99% Invisible - 181- Milk Carton Kids

Episode Date: September 16, 2015

On a Sunday morning in 1982, in Des Moines, Iowa, Johnny Gosch left his house to begin his usual paper route. A short time later, his parents were awakened by a phone call–it was a neighbor—their paper hadn’t come. When … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The story we're about to tell is pretty much the worst thing a parent can imagine. We were awakened by the phone ringing. That's Noreen gosh. It was early on a Sunday morning in 1982 in Des Moines, Iowa. Noreen's son Johnny had left for his regular paper route. It was the neighbors saying they did not receive their newspapers. 92 in Des Moines, Iowa. Nareen Sun Johnny had left for his regular paper route. It was the neighbors saying they did not receive their newspapers. This wasn't like Johnny. He'd been a paper boy for years.

He'd never missed a delivery. His dad got up and said I'll go help him finish the route. He's probably just running late. He went up the street and that's where he saw Johnny's wagon sitting. Johnny's red wagon was sitting at the corner. It was still full of newspapers. He rushed back and told me, Johnny was gone and called the police. Johnny Gosh was 13 when he disappeared.

He had blue eyes and dirty blonde hair with a small gap between his front teeth. And his would be the first face of a missing child ever printed on a milk carton. It's been 30 years since these milk cartons came and went. I wasn't even alive to see them, but I still know about the faces on the milk cartons. That's reporter Annie Brown.

The image of a missing child on a milk carton became iconic, a kind of cultural shorthand for missing children. And even though this image has stuck around for three decades, the actual milk carton campaign only lasted two years, and it was largely unsuccessful at locating the kids on the cartons. The morning that Johnny disappeared, Nareen said it took 45 minutes for the police to arrive, so she called around to the other boys who delivered papers that morning. She found five witnesses that saw her son

talking to a man in a blue van. She relayed this to the police. The cop looked at me and said, well, has your son ever run away before? And I said, well, no, he's never run away ever nor did he run away today. But the police were skeptical. This was Iowa. This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen to kids like Johnny in places like Iowa. We'd never had a crime like this before. This was before Amber Alerts, before those text messages that you get when a kid goes missing. There wasn't even a category for missing children. Kids were put in the same group as missing adults and an adult had to

be gone for three days before they were considered missing. Without the police's help, Johnny's parents tried everything they could on their own. They hired private investigators and coordinated search parties. Meanwhile, as they searched, they also wrote Iowa State legislation that would differentiate missing children

from missing adults. I wrote the John Agash Law at my kitchen table. But after all of this, Nareen Gash's son was still gone. And then, two years later, in 1984, another little boy disappeared while delivering newspapers. He lived in a neighborhood not far from John's. Jean Martin was last seen delivering newspapers between 5.30 and 6.00 that morning. His paper bag with newspapers still inside was found just outside of Des Moines. This second paper boy had a relative who worked at a local dairy, the Anderson and Ericsson dairy.

The relative and the dairy's owner came up with an idea to help find these boys. The Anderson-Ariks and Dairy contacted each family, and they wanted to do something helpful in the investigations. The families of the missing boys agreed, and within a few short weeks, thousands of milk cartons were rolled out of trucks and inter-grotary stores all over Des Moines. As clerks stocked their shelves, the faces of Johnny Gosh and Eugene Martin smiled back.

The campaign started out at one local dairy, but over the next few weeks it spread to other Midwestern towns. In Illinois, Dairy saw it and said, hey, why don't we try that? And from there, it went national. Nearly everybody drinks milk. Milk turns over quickly so we could put a lot of different kids photos on and pull children's off that needed to come off. At a moment's notice. That's Barbara Huggett. She was working as an artist at the National Child Safety

Council in Michigan when the National Milk Carton Campaign took off. Our founder, apparently he'd seen Johnny Gashin, Eugene Martin on the Anderson, Erickson, Dairy Milk cartons. But he felt that the program should be nationwide. A nationwide milk carton campaign would alert families in California to look for a child who went missing in Iowa. The national campaign brought together local groups looking for missing children, and together they came up with a list of 77 kids from all over the country.

We used cases that were believed to be what they termed in those days danger stranger abductions. In other words, kids that weren't taken by someone they knew. Barb's team didn't have computers, so they cut and arranged all 77 layouts by hand. We designed a layout that was just, you know, rather simple. In black block letters, the word missing was printed across the top of each waxy paper panel. Photos of two children relate side by side in black and white. Under the photos were their dates of birth, height, weight, and where they were

last seen. They also printed the pictures on school milk cartons but only one child could fit on those. Barb reached out to Darry's all over the country, asking if they'd be a part of the campaign. Within months, 700 independent Derry's had signed on. Boy, I wish I knew how many cartons had circulated. I imagine it's way into the billions. When you have 700, 750 Derry's printing day in and day out

for years. Some sources have estimated that as many as five billion milk cartons were printed with the faces of missing children. 200 missing children were featured on milk cartons as part of the campaign led by the National Child Safety Council, too, were found alive. One was a kid named Bobby Smith, Jr. Barb still remembers when she got the call

about Bobby. After we'd gotten the word that the child had been found, it was just a sense of of elation and you wanted to let everyone in the building that had mailed it, boxed it, shipped it, you know, you just wanted to tell everyone who had touched it that that was worthwhile. You could hear the cheer throughout the whole building. Yay, we found a child, it was wonderful, you know. But Bobby Smith wasn't found because of the milk carton. Bobby was found by coincidence. His kidnapper's car had been involved in an accident.

And when the police came looking for the owner of the car, they found Bobby. The other child found alive was a girl named Cheryl Lynn Kramer, but most of the kids featured in the national campaign and in the smaller local ones were never found. Unfortunately, the leads from the milk cartons did not reveal where Johnny's location was. That's Noreen Gosh again. Her son, Johnny, was never found. But Barbara Huggett and Noreen Goss are both adamant that the campaign had a positive impact.

What it did was promote more awareness, so that people were looking if they saw a child that looked like they were in distress. Maybe you questioned whether or not those were the parents. During the Milk Carton Campaign, the Missing Children Assistance Act was passed. It established a federal program to find missing kids. Changing the rules for children when they're missing, not having to wait the hours and days. And mostly the Milk Cartons just got people thinking about kidnapping. That this could happen to your kid.

I have talked to quite a number of adults and they could remember their mom putting the milk carton on the kitchen table and saying, now, we're going to go over the rules again. And they would use the example of the boys on the milk carton. And make the correlation between that child and their child's life. In other words, the faces on the milk cartons scared the hell out of everyone. Which ultimately led to the campaign's downfall. Almost as quickly as it began, the milk carton campaign started by the National Child Safety Council ended.

Just two years after the first milk cartons were printed, Derrys began to pull the missing kids' pictures from their side panels. One reason, of course, with the cartons is that the industry shifted to plastic. But Derrys also started to get tired of the depressing message. They took it away because there were people that were complaining that they thought

it might scare children at the breakfast table. The famous pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, wrote columns condemning the milk carton campaign. It was traumatizing, he said. Kids shouldn't have to face that over their lucky charms. They see these missing kids kind of staring at them. That milk carton almost demands them to have that conversation.

What to do if you see a stranger or a stranger costs you. That's Paul Morsicchi-Rinfrow. He's a historian at the University of Iowa who's been writing his dissertation on child safety on the milk carton kids and their effect on us. He believes the milk carton campaign reflected a larger fear that was gripping society at the time. Stranger danger. Paul studies the way that child safety was talked about at this time. In the news on the radio by politicians, and he says that this fear of stranger danger was exploding. Folks are kicking around these numbers that are just astronomical.

Folks are saying there are 1.8 million missing children in the United States, and missing becomes very closely attached to abducted by strangers. But that just wasn't true. Every year, 800,000 kids are reported missing to the authorities. That's around 2,000 every day. But, a report from the Department of Justice found that the number of kids taken by strangers every year is only about 115. The Milk Carton campaign led by the National Child Safety Council focused on kids who

were kidnapped by strangers, and they were criticized for this. But there were also smaller, more localized campaigns going on that weren't bound by this rule. It was one of these smaller campaigns that ended up featuring the face of a missing girl named Bonnie Lomon. I wasn't kidnapped by strangers, I was kidnapped by people that loved me. Bonnie Lomon was kidnapped by her mother when she was three, after her parents got divorced. Even though she wasn't kidnapped by a stranger, Bonnie's dad had managed to get her on a milk carton. Bonnie had no idea that she had been kidnapped,

but her childhood was pretty strange. After taking Bonnie, her mom and stepdad went to Sipan, a tiny island near Guam. Yeah, yeah, we lived in the woods, like in a shack. After a year in Sipan, next was Hawaii, but there was still line pretty low. We stayed inside all the time in Hawaii. I recall maybe one or two times being outside. Finally, they ended up in Colorado, and her mom and stepdad started to relax a bit.

The next were neighbors had a bunch of kids, and Bonnie played at their house all the time. We would play Barbie using I had my little Barbie case and I would bring that over. Aside from going to her neighbors, Bonnie was hardly ever allowed to leave the house, but on an unusual occasion her stepdad took her to the supermarket. They needed milk. I just remember looking and seeing how many cartons of milk there were. Like nowadays it's like whatever brand it is would be facing you, whereas at that time all the pictures were facing you. He grabbed the milk.

He's like, hey, do you know who that is? Hey, you're famous. And I saw myself and I was like, oh, is that me? And he was like, oh, shush. Yes, Bonnie actually saw her own face on a milk carton. Though she had no idea what it meant at the time, Bonnie's stepdad bought the milk carton. And when they finished it, he asked her,

Do you want it? You want to keep it? And so I remember cutting it out and being like, whoa, and staring at the picture. My hair was like in a little ponytail on the side, and I was wearing this little dress. He's like, now you got to keep it in, you know, a safe place. And I must have tossed it in my Barbie case. Looking back now, Bonnie sees her stepdad's actions as arrogance.

He was so confident in himself that he could show me that because nothing's going to happen with it. But the next time Bonnie was at the neighbor's house, she left her Barbie case there. With the picture, she cut out of her own face on a milk carton. I remember there a lot of police showing up, a lot of police showing up. Within hours of the neighbor finding the picture,

police had swarmed Bonnie's home. She was whisked away and returned to her father. She was seven at the time. But their reunion wasn't easy at first. I remember being scared because I didn't know my dad, and all I wanted to do was be with her kind of sucked, you know. Bonnie is very clear that her mother loved her, But what she didn't know then was that she'd been denied some pretty basic pieces of her childhood. In the three and a half years she was missing, Bonnie didn't go to school. She hadn't learned to read.

I know I didn't read then because I would have realized that I was missing because on the picture it actually said missing child and then my name and the date. After returning to her dad, Bonnie had a pretty normal life. She started school, went on to college and eventually became a nurse. She has two kids now. She's really happy. She's one of the Milk Carton campaign's few success stories. I believe that I am who I am because I was on a milk carton and I was found and I had opportunities that with my dad growing up that I might not have had with my mom. I was able to live a great life and I'm grateful for it. After only two years the milk carton campaign had ended, but the faces

of missing children were still being printed on all kinds of other things. Pizza boxes, plastic rush re-bags, utility bills. Actually, the utility bill campaign went on for 10 years, much longer than the milk cartons. But most of us haven't even heard of it. It didn't stick the way that the milk carton did. Again, here's Paul Morsicchi-Renfro, the historian. It's one of those tropes with which we're all familiar, and it's appeared in novels, films, you know, there's a band called The Milk Carton Kids.

There was something different about seeing a face on the side of a milk carton that really struck a nerve. There is a sense of familial unity that I think milk helps to author maternal nurturance and also being this kind of item around which people gather around the breakfast table. So putting missing kids' faces on that item was quite deliberate and perhaps the reason why that lives on. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Annie Brown with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan,

Avery Troll from Inkert, Colessted, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW, Sam Franciscoerenses going and produced out of the offices of Harksine in architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. We're all on Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, Tumblr. If you name it, we're probably on it. But you're always welcome in our place at 99pi.org. Radio Tapio from PRX.

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