemed criminal.

Still, Pruden recalls the positives even in the home where she sometimes stayed awake all night for fear of incurring the foster mother's wrath by wetting the bed. ``That was the prettiest house I ever saw,'' she says. ``We had a lovely room, and Mom Tanner taught us beautiful manners.''

But as the woman she refers to as Mom was indoctrinating the young girls in the niceties of table settings and proper serving, her husband was introducing them to sexual behavior far beyond their years.

The sexual abuse ended for Pruden when the foster mother packed the sometimes rebellious young girl's suitcase and told her she'd have to go to another home because she had become too hard to handle. Her younger sister, the good girl, would stay.

As bad as the abuse was, Pruden has gone against the current trend and stayed away from sensational revelations in her book.

``I wanted it to be a book that everybody could read - foster children, parents, welfare workers,'' she says.

It was not until she graduated from high school in 1951 that Pruden left foster care. First to go to business college in Rochester, N.Y., and then to marry an Air Force man.

Eventually they moved to southwestern Virginia where, for the first time in her life, Pruden had extended family. ``My in-laws were my first real family,'' she recalls. ``They were wonderful to me.''

But there was yet another abandonment. Her first marriage ended after 32 years when her husband left, saying he didn't love her and never had. She was devastated.

It was while seeing a counselor after the breakup that Pruden decided to write her story.

Now remarried, she divides her time between her Roanoke home and her daughter's in Virginia Beach. She and her husband are making plans to move to the area in the fall, to put down roots in a place where they can be close to family, something that is particularly important to the woman who grew up with so little.

A few years ago she sat down to talk with the foster care worker who was responsible for her first three placements. She asked the woman why she and her sister had not been removed from a particularly abusive home.

``I thought there might be something wrong,'' the elderly woman told her. ``You had roses in your cheeks when I took you there, then they faded. But every time I asked you if you were all right, you said you were.''

It was a home in which Pruden had been starved, beaten and threatened with death. She was malnourished, ill-clothed and covered with bruises when the welfare worker asked her the question she dared not answer truthfully.

She was 6 years old.

The bruises have gone but the memories remain. MEMO: ``Home Free'' (E.M. Press, $21.95) is available locally from

Barnes & Noble and Riverbend Books . Pruden is working on a second book,

which will tell the story of her final foster care placement and her

adult life. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

L. TODD SPENCER / The Virginian-Pilot

Betty Pruden recently published her novel, ``Home Free,'' about her

experiences as a foster child in the 1930s and '40s, in the hopes

that it will help others become more aware of the plight of all

vulnerable youngsters.