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136 SATISFACTION GUARANTEED Georgia Tann, the Memphis baby seller, had a reject on her hands—a fourmonth -old girl with a pronounced purple birthmark on her back who had probably been returned by her original adoptive parents (at least that was the conjecture years later). Tann, through her Tennessee Children’s Home Society , placed children of all ages, from newborns to early teens, but most of her wealthier clients wanted white infants in excellent condition. This little girl was born on November 1, 1945, in John Gaston Hospital, Memphis’s charity hospital, to a woman who fit the classic Tann profile: white, young,unwed,uneducated,and poor.The woman signed her baby over to Tann, who most probably (she routinely falsified all adoption records) first placed the infant with a couple who had second thoughts and returned the child to Memphis. The move was unusual but not rare. Generally children who were rejected had physical deformities, congenital diseases, or mental problems that their adoptive parents felt they could not or did not want to handle. Tann’s lawyer, Abe Waldauer, who often referred to the children who were up for adoption as “products,” wrote to a potential adoptive couple in 1947 that they had“complete custody and control of a child for one year; may submit the child to any physical or mental examination they wish and take any steps they may desire to ascertain they have a healthy and normal child. If it is not, the Tennessee Children’s Home takes it back without question.”1 Tann’s business was brisk. In an interview in 1946, she told a Memphis newspaper reporter that she had arranged for the adoptions of more than five thousand babies since 1924, an average of about twenty babies a month (later investigations showed that she had made more than a million dollars doing it). While most adoptive parents kept their children, some rejections were inevitable. 8 Satisfaction Guaranteed 137 Oddly enough,Tann’s Children’s Home Society did not have a physical home of its own until 1943; Tann placed children awaiting adoption in both public facilities and foster homes. But in 1943 a wealthy Memphis businessman gave the society a mansion at 1556 Poplar Avenue, a three-story tile-roofed building in what was then a lush residential area of Memphis. The house, at the top of a well-tended grassy slope, oozed respectability. Tann turned the upstairs areas into nurseries and the downstairs into a receiving area and office space. To care for the babies awaiting adoption, she hired an all-female staff, mostly untrained and sometimes alcoholic, who wore the crisp white caps and uniforms of nurses. The babies lay in metal cribs, decorated with teddy bear pictures, in pleasant-looking nurseries upstairs. Later investigations revealed that the children were frequently sedated with drugs or alcohol and that many who were sick or could not be adopted were allowed to die of neglect, malnutrition, or abuse. But the little girl born on November 1 and back in Tann’s care around late February was different from the sickly ones. She was cute, spritely, and always ready with a smile. Her personality was probably one that the Tann staff responded to, and she got the care she needed. This baby could be placed with another family. Tann thought of the McLeans, the nice couple over in Tupelo who had adopted an infant boy from her before the war and had expressed an interest in one day adopting another child. She picked up her telephone and called Keirsey McLean on Highland Circle. Mrs. McLean was at a friend’s home playing bridge, the housekeeper explained; she could be reached there. In Tupelo,Keirsey,now thirty-nine,had become a significant member of the city’s social structure. Her identity consisted in being the wife of the man who was rapidly becoming the city’s dominant newspaper publisher,and she enjoyed it. Her son John had turned five in December 1945 and was in a tuition-based kindergarten that was housed in a nearby public school. Earlier that month, on December 12, Keirsey’s pediatrician father, Eugene Rosamond, had died at home in Memphis. He was sixty-five, and his death was not unexpected.2 Five years earlier, Rosamond was playing in a high-stakes poker game with four or five friends when two men carrying guns burst into the room and demanded their money. One of the poker...

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