Betty Murray, Kentucky Rider, 1930
Chapter 9: The Cutest Child in Kentucky

For the King family, getting by was always a struggle. Delia, the mother,was only 15 in 1909 when she met Tom King, a 30-year-old rodeo rider who, along with his brother, had started the first traveling rodeo in America. Tom King gave Delia's father $150 for the privilege of marrying her. Within a year they had their first baby, and one followed another. By the time Betty was born in 1925, they already had Bob, Louise, Virginia, Roy, Tommy, Evelyn, and Carl.The girls all had natural platinum blonde hair. Betty, who had big brown eyes, was especially pretty.

With a growing family to provide for, Tom King quit the rodeo and tried farming a little place in Missouri. It was a struggle, and sometimes he worked for the railroad to make extra income. One day in 1927 he decided not to come home.

Delia had no education and no money. All she had was eight hungry kids. For a few weeks they managed to get by. Then the local banker showed up and told her, "Your husband sold the farm and the new owner wants to move in. You've got to leave."

The only place Delia could think to go was to her sister's in Louisville, Kentucky. She knew she couldn't show up with eight kids, so she sent Bob to live with a relative in Oklahoma, and found someone else to take Louise and Virginia. Somehow she managed to get to Louisville with the five youngest.

With three children of her own, her sister was not happy to see them. When Delia went out to look for a job the next day, the sister and her husband loaded Delia's kids into the car and took them to an orphanage in nearby Lyndon, Kentucky. When Delia returned that evening, they told her that the children had "gotten lost."

"Now, you'd think that would have driven her crazy, wouldn't you," says Betty. "Five children, ages nine and younger, simply gone. But from what I know, I feel sure she was glad to get rid of us. She breathed a sigh of relief and got on with her life."

Betty was not yet three and doesn't remember these events, nor does she remember much about the orphanage. Later, whenever she was asked what they ate there, she would always reply, "Oatmeal, oatmeal, no cream or sugar."

She remembers poverty--rural Kentucky was headed into the Great Depression in 1929, along with the rest of the country. The orphanage felt like a prison to Betty because she was kept with the youngest children, separate from Evelyn and the three older brothers she adored. A stern old lady with gray hair ran the place. "I don't recall kindness or smiles. Evelyn took care of me whenever she could, and all five of us would try to find each other and be together whenever we were allowed on the playground."

There are no records to pinpoint dates, but sometime in 1930, when the five King children had been at the orphanage over a year, they were bathed and dressed in clean secondhand clothing. So were several dozen other orphanage children. Eight-year-old Evelyn tried to help Carl, six, and Betty, who was now five, get ready. Roy and Tommy took care of themselves. Betty's light blonde hair was trimmed in a pageboy cut, and she was given a boy's camel-haired coat and hat to wear because there was no coat and hat for a little girl.

Then the children were taken to the local train station. Everything was smoke, noise, and confusion, but Betty realized enough to know that her beloved Roy and Tommy were being put on a train going one direction, while she and Evelyn and Carl were placed aboard a train going the other direction. "We cried a bucket of tears over being separated, but the trains pulled away and nobody paid any attention to us," Betty recalls.

Betty's westbound train stopped at little towns along the way. Each time it did, the children were lined up. The gray-haired old lady would talk about them, and people would look them over. Several children would then be led away to make their lives with new families.

When the train reached Owensboro, Kentucky, just a few hours west of Louisville, Betty climbed down the huge train steps, Evelyn on one side of her and Carl on the other.

Confused by Betty's boy coat and hat, a man in the waiting crowd shouted, "Is that a cute little boy?" Betty looked straight at him and replied, "No, I'm a cute little girl." The children were put in cars and taken to the local downtown hotel, an elegant five-story building with a hundred rooms. They rode up the elevator to the grand ballroom. People soon filled it. One by one the children had to step onto a wooden block so the crowd could see them while the gray-haired lady said something about them. When Betty's turn came, she had to be helped onto the block.

"I still remember what it felt like to stand there with everyone looking me over," she says. "It was awful. It must have been sort of like slaves felt when they were auctioned off."

Afterward the crowd pushed toward the children. Those looking for workers felt the children's muscles and wanted to see their teeth. Evelyn and Carl held on tightly to their little sister. "We all wanted to be picked," Betty says. "But we wanted to stay together."

An elderly couple stopped before the three children and then claimed Evelyn and Carl. "What about my little sister?" Evelyn asked in alarm. "She's too young to milk a cow," the man said, and the next thing Betty knew, Evelyn and Carl were gone. Five-year-old Betty cried and cried, but nobody dried her tears.

The crowd gradually thinned until only a few children were left. Betty was one of them. She had never felt so abandoned and afraid. That was when a handsome, dark-haired gentleman approached and smiled at her. She recognized him from the train station as the man who had questioned if she was a boy. "Would you like to be my little girl?" he asked her. Betty went to his outstretched arms.

With that simple act, she gained an enchanting home. Andy Wade was the general manager of the hotel. He and his beautiful young wife, Louise, lived in an apartment in the hotel and ate their meals in the elegant dining room. Maids washed their clothes and did all the housework. Louise liked the idea of a child and readily welcomed this very pretty five-year-old. She loved to dress up her new daughter and saw to it that Betty had dance and piano lessons; she was able to use the grand ballroom to practice. Because Andy and Louise were part of the country club set and had many social obligations, Betty had her own nanny. She also had her own room in the hotel and could pick up the phone and order room service whenever she wanted. She had so many toys that some were given away regularly to the Salvation Army. There was even a movie theater across the street where she saw all the latest picture shows. The hotel had some permanent residents, mostly older people, and everyone doted on Betty. All the cooks and waiters and housekeeping staff loved her, and the entire hotel was her playground.

She quickly grew to love Mother and Daddy. Her handsome father was always well dressed, always charming. Whenever music came on the radio, he would sweep her into his arms and dance with her. He also took her to church each Sunday. She even had wonderful, devoted grandparents--her mother's parents--who lived right there in Owensboro.

Betty's mother entered her photo in the "Cutest Child in Kentucky Contest" sponsored by newspapers across the state. With her show-stopping blonde hair, Betty won. Her picture was in all the state newspapers, identifying her as "Betty Lou Wade, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Andy Wade of Owensboro".

But there were also shadows in her new life. Her father had been gassed in World War I and suffered chronic pain. He tried to numb the pain with alcohol, but it grew worse, and so did his drinking. At school the children who teased Betty about being an orphan train rider loved to remind her that Andy and Louise weren't her real parents. Betty became good friends with a boy named Joe who had come on the same orphan train and knew exactly how she felt. Both were ashamed of their pasts. Neither could be adopted by their new families because their birth parents were still living and had not given signed permission.

Twice a year Betty got a hard dose of reality when she went to see Evelyn and Carl, whose new home was a farm 20 miles outside Owensboro. "I was allowed to visit because Daddy was a prominent businessman and the old couple were in awe of him. My brother and sister couldn't be spared from their work to come visit me in town. They were trapped."

Evelyn and Carl lived in a dingy attic room. At 4:00 A.M., seven days a week, they had to milk two dozen cows. Then they started the house and field work. One of their jobs was to pull worms off the leaves of tobacco plants; they often worked in the blazing sun.

"I would show up from my privileged world of private school and fine living," Betty recalls. “We were always thrilled to see each other, but of course they envied me. I felt so bad for them. I brought them gifts, and I always tried to help them with their work, but I never seemed to do anything right."

When Betty was eleven, her world suddenly turned upside down. Unable to tolerate the pain any longer, her beloved father jumped into a river and drowned. He thought he had provided for his family. He did not realize that since his death was a suicide, his large life insurance policy could not be collected. Betty and her mother were left with nothing. For a year they lived with Louise's parents. Betty switched to public school. She worked hard to be the best student she could, but it was a very difficult time for her. "Losing my daddy broke my heart," Betty says.

When she was twelve and finally adjusting to life without her father, everything was turned upside down again. A telegram arrived asking if Betty Lou Wade was also Gladys Marie King. Betty barely remembered that name--the one she had arrived with on the orphan train. The telegram was from Betty's oldest sister, who had found a copy of the "Cutest Child in Kentucky" newspaper article at the home of the Louisville aunt who had put Betty and her sister and brothers in the orphanage eight years earlier.

"I guess our aunt had seen my picture in the paper and saved it out of guilt or something," Betty says. "Mother telegramed back that I was the same person, and invited my sister to come visit. I didn't remember her. We went out to the farm where Carl and Evelyn were so she could see them too. We wouldn't have been found if not for that contest."

The following Christmas, 1937, the sister hosted a King family reunion. Betty, Evelyn, and Carl rode the bus to her Indiana home. When they arrived, everyone surrounded them excitedly except a small, hard-looking woman who stayed to one side. She wore a thin cotton dress, heavy work shoes and men's socks. It was Delia, their birth mother.

Betty went to embrace her, but was pushed away. "She was only interested in a couple of the boys,"Betty recalls. "She didn't want anything to do with the rest of us. Here I was, her baby daughter, and there was no hug, no kiss, no nothing. She just didn't care."

Betty had to start all over again getting to know Bob, Virginia, and Louise, but she was thrilled to see Roy and Tommy, who were now grown men. She learned they had both been taken from their orphan train by a tobacco farmer who wanted field help. When Tommy became ill with appendicitis, the farmer refused to pay his medical bills and instead returned him to the orphanage. Once Tommy recovered, he went to find their father, who was back in the rodeo business. After that, Roy ran away from the tobacco farm and also joined the rodeo.

Betty's life was a sharp contrast to that of her other siblings. She was the only one who did not have to work and would be the only one to graduate from high school. No one was willing to talk about what had happened to the family, and Betty would never learn much about her brothers' and sisters' lives. They made it clear they envied Betty and felt it was not fair that her life had been so much easier than theirs.

When Betty returned to Owensboro, she was happy to see her mother and grandparents. She maintained contact with her siblings but would never succeed in having any kind of relationship with her birth mother, who worked as a short-order cook and never remarried. Several years later, during World War II, Betty had finished high school and was working as a secretary. One day her brother Carl contacted her to say he had left the farm and was currently living in Oklahoma with their father, who was laid up with a broken leg. He needed help. Could Betty come?

She thought about that a long time. Finally she said yes, hoping it meant she would have a father again. But she quickly realized that he only considered her an unpaid housekeeper. For Betty, the memory is painful:

"Even after I'd been there a few months, my birth father still called me 'girl.' He never used my name. He was always ordering me around. One day when he started in on me, I couldn't take it any longer. 'Girl, I told you I don't like my eggs cooked like that,' he complained. Well, I'd had it. 'You'll eat them however I fix them,' I snapped. He got mad and shouted, 'Girl, I didn't raise you to talk to me like that!' I just looked at him. 'You didn't raise me at all,' I said, and I walked out. I got on the bus that very afternoon. I had enough money for a ticket to Oklahoma City, so that's where I went. I never looked back."

It was 1946 and World War II was over. Betty liked Oklahoma City and decided to stay for a while. She got a job and rented an apartment with three other young working women. They were friends with a group of young men who often met them in a nearby drugstore for sodas. One day a tall, handsome young man just home from the navy was visiting one of the friends and spotted Betty. "See that beautiful girl?" he told his buddies. "I'm going to marry her." "Then you ought to meet her," they declared, and introduced him to Betty. Love bloomed, and indeed they married.

Thus began a very happy period of Betty's life. She and her new husband, Dick Murray, had a son and a daughter. They lived in many interesting places as part of Dick's job with the Federal Aviation Administration, including the Panama Canal Zone and a remote island off the coast of Alaska.

Betty was ashamed of being what she called a "throw-away child" and never told Dick or her children about her past or about her ride on an orphan train. It wasn't until a few years ago, when she began hearing about orphan train riders, that she decided to speak up. She learned that many children rode orphan trains from orphanages located in places other than New York, some from one place within a state to another, as she had done. She knew she was fortunate to find a loving family, that many riders, like her sister and brothers, were taken just to work.

"I've had my ups and downs--I'm widowed now, and two years ago I suffered a stroke," she said. "But in spite of the bad, I know I've been blessed. I was happily married for 38 years. I've always been very sensitive to other people's feelings and I've always tried to help others. All in all, I've had a real interesting life.

Betty Lou Wade Murray, who was born Gladys Marie King, was interviewed from her home in Ponca City, Oklahoma, in March 2000, at the age of seventy-five.

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