CT - NEWS - `Little Miss X' Filled In The Blanks
BabySafeHaven
`Little Miss X' Filled In The Blanks
By WILLIAM WEIR Courant Staff Writer
March 15 2007
Not until she was 25 with a child of her own did Maggie Smith learn of
her unusual introduction to the world.
Smith already knew she was adopted, and had an inkling that things
didn't happen the usual way. But when she pressed for details, her
parents always gave a different version of events. Their accounts
never included that - at all of 2 days old - she showed up on a New
Britain doorstep in a 11/2-bushel apple box. Nor did they tell her her
original name, "Little Miss X." The October 1950 news stories about
her and the offers that poured in to adopt her were also left out of
the various accounts.
One evening, with her mother and aunt cooking dinner and drinking
highballs in the kitchen of their Avon home, Smith recognized a unique
opportunity. She asked again, and this time her aunt spilled the
beans.
"I could tell it was the truth because my mother looked like she was
going to have a stroke," said Smith, 56.
Her mother didn't need to worry; the truth hardly traumatized her
daughter.
"I thought it was kind of cool," said Smith, now living in Las Vegas.
"I knew that something different had happened. `This is OK; this is
the story,' I thought."
After the initial spate of media coverage, we usually don't hear much
more about abandoned babies. They join the general population of
children given up through proper channels, and their lives proceed
pretty much like everyone else in the system. It was by chance that
The Courant caught up with Smith. As operations manager for the Atomic
Testing Museum in Las Vegas at the time, she happened to pick up a
call for an unrelated article.
The Hartford Courant? she said. - I know them; they did a story about
me when I was left on a doorstep.
· · ·
Her aunt's highball-induced candor didn't produce all the details. She
learned more through clippings in The Courant, the Hartford Times and
New Britain Herald.
On Oct. 22, 1950, two days after giving birth in her New Britain home,
18-year-old Violet Sadis swaddled her baby in old blankets and towels,
placed her in the box and walked four blocks from her Booth Street
home to Cleveland Street. There, she left Maggie in front of the home
of Zacharyas Baranowski and his wife. She left a note addressed to the
Baranowskis' adult daughter, who also lived there.
"Jean," read the note, as quoted by The Courant in 1950. "A gift for
you. I'll call in the morning for adoption. If you don't care for this
baby, tell police." Smith doesn't know how her birth mother knew Jean.
Sadis, who already had an 18-month-old son and lived with her parents
in New Britain, told police she waited in the bushes until someone
took her baby inside.
The family notified police, who took the newborn to the hospital.
After a brief investigation, Sadis was charged with abandonment and
convicted one month later. News accounts didn't follow up on the
sentence. Smith figures it wasn't too harsh, since Sadis married soon
after, though not to Smith's birth father.
The news prompted several offers to take Maggie in, and an Avon couple
adopted her. It still amuses Smith that, after spending the first six
months of life with no name, her new parents had the pseudonymous-
sounding names John and Mary Smith. She also had two older siblings,
both adopted by the Smiths. Her brother died about 15 years ago, and
her parents died 10 years ago.
Her sister, Bobbie Smith, lives in Avon. She learned of her sister's
first days when Maggie did. "Actually, I didn't think much of it," she
said. "I thought, `Well, we got her, and it was a nice surprise.'"
· · ·
The problem of abandonment has hardly gone away in the time since.
Despite the passage of Safe Haven laws in all but a few states, babies
still end up on doorsteps, and worse. The Safe Haven laws allow new
parents to leave a child at authorized locations without risk of
abandonment charges.
Connecticut's Safe Haven law passed in 2000 and gives parents up to 30
days after birth to leave their child at a local hospital. Since then,
six children have been legally relinquished through the Safe Haven
law. Five of them have been adopted and the sixth has been placed with
relatives. But in the same period, four babies have been illegally
abandoned. So far, two of those babies have been adopted.
· · ·
So you start off on a doorstep in an apple box. Where do you go from
there?
Smith describes her life as a happy one. "They were just good people,"
she said of her parents. "I grew up in a nice house in suburbia in the
woods, we had good neighbors. We didn't have to worry about too much.
We could just walk over to someone's house."
Her father built custom houses, and she often went with him to
observe. Neighborhood kids teased her about being adopted, but it
didn't bother her. She had a snappy comeback. "Well, I was chosen out
of thousands," she would tell them, "while your parents didn't have a
choice."
Before Title IX gave girls' sports their due, Smith was something of a
pioneer. Tucking her hair up in her ball cap, she tried out for Little
League in the late 1950s. - Sorry, you're a girl, they told her. Her
father appealed to the national office, but had no luck. Her
classmates voted her most athletic in her senior year of 1968. In the
late 1970s, she played with the Wild Roses, a women's rugby team in
Hartford still around today.
After high school, Smith got married, divorced, and moved west in 1980
with her son. She started working at the Atomic Testing Museum a few
years ago, shortly before it opened. She was recently promoted to
director of marketing and special events.
Smith didn't go to the state for more information until after her
adoptive parents died, mainly out of curiosity about her ethnicity.
When she learned about her biological parents, her Polish heritage
came as a surprise; with high cheekbones and long straight hair, she
figured herself for Native American.
Her birth mother died about 10 years ago, without any contact from
Smith. Smith's spoken to her half-sister a few times, but otherwise
hasn't had contact with her biological family.
Smith says she harbors no resentment. Considering the circumstances,
things could easily have gone very badly. Yes, her birth mother could
have handled the situation better, but Smith believes her actions were
made with a real sense of sacrifice.
"If I were to say something to my birth mother, it's that she did the
right thing."