Home Boys

In the years after the war, the population of the home dropped. But that wasn't the only change. The area around the home was becoming increasingly urban, and farm activities--chiefly the dairy barn and the hog operation--were phased out until only the garden remained. But a more fundamental shift was occurring, too. Through the war, most of the children brought to the home were Caucasian. Beginning in the late Forties, though, there was a marked increase in Hispanic children.

One reason for this change, at least according to Lucero's research, was that child-welfare agencies were beginning to exert more influence in removing children from poor families. In this era of post-war prosperity, Hispanics remained the poorest of the poor. And then, once at the home, Anglo babies were the first children adopted. Hispanic couples, who might have taken home children like Jim Lucero, often were too poor to meet the state's adoption requirements. In 1940, Hispanic children made up 10 percent of the home's population; by 1961, they accounted for 70 percent.

On a regular basis, people would come to the Home, look at the children and then make a decision on who they wanted to adopt.

I remember on a Saturday morning all of us girls were told to line up in a circle in the dayroom. Those girls who were not adoptable were excused. This couple who wanted a younger girl but couldn't due to their age picked three or four of us older girls, including me. We had personal visits with the couple.

After the couple talked with the office, I was placed in their home. After one year, I was adopted. My new parents were wonderful.

--Helen Parker Lungwitz, who lived at the home in 1947.

Bill and Chuck Ramsey came to the home from the Western Slope sometime after 1945. Although both of the boys' parents were alive, going to the home "was a blessing," says Bill.

The family had five kids, three boys and two girls, starting with five-and-a-half-year-old Bill and stair-stepping down to the eighteen-month-old baby. Their parents often locked their children out of the house and told them to go away. "Chuck, here, who was the next oldest, cut his arm on a window, trying to get back in," Bill says.

They were lucky to be living in the days when milk and cheese were still delivered to neighbors' doorsteps. "And that we were too young to know that stealing was wrong," Bill laughs. "We were just trying to survive."

The brothers' sketchy memories of early childhood include living under viaducts with hoboes, who gave them food to eat "and good old dago red to drink," says Bill. "At least it made you feel warm."

One day the children's parents took the five kids to a babysitter--an unusual event in and of itself. A few hours later a woman arrived in a blue car. The parents had been deemed unfit, and she was with child welfare. She packed the kids into her car and drove them to the state home.

The three youngest children were quickly adopted. "Chuck and I were kept together at the home," Bill says. "To us, it was heaven--three meals a day, a place to sleep. There was stability, if not love.

"Life at the home was good. Sure, we were disciplined, but never beaten. One matron used to catch us talking at night and put us in her closet. About the fifth time she did that, I pulled all of her clothes down on her head...For some reason," Bill laughs again, "she never seemed to hear us talking after that."

After several years at the home, the boys were adopted. The couple had wanted younger children but settled for Bill and Chuck. Bill, who had looked after his siblings, had an independent streak that frustrated his new father, and he left home at sixteen.

"I was better off at the home than with either my birth parents or my adoptive parents," says Bill. "Life was tough at the home; there wasn't a lot of nurturing, but we were treated fairly and given what we needed to make our own way in the world."

Bill went on to earn a college degree and became a salesman in Colorado Springs. Chuck, a teacher in Jefferson County, got his master's degree--even though their adoptive parents "ridiculed him and said he wasn't smart enough to go to college," his brother says.

Bill and Chuck both became family men, although they admit that their experiences probably made them too lenient with their own children. Together they found their other brother and one sister, Ruth, who lives in Commerce City. But so far, they've been unable to locate their second sister, because the records of her adoption remain sealed.

The siblings also decided to try to locate their parents. In part, it's to learn their medical history, "in case there's something we should be aware of," Bill says. But there's a more important reason.

"Every one of us here," he says, gesturing to the reunion crowd, "is looking for some sense of closure. Who are we? Where do we come from? We can't go back to our childhood and do it over again, but it'd be nice to know who they were, what they thought when we were taken away, and what made them treat us like they did."