The best newspaper story I never wrote

On a July day in 1992, one of the women who worked the front desk at the Sulphur Springs newspaper came to my desk. She said, “Bob, could you help this woman? She wants to look up old newspapers, but she doesn’t know how to use the microfilm machine.”

The woman she referenced was black and in her mid-twenties, about five-four.

“Sure,” I said. I stood and said, “Right this way.” At the machine I asked which edition she was looking for.

“Early July, 1967,” the woman said.

I got that reel from a drawer and loaded it onto the microfilm reader. I showed the woman how to advance and reverse the film, how to adjust focus and how to move the lens image on a specific page. I said I would be at my desk if she needed any assistance. I went back to my desk and resumed work on a story for the next day’s edition.

A few minutes later, the woman walked to my desk. She seemed a bit upset and confused at something. She said, “Could you show me how to print a page?”

“Of course,” I said.

When she and I reached the machine, she pointed and said, “That story is about me.”

I looked and saw the headline:

Negro infant
found in box

If ever a headline said "Read Me!" that was the one.

The story was three paragraphs, one column, on Page One, dated in early July 1967 – 25 years before. A Hopkins County Sheriff’s deputy the afternoon before reported he was on patrol on a county road, and he saw a cardboard whiskey case between the ditch and a barbed wire fence. The county is dry, so the deputy stopped to investigate. He approached the box and he looked in.

The deputy saw “a Negro infant,” obviously not more than a few days old. The deputy put the box and the baby in his patrol car and drove as fast as he could to the local hospital.

Then story said the infant was in good health, suffering only from dehydration and insect bites.

I looked up from reading. The woman said, “That’s me. I was the baby in the box.”

I went to the next day’s edition. Another short, Page One story reported the Negro infant found in a box was doing well. And then there was the example of how Texas people are: Around 40 families, equally divided black and white, had contacted the hospital, saying, “We want that baby. We will raise the baby.”

Within a few days, the baby was placed into the care of a prominent black family and adopted by the family after a short period of time.

The woman said, “I always wondered why I was adopted.” She said relatives sometimes commented, but never explained, at family reunions. “Oh, you are the adopted girl,” or, “You’re the girl found in a box.”

Her adoptive mother, she said, only commented, “You are our daughter.”

She looked distraught. She had only then learned where she came from – an empty whiskey box on the side of a county road.

I said, “You could use a hug, but we can’t do that sort of thing.”

She smiled and said, “My mother will have a hug for me when I get home.”

I printed all the small stories on the Negro infant found in box. I handed the copies to her, and I said, “I want to write this story.”

She said, “I don’t know. My mother will decide.” She said I should call her mother later that day.

Of course I called. I explained to the mother I wanted to write her daughter’s story. The mother said, “What good would it do?”

Several reasons ran through my mind. Because it’s a good story. Because people want to know. Because … Because I am a very good writer and I can give the story the words it deserves.

But … I realized the family had its own reasons for privacy, and I would be interfering.

“Yes, Ma’am,” I said to the mother. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said.