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6 Kids, 6 Grandkids, 3 Great
grandkids
I flew (Eastern Airlines) down to
Orlando, FL, where Betsy had just started as Youth Minister at a Winter Park
church. She agreed to my proposal, and we were married soon after in NYC. We
are living happily ever after
By far, the best years of my life.
Betsy and Mel in Winter Park (9/26/1971)
We both loved kids and wished to
build a family. After a year of trying and dozens of fertility tests, we
decided to get on with the program and adopt. The local agencies were
discouraging with waiting lists of years for white babies and prohibition of the adoption
of blacks by white couples (they wanted to retain the black traditions of
poverty and squalor).
Betsy, who is an avid reader,
came across The Children, by Jan de Hartog, describing the adoption of his
two girls from Korea.
We started to build our family. Six kids adopted from Korea.
At that time, Korea was having economic problems, and it was easy to adopt kids
in need. We did not have to go to Korea to get them.
We had a big problem with the racist bigot, Senator Eastland from
Mississippi. We had to get a bill through Congress to allow John (age 5) into
the country. Eastland retired, and we had no similar problems for Virginia and
David.
Mel, Paul Sellers, Mom, Betsy, Paul, Ann, John, and Mary in front
of our Cabin John house.
This page explains how our family
grew and some of the fun we had together. The pictures here come from a Google
Photos Album made of a selection of 1121 slides from the thousands we collected
over the years. The Album is on a password-protected page (user
kids password Haas123456) for our family and distributed to each kid as a DVD.
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