Bittersweet Infamy - #14 - Georgia Tann

Episode Date: May 2, 2021

Josie tells Taylor about the woman who built an adoption empire by stealing children. Plus: the crazy coloured ketchup trend of the early 2000s.

Hello and welcome to Fitter's Sweet Home for me, the podcast about infamous people, places and things. I'm Taylor Basso. I'm Josie Mitchell. My friend Josie is going to tell me a story. I don't know what it'll be. The only rule? The subject matter must be infamous.

Are you a catch-up person? Yeah, yeah, I don't hate it, yeah. What is it about catch-up? Is it its sweet tang, its distinctive red color? Yeah, you nailed it. Okay, well. Maybe it's a ubiquitous appearance everywhere, there's something nice about that. It is.

That's true. Heinz is very, this is some madman shit, we're really doing some good market research here. I don't like catch-up. You don't like condiments. I don't like condiments or dressings either, sauces in general are real hit and miss for me. The worst thing in the world is when you get a little bit of catch-up on the side of your hand and then you wash it off, but the rest of the day, just this waft of like, catch-up

up at you. That's the worst thing in the world. That is, that is, it's top three, dude. The reason that I was asking you about catch-up was back in 2000, I don't know if you remember, but Heinz started coming out with a line of outrageously brightly colored catch-ups. Yes, for kids, like purple catch-up, green catch-up, crazy catch-up. That's crazy catch-up with a K, I assume. The first time they did this was because Shrek was coming out, so they came out with

new easy-squirt, blasted green catch-up, and listen, lean into the hole, okay? And the sales went through the roof because kids were like, yo, this is catch-up, but it's green. That was the market research. So Heinz looks at this, the success of this Shrek tie-in. They wait a couple of years weirdly, I'm not sure what that's about, but then they come out with, in addition to blast and green, they had funky purple, stellar blue, passion pink, awesome orange, and totally teal, which is the color of your face while I describe

these. I do love teal. That's one of my favorite colors. Totally. I did a mystery flavor where you would buy, it was like, you didn't know what color was coming out of that bottle. Funky, what was it, funky? Funky purple, stellar blue, passion pink, there's a whole bunch of them.

There's very specific foods that I could eat that are described as funky, and catch-up is not one. Like, that doesn't, wow. So it's interesting to me that these sold off the charts because I feel like even as a child, I was right at the age, I was maybe like, so if this is like happening 2000, 2001, I was like 12 or 13, so maybe a little old for, you know, awesome orange. Oh, now I'm never too old for awesome orange, I take that back. I feel like even at a kind of preteen kind of age observing this, I was like, I don't

trust that electric blue catch-up that I'm seeing being squeezed on these tauts. No, your mama taught you right. Thank you. Okay, Anna Maria would never darken our refrigerator with this shite, but point being, you'll notice now that as you, maybe in America, I'm not sure, but if you're walking down the aisles, you're not seeing these stellar blue and passion pink catch-ups, right? So what happened? Basically, they discontinued them in 2006.

Before the sales started to slump, this helped Heinz get their most profitable quarter ever. They were like something like 60% of all catch-up being sold with primes, which is like record high or whatever. It was just a trend that cratered because the novelty wore off quick. So kids would be like, mom, I want the blue one. They'd have two squirts of the blue one. They'd be like, I don't want the blue one anymore. It's over.

I've eaten the blue catch-up. Give me the purple one or whatever. And so moms would end up with all of these like half consumed bottles of gross neon vibrant catch-up in their fridge. God bless them, those moms. God bless them. The real heroes of the soccer team. This also kind of coincided with a time when moms were just starting to get like more health

conscious in the products that they bought for their kids. And in addition to the bizarre optics of this colored catch-up, whatever they did to make it that color, they had to strip the catch-up of its natural red color and then put in a bunch of food coloring, which whatever it was made it so that they could no longer legally sell it as being called catch-up, which sounds like one of those things that should be an urban legend. But according to fastcompany.com, it's real. So it was like a catch-up sauce, like catch-up condiment, catch-up product, yes, exactly.

Difference between when it says chocolate and chocolatey on the bar, you know what I mean? Hines sucked up to the moms a bit. And I shouldn't say moms because, you know, fathers and aunts and uncles and everybody, grandma buys ketchup, grandpa buys ketchup. But this is our mother's May show. So Hines sucked up to the moms by fortifying the product with vitamin C, but even that didn't work.

No one was buying the ketchup and the ketchup had to go. And now we're back to boring red Hines catsup. Ugh. Ugh. Wait, is that where the word ketchup comes from? Because it's like not catch-up? I don't know. I was hoping you would know since you're a catch-up person and I'm not.

No, no, I'm not like that much of a catch-up person. That I feel like. If anyone in the catsup industry wants to send us an email. Yeah. Bittersweetinfo.meaggmail.com. That's right. We don't check it. So it feels like we need to do a little education piece here.

I really want you to sit down and take notes because apparently it has escaped notice what we're doing off the top here. This is a minfamous story. It's just a little. Mini infamous story. We decided that we were bored of listening to our stupid patter off the top. You don't want to know about my shampoo and shit. So now, no, I don't.

I did a hair mask the other day. Do you give a shit? I mean. Yeah, no. Let's talk about hair products after this. I am kind of interested. We decided that what we should do instead is a little whoever's not telling the story this week brings in a little mini infamous thing.

And in this case, it was weird catch-up. Love a weird catch-up. Love a weird catch-up. So yeah, that was the, oh, I'm sorry, someone's at the door. It's a new segment. Okay. So. Love when you scream into the mic, babe.

So I have a bittersweet update. I have two bittersweet updates, in fact. Here's a couple of updates on some new developments in stories that we've covered in the past. Back in episode seven, I told the story of JT Leroy, who was a woman who pretended more or less to be a young HIV positive gay sex worker in order to make great strides in the literary world. And it's a really great story. If you haven't listened to episode seven, go back and give it a listen.

Shortly after we finished our last recordings, Josie sent me a link to a Zoom reading of JT Leroy's collection of short stories, The Heart is Deceitful, above all things. Which is strange, because it's not like it's come, where did it have a reissue? It's a new audio book. A new audio book. And in true Who Is JT Leroy style, each story is read by a different person. All of these weird different actors and artists and whatever that Laura Albert, the woman behind JT Leroy, has collected.

And I would describe the atmosphere there as like, fawning. Like, of course, they would be complimentary to her while kind of reading at her reading, right? But they were like, you were so instrumental to my growing up. Thank you for doing everything you've done for literature. You are an icon. And they would all talk about meeting at Laura's cocktail parties where you could meet anybody. You just never knew who's going to be there, but they were all characters and we're like

family. Nostalgia! Nostalgia! Exactly. So if you listened to episode seven and you were worried about Laura Albert at all, she has landed on her feet. Good for her. Doing Zoom.

Love it. Doing Zoom readings. And then the second bittersweet update is an update on the subject of our last episode, episode 13, Flowers in Hell, the twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons, a screenplay about their lives has been purchased. Focus Features has acquired worldwide rights to feature the silent twins. It's the English language debut of director Agnieszka Smidzinska. The twins are going to be played by Letitia Wright from Black Panther.

Tamara Lawrence has also been attached. There will be a movie, Worldwide Rights, coming out soon, presumably, about the silent twins. Oh my gosh, that's so cool. I want to know what Allison thinks of the movie. That's my bittersweet update. Thank you. I'm so glad to know that. Every time you say bittersweet update, I'm like, there's going to be good news and there's

going to be bad news. What's the bad news? But it's all good news. Hey! Thank you. All good news, all good news. So as the lead-in to your story, Josie, our Instagram followers, who follow us at at bittersweet.info me on Instagram, will know that we are doing a little theme month for May.

Getting a little themie in here, my glasses are fogging up. And in this case, the theme is Mother's May. As in Mother's Day. But over May. Over the month of May. We have taken the theme of motherhood and walked in two different directions with it, and now we're coming back to share the stories. So in the spirit of Mother's May, Josie, what is the mother of all stories?

Oh god, no pressure, hey? I hope that you have gone a little cheeky with this and given me like a kombucha story. You know what I mean, like the mother? Ah, damn it, I did not. Oh, jeez. I wish I had. No, I went pretty full, full steamy. Okay.

And even to prepare slash distract myself, I watched Mommy Dearest the other night. And my mom called me in the middle of it, which is, oh, mother, mommy, which is, it's like my mom, me, she didn't make me, I have to watch my language a lot over this. My mom encouraged me and facilitated me watching Mommy Dearest as a kid. You know, like 13 year old or whatever. You've seen it, haven't you? I've watched some Joan, and I've watched some about Joan. Well, for those of you who don't know, the movie Mommy Dearest is from the late 1970s

and 80s, and it's based on Christina Crawford, Joan Crawford's daughter. So Christina's tell all memoir that was released after Joan died. And it chronicles Joan's strange behavior as a mother, abusive at times. She's also abused in her role as this, you know, big MGM, movie star, Hollywood heyday kind of thing, but it bears all the secrets, the memoir does, and then they bear them again on screen. And it's wild. Apparently, I was thinking that like, oh, this is just camp.

Like it came out as camp, it is camp. But it was meant to be full on drama. And then... They were serious as a heart attack, yes. And then kind of as it was getting more reception and bad reception, they switched marketing to more camp. I feel like this is infamously the movie that did Faye Dunaway's career. Like you know how they say that about what's-her-face, Jesse Spano and showgirls, too?

Like they're like, yeah, it was hard for her after this movie. Which honestly, I really like Mommy Dearest. It's definitely a melodrama. It's a great film. I have the DVD version and the commentary is by John Waters, if that gives you... Yes. Sorry, I don't mean to tell your story at you. No, no, no, no, don't even worry, because this isn't my story quite yet.

We're getting ready. Okay. Oh, so you're giving me a little bit of preamble here. All right. So Joan Crawford, you know, she's a huge movie star. She came up in this era of like she was a chorus girl to start with. She got signed by MGM and then they held a contest to give her a new name because her original name was Lucille Lissue and they thought it was too close to sewer.

And so... Oh, no. And they did a contest where they had to, yeah, where viewers and fans got to change her name, which is wild to me because you remember like a few years ago, I think it was the British Navy? I don't know. There was some official boat and there was a contest. It was like this woman would not get a name like Joan Crawford from that.

They had a contest to send Pitbull to any Walmart and they sent him to the most remote Walmart in America in Kodiak, Alaska. And he went and earned my respect by going. Good, good for you. And Justin Bieber did one of those, what country should I play a concert in and they sent him to North Korea. Oh, God. He didn't go.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn't work anymore, but it worked for Joan Crawford. Nice. And she, which is something you can learn in the memoir or the film, Mommy Daerist, she adopted four, actually five children. She was married, I think four, yeah, she was married four times, but never had a child with any of her husbands. In fact, she never adopted a child with a husband.

She always adopted as a single woman. She adopted five and one child was reclaimed by his birth parents. Okay. Yeah. She had another child and called him Christopher as well. It's a little weird. As you do. As you do.

We talked, this is Marcel, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. It kind of has some Marcel vibes to it. It also kind of has some Barbra Streisand cloning dogs vibes, I don't know. It turns out, it turns out that we've been, we thought we were doing a short story collection, but we've been writing a novel this whole time. It's beautiful. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I hate that little thing, but. Yeah, that's a true, oh, fuck it's a novel. Right. So this story though, it's not about John Crawford and it's not about Christina Crawford. Oh, you swerved me. I swerved you. I Simpson's do you. That's harsh.

You like it. What we're going to talk about is the story of Georgia Tan and the Tennessee Children's Home Society. Two of the children that John Crawford adopted were from this. Wait, what the? Oh, okay. There's the connection. There's the connection.

I was just about to lace into you. What the fuck was that? Joe Crawford shit then. I should have more faith in you. I'm sorry. No, no, no, don't. It's fine. I think I just got sucked into Mommy Dearest and I just.

It's so good. It's so good. My mom called me in the middle of it. Mommy Dearest is a strange shorthand for my mom apologizing for her parenting when my brother and I were small. And so even when she called me the other week and I was watching it, she was like, I'm so sorry. This must be bringing up memories for you.

There's so many. There's so many like, okay, I don't I won't because I was literally just like about to talk about all my favorite scenes in Mommy Dearest, but there's like where she makes her eat the steak, where she beats her in the swimming race, where she beats her with a can of Javax. That was I mean, wire hangers, got a wire hanger kicking around here. Watch out. Knock, knock, knock.

Who's there? Joan. Georgia Tan. Georgia Tan. A horrible human. We'll go out and say that at the top to just, you know, steal yourself. It's going to be one of those. This is going to be one of those.

It's ogre season. Is it? Oh yeah. Okay. She was responsible for kidnapping, abusing, neglecting, marketing and selling somewhere between 5,000 to 6,000 children between the years of 1924 and 1950 and not only was she responsible for all of this, but she profited off of her sale of children and became a millionaire. Jesus.

Yeah. That's that's evil. So I'm sure you're just itching to meet her. Send her in. She was born Bula George Tan in 1891 in Philadelphia, Mississippi. She didn't really have a chance with that name. Well, and I don't. Yeah.

I mean, her dad was George Tan. I assume that's always the case, you know. Her mom was Bula Yates. So they just kind of didn't get very imaginative on that one. They got to name one and they're like, well, I'm poopy. So her mom was a school teacher. Her dad was a judge, judge George Tan. They were a pretty well off family, Georgia, which she'd like to be called rather than

Bula. Completely understand. I mean, I don't like Bula. I don't know. I like Bula, too. I like Bula, too. I'm being a shit. I try not to make fun of names.

Actually, it's a little bit of a button. Well, because they'll go in and out of fashion, right? They'll come around. Exactly. Or you meet a really great Bula and a horrible Georgia and you're like, that's true. I'm very into like noun names. I like iceberg, pedal, fucking, you know what I mean, lake, sunshine. Just real, real hippie nature noun names are super up my alley.

And I know that's an acquired taste. So I really can't be out here bagging on anybody else. So she's growing up in this small town in Hickory, Mississippi. And as you can imagine, her dad is a complete nutter, hard ass. He has dreams of her becoming a concert pianist. So from the time that she's five years old, well into adulthood, she is forced to take lessons. She gets a college degree in music in 1915.

So it's kind of unique because pretty early for women to get education like that. But she hates music and she doesn't want anything to do with it. Of course. That's always how that goes. So after she graduates from college, she starts reading the law with her father. Just the law? At this time, there is no law school in the way that we have it now. You read the law meant that you apprenticed with a lawyer and you interesting, okay.

Literally read the law. But then you did all the kind of clerical work and you got to sit in on cases and blah, blah, blah. Sure. So once you were finished reading the law, once you'd read all of it, you could take the bar exam. The end. The end.

I'm ready for the bar exam. So she becomes the first woman in Mississippi history to pass the bar exam. Oh, I feel like I shouldn't be cheering her, should I? It sounds like she... It's early yet. You're fine. It sounds like she maybe applies her knowledge of the law in some pretty gnarly ways. So I'll hold off on that chair.

Well, the thing is, is that her dad never lets her practice. He thinks it's inappropriate for women to practice law even though he let her be the law. So she never gets to become a lawyer. Instead, she turns to social work. Okay. So this is plan C now. She hated music.

Her dad is keeping her out of the law and social work. And I think because he's a judge, it would be really, really hard for her to practice in Mississippi. Right. So she couldn't really even defy him very easily. As a social worker, she starts working at the Mississippi Children's Home Society. At that time, it's, it's pretty much an orphanage, more or less. She's working there and she meets a woman who's also a family friend, who's working

at the house or the, you know, the home as a home mother. And her name is Anne Atwood. She's eight years younger than Georgia Tan and she recently had a baby out of wedlock herself. I know. Scandal. It's largely been undisclosed because the two women kept it very well hidden, but there were suspicions and some pretty solid suspicions that they were a lesbian couple in what was

called at the time, a Boston marriage. Beautiful. I love, no, do you know what, can I say something? I really like most weird homophobic euphemisms like that. They're always, like, friend of Dorothy. You know what I mean? They're so weird and vague. I just love them.

Yeah, weird and vague and like, I mean, they're vague, they have vagueness, yeah, they have this kind of flowery-ness to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Boston marriage, which is, which is good. So around this time, which is like 1922, Georgia Tan adopts a daughter herself and she calls this daughter June. She's more or less in this committed relationship with Anne and they have two, two children. Right.

So in 20 years, Georgia Tan adopts Anne as a sister, which is this legal workaround for same-sex couples so that they could inherit each other's property. Man. Yeah. I know. I know. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Okay. I know. Let's just, can we just not do that? Let's just, no. No, no, listen, listen, I love those weird, that makes it weirder. You know what I mean? I like how weird that is. That's incredibly weird.

Yeah. That's Jolton Green level weird for me. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's awesome, awesome blue. Awesome blue. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. Funky purple. Thank you. Thank you. Funky purple. Okay. So after a short time at the Mississippi home when she's working there with Anne, Georgia is asked to leave because there's some shaky, shady stuff about the way that she is pulling

children into the home, which is like huge red flag that nobody really stealing, stealing children. Yeah. That's pretty good flag. And it is documented that she steals a baby off of somebody's back porch. The mom's name is Rose Harvey. She's a single mom with two kids. She's taken a nap inside.

Jesus Christ. Babies on the back porch like playing with like, I don't know, the one wooden toy car that they have. Yeah. Yeah. Georgia Tan rolls up in her big fancy car and has the biggest candy cane this baby has ever seen and lures the baby into her car with candy. She's why they say that.

Yes. Whoa. Yeah, dude. Whoa. She invented luring babies into cars with candy. That's fun. I don't know if she invented it, but like she popularized it. She's in there early.

I mean, when did cars come out? True. Very true. Okay. Yes, yes. We are a very anti car on this podcast. We're on record. Yeah.

Get on the bike. Get on the bus. Don't follow the stranger with candy. It's all there. Oh, porecito, though. That's so sad. So Rose also had another child and George just stole that child the same way. What a nightmare for that poor woman.

Rose Harvey went to court and tried to get her children back, tried to say like, this woman, Georgia Tan, who works for the Mississippi Home Society stole my kids. There's absolutely no legal recourse that can help Rose Harvey. You know, Georgia's daddy is a judge, but the town is very aware of what has happened. And it's reported that Georgia is essentially run out of town. Like she can't have that. I fucking hope so. Yeah.

Okay. At that point, she, Anne, Anne's baby, and June, Georgia Tan's adopted daughter. So the four of them, their four family, they go to Memphis, Tennessee. What of the two children that she stole? They get placed in homes. They're adopted away to, to homes and Rose Harvey never sees them again. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Prepare yourself, my dude. Okay. So this is a fun story. Cool. Okay. Cool. They all go, Georgia Tan takes her family and goes to Memphis, Tennessee. And I want to paint you a picture of Memphis, Tennessee at this time because it's 1924 and

a very deadly yellow fever outbreak has hit the city. What does that look like? Oh, who knows? Half the city population has left. They deserted to not be exposed to it. And then out of the 19,000 people that stayed, 17,000 people got sick and 5,000 died. So the city is, it, it's completely shrunk. It's completely decimated.

Of course it's bankrupt. It's totally fucked. So enter this dude named Edward Hall Crump, who was also from Mississippi. And is my personal favorite member of the Cats Ensemble. Yeah, that dude, man. So he waltzes into this power vacuum and takes the seat of power and immediately is the mayor and there's no checks or balances on what he's doing. They call him boss crump.

And frankly, Memphis is just scared of him. They can't do anything really to get him out. And there is nobody has the energy for it, right? I wonder what that's like. Crump, you said? Crump. Gotcha. Boss crump.

Get old boss crump, gotcha. And so who also shows up in decimated power vacuum, Memphis is Georgia Tan. She gets work at the Tennessee's Children's Home Society as a receiver director. And she quickly rises in rank and becomes the head of the Memphis, Tennessee Children's Home Society. So just to take a brief pause so that we can know a little bit more about adoption at this time, because it's changed radically from what we even know it today. Adoptions at the time, they're not socially common.

Okay. So they were really accepted in society. So typically orphanages were used as temporary homes. So like if a family was having economic hardship or if someone was really sick, they would put their child or children in an orphanage to collect them at a later time. So the state would take care of it. There's no welfare system. So this is in the world.

So you pawn your child. They're not getting any compensation. Oh, I see, I see, I see, I see. In my head, it was you're pawning your child. I apologize. That's okay, because that's, yeah, that's the whole other. I have a, I have a feeling I'm about to hear about a whole bunch of terrible shit people are doing to kids.

So whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So it was more like, it was a temporary home. It was a type of social, social net that was available at the time because there wasn't much else. So there were some orphans who were given to orphanages and they never went back to their families, but it was very rare to have them adopted out through the state system.

They would stay in the orphanage until they were adults and then enter society that way. Sure. So what Georgia tan starts doing is she's placing these kids with families and it's happening all the time. Adoptions are happening, but they're not out in the open like that or they're not. People aren't talking about them in the same way. They're stigmatized. They're stigmatized.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's, this is kind of horrible, brace yourself. There's these things called baby farms. That's already bad. These are locations that are, you know, under the radar where children are pond off more or less and then they're sold to families. But because it's so stigmatized, families that wanted to adopt children couldn't, couldn't

do so easily. So there's recorded instances of women faking pregnancies as in they don't tell their husbands that they're not pregnant. They start stuffing their dresses so that their bellies get progressively bigger. And then very conveniently, they'd be in front of one of these baby farms and they'd fall ill and they'd have to go up into the house and they would give birth and the father would be let in and she'd be, you know, she would give birth quote unquote. And then the mom would be holding a newborn or, you know, an infant and the dads were

dumb enough to think that, yeah, people are going to some pretty gnarly lengths to, to get babies into their homes when they want children. So it just means that Georgia Tan is at a point where she can easily overturn the cultural stigma. Like if she just kind of turns it in just the light, then adoptions can happen more regularly. She does that, but it's not out of the goodness of her heart. Right. In the state of Tennessee, you could only charge something between like $7 and $15 for

an adoption. And that was for process rates have gone up. Right. It's a lot of money at the time. $15 is still a lot of money. But it's something that could be managed by a middle class family who really wants a baby, you know. Right.

So she's of course collecting these fees, but we'll see later that it's not just these fees. So that's kind of the state of adoption at the time and where Georgia Tan is in all of that. Is that all? Is that all? Yeah. Okay.

And something else to note about the state of adoption is to go through like state channels, so kind of like valid channels, you had to be a very specific couple. So you had, of course you had to be married, you had to be heterosexual, but that also means like single women couldn't adopt, which is actually, Joan Crawford have a lot of problems because she was a single woman trying to adopt. Yeah. Yeah. So even in Mommy Deer, she goes to a state run orphanage and they're like, no, you're

a single woman. You're crazy. Even though it's Joan Crawford and she's a freaking millionaire. Right. Anyway. But you also couldn't adopt a child if you were of a certain age. So if you were in your 40s, then... As young as that.

Well, I mean, life expectancy was different, but yeah, yeah. So the state run, the more, quote unquote, above board adoptions weren't really options for people. It just wasn't a system that worked. And so Georgia Tan manipulated that. So she's in Memphis and she starts doing the candy and the Cadillac trick again, but she also extends her web and she prays on unwed single mothers, unwed mothers who are still connected with the father.

It's like the father's still in the picture, but they just, they haven't gotten married yet for whatever reason. And it's common practice at that time that unwed mothers weren't even given another option, but to put their child up for adoption. Mind you, the pill is decades away. Sex education in the US South is already abysmal and so it subtracts a hundred years. And you're looking at a lot of pregnancies, unplanned pregnancy. For sure.

If you happen to be a psychopath who wanted to snatch babies for profit, every possible societal, political, whole is lining up right for you to drop through. Especially if you have the state supporting you and the court supporting you. Yeah. Yeah. So she not only prays on single women, but poor families, she'll kind of like mark certain kids that she sees around town and she'll send people out to like do her dirty work. She's looking exclusively for white babies.

I think that's really important to say. She's looking for white children and then she prefers them to be blonde and blue-eyed. She's looking for the most marketable Aryan child she can get. Yes. I think it is important to note that it's only white kids because there's some who argue that she was able to de-stigmatize adoption in a way that is positive. But I think it's, her application is so horrendous, so uneven, it's just not, I don't think that argument really stands.

Yeah. She prays on widows. She uses the court system also. She has people in the courts who will flag newly divorced people. She's so, she's so good at this. She's very, well, she studied law. She knows all these ins and outs, right? This podcast is so depressing sometimes.

I'm sorry. I know. I'm sorry. No, it's fine. It's fine. I did fabulous, Mila. I should have done the kombucha one. No.

It's fine. The truth of infamy is that they're not all going to be campy fun stories that don't have any victims. Yeah. There is, people are, people, there's a reason you're infamous rather than famous. Yeah. Right? Oh, big time.

Big time. The people who worked for Georgia Tan were usually young women who would be, you know, assumed as like caretakers and that of that. She would have them dress as nurses, even though they were never qualified to be nurses. And she'd send them into hospitals to collect babies, routinely those fake nurses would collect a child and then tell the mom that the baby died. That's horrifying. And if the mom asked to see the baby, they would say the state has put your baby in the

ground. That is scary. That is a scary, scary thing to do. It's terrifying. It is truly, truly terrifying to imagine that like in a very vulnerable position like that, you've just given fucking birth. This is legit the stuff of horror movies. Yeah.

Oh, big time. Big time. In those cases too, when women had just given birth and they were super vulnerable, they might be asked to sign, you know, like, oh, could you sign this birth certificate or could you sign this hospital release or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it would be a fake nurse and they would have ended up being adoption papers. There's a story of Georgia Tan and she was lurking on a baby that she thought was particularly pretty and she notices, does her homework and notices that the mom is a single mom living

in a, like, a boarding house and she approaches this woman, her name's Alma Sipple, and she says, hi, I'm a social worker and I see that your baby's a little sick. And Alma says, well, it's just a little cough, it's a little cold, yeah. And then Georgia Tan does, you know, a fake examination is like, your baby's really sick. I need to take this baby into the hospital, will you let me do that? And Alma's like, she's really sick, okay, let's go. And Georgia says, no, no, no. In order to get the free healthcare, because you need the free healthcare, right, don't

you? Then we need to pretend that the baby's a baby of the state. So I will take the baby, she takes the baby and Alma shows up the next day at the hospital sees her little baby, chumming it up with the other babies in the, in like a little crib area and she's healthy and happy and Alma's like, awesome, this is great. And she asks the nurse like, hey, can I go and see my baby? I think she's okay, I want to take her home. And the nurse says, you don't have a baby here.

She contacts Georgia Tan and Georgia Tan says, no, your baby died of pneumonia. There's nothing that Alma Sipple can do. She goes to court, but there's absolutely no recourse. Sorry, Dr. Kimberly Shaw did this to Joe on Melrose Place. Wait, really? This exact thing, yes, no, literally this thing, Joe had the baby, Kimberly took the baby and ginned it up like Joe was crazy and the baby had died and she was like breastfeeding Joe's baby and shit.

My point being Dr. Kimberly Shaw is a psychotic villain character from Melrose Place and this woman is doing the same, the exact same shit in real life. So maybe a little bit of perspective there. Yeah, oh yeah. So multiple mothers and mothers and fathers try and get their babies back. There's been all these crazy ways that Georgia Tan has kidnapped and abducted their children and there's numerous lawsuits against Georgia Tan and the Tennessee Children's Home Society and not one of them overturns Georgia Tan's actions.

Is this being reported on by the media? In a way that Georgia's on any radar is quite yet. Right, okay. No, I think there's such a stigma around unwed mothers and there's such a trusting of the state in what it's doing because Georgia's claiming that she's finding better homes for these kids. Right, it's philanthropic, it's out of the goodness of her heart and obviously she's making money, but she's just a really good woman who's doing a good thing for these kids.

And she in her core, Georgia Tan believes that the poor are not capable of parenting. Like it's a bad move for society to have poor people raising children. So she has this very warped moral motivation that she can convince others of. That's fucked. It's really, really fucked. What a nice woman, geez. She would change medical records of the children that she found to hide any questionable medical issues that they might have.

How many schemes does she have? She is the, I believe I've coined the phrase the Michael Phelps of strangling. This is the Michael Phelps of adoption fraud. She's got a thumb in every pie. Yes, oh big time. She would pull babies from women who were in sanitariums or mental health institutions and then she would change the baby's birth certificates to say that oh this baby's father was a chemist and her mother was a harpist and they died in a terrible car crash and

blah, blah, blah. I get the urge to start getting creative like that. But when you have so many, you gotta think of. You gotta start doing like. They can't all be doctors, you know. Her father was eaten by a lion at the zoo and her mother was crushed by a giant peach. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly. And that just brings up a whole another problem when these adopted children grow up and their adults and they're trying to track their birth parents. But things have been changed so drastically. In some cases the birth place was changed to the place of adoption. So there's just so very, very little that they can do. And then gosh, so Georgia Tan is just so untouchable because she does all this work to erase her tracks of paperwork.

She changes everything so much but she also makes it, which is pretty common at the time, to have all of these be closed adoptions, which means that the records are sealed and they could not, you can't access them. Of course. And nobody, in some cases nobody can access them. So the, of course the parents who the kids were stolen from, but the adopted parents and the adoptees themselves can never get to their original paperwork. And she had Boss Crump at her back the whole time, but she had started working a network

of other judges and lawyers and nurses, doctors, the whole thing, who were either getting kickbacks or she had given them children. And so that they were implicated in the adoption scandals so that if everything, if anything were to come out, their own children might be taken away from them. You know, it really frustrates me when these are the people who are in charge of society's most vulnerable period and a thought. Yeah. That's it.

That's all I have to say about that. Keep going. There was one family court judge who was particularly instrumental and her name was Camille Kelly. She's known as the little Irish judge. Okay. I know. She never wore judicial robes. She wore bright colorful dresses and big jewelry and she would always have a flower pinned

on her lapel. I assume we like her. How did I know? How did I know? Sounds like we like her a lot. Okay. Let's go. I don't know, dude.

She always said about the robes. She was like, robes would scare the children to death. They're not so timid when they appear before me and see that I'm wearing a flower. So she has this very, like, shimmery- No. That's fucked up. Clowns. She's, children hate clowns and she's dressing like a clown.

People love clowns. They're funny. That can't have been true. I know. I know. I refuse to believe that. So even though she seems very nice, grammatically all of that, Camille Kelly used her position of authority to sanction a lot of TAN's tactics and actions.

In fact, TAN would identify children as being from homes that could not provide for them. She'd had all these feelers out and she would give those names to Judge Kelly, who would pursue those in a legal sense. So she'd push those families through her dockets. And then conversely, Kelly would let Georgia TAN know about all the divorce cases that would come through because those would be deemed as inappropriate families for children. And Georgia TAN could step in and take those kids as well. Wow.

There's a diabolical level of, like, strategy to all of this. It's insane. Yeah. It's so ornate. Yes. Yeah. I think ornate is a really good word for it because it's just so, there's just so many ways that Georgia TAN finds kids and then covers up her tracks.

Yeah. She has so many goons. She has so many hench people on payroll too. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot to say that Kelly, that Judge Kelly with the flower, she writes several books on child delinquency because she's kind of seen as an expert in turning kids around. Yeah.

Turning kids around for profit. Yeah. And towards the end of her life, she's in negotiations with Hallmark who wants to produce a movie based on one of her books. Okay, little Irish judge, calm down. I know. I know. In the end, apparently 20% of Georgia TAN's illegal adoptions were overseen by Judge Kelly.

We'll come back to her. Oh, we better. Mm-hmm. If it's not clear already, Georgia TAN is making buku bucks off of these kids. That's why she could be so detailed in what she does. Right. So in the state of Tennessee, the fee for in-state adoption is $7 to $15. But out of state, that rate doesn't apply.

For like neighboring states like Mississippi, all of that, it ranges like $750 for an adoption, which is an insane amount of money. Yeah. Though many of the kids that Georgia TAN adopted out were to California and New York. And that's because that's where the big money. The money was, yeah. That's where Joan Crawford got her to twin girls. They're not actually twins.

Joan Crawford just called them twins. That's fucked up. I know. They're sisters. They're not twins. No, but that's so fucking weird. Why bother with that? It's so weird.

I know. I know. Oh, Joni. Pearl S. Buck adopts kids from Georgia TAN, Ric Flair of Wrestling fame. So let's say about a month ago, and I read for the first time that, oh, Ric Flair was adopted and he was a Georgia TAN baby. And I was like, what does that mean? So you did know about this story.

No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. You yelled at the mic again. No, I didn't know about the story. So I knew the vague just that basically there was a woman. I wouldn't have even been able to tell you her name. Right, yeah. But I would have known that there was an evil adoption lady and that Ric Flair was, and

as you were telling the story, I was like, maybe this is the lady that is responsible for the Ric Flair thing. This is her. She adopted out Ric Flair. Thank you for including that gem for me. There are a few other Hollywood names, but I didn't recognize them and I was like, Ric Flair. Tell you more.

Woo, come on. She also adopted kids out to New York governor, Herbert Lehman, who signed a law sealing birth certificates in New York for adoptees in 1935. Oh, horrible people in power make me so mad, man. Yeah, yeah. That's so self-sacred. What? Anyway.

That makes me mad. I think politicians make me really mad because there is, like, I feel like the barest percent of them are actually people interested in improving community or something like that, and a huge amount of them are just there to be part of the politician industrial complex. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I don't think that your boy Ted Cruz, for example, has any real interest in being a public servant.

I think he has an interest in being a senator, right? Right, yeah. Yeah, and having his voice heard and his smartness commented on. And I think Ted Cruz is a weirdo in so many ways, because I think he loves getting dumped on. I think he gets off. You think it's like a sex thing? Yeah.

Allegedly. Allegedly. This is conjecture. This is theory. This is fact. He lives in Houston. I know. Send him a mariachi.

Send him. Let's go. Fuck that. They're coming to mind. I can feel you. How did that turn into, man, I hate Ted Cruz. We're like, politicians suck, Ted Cruz. Yeah.

EG. Yes, go ahead. Another way that Georgia Tann got so much money out of this is that often with these big name clients, or maybe not big name, but with the really wealthy clients, she would return to them years after the adoption had been confirmed and she'd say, there's a fee that you never paid. Or I'm going to tell everybody that your child is adopted if you don't pay me so much money.

Yeah. And then, of course, because adoption still had the stigma and because there's like all this stuff about the sealed records, nobody wanted anybody else to know, so they would pay. Right. Also, these families who couldn't have kids, who tried to go to state adoption services and were denied again and again, they really, really wanted kids. And money was not an object for them.

I think the other thing to note, too, is that the Tennessee Children's Home is also a state agency. So the state of Tennessee is still contributing money to the agency every year. They're giving like $6,000 and a third of that money is going to the Memphis branch. When is someone going to do something about this woman already? There's still more, dude. Oh my God. I want to get to the fireworks factory on Georgia Tan in her whole thing.

In 1943, a wealthy businessman donated the mansion that becomes the home at 1556 Popular Avenue. And it's a huge, crazy, big, ornate mansion for the kids to live in. Georgia Tan doesn't pay percent of it. She is so fucking wealthy. She starts buying second, third homes on the Gulf. She gets these big old limos. She has fancy houses.

She makes sure that the children's home is immaculate. The floors are always polished. Sounds very unfriendly to children, but she needs to make sure that it's very, very fancy for when these big names come through. What a horrible old witch from a fairy tale. What a Cinderella's stepmom. You know what I mean? Totally.

She's estimated to have profited a million dollars off of her operation. That's sickening. Equivalent in today's money, that's 11 million. And that's what they can track. You know, like who knows how many like... Oh, this woman? Did you see she like lives in an escape room with a million friggin espionage and undercover plants in the fucking like legal and medical and...

Yeah. Mmm. It really steams my cabbage. That makes me mad. Yeah, it does. Good. You're passing your empathy exam right now, that's good. Oh, good.

I'm glad. Thank you. What George Hutan does with all of this is she advertises these kids like crazy. So this had never been done before and she goes... With reason. Yeah. She goes fucking hard. She takes out newspaper, pages in the newspaper and puts up pictures of these kids and they're

all like cute blonde, blue-eyed Aryan little nuggets. And she's like, little Bobby loves pudding and like all of this crap, you know? She always has huge campaigns at Christmas because what better time than Christmas to have a baby? For the fucking Grinch to show up. Right? Exactly. She in town in Memphis, she would have a Christmas baby giveaway.

I feel like those three words, you know? Christmas baby giveaway. Christmas baby giveaway. Again, Christmas I'm on board. Baby, sure. Christmas giveaway is where I get a little more hesitant. Right? And of course everything is super, super staged.

Like within the home, there's pictures of these beautiful nurses taking care of these little babies and da-da-da. But in real life. Are they? They're not nurses. The fake nurses, right? They're not even nurses. They're not even nurses.

But of course these kids were crammed in multiple to a crib. There wasn't a lot of oversight with them. Medical attention was routinely delayed. This gets really sad, so just like hard on yourself. But this is the saddest it gets, okay? Medical attention was routinely delayed if it was given at all. There's a book by a woman named Barbara Raymond called The Baby Thief and she is a journalist who interviews a lot about this and she talked to a doctor who volunteered his services to

the home because he was so worried about these kids. He knew everything was wrong, but he was just like, someone has to get in there and take care of them. And he remembers a time when he prescribed a very simple antibiotic for a baby who was sick and Georgia Tan told the nurse not to give the baby the antibiotic, but to chart it as if she did so the doctor wouldn't bug them. And if the baby died then. Did the baby die?

I don't know in that particular case. That's not very nice. Children were subjected to neglect, big time neglect, physical abuse, in some cases sexual abuse. Many children died very preventable deaths. So like diarrhea, like a baby just, yeah, just very simple things. If you just took the kid to a hospital, they could have easily, easily, even at that time not intervened.

In the 1930s, Memphis had the highest infant mortality rate in the nation and it's largely due to Georgia Tan. Fucking another gold star on the resume of our lovely Georgia Tan, gotcha. Many of these kids were buried in Elmwood Cemetery, which is in Memphis, but still there's other children who were never accounted for. The exact number of children that she murdered remains unknown. I estimate that it's about 500 deaths due to mistreatment. Fuck you, fuck you, not fuck you.

I know. To be clear. I'm upset because I don't like the things that you're telling me. When we had this prompt of the... Of motherhood, thanks for that. No, I was talking to him, I called my mom and I was like, do you have any good stories? And she's like, oh gosh, I don't know. And she's like, this is hard because...

That's sweet that you called your mom. Well, yeah, I have a hard time coming up with them sometimes. No, I thought for the mothers one you do. Yeah, yeah. And she pointed out it's like, if you're taking an infamous lens on motherhood, then it's about infant mortality. It's about children who aren't taken care of or it's about children who are abused and it's just really dark.

Yeah. Okay, so things are turning now. Okay, it's 1941. The Child Welfare League of America drops them as a qualifying institution because the paperwork doesn't seem to be being processed correctly. They don't quite get into the sort of details, but they're noticing that things aren't going like they should in terms of paperwork alone. So they drop them on that.

There's a lot of stuff being fudged and covered over. When you have a plan, this active and labyrinthine and huge, you're bound to leave fingerprints somewhere. Exactly. It's inevitable, unless you're a robot. Yeah. You've got like eight people involved in the fucking government. Someone's not going to dot an eye or cross a T somewhere along the way.

And the other thing too is Georgia Tan is also becoming a bigger and bigger known entity. She's invited to the White House to speak to Roosevelt and stuff like that. When she was in the Roosevelt White House, was she just like eyeing his kid up? Maybe. I don't know. What she was probably doing was like, would they like another kid? What a wonderful political move to support adoption. I could sell them.

Yeah. And then they would be in my pocket forevermore. I mean, I don't like fucking Georgia Tan, like truly. No. It's 1950 when there's a new mayor in Memphis named Gordon Browning, and he launches an investigation into the black market adoption ring that Georgia Tan oversees. What was his name? Gordon Browning.

Gordon Browning. Protagonist. Thank you, Gordon. I needed you like fucking half an hour ago, man. You came late. I know. It's a pretty quick investigation. Starts in September, and the home is shut down within the same year.

So within three months, they find enough evidence to close the Tennessee Children's Home Society. Judge Kelly, who was such a big part of this, she was believed to be receiving bribes for ruling in Tan's favor. However, apparently, in a 1951 report by the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, she had failed on many occasions to assist destitute families and permit family ties to be destroyed, but she had not personally profited from the rulings, which I don't know what Kool-Aid she was drinking if it wasn't the money Kool-Aid. Like, I don't get it.

That doesn't make any sense. Did she adopt from Georgia Tan? I don't know that. That might be a motive, but other than that, I can't think of any other. There's no other reason that she would so throatily help this woman unless she was on the take. Right. Or unless she just had some very skewed morals akin to take Georgia Tan's.

Ew. Ew, Christ. I know. Uh, she retired shortly after. Great. Retired. Cool. Yeah.

We know that's a great institution of justice when people are wrong just to retire. And she died in 1955 without any charges having been brought against her. Though I will say Hallmark never made that movie. That feels like the right decision. Right. Just to tie it back into Joan Crawford. This is what Betty Davis said when Joan Crawford died. She said, you should never say bad things about the dead.

Only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good. I choose to express that similar. You know, I don't like to say that though. I don't even, someone who I think is evil, I try not to be like, I'm stoked that somebody died. But I can't say that I'm exceedingly sad that someone like that.

I don't know. It's complicated. Well, let me, let's, let me tell you this and we'll run that, we'll run this by you again. The investigation starts 1950, the home shuts down in the same year within months, Tan dies. She dies of uterine cancer. Three days before the state filed charges against the society. She never faced problems.

She made it out right on the wire. Right on the wire. She never had to deal with those families coming back to her. She never had to deal with any political or public fallout. She just, she, she won. She won. I mean, she's dead. So will we all be good or bad?

True. Jesus. Yeah. Oh wow. I sing on the shit cake. You know? Yeah. No.

And again, and I, I hate to keep drawing this comparison, but like I say, we covered the fabulous Mula back in episode five, I think. Yeah. And, and it's, the, the stories remind me a bit of each other because it was a very similar like, yeah, she has to endure the fact that now people look at her as like a blight, but she never had to personally experience that. That's completely hypothetical. Yeah.

No, I think when I was putting this together, I'm researching it. I was thinking of the fabulous Mula a lot because of those correlations. Yeah. After several decades, 19 of the children who died at the Tennessee Children's Home Society were buried at the historic Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. In 2015, the cemetery raised enough money to erect a monument in their memory, which is really lovely. There was a lot more reporting about Georgia Tann as things kind of started to come out.

It was like in the 80s and the 90s that it really got going, like there was a 60 minutes. And actually in 1990, the Los Angeles Times published the story of Alma Sipple, who was the single mom who had the sick baby. Her daughter, Irma, had been taken by Georgia Tann for the purpose of giving her free healthcare. And then she went to the hospital, saw her. Yes. Yes. That was chilling.

Yes. Yes. I remember that. Years later, in 89, Alma Sipple was watching Unsolved Mysteries, as you do. As you do. And she recognized Georgia Tann as the woman who had taken her baby. And she wrote to an organization that was created around that time called Tennessee's Right to Know, and it was a nonprofit kind of grassroots organization put together to

help adoptees through the Tennessee Children's Home to, you know, through Georgia Tann to help them find their families, which is really, really lovely because it's such a dirty, massive bureaucratic paperwork to go through. Right. Of course. If you can even get to it. Like a lot of these people emotionally couldn't do that. They either couldn't do it themselves or they didn't want to put their adopted parents

through it. Like there's just, there's so many, so many roadblocks that if you add the bureaucratic ones to it, it's, it's nearly impenetrable. So Alma Sipple, she reaches out through this organization and she finds her daughter through them. Her daughter was named Sandra Kimbrel and they were reunited. Okay. Yeah.

That's a, that's a complicated reunion. It's very complicated. Yes. Yes. And the reunions themselves are really difficult because sometimes people would find their birth parents to learn that they had already passed. Sometimes they would find their families. So siblings, uncles, aunts, and find that there was some pretty big differences between them

that were hard to understand, of course, in general. But then there was also just this huge, because Georgia Tann was selling these babies to people who could afford $5,000, there's a big class difference. Of course. And that's, that was just, on top of everything else, that's a really hard thing to process. And processing that your parents, your adoptive parents, like literally purchased you. Correct. Yeah.

And a lot of cases, those kids weren't told as they were growing up that they were adopted. They were told once they got to adulthood, hey, you were adopted. Yes. Yeah. All the reunions are, some of them are absolutely beautiful and some of them are complicated, most of them are complicated because, of course, any reunion is going to be complicated. But add in this huge villain that kind of like dominates your story, too. Yeah.

Like, really moves the chess pieces around. Exactly. Yeah. In, I think it was like late oddies, there was a fiction writer. No, not oddies. What is it then? I don't know, but it surely can't be the oddies, can it? It was like, I didn't consent to that.

Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I always call it like the double O's. The double O's? But you don't, I don't have to, mine isn't better than yours, they're just different, I guess. I have the more divergent version, you're the... The oddies.

I do like the naughty oddies, that's kind of cute. Yeah, that one's cute. That would bring me on board. Okay. Okay. I talked myself into it, it's fine. Somewhere in there, there's a novelist named Lisa Wingate who uses the story as a backdrop for a novel.

She fictionalizes it and turns it into what becomes a bestseller, it's like really hot in the book clubs, it's, you know, Lisa Wingate writes the novel and then she has so many people responding to her saying, I was stolen by Georgia Tan, I, my sibling was, my parent, blah, blah, blah. There's so many people who were just so moved by her story, even as fiction that she started compiling all of their stories with, of course, with their intent because they were looking for this, but they all seem to be looking for her for some type of connection to the other adoptees.

And so in the next five years, I think after her novel came out, she helped put together a reunion at Elmwood Cemetery, which is where the monument is for the 19 children, she, with a lot of the adoptees volunteering their own time and expertise. She was just kind of like the big face that could, everyone could email her, you know. Yeah, she was, she was the hub, she became the hub for these people. She was the hub, yeah, and, and because it was kind of overwhelming for her, she asked her friend, Judy Christie, who was a journalist to chronicle it all, to document the whole thing.

And so there's this huge reunion in, I think about 2015 or so after they've erected the monument and it brings all of these adoptees together, and it's really, really lovely. So that's this book, which is called Before and After. I love the gentle crinkle of the plastic book cover. Yeah, it's the library book. There you go. So, you know, you know that, yeah. And I think that reunion, I think is really, I'm sure there's some really beautiful reunions

with families that, that happened, but I think reuniting with other people who were adopted in such a violent way. Of course. Who were kidnapped. You share a trauma, right? You share a trauma. And I think, you know, your family member shares a trauma, but kind of in another way. So reuniting with other adoptees seems like it was really, really important for a lot

of these people. That makes me happy. I mean, the world's loosest definition of happy, that makes me devastated, but that makes me, ah, community won't heal a wound, but it can help balm it a bit, you know what I mean? Yeah. It can be a useful nugget of gold to pull out of the giant shit heap that is the situation. Yeah, yeah.

And I think, I mean, we're talking about the Mayor Gordon Browning as being kind of protagonist, but I think it's like all these kids who fucking survived this, like fucking shit, fantastic. And then she like. And then also the ones who didn't. And the ones who didn't. And then also the ones who didn't. That's so sad.

500, that's nauseating. She should be the ogress this one. I know. There can be more than one though. There's a few ogresses around. Something that gets a little muddy and that I don't think needs to be as muddy is this idea that Georgia Tan helped revitalize and de-stigmatize adoption in America. And I find that really troubling because, and I said it before, she did it so unevenly

and with such horrible motivation and her tactics were so cruel. And I really think that if you, if you want to make the argument that this experience and this 25 years of neglect and abuse changed adoption, then I feel like you need to give that credit to the kids rather than to Georgia Tan because they're the ones who are enduring those seismic changes, those seismic, cultural and societal changes and more than that, of course, a lot more is put on their shoulders than just that. But there's, there's a, I don't know, I kept running into people who saying like, well, you know, she did.

Did it, was it that prevalent? Was it really that prevalent? It was that prevalent. And I think because she was able to get such big names, you know, like Joan Crawford, right? Because such wealthy and famous people were adopting. Adoption became equivalent with, with wealth, with fame, with this kind of luxury aesthetic that changed the way that the nation saw adoption.

Cool. Okay. You made, you made adoption trendy. That's, I mean, that doesn't make you a fucking good person. I mean, that's a good point. But I, I guess what I mean is that some people like to give Georgia Tan credit for making adoption for children who actually need it, a good thing, you know, destigmatizing it for children who actually need it and destigmatizing it for families that actually need it as well.

But I don't think that she, of course she's not deserving, but I really just don't think that she, she didn't sacrifice anything, right? So how can she be deserving of that accolade? This was her industry and she was very good at both the front facing PR part of it, as well as the back end scheming part of it, as well as the part of it where you need to steal a bunch of fucking babies. So I'm happy that adoption is less stigmatized. It is always a trial to endure being stigmatized in any way.

I love that that has changed. I wish anyone else but this woman had done it. I wish anybody else but this woman had done that. To me, it's just, it's such a horrifying scenario. This is what they make those fucking pulpy thrillers that I love about. Some friendly woman tells you that your baby is sick and they need to help you and the next thing you turn around and you're looking at your baby but they're saying, no, ma'am, that's not your baby.

Your baby is dead. Like that's bone chilling. That's like a fucking horrible fever dream and she's out there doing this scam or a scam like just like it to fucking how many, 500 was the ones who died. Like that's how many. Yeah, five to six thousand. Jesus fucking Christ. So yeah, Georgia Tan is not invited to my bobble party.

God, I'm glad. She can play a bobble elsewhere. Happy Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day. Next week I'm doing a Mother's May one too but I think this is the one that will release closest to Mother's Day. So happy Mother's Day, ma'am. Thanks for not being Georgia Tan.

Oh my fuck, thank you for not being Georgia Tan. You can be Joan Crawford if you want, I don't fucking care, just don't be Georgia Tan. Thank you, Josie, for that story and to all of you for listening. If you want more infamy, we release episodes every other Sunday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and at bettersweetenfleet.com. Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this episode were the Georgia Tan Wikipedia page. Thank you, good friends at Wikipedia.

As well I watched the 60 Minutes Report Tennessee Children's Homes scandal that aired in January of 1992. I looked at the book The Baby Thief by Barbara Byzantz Raymond. And I mentioned the book by Lisa Windgate, the fiction book called Before We Were Yours, and that sprung board her into writing the non-fiction book with journalist Judy Christie called Before and After, the incredible real-life stories of orphans who survived the Tennessee Children's Homes Society. The song that you are listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele.