Loving Support

Thanks to you and others like you, Jade is well on her way to making a good life for herself and her toddler son, Say'Vonn. It is more than she could have hoped for in the dark months following her expulsion from school a few years ago at age 14.

Jade got in an argument with a girl at school. When the girl punched her, Jade hit her back. The following day, she was expelled. She fell into a deep depression, and with no advocacy at home, she became lost. Eventually Jade entered an alternative school, but instead of being allowed to learn, she struggled to survive the near-daily duress of physical threats, brutality and sexual harassment by the other students. Jade dropped out of school and became gang-affiliated, experimenting with drugs and alcohol. 

Jade and her son, Say'Vonn

When she learned she was pregnant at 16, she took a hard look at her life and the dreary outlook for her unborn child if she continued on the same path. "Here I was going to be a single mom and I still had no education, no direction…I knew things had to change," Jade recalls. She learned of Child Saving Institute’s 10-week parenting class through the Young Parents Program and there she found hope and help with social worker Tricia Wagner. "Tricia is the best support I’ve ever had," Jade says enthusiastically. "She has helped me in so many ways. She tells me I’m a wonderful mom, and I can get my education. She helped me get started in Independent Studies…She’s been there every step of the way."

"I was going to be a single mom
and I had no education, no direction…
I knew things had to change."

Now Jade attends an intensive, accelerated program where she earns credits toward her high school diploma over the course of weeks, rather than semesters. She and Say'Vonn had been living in a shelter sponsored by the Salvation Army, but she recently returned home to live with her mother.

"Jade inspires me," Wagner says. “She is working so hard—studying and taking good care of her baby. She even wants to go to college and dreams of being an obstetrician some day. That girl is a dynamo and I know she can accomplish anything she sets her mind to."
  
"I changed everything to be a better parent to my son," Jade says quietly. "He's my light at the end of the tunnel. In addition to being an OB-GYN, I'd also like to talk to young people about making good choices. I’d like to teach them how to be strong like Tricia has helped teach me. You can change your life around. There is hope."

Memory Lane

In the late fall of 1950, Margie Straw, 24, and her good friend June Blevins, 19, went to the movies in Nebraska City where they were deeply moved by a story of suffering children. That random experience changed Margie’s life forever.

A 120th Moment  ::  Memory Lane

“June and I went to the picture show and it was about an orphanage where the children were mistreated so badly,” Margie, now 86, explains. “I decided right then and there that I wanted to work for an orphanage and straighten them out. Well June had the same idea, so we were off.”

Margie and June did some research and sent out employment applications to agencies in the area. One agency responded noting openings for a position in which they would care for 8-year-olds and do housework. Child Saving Institute responded that there were immediate openings for them to serve as nurses’ aides to the little children—and no housework. The young women opted for CSI.

They moved together to the “big city” in 1951, living in a dormitory in the Child Saving Institute orphanage located at 42^nd and Emilie Street. Margie recalls that as a condition of their employment, they were asked “to sign papers that we would never enter a bar within 10 miles of the orphanage and we couldn’t use bad language.” They signed on the dotted line and their adventure began. 
   

Margie holding Peggy

All of the six nurses’ aides and two registered nurses who tended the approximately 30 babies in the nursery provided gentle, compassionate care, but each woman also had their personal favorites or “pets,” as Margie called them. From the moment Mrs. Beals, the orphanage superintendent, took Margie on a tour through the home, she became enamored of a baby with brown curly hair and big eyes named Dale. “We just fell in love with each other from the beginning,” Margie explains. She also fell for a beautiful biracial baby named Peggy. “I got attached to Peggy and she got attached to me,” Margie recalls. “I was ‘MomMom’ to her. One day when Peggy got demanding and I wasn’t there, the head nurse even said to her, ‘Peggy, your mom will be with you in a minute!’”

Margie talked about Peggy so much when she’d go home to visit her family, her mother made Peggy a new dress from feed sack fabric, which was a common practice in the day. The pleated dress featured a bright tulip pattern, and the orphanage laundress took special care to press the pleats so Peggy looked particularly darling on “visiting day,” when prospective adoptive families visited the orphanage. Later, Peggy’s adoptive family mailed the pretty dress back with a note expressing their joy in their beautiful daughter, whom they had renamed “Merry” because of her cheery disposition.

Margie today, at her home in Nebraska City

Sitting in her cozy kitchen surrounded by her collection of tea pots, Margie overflows with stories from her nearly four years at CSI, her eyes twinkling and her laughter bright as she recalls memories from nearly six decades ago. She especially enjoyed the special Christmas celebrations involving lots of toys and decorated Christmas trees in every room. On Christmas Eve the Shriners—accompanied by an Omaha World-Herald photographer—would arrive to entertain the kids, and all of the children and babies would be dressed in flannel pajamas and posed on the stairs for a photo which appeared on the front page of the paper on Christmas day.

Then there were her tales of the children. She shares story after story about the little ones she fed and bathed and loved during her time at CSI. Darling baby Roger with the bright red leather shoes, mischievous preschooler Keith who unlatched a closet screen door and “repainted” a freshly painted room, and tiny, malnourished Douglas. It wasn’t unusual in those days for working mothers to pay a small stipend to place their children at CSI to ensure quality care. Douglas’s mother brought him to Child Saving Institute after learning his daycare provider wasn’t feeding the baby and he suffered severe malnutrition resulting in developmental delays. At 10 months old, Douglas could not sit up, but Margie diligently worked with him until he was sitting on his own, and proudly displayed his progress to his overjoyed mother when she came on visiting day. “Eventually Douglas crawled and walked…He was a real firecracker!” she observes with a chuckle.

All too soon, Margie was called home to help her mother care for her ailing father, but her memories stayed strong as she worked at a variety of other jobs through the years, including long-held positions in the garment and food industries as well as participating in a family-owned grocery store and sanitation business.

“If there was one thing I learned at Child Saving, it was that loving does a lot for children,” Margie says thoughtfully. “Loving is the key to them being good; or if there is no love—then being bad or sick. It’s the loving that makes the real difference.”