Beulah Bondi's sleazy adoption agency

Thank you for your informed and well thought out reply.
-packrat1

I have to laugh at hipsters who think they know something about my mother's generation. Read up on a few facts before you go off like this on a web board where someone who doesn't know might take you seriously.

The women in my mother's family, and the men in my dad's family, were not "unrestrained gluttons". They were also not thin. And we're talking ordinary people here -- not wealthy. In fact, my father's family were dirt poor and worked extremely hard -- physical labor. Back then, being heavy was not shameful. It ran in families, and that's just the way things were. There are plenty of photos from that period showing overweight people. You're probably thinking of the Arthur Rothstein Dust Bowl photos. You think they all lived like that?

Early death is extremely common in America today, and goes mostly unreported. Most working people have little or no insurance. In Detroit, babies die at the same rate as Honduras.

Children were often adopted from other countries. They were called war orphans (whether or not they were actual orphans) or DPs - displaced persons.

And where on earth did you get the idea that people did not pay for adoptions? People would pay a lot of money for a baby, and legitimate adoption services knew it -- and so did the non-legitimate, crooked outfits, or haven't you ever heard of Georgia Tann?

Let's just say that God doesn't believe in me.

What if Miss Oliver saw beyond the income of prospective mothers and fathers? What if Trina’s blood carried a genetic defect that wouldn’t allow her to live more than ten years or so? Suppose that this was the reason her biological mother gave her up for adoption. The tragedy of burying a child is the most profound grief in the world.

Since Roger and Julie already suffered through the tragedy of losing their unborn baby, they would be prime candidates to love a terminally ill child. Having done such a wonderful job with Trina, I can even see how Miss Oliver would present Julie and Roger with the opportunity to have another baby in the end.

I might have agreed that at times, the chemistry between Julie and Roger seemed cool… watch closely at the scene where they bring Trina home for the very first time. It is an awkward moment. They try to be as quiet as possible so they don’t wake the baby up. The boxes in Roger’s arms are tumbling and he drops them to hold Julie while she holds the bundled baby. Then she stops half way up the stairs to remove her shoes to prevent the floorboards from creaking. Everything in that scene is symbolic of their relationship. It indicates that Roger and Julie can’t function alone. They depend on each other for support. The strength they provide for each other carry’s the baby. It might be true that they lack passion for each other, but as partners, they also find solutions which keeps them moving forward.

Falling in love and having a baby isn’t as simple as it seems.


Smoke me a kipper. I’ll be back for breakfast

Re: lpproductions

Shoot...my mother had my sister in an unwed mother's home in San Diego and that was in 1976 (AND she was 21 years old, so clearly not a teenager in high school that her parents were trying to hide away). I wonder when that changed in the U.S. I can imagine in certain communities that people still would try to keep a child conceived out of wedlock a secret today, but when did the general attitude change? (note: not being judgmental, just curious from a sociological viewpoint)

lp productions, women in the U.S. were granted the federal right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1920. This movie was released 21 years after that.

A woman running her own business was not way ahead of its time. It was easier for women who needed to earn a living to run their own enterprise than to break into nontraditional professions mostly closed to them.

The past is not an unbroken march from "no rights" to "equal rights." There are many subtle changes and retrenchments that happen along the way. Films can sometimes illuminate those subtleties of life, which is one of the things that makes their preservation so important.

I was 12 in 1972 when my 16 year old sister got pregnant by this guy she barely knew. My parents completely freaked out, it simply wasn't something that happened to nice middle-class people like us. As soon as my sister started showing she was pregnant, she was yanked out of school. I didn't see her for the last month of the pregnancy, she was sent away to an aunt, who oversaw her having the baby. The baby was adopted after being alive for less than a week, my sister has never seen him nor heard about him since, he just disappeared. That was 43 years ago! Note: this took place in Los Angeles, not some rural small town.

I can't even imagine what it was like for girls like my sister in 1941.