Different Worlds

I live in a different World from the one I knew as a child growing up during the Great Depression and World War II in Texas before air-conditioning. As for my grandmother, she remembered when the first automobile came to Rockwall. More important in her memory was her father being a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. She took me to Sunday “camp meetings” in the basement of the county court house where I saw old men, Confederate veterans, toss up their caps as they sang “Dixie.”

My family were all Baptists. I spent half my life at College Avenue Baptist, a church in a working class neighborhood in Fort Worth. We were in church all Sunday mornings and went back again Sunday evenings for “training union” with afterwords more hymn singing and hour-long sermons. Sometimes at the Sunday evening service I got to watch baptisms in the tank of water up behind the rows of wooden choir chairs. I myself was dunked under water there when I was nine years old.

Tuesday nights my father went with other men on “visitation” to members who were ill and to proselytize sinners who had not accepted Jesus as their personal Savior. After that they came to our house, where the preacher, who on Sunday mornings railed that “a deck of cards is the Devil’s prayer book,” sat down to join the others in a lively game of dominoes.

Wednesday nights we went back to the church for supper. While Mother met with the other teachers to prepare for next Sunday School lessons, my cousins took me to Taylor’s for an ice cream cone. That was a treat, especially since I got to be with the older girls and listen to their “grownup” conversation. Then it was back to church for prayer meeting.

My cousins were orphans. They had no Mother and Daddy, but they were rich. The bank gave my grandmother $200 a month to take care of them. My father’s salary at the same bank was less than $100 a month. I used to lie awake nights worrying that the house would burn down, or if Mother and Daddy died, my brothers and I would have to go to Buckner’s Orphans Home.

In Sunday School we collected money, clothes, and toys to send to Buckner’s. The people at our church were poor, but we were told to feel compassion for the orphans, who were worse off than we were.

After I grew up, married, lived in Chicago, I came home to visit. One Sunday, sitting around the big oak table in the house where my grandmother had lived since before I was born, I heard my grandmother say, “When I was a little girl, I was afraid Mama and Papa would die and I would have to go to Buckner’s Orphans Home.”

It was a revelation to hear my grandmother express the same fears I had when I was a child.

Years later, when I was even older than my grandmother was when she said that, I came back to Texas. I found some things changed beyond belief. Dallas is now one of the largest cities in the U.S. Garland, a little town of about 1,000 people when I went away, is now larger than Fort Worth when I was a child.

But the Baptists are still strong. My friend Lois goes to the First Baptist Church in Garland as many times a week as my family went to College Avenue Baptist in the 1930's. I heard that Buckner’s is now a retirement home for old people similar to the place where I now live in Garland.

Then in the Dallas Morning News I learned something new about Buckner’s. The Sunday paper devoted three pages to stories of 69 Vietnamese children who came to Buckner Children’s Home at the end of the Vietnam War.

The incredible story told in the News began with Patrick Beckham, an Air Force surgeon from Texas stationed at Can Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War. In Korea he had seen the damage war did to families and children. He enlisted the aid of the base’s chaplain and a Baptist missionary, a former Buckner orphan, to start Cam Ranh City Christian Orphanage.

When Da Nang fell in 1975, the director, Ha Nguyen, asked his sister to evacuate the orphanage at Cam Ranh City. On April 2, 1975, all 69 orphans, plus staff, loaded onto three buses and headed south. After an amazing journey, involving roadblocks and buying a leaky boat which was rescued by a Taiwanese freighter and towed to Singapore, a Houston Baptist church sponsored the entire group’s entry into the U.S.

“Finally, on June 12, they arrived by bus at Buckner Children’s Home, which had agreed to take them all in.”

The Dallas Morning News told stories of individual children, some of whom were adopted, forgot how to speak Vietnamese, and grew up in American Homes with American names. The four Nguyen children remained at Buckner’s until they were adults. They kept in touch with the others, and last week the group returned to Vietnam for a reunion with relatives these now-Americans had not seen in 35 years.

The stories were deeply moving. The best of immigration stories, where children who are happy they grew up in America and are now loyal citizens, still retain love for their Vietnamese heritage. I had an additional emotional response. In this changing World, where little Baptist children don’t lie awake worrying about parents dying, I am grateful that children from a different world found refuge at Buckner Children’s Home.