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Akron Beacon-Journal
May 16, 1997
Black-market babies search for their past
by Regina Brett
AKRON, Ohio - The mystery of Jane Blasio began to unravel the day a
relative slipped and called her a black-market baby.
Jane's parents sat her down in the living room the next day and told the
5-year-old the truth: She was adopted.
Well, it was almost the truth.
They left out the part about driving 12 hours to a small clinic in
Georgia, where they paid a doctor $1,000 for a newborn and a falsified
birth certificate.
Jane is now 32 and has no idea who her birth parents are. No one does.
The doctor is dead. Nurses are dead. Lawyers are dead. The clinic is
closed. The records are gone.
All she is left with is a sense of deep mistrust, abandonment and shame
and a voice inside that keeps whispering, "You were sold. You were
chattel."
In her quest to quiet that voice, Jane has traveled down to the red clay
soil of Georgia four times to find her birth mother. There she uncovered
the dark secrets of the Hicks Community Clinic in a tiny town called
McCaysville, where dozens of babies were born and sold.
At the county courthouse near there, Jane found out that 49 babies went to
people in Ohio - Summit County, to be exact.
All the fathers who bought them worked in the Akron tire companies, except
for a Cuyahoga Falls doctor who bought two babies.
All the birth certificates listed the people adopting as birth parents.
All the sales were arranged by a West Akron Goodrich employee who bought
four babies for herself.
All of them paid a Dr. Thomas J. Hicks up to $1,000 for a baby no one
could trace back to its mother.
Jane Blasio never found her birth mother in Georgia, but she did find a
new family.
They call themselves the Hicks Babies.
Before he died two years ago, Jane's father told her everything he could
remember about Hicks Clinic.
After losing a child at birth, Jane's parents turned to Hicks for a baby
and were put on a waiting list. Joan and James Walters had heard about the
Georgia clinic from a relative who had purchased a son there.
One day the doctor called the Walters at their Akron home and said,
"You have 24 hours to come or I call the next person on the
list."
The Walters had been warned not to be picky. If you told Hicks you only
wanted a boy or you wanted a girl, you could forget about getting a baby.
They bought their first baby, Michelle Renee, on Sept. 20, 1961, for $800.
The Walters never met the woman who gave birth, although James Walters
caught a glimpse of her long red hair when he passed her room at the
clinic.
Michelle remembers her dad telling how Hicks treated the adopting mother
as if she'd just given birth.
"They put her in a hospital bed, put a gown on her, then called Dad
in," Michelle said. "When he came in, she was bottle feeding me.
He said nobody could have told him that wasn't his baby."
By the time Jane came along 3 1/2 years later, the clinic was filthy,
rundown and nearly a drive-through operation.
Jane was handed out the back door without so much as a spare diaper,
bottle of formula or a blanket in exchange for $1,000.
Selling babies wasn't Dr. Thomas Jugarthy Hicks' primary business in
McCaysville. He was known all over the state for providing illegal
abortions.
He advertised on phone booths, bus stations and bridges. Women came by
bus, car and train to pay $100 to "fix their problem." A small
airstrip was built in nearby Ducktown so the prominent could fly their
daughters in from Atlanta and Chattanooga for an abortion.
The clinic on Toccoa Street barely stands. It is dilapidated, and cracks
run through the yellow brick front. It is now owned by a local church that
plans to tear it down.
The doctor is long gone. In 1972, Hicks died of leukemia at age 83.
The mystery that lives on is whether he kept any private records that
survived. Jane is hopeful she will find some, but it's not likely.
What is known about Dr. Hicks is this: After getting his medical degree
from Emory University in Atlanta in 1917, he moved to Copperhill, Tenn.,
but lost his medical license and served time in federal prison for selling
drugs.
While incarcerated, he studied a lung disease that kept copper miners from
living past the age of 40.
Once out, he was hired by the Tennessee Copper Co. to treat miners. The
only problem was, he filed more claims than there were miners with the
disease.
After he was fired from that job, he opened up the Hicks Community Clinic
in Georgia in the mid-1940s in McCaysville.
When Jane asked people around McCaysville, they said Hicks was both a
saint and scoundrel.
He was the man who donated a Wurlitzer to the First Baptist Church but
once took a new watch off a dying man to earn him the nickname "Bulova,"
after the brand he swiped.
He was the man who shared fresh eggs and vegetables from his farm but
tried to sell a broken stove by putting in a loaf of bread he had baked
elsewhere, then warned the buyer not to touch the stove because it was
still hot.
Local historians, sisters Doris Abernathy, 69, and Grace Postelle, 70, say
Hicks was a charmer whose downfall was that he loved money too much.
"He was a leading citizen, remember that," Postelle said from
the start. "Today he'd probably be a hero, but then he was a villain.
He performed abortions daily. I just think he was a man ahead of his
time."
Back then, birth control was hard to come by and being an unwed mother was
a source of shame. Most abortions were dangerous back-alley procedures.
"We had a number of prominent girls who had been sent away to
Knoxville (Tenn.) and came back in a coffin after having abortions. That
was before Hicks opened up," Postelle said. "That's one
reason his business was permitted."
It was permitted until 1964, when Hicks was indicted for performing an
illegal abortion. Some folks believe the arrest was orchestrated by
doctors who were jealous of all the money Hicks was making.
Hicks agreed to surrender his medical license on Dec. 8, 1964, so the
charge was dropped. He kept practicing anyway, at least into Junuary of
1965 when Jane was born.
Search for her mother
From the time Jane learned she was adopted,
she has fantasized about meeting her mother.
"You're always looking. At noses, eyes, bits of you in
strangers," she said. "I could have a brother or sister
in Akron."
"I've run down every lead that has come to me," she said,
flipping through her notes from four trips to Georgia in the last seven
years. "What hasn't already been taken to the grave is getting ready
to go."
One person may help
There's only one person left who may have
some answers, but she's not talking.
The woman who arranged the sales between Akron couples and Dr. Hicks is
now 78 and in ill health. Since some members of her family may not know
they were purchased from the clinic, her identity is being withheld here.
She will be referred to as Ruth.
Ruth was born near McCaysville and her family knew Hicks. So when she
found out she could not have children, she turned to him and bought two
boys and two girls.
She gradually spread the word all over Akron about where to get a baby.
When contacted recently at her Fairlawn home, Ruth did not deny her
involvement in the buying of babies, but she did not offer any information
to clarify it.
"It's something in the past," she said. "It was too long
ago. That's something that I've completely forgotten and put out of my
mind."
Helpful judge
One person who continues to give Jane hope is Probate Judge Linda Davis,
who oversees birth records in Fannin County, Ga. Davis, 46, just happens
to be an Akron native.
Until Jane came to Davis looking for a birth certificate four years ago
and shared the details of her birth, the
judge couldn't figure out why so many birth certificates on file listed
Akron as the "usual residence of mother."
When the judge scanned birth records from 1955 to 1964, she found 56
babies "born" at the clinic to people out of state: 49 went to
couples in Ohio, five to Michigan and one each to Illinois and
Pennsylvania.
That may not sound like a lot of babies, but McCaysville is a small town.
In 1960, there were 50 babies born in all of Fannin County. Six of those
births - more than 10 percent - were Hicks babies sold out of state.
Now, whenever any Hicks Babies come seeking information, the judge tells
them to speak to Jane, who is trying to collect all the pieces to the
puzzle.
Jane even visited the only survivor of Hicks' immediate family, his
daughter, Margaret Brown.
In the last 25 years, a dozen Hicks Babies have contacted Brown for
information about their birth parents.
"I couldn't help them. I wish I could. I called 12 or 15 people that
might have had some information, but I doubt he kept any records. He sent
everything to his lawyer in order to make it legal. Maybe it wasn't
legal," she laughed. "It reads just like one of these soapbox
operas.
Another Hicks baby
After hearing that, Jane nearly gave up the search. Then in March, Jane
got a call out of the blue from Georgia. It was Judge Davis, who had a
Melinda Elkins in her office.
"I've got another Hicks Baby,"
Davis told her. "I think you'd better talk to this one."
Melinda Elkins had driven all the way to Georgia fantasizing about meeting
her mother for the first time in her life.
Instead, she got stood up.
Melinda was purchased at the clinic 34
years ago by a Barberton, Ohio, couple.
Melinda, who asked that her maiden name not be revealed, was told at age 7
that she was adopted. It didn't bother her until she married and got
pregnant.
"I had to know my medical background," she said. "When you
go fill out medical forms, I have no family history. I write, `I don't
know. I'm adopted.' "
That medical history would have helped when she was diagnosed with breast
cancer four years ago.
Her mother tried to put her questions to rest, telling her
"There are no records. There's nothing
you can find. It's something you have to live with." She lived with
it until the stranger called.
Two years ago, a man from Georgia called Melinda and said he had bought a
doctor's home and found some records in the basement. Did she want to know
her birth mother's name?
He gave her a woman's name, and described her as having been 33 with red
hair and green eyes. Then he asked for Melinda's address and promised to
mail the file.
It never arrived.
Looking back, the pieces didn't add up. She hasn't been able to find a
woman by the name she was given. The man said he found Melinda through
Bureau of Motor Vehicle records, yet her license carries her married name,
not her birth name. Why would he ask for her address if he had found her
through her license? Also, Melinda had an unlisted phone number. How
did he get it?
Then last February, a woman called claiming to be her sister.
"Oh, my God, we found you!" the
woman sobbed. "I have some bad news."
She told Melinda their brother had been killed in a car accident and the
family wanted her to come to Georgia for the funeral. The woman said they
knew Melinda had been contacted two years earlier and they had been
waiting for her to call.
"I was freaking out," Melinda
said. "It was really strange."
Strange, because Melinda had a new unlisted number.
Melinda agreed to meet the woman in
McCaysville a few days later, on a Saturday at 1 p.m. at a gas station.
The funeral was at 3 p.m.
When Melinda and her husband stopped at the county courthouse to get a
copy of her birth certificate, Melinda discovered she wasn't the only
Hicks Baby from Akron.
After meeting Melinda, Judge Davis called Jane and the two women exchanged
information. Jane was excited to hear there might be birth records
somewhere.
But the judge was leery about Melinda's meeting a stranger at the gas
station, so she had a sheriff's deputy park close by to watch for the
purple van that was to stop for Melinda.
Melinda waited under blue skies in her Sunday best, dressed for a funeral,
but hoping for a family reunion.
"I stood there at 1 o'clock. Then it got to be 1:05. Then 1:30 came
and I just broke down," Melinda said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
"I knew they weren't coming."
A check of the funeral homes in the five-county area and found no one had
recently died in a crash. There was no funeral anywhere for anyone of the
name Melinda was given. The phone number Melinda had been given was no
good.
A connection back home
But the Melinda's trip to Georgia wasn't entirely wasted. It gained her a
connection back home named Jane Blasio.
When the two met, Jane froze.
"Oh, my God," Jane gasped.
Melinda looked just like Jane's sister, Michelle.
Put Melinda and Michelle next to each other and it's like they're looking
in a mirror.
They share the same red hair, blue eyes, foreheads, laugh lines - even the
same laugh. By no stretch are they identical. Melinda, 34, is heavier and
7 inches taller than Michelle, 35, who is 5 feet, 3 inches tall. But they
both have a little bump near the end of their nose and they share the same
slant to their eyes and identical thin lips.
Sit and talk with them a while and their personalities are duplicates.
They laugh the same way over the same things. They nudge each other
over the same inside jokes at the same moment, and say, "Oh,
yeah," in stereo.
"It's uncanny," Melinda said. "It's so strange. We look
alike and we feel this connection. My oldest son went with me to meet
Michelle. All he could say was, `Wow!"'
Only DNA testing will show conclusively whether Melinda and Michelle are
blood relatives. Will they do it?
"Oh, yeah," they say, simultaneously.
"The DNA test would clinch it, but we already have this connection as
sisters," Melinda said. "She knew it the day she met me. I did,
too."
Melinda's mother still defends Dr. Hicks. "She says, `He gave you to
me, and I cannot condemn him for that.' I can understand that, but
the way he did it? Didn't anybody think of what the future would bring?
Didn't he realize the consequences down the road?
Strange knowing you were sold
"It's a strange feeling knowing you were sold. It was wonderful they
wanted me that badly, but why didn't the
other woman want me? I felt that way all my life. There is a void in my
life that will never be filled until I
find out.
Michelle might be my sister. That could
close one chapter, but there's so much more."
Michelle doesn't hold a grudge against Hicks.
"When I was little, I always felt that
I was chosen, that I was kind of special," Michelle said.
"It didn't matter to me until my parents were gone. When they were
gone, I felt like I didn't belong anywhere."
The day her dad died, so did her sense of family.
"I had nothing from birth, then the family that I borrowed was gone.
I felt like I didn't have anything," she said.
For now, the three women have each other and a new sense of family: they
are all Hicks Babies.
With the help of Judge Linda Davis, Jane is creating a birth registry so
all the children sold at Hicks Clinic
and the women who gave birth to them can match information and perhaps
find one another.
The judge wants to prevent any chance of intermarriage but fears it may
have already happened.
Jane is confident that once the word gets out, birth mothers will come
forward.
And she is still hopeful that a box of files will surface.
"I know that's wishful thinking," she said. "But you never
really know who you are until you know where you came from."
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