Adopted daughter of the former Mayor of New York City, James J. Walker, and his second wife, Betty Compton. Upon her adoption the press deemed her to be "one of the luckiest babies in the world."
Mary Ann was sister to James J Walker II (also adopted) and a son from her mother's 4th/last marriage.
------
Mary Ann Walker's scrapbook is filled with the yellowed photographs and clippings that chronicle her childhood - the nurses, the sunny pink nursery high above East 72d Street and the doting couple who adopted her in March 1936: James J. Walker, New York City's flamboyant former Mayor, and his wife, the actress Betty Compton.
Newspaper accounts at the time referred to Mary Ann as ''one of the luckiest babies in the world,'' a ''blue-eyed, curly-haired tot bubbling with a genial disposition - to match her father's.'' To Mr. Walker, a father for the first time at 55, she was simply ''the loveliest little lady anyone ever cast eyes on,'' and he vowed that she would be ''a normal American child.''
But like many sons and daughters of celebrities, Mary Ann Walker never really felt ''normal.'' For years, she struggled to extricate herself from the lengthy shadow cast by Jimmy Walker, who as Mayor of New York from 1926 to 1932 came to symbolize the gaiety and exuberance of the Jazz Age. And like many of the adopted, she discovered she knew nothing about herself when she emerged.
A Search for the Past
As a result, she has now undertaken an even more arduous task: piecing together her past and finding her natural parents, if they are still alive. The search has brought Miss Walker to court in New York, where she lost one round earlier this year but is determined to prevail in the next round.
''I loved Jimmy Walker, but for so long I was his daughter when what I really wanted to be was my own person,'' she said in a recent interview. ''I look at that clipping about being the 'luckiest baby' and I think how ironic it is.''
Continue reading the main story
Jimmy and Violet Halling Walker - better known by her stage name of Betty Compton -adopted 6-week-old Mary Ann on St. Patrick's Day, 1936. The arrangements were made through the Cradle in Evanston, Ill., an adoption agency that catered to such famous couples of the day as Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler and George Burns and Gracie Allen.
At 55, Mr. Walker was quite old by the conventional standards for an adoptive father -prohibitively old, perhaps, had he not been so wealthy and prominent. The following year the Walkers adopted a baby boy.
Miss Walker's childhood memories are a series of idyllic vignettes: leisurely rides on a Sunday morning to St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church on Park Avenue, walks to the bandshell in Central Park, periodic visits to the Polo Grounds for Giants baseball games. Always, she says, she was raised to know both that she was adopted and that she was special.
''We know practically nothing of your background, except that you came from intelligent and fine American people,'' her adoptive mother wrote Mary Ann in 1943. ''We had no desire to know any more. You were to us perfect, and we wanted to give you all the love we had to give.''
The Walkers were divorced in 1941, and three years later Betty Compton, 40, died of cancer. Jimmy Walker died in 1946 at the age of 65. The children were placed in the care of Mr. Walker's sister, Nan Walker Burke, in Bayside, Queens, and Mary Ann, a sixth grader, went to the Thevenet Academy, a girl's boarding school in Highland Mills, N.Y., for the next seven years. Then she enrolled in St. John's University.
Upon graduating in 1958, Miss Walker married, had a son and taught for many years in the city's public school system. After her divorce in 1967, she left New York and moved to Berkeley, Calif., where she was unable to find teaching jobs so she drove a truck, was discharged for picketing and became a secretary in a law firm.
Though always curious about her natural parents, Miss Walker had long been convinced that any attempt to track them down would be both difficult and disloyal. But the void created when her son left home convinced her to try.
In March 1979, she wrote the Cradle and asked for what is known in adoptees' circles as ''nonidentifying information'': the circumstances of her birth and lineage. The agency described her father as a handsome 35-year-old engineer of Irish descent, with dark, curly hair. Her mother was 15, a high school honors student of English-German and French stock, with blond hair and blue eyes. She was a talented musician - which may have accounted, Miss Walker realized, for her adoptive parents' insistence that she study music. The natural parents had not married. Letter Brings Tears
''I cried when I read the letter,'' Miss Walker recalled. ''All of a sudden the person who is my mother was real, with interests and a life of her own. For me, it was like coming out of a fog.''
The agency declined, however, to provide Miss Walker with the names of her natural parents. Such questions, it said, were ''right and healthy'' but ''must go unanswered.''
In Illinois, as in New York and virtually every state, adoption records containing the names of the natural parents are sealed by statute, except upon a showing of ''good cause.'' Courts have interpreted these provisions restrictively, holding that only compelling medical, psychological or genetic reasons - and not mere curiousity - constitute such ''good cause.''
New York, like Illinois and many other states, once maintained an open records law. But in 1936 Gov. Herbert Lehman, himself the father of three adopted children, appointed a commission that led to the mandatory sealing of records.
In 1977 the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association, a national organization working to open adoption records, unsuccessfully sought to have the New York State statute declared unconstitutional on the ground that it violated the equal-protection clause of the Federal Constitution by subjecting adoptees to ''psychological pain, suffering and damage not experienced by nonadopted persons.'' A similar suit is pending in California. 'Glacial Rigidity' Reported
''The courts are dealing with the issue with almost glacial rigidity,'' said Prof. Cyril C. Means Jr. of the New York Law School, who represented the adoptees' association in the New York case.
Unlike many adoptees, however, Miss Walker had another avenue to pursue. The executor of Mr. Walker's estate, Charles L. Sylvester of the Manhattan law firm of Warshaw Burstein Cohen Schlesinger & Kuh, retained a copy of her adoption decree.
She contended she was entitled to the document under Mr. Walker's will - in which he left to his children ''memorabilia of every kind, nature and description.'' In September 1980, after efforts failed to have the law firm voluntarily hand over the decree, she turned to New York Surrogate's Court. She was joined by her younger, adopted brother, James J. Walker 2d.
''I just went along with it,'' said Mr. Walker, a New York City policeman who lives in Rockaway Point, Queens. ''Finding my real parents never meant a hill of beans to me. If they're not interested, I'm not interested.''
Lawyers at Warshaw, Burstein, which has represented Mr. Walker's interests since 1933, argued that they were bound by New York State law,the attorney-client privilege and their own sense of propriety. Right to Privacy Cited
''We feel that we have at least a moral obligation to protect the privacy of the natural mother,'' the firm asserted in court papers. ''Adoption is a traumatic experience for the mother. To reopen any wounds the natural mother has had, without knowledge of her present circumstances, would be even more traumatic.''
In an interview Mr. Sylvester, who is 84, called the lawsuit a ''nuisance'' and said it had been prompted by ''that damned Haley book about roots.''
Earlier this year Surrogate Marie Lambert upheld the law firm's position. Citing the ''strong and clearly enunciated public policies of both New York and Illinois,'' she ruled that the decrees were not property ''transferable by will.''
Florence Fisher, the head of the adoptees' association, who found through her own search that her natural father was a Hollywood stuntman, criticized the ruling by Surrogate Lambert. ''This isn't an adoption issue at all,'' she said. ''This is an issue where a father has left all of his belongings to his children, and she is blocking it.'' An Appeal Planned
Miss Walker plans to appeal Surrogate Lambert's decision. In the meantime she is chasing down leads and checking birth and baptismal records. While she would like to find both of her parents, she feels a special kinship with her mother.
Despite the recent setbacks, Miss Walker feels the pertinent question is not whether, but when and how, she will find her mother, who would now be 61.
''I do not know what I will find, or what my birth mother's attitude will be,'' she said. ''I assume she will be eager to know what has happened to me, but should she choose to reject me, I have people I can talk to to relieve my own disappointment. In any event, I will still know a part of myself long suppressed.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/06/nyregion/lucky-baby-of-30-s-hunts-her-parents.html
------
NOTE:
Mary Ann Narita eventually located her birthparents in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Her adoption was handled by The Cradle of Evanston, Illinois.
Adoption records listed her as Baby Girl Demaray, daughter of Katherine Demaray, and an unknown father. Limited non-identifying information with identifying names and places withheld was provided by The Cradle.
The actual original birth certificate which Illinois Vital Statistics in Springfield, Illinois could not locate was filed on 2/14/1936, Record No. 4590 as Patricia Jean Kellay, born 2/6/1936 in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois (NOT Evanston). Daughter of Robert Kellay
20 years old, born in Alma, Michigan, and Katherine Demaray, 15 years old, born in Alma, Michigan.
Ironic that both parents were born in and from ALMA, Michigan and the first place she sought help in her Adoption Search was A.L.M.A. Although she was unable to locate through A.L.M.A. or on her own she engaged a Private Investigative Firm and located her birth family. It is unknown whether she made contact with them.
Mary Ann was sister to James J Walker II (also adopted) and a son from her mother's 4th/last marriage.
------
Mary Ann Walker's scrapbook is filled with the yellowed photographs and clippings that chronicle her childhood - the nurses, the sunny pink nursery high above East 72d Street and the doting couple who adopted her in March 1936: James J. Walker, New York City's flamboyant former Mayor, and his wife, the actress Betty Compton.
Newspaper accounts at the time referred to Mary Ann as ''one of the luckiest babies in the world,'' a ''blue-eyed, curly-haired tot bubbling with a genial disposition - to match her father's.'' To Mr. Walker, a father for the first time at 55, she was simply ''the loveliest little lady anyone ever cast eyes on,'' and he vowed that she would be ''a normal American child.''
But like many sons and daughters of celebrities, Mary Ann Walker never really felt ''normal.'' For years, she struggled to extricate herself from the lengthy shadow cast by Jimmy Walker, who as Mayor of New York from 1926 to 1932 came to symbolize the gaiety and exuberance of the Jazz Age. And like many of the adopted, she discovered she knew nothing about herself when she emerged.
A Search for the Past
As a result, she has now undertaken an even more arduous task: piecing together her past and finding her natural parents, if they are still alive. The search has brought Miss Walker to court in New York, where she lost one round earlier this year but is determined to prevail in the next round.
''I loved Jimmy Walker, but for so long I was his daughter when what I really wanted to be was my own person,'' she said in a recent interview. ''I look at that clipping about being the 'luckiest baby' and I think how ironic it is.''
Continue reading the main story
Jimmy and Violet Halling Walker - better known by her stage name of Betty Compton -adopted 6-week-old Mary Ann on St. Patrick's Day, 1936. The arrangements were made through the Cradle in Evanston, Ill., an adoption agency that catered to such famous couples of the day as Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler and George Burns and Gracie Allen.
At 55, Mr. Walker was quite old by the conventional standards for an adoptive father -prohibitively old, perhaps, had he not been so wealthy and prominent. The following year the Walkers adopted a baby boy.
Miss Walker's childhood memories are a series of idyllic vignettes: leisurely rides on a Sunday morning to St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church on Park Avenue, walks to the bandshell in Central Park, periodic visits to the Polo Grounds for Giants baseball games. Always, she says, she was raised to know both that she was adopted and that she was special.
''We know practically nothing of your background, except that you came from intelligent and fine American people,'' her adoptive mother wrote Mary Ann in 1943. ''We had no desire to know any more. You were to us perfect, and we wanted to give you all the love we had to give.''
The Walkers were divorced in 1941, and three years later Betty Compton, 40, died of cancer. Jimmy Walker died in 1946 at the age of 65. The children were placed in the care of Mr. Walker's sister, Nan Walker Burke, in Bayside, Queens, and Mary Ann, a sixth grader, went to the Thevenet Academy, a girl's boarding school in Highland Mills, N.Y., for the next seven years. Then she enrolled in St. John's University.
Upon graduating in 1958, Miss Walker married, had a son and taught for many years in the city's public school system. After her divorce in 1967, she left New York and moved to Berkeley, Calif., where she was unable to find teaching jobs so she drove a truck, was discharged for picketing and became a secretary in a law firm.
Though always curious about her natural parents, Miss Walker had long been convinced that any attempt to track them down would be both difficult and disloyal. But the void created when her son left home convinced her to try.
In March 1979, she wrote the Cradle and asked for what is known in adoptees' circles as ''nonidentifying information'': the circumstances of her birth and lineage. The agency described her father as a handsome 35-year-old engineer of Irish descent, with dark, curly hair. Her mother was 15, a high school honors student of English-German and French stock, with blond hair and blue eyes. She was a talented musician - which may have accounted, Miss Walker realized, for her adoptive parents' insistence that she study music. The natural parents had not married. Letter Brings Tears
''I cried when I read the letter,'' Miss Walker recalled. ''All of a sudden the person who is my mother was real, with interests and a life of her own. For me, it was like coming out of a fog.''
The agency declined, however, to provide Miss Walker with the names of her natural parents. Such questions, it said, were ''right and healthy'' but ''must go unanswered.''
In Illinois, as in New York and virtually every state, adoption records containing the names of the natural parents are sealed by statute, except upon a showing of ''good cause.'' Courts have interpreted these provisions restrictively, holding that only compelling medical, psychological or genetic reasons - and not mere curiousity - constitute such ''good cause.''
New York, like Illinois and many other states, once maintained an open records law. But in 1936 Gov. Herbert Lehman, himself the father of three adopted children, appointed a commission that led to the mandatory sealing of records.
In 1977 the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association, a national organization working to open adoption records, unsuccessfully sought to have the New York State statute declared unconstitutional on the ground that it violated the equal-protection clause of the Federal Constitution by subjecting adoptees to ''psychological pain, suffering and damage not experienced by nonadopted persons.'' A similar suit is pending in California. 'Glacial Rigidity' Reported
''The courts are dealing with the issue with almost glacial rigidity,'' said Prof. Cyril C. Means Jr. of the New York Law School, who represented the adoptees' association in the New York case.
Unlike many adoptees, however, Miss Walker had another avenue to pursue. The executor of Mr. Walker's estate, Charles L. Sylvester of the Manhattan law firm of Warshaw Burstein Cohen Schlesinger & Kuh, retained a copy of her adoption decree.
She contended she was entitled to the document under Mr. Walker's will - in which he left to his children ''memorabilia of every kind, nature and description.'' In September 1980, after efforts failed to have the law firm voluntarily hand over the decree, she turned to New York Surrogate's Court. She was joined by her younger, adopted brother, James J. Walker 2d.
''I just went along with it,'' said Mr. Walker, a New York City policeman who lives in Rockaway Point, Queens. ''Finding my real parents never meant a hill of beans to me. If they're not interested, I'm not interested.''
Lawyers at Warshaw, Burstein, which has represented Mr. Walker's interests since 1933, argued that they were bound by New York State law,the attorney-client privilege and their own sense of propriety. Right to Privacy Cited
''We feel that we have at least a moral obligation to protect the privacy of the natural mother,'' the firm asserted in court papers. ''Adoption is a traumatic experience for the mother. To reopen any wounds the natural mother has had, without knowledge of her present circumstances, would be even more traumatic.''
In an interview Mr. Sylvester, who is 84, called the lawsuit a ''nuisance'' and said it had been prompted by ''that damned Haley book about roots.''
Earlier this year Surrogate Marie Lambert upheld the law firm's position. Citing the ''strong and clearly enunciated public policies of both New York and Illinois,'' she ruled that the decrees were not property ''transferable by will.''
Florence Fisher, the head of the adoptees' association, who found through her own search that her natural father was a Hollywood stuntman, criticized the ruling by Surrogate Lambert. ''This isn't an adoption issue at all,'' she said. ''This is an issue where a father has left all of his belongings to his children, and she is blocking it.'' An Appeal Planned
Miss Walker plans to appeal Surrogate Lambert's decision. In the meantime she is chasing down leads and checking birth and baptismal records. While she would like to find both of her parents, she feels a special kinship with her mother.
Despite the recent setbacks, Miss Walker feels the pertinent question is not whether, but when and how, she will find her mother, who would now be 61.
''I do not know what I will find, or what my birth mother's attitude will be,'' she said. ''I assume she will be eager to know what has happened to me, but should she choose to reject me, I have people I can talk to to relieve my own disappointment. In any event, I will still know a part of myself long suppressed.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/06/nyregion/lucky-baby-of-30-s-hunts-her-parents.html
------
NOTE:
Mary Ann Narita eventually located her birthparents in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Her adoption was handled by The Cradle of Evanston, Illinois.
Adoption records listed her as Baby Girl Demaray, daughter of Katherine Demaray, and an unknown father. Limited non-identifying information with identifying names and places withheld was provided by The Cradle.
The actual original birth certificate which Illinois Vital Statistics in Springfield, Illinois could not locate was filed on 2/14/1936, Record No. 4590 as Patricia Jean Kellay, born 2/6/1936 in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois (NOT Evanston). Daughter of Robert Kellay
20 years old, born in Alma, Michigan, and Katherine Demaray, 15 years old, born in Alma, Michigan.
Ironic that both parents were born in and from ALMA, Michigan and the first place she sought help in her Adoption Search was A.L.M.A. Although she was unable to locate through A.L.M.A. or on her own she engaged a Private Investigative Firm and located her birth family. It is unknown whether she made contact with them.
Adopted daughter of the former Mayor of New York City, James J. Walker, and his second wife, Betty Compton. Upon her adoption the press deemed her to be "one of the luckiest babies in the world."
Mary Ann was sister to James J Walker II (also adopted) and a son from her mother's 4th/last marriage.
------
Mary Ann Walker's scrapbook is filled with the yellowed photographs and clippings that chronicle her childhood - the nurses, the sunny pink nursery high above East 72d Street and the doting couple who adopted her in March 1936: James J. Walker, New York City's flamboyant former Mayor, and his wife, the actress Betty Compton.
Newspaper accounts at the time referred to Mary Ann as ''one of the luckiest babies in the world,'' a ''blue-eyed, curly-haired tot bubbling with a genial disposition - to match her father's.'' To Mr. Walker, a father for the first time at 55, she was simply ''the loveliest little lady anyone ever cast eyes on,'' and he vowed that she would be ''a normal American child.''
But like many sons and daughters of celebrities, Mary Ann Walker never really felt ''normal.'' For years, she struggled to extricate herself from the lengthy shadow cast by Jimmy Walker, who as Mayor of New York from 1926 to 1932 came to symbolize the gaiety and exuberance of the Jazz Age. And like many of the adopted, she discovered she knew nothing about herself when she emerged.
A Search for the Past
As a result, she has now undertaken an even more arduous task: piecing together her past and finding her natural parents, if they are still alive. The search has brought Miss Walker to court in New York, where she lost one round earlier this year but is determined to prevail in the next round.
''I loved Jimmy Walker, but for so long I was his daughter when what I really wanted to be was my own person,'' she said in a recent interview. ''I look at that clipping about being the 'luckiest baby' and I think how ironic it is.''
Continue reading the main story
Jimmy and Violet Halling Walker - better known by her stage name of Betty Compton -adopted 6-week-old Mary Ann on St. Patrick's Day, 1936. The arrangements were made through the Cradle in Evanston, Ill., an adoption agency that catered to such famous couples of the day as Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler and George Burns and Gracie Allen.
At 55, Mr. Walker was quite old by the conventional standards for an adoptive father -prohibitively old, perhaps, had he not been so wealthy and prominent. The following year the Walkers adopted a baby boy.
Miss Walker's childhood memories are a series of idyllic vignettes: leisurely rides on a Sunday morning to St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church on Park Avenue, walks to the bandshell in Central Park, periodic visits to the Polo Grounds for Giants baseball games. Always, she says, she was raised to know both that she was adopted and that she was special.
''We know practically nothing of your background, except that you came from intelligent and fine American people,'' her adoptive mother wrote Mary Ann in 1943. ''We had no desire to know any more. You were to us perfect, and we wanted to give you all the love we had to give.''
The Walkers were divorced in 1941, and three years later Betty Compton, 40, died of cancer. Jimmy Walker died in 1946 at the age of 65. The children were placed in the care of Mr. Walker's sister, Nan Walker Burke, in Bayside, Queens, and Mary Ann, a sixth grader, went to the Thevenet Academy, a girl's boarding school in Highland Mills, N.Y., for the next seven years. Then she enrolled in St. John's University.
Upon graduating in 1958, Miss Walker married, had a son and taught for many years in the city's public school system. After her divorce in 1967, she left New York and moved to Berkeley, Calif., where she was unable to find teaching jobs so she drove a truck, was discharged for picketing and became a secretary in a law firm.
Though always curious about her natural parents, Miss Walker had long been convinced that any attempt to track them down would be both difficult and disloyal. But the void created when her son left home convinced her to try.
In March 1979, she wrote the Cradle and asked for what is known in adoptees' circles as ''nonidentifying information'': the circumstances of her birth and lineage. The agency described her father as a handsome 35-year-old engineer of Irish descent, with dark, curly hair. Her mother was 15, a high school honors student of English-German and French stock, with blond hair and blue eyes. She was a talented musician - which may have accounted, Miss Walker realized, for her adoptive parents' insistence that she study music. The natural parents had not married. Letter Brings Tears
''I cried when I read the letter,'' Miss Walker recalled. ''All of a sudden the person who is my mother was real, with interests and a life of her own. For me, it was like coming out of a fog.''
The agency declined, however, to provide Miss Walker with the names of her natural parents. Such questions, it said, were ''right and healthy'' but ''must go unanswered.''
In Illinois, as in New York and virtually every state, adoption records containing the names of the natural parents are sealed by statute, except upon a showing of ''good cause.'' Courts have interpreted these provisions restrictively, holding that only compelling medical, psychological or genetic reasons - and not mere curiousity - constitute such ''good cause.''
New York, like Illinois and many other states, once maintained an open records law. But in 1936 Gov. Herbert Lehman, himself the father of three adopted children, appointed a commission that led to the mandatory sealing of records.
In 1977 the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association, a national organization working to open adoption records, unsuccessfully sought to have the New York State statute declared unconstitutional on the ground that it violated the equal-protection clause of the Federal Constitution by subjecting adoptees to ''psychological pain, suffering and damage not experienced by nonadopted persons.'' A similar suit is pending in California. 'Glacial Rigidity' Reported
''The courts are dealing with the issue with almost glacial rigidity,'' said Prof. Cyril C. Means Jr. of the New York Law School, who represented the adoptees' association in the New York case.
Unlike many adoptees, however, Miss Walker had another avenue to pursue. The executor of Mr. Walker's estate, Charles L. Sylvester of the Manhattan law firm of Warshaw Burstein Cohen Schlesinger & Kuh, retained a copy of her adoption decree.
She contended she was entitled to the document under Mr. Walker's will - in which he left to his children ''memorabilia of every kind, nature and description.'' In September 1980, after efforts failed to have the law firm voluntarily hand over the decree, she turned to New York Surrogate's Court. She was joined by her younger, adopted brother, James J. Walker 2d.
''I just went along with it,'' said Mr. Walker, a New York City policeman who lives in Rockaway Point, Queens. ''Finding my real parents never meant a hill of beans to me. If they're not interested, I'm not interested.''
Lawyers at Warshaw, Burstein, which has represented Mr. Walker's interests since 1933, argued that they were bound by New York State law,the attorney-client privilege and their own sense of propriety. Right to Privacy Cited
''We feel that we have at least a moral obligation to protect the privacy of the natural mother,'' the firm asserted in court papers. ''Adoption is a traumatic experience for the mother. To reopen any wounds the natural mother has had, without knowledge of her present circumstances, would be even more traumatic.''
In an interview Mr. Sylvester, who is 84, called the lawsuit a ''nuisance'' and said it had been prompted by ''that damned Haley book about roots.''
Earlier this year Surrogate Marie Lambert upheld the law firm's position. Citing the ''strong and clearly enunciated public policies of both New York and Illinois,'' she ruled that the decrees were not property ''transferable by will.''
Florence Fisher, the head of the adoptees' association, who found through her own search that her natural father was a Hollywood stuntman, criticized the ruling by Surrogate Lambert. ''This isn't an adoption issue at all,'' she said. ''This is an issue where a father has left all of his belongings to his children, and she is blocking it.'' An Appeal Planned
Miss Walker plans to appeal Surrogate Lambert's decision. In the meantime she is chasing down leads and checking birth and baptismal records. While she would like to find both of her parents, she feels a special kinship with her mother.
Despite the recent setbacks, Miss Walker feels the pertinent question is not whether, but when and how, she will find her mother, who would now be 61.
''I do not know what I will find, or what my birth mother's attitude will be,'' she said. ''I assume she will be eager to know what has happened to me, but should she choose to reject me, I have people I can talk to to relieve my own disappointment. In any event, I will still know a part of myself long suppressed.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/06/nyregion/lucky-baby-of-30-s-hunts-her-parents.html
------
NOTE:
Mary Ann Narita eventually located her birthparents in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Her adoption was handled by The Cradle of Evanston, Illinois.
Adoption records listed her as Baby Girl Demaray, daughter of Katherine Demaray, and an unknown father. Limited non-identifying information with identifying names and places withheld was provided by The Cradle.
The actual original birth certificate which Illinois Vital Statistics in Springfield, Illinois could not locate was filed on 2/14/1936, Record No. 4590 as Patricia Jean Kellay, born 2/6/1936 in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois (NOT Evanston). Daughter of Robert Kellay
20 years old, born in Alma, Michigan, and Katherine Demaray, 15 years old, born in Alma, Michigan.
Ironic that both parents were born in and from ALMA, Michigan and the first place she sought help in her Adoption Search was A.L.M.A. Although she was unable to locate through A.L.M.A. or on her own she engaged a Private Investigative Firm and located her birth family. It is unknown whether she made contact with them.
Mary Ann was sister to James J Walker II (also adopted) and a son from her mother's 4th/last marriage.
------
Mary Ann Walker's scrapbook is filled with the yellowed photographs and clippings that chronicle her childhood - the nurses, the sunny pink nursery high above East 72d Street and the doting couple who adopted her in March 1936: James J. Walker, New York City's flamboyant former Mayor, and his wife, the actress Betty Compton.
Newspaper accounts at the time referred to Mary Ann as ''one of the luckiest babies in the world,'' a ''blue-eyed, curly-haired tot bubbling with a genial disposition - to match her father's.'' To Mr. Walker, a father for the first time at 55, she was simply ''the loveliest little lady anyone ever cast eyes on,'' and he vowed that she would be ''a normal American child.''
But like many sons and daughters of celebrities, Mary Ann Walker never really felt ''normal.'' For years, she struggled to extricate herself from the lengthy shadow cast by Jimmy Walker, who as Mayor of New York from 1926 to 1932 came to symbolize the gaiety and exuberance of the Jazz Age. And like many of the adopted, she discovered she knew nothing about herself when she emerged.
A Search for the Past
As a result, she has now undertaken an even more arduous task: piecing together her past and finding her natural parents, if they are still alive. The search has brought Miss Walker to court in New York, where she lost one round earlier this year but is determined to prevail in the next round.
''I loved Jimmy Walker, but for so long I was his daughter when what I really wanted to be was my own person,'' she said in a recent interview. ''I look at that clipping about being the 'luckiest baby' and I think how ironic it is.''
Continue reading the main story
Jimmy and Violet Halling Walker - better known by her stage name of Betty Compton -adopted 6-week-old Mary Ann on St. Patrick's Day, 1936. The arrangements were made through the Cradle in Evanston, Ill., an adoption agency that catered to such famous couples of the day as Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler and George Burns and Gracie Allen.
At 55, Mr. Walker was quite old by the conventional standards for an adoptive father -prohibitively old, perhaps, had he not been so wealthy and prominent. The following year the Walkers adopted a baby boy.
Miss Walker's childhood memories are a series of idyllic vignettes: leisurely rides on a Sunday morning to St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church on Park Avenue, walks to the bandshell in Central Park, periodic visits to the Polo Grounds for Giants baseball games. Always, she says, she was raised to know both that she was adopted and that she was special.
''We know practically nothing of your background, except that you came from intelligent and fine American people,'' her adoptive mother wrote Mary Ann in 1943. ''We had no desire to know any more. You were to us perfect, and we wanted to give you all the love we had to give.''
The Walkers were divorced in 1941, and three years later Betty Compton, 40, died of cancer. Jimmy Walker died in 1946 at the age of 65. The children were placed in the care of Mr. Walker's sister, Nan Walker Burke, in Bayside, Queens, and Mary Ann, a sixth grader, went to the Thevenet Academy, a girl's boarding school in Highland Mills, N.Y., for the next seven years. Then she enrolled in St. John's University.
Upon graduating in 1958, Miss Walker married, had a son and taught for many years in the city's public school system. After her divorce in 1967, she left New York and moved to Berkeley, Calif., where she was unable to find teaching jobs so she drove a truck, was discharged for picketing and became a secretary in a law firm.
Though always curious about her natural parents, Miss Walker had long been convinced that any attempt to track them down would be both difficult and disloyal. But the void created when her son left home convinced her to try.
In March 1979, she wrote the Cradle and asked for what is known in adoptees' circles as ''nonidentifying information'': the circumstances of her birth and lineage. The agency described her father as a handsome 35-year-old engineer of Irish descent, with dark, curly hair. Her mother was 15, a high school honors student of English-German and French stock, with blond hair and blue eyes. She was a talented musician - which may have accounted, Miss Walker realized, for her adoptive parents' insistence that she study music. The natural parents had not married. Letter Brings Tears
''I cried when I read the letter,'' Miss Walker recalled. ''All of a sudden the person who is my mother was real, with interests and a life of her own. For me, it was like coming out of a fog.''
The agency declined, however, to provide Miss Walker with the names of her natural parents. Such questions, it said, were ''right and healthy'' but ''must go unanswered.''
In Illinois, as in New York and virtually every state, adoption records containing the names of the natural parents are sealed by statute, except upon a showing of ''good cause.'' Courts have interpreted these provisions restrictively, holding that only compelling medical, psychological or genetic reasons - and not mere curiousity - constitute such ''good cause.''
New York, like Illinois and many other states, once maintained an open records law. But in 1936 Gov. Herbert Lehman, himself the father of three adopted children, appointed a commission that led to the mandatory sealing of records.
In 1977 the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association, a national organization working to open adoption records, unsuccessfully sought to have the New York State statute declared unconstitutional on the ground that it violated the equal-protection clause of the Federal Constitution by subjecting adoptees to ''psychological pain, suffering and damage not experienced by nonadopted persons.'' A similar suit is pending in California. 'Glacial Rigidity' Reported
''The courts are dealing with the issue with almost glacial rigidity,'' said Prof. Cyril C. Means Jr. of the New York Law School, who represented the adoptees' association in the New York case.
Unlike many adoptees, however, Miss Walker had another avenue to pursue. The executor of Mr. Walker's estate, Charles L. Sylvester of the Manhattan law firm of Warshaw Burstein Cohen Schlesinger & Kuh, retained a copy of her adoption decree.
She contended she was entitled to the document under Mr. Walker's will - in which he left to his children ''memorabilia of every kind, nature and description.'' In September 1980, after efforts failed to have the law firm voluntarily hand over the decree, she turned to New York Surrogate's Court. She was joined by her younger, adopted brother, James J. Walker 2d.
''I just went along with it,'' said Mr. Walker, a New York City policeman who lives in Rockaway Point, Queens. ''Finding my real parents never meant a hill of beans to me. If they're not interested, I'm not interested.''
Lawyers at Warshaw, Burstein, which has represented Mr. Walker's interests since 1933, argued that they were bound by New York State law,the attorney-client privilege and their own sense of propriety. Right to Privacy Cited
''We feel that we have at least a moral obligation to protect the privacy of the natural mother,'' the firm asserted in court papers. ''Adoption is a traumatic experience for the mother. To reopen any wounds the natural mother has had, without knowledge of her present circumstances, would be even more traumatic.''
In an interview Mr. Sylvester, who is 84, called the lawsuit a ''nuisance'' and said it had been prompted by ''that damned Haley book about roots.''
Earlier this year Surrogate Marie Lambert upheld the law firm's position. Citing the ''strong and clearly enunciated public policies of both New York and Illinois,'' she ruled that the decrees were not property ''transferable by will.''
Florence Fisher, the head of the adoptees' association, who found through her own search that her natural father was a Hollywood stuntman, criticized the ruling by Surrogate Lambert. ''This isn't an adoption issue at all,'' she said. ''This is an issue where a father has left all of his belongings to his children, and she is blocking it.'' An Appeal Planned
Miss Walker plans to appeal Surrogate Lambert's decision. In the meantime she is chasing down leads and checking birth and baptismal records. While she would like to find both of her parents, she feels a special kinship with her mother.
Despite the recent setbacks, Miss Walker feels the pertinent question is not whether, but when and how, she will find her mother, who would now be 61.
''I do not know what I will find, or what my birth mother's attitude will be,'' she said. ''I assume she will be eager to know what has happened to me, but should she choose to reject me, I have people I can talk to to relieve my own disappointment. In any event, I will still know a part of myself long suppressed.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/06/nyregion/lucky-baby-of-30-s-hunts-her-parents.html
------
NOTE:
Mary Ann Narita eventually located her birthparents in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Her adoption was handled by The Cradle of Evanston, Illinois.
Adoption records listed her as Baby Girl Demaray, daughter of Katherine Demaray, and an unknown father. Limited non-identifying information with identifying names and places withheld was provided by The Cradle.
The actual original birth certificate which Illinois Vital Statistics in Springfield, Illinois could not locate was filed on 2/14/1936, Record No. 4590 as Patricia Jean Kellay, born 2/6/1936 in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois (NOT Evanston). Daughter of Robert Kellay
20 years old, born in Alma, Michigan, and Katherine Demaray, 15 years old, born in Alma, Michigan.
Ironic that both parents were born in and from ALMA, Michigan and the first place she sought help in her Adoption Search was A.L.M.A. Although she was unable to locate through A.L.M.A. or on her own she engaged a Private Investigative Firm and located her birth family. It is unknown whether she made contact with them.
Family Members
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Records on Ancestry
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
