Special memory from one of Curlee couple’s 116 foster children

Of course, Louise Curlee remembered Jody. She hasn’t forgotten any of her 116 foster children.

That’s right — 116.

But what shocks Louise and the rest of the Curlees is that Jody remembered them.

How, they ask.

How could she possibly remember where they lived when she was their foster child, and not quite 4 years old when she was adopted?

And how could she describe it so well to her adopted mother and her own daughter that they could find the place — and bring about an unexpected and wonderful reunion?

Why, she lived with them a little less than six months.

“We got her March 17, 1970, and kept her until Sept. 10, 1970,” Louise says, flipping through a treasured list of all her 116 foster children that shows when they came and when they left. “I didn’t have her very long, and I didn’t think she’d ever remember us.”

But Jody remembered and often talked about Mama and Daddy Curlee after she was adopted.

“And she did remember where we lived,” says Joy McDaniel, Louise and Claude Curlee’s only child. Joy’s the reason they opened their home and their hearts to all those foster children who became part of the family, too, but more of that later.

First Jody, who was adopted by an Air Force family that traveled a lot. And every time they drove over Interstate 85, her mother later told the Curlees, she’d say, “Mama Curlee lives over there.”

So when she was 8 years old, her parents brought her to see the Curlees.

“She acted like she wanted to stay,” Louise says, “but I think the visit satisfied her. After that they went overseas, and we lost contact.”

“We tried to find her,” Joy says, but didn’t until a recent afternoon when an older woman and a child showed up at her front door.

They were Jody’s mother, Anita Rothhaar, and her daughter, Elizabeth, who was 11. They lived near Richmond, Va., but had been to Florida and were on their way home again.

“And Elizabeth had been hearing her mom talk about trying to find us,” Louise says, “and she wanted to stop.”

The Curlees had moved from the house in which they lived when Jody visited as an 8-year-old, but not far, and Elizabeth wouldn’t let her grandmother stop looking. Finally someone pointed them to Joy’s house because Louise and Claude weren’t home.

“Do you remember a little girl named Jody?” they asked.

“Jody Michelle Crisco?” Joy responded.

Yes, Jody Michelle, they said, but they’d never known her last name.

“I’m her mother,” Anita Rothhaar said, “and this is her daughter.”

Joy was shocked. She had tried to find Jody for a 50th anniversary celebration for her parents and had been told her mother had died — but now the door on the past was open, and they were exultant. Claude came home, and they talked and exchanged phone numbers and had a great visit.

The next day, Jody called Joy. They talked for an hour.

Then she called Louise.

“And we talked two or three hours,” Louise says. “She said, ‘My husband’s going to kill me when that phone bill comes,’ but there was so much she wanted to know. I talked to her two or three times.”

And she planned a visit. She’d like to find out who her real parents were, she told Louise, and Louise realized she had an uncle, Billy Crisco, who might know.

Uncle Billy found that Jody was his brother’s daughter. She had four half-sisters that she didn’t know about.

Joy says when Jody came,the family thought she and one of those half-sisters could have passed for twins.

She had found her family — and she couldn’t believe she was really kin to Mama Curlee and her family.

The weekend was full of meeting relatives, full of looking at each other up close to see what they could recognize, and full of everybody saying, “Look at the eyes and the cheekbones!” and “You’re a Crisco all right!”

And more.

“I got hold of every one of the foster children I had when I had her,” Louise says, so she got to see her “brothers,” Charles and Billy and Ronnie Sellers, again.

They took pictures. They cried. They laughed. It was a weekend like they’d never had, and a trip, Jody says in an e-mail she wrote after she got home, that“changed my life forever.”

It’s sad, she says, that the laws seal records.

“I have been searching for my family for many years and had the laws been different I could have met both my parents before they died and would have had a chance to get to know my whole family a lot sooner in life.”

She’s angry, she says, with a system that “plays with people’s lives and deprives families from finding each other.”

But she’s found out so much more than she ever thought she would and has answers to many questions, “although there are many questions I will never get answers to.

“They say there is a reason for everything that happens so I have to deal with the outcome as it is, but at least I still have a large, wonderful family that is now part of my life. They have welcomed my daughter and myself with open arms and that in itself makes me happier than I have ever been in my life.

“We keep in contact now and are working on getting everyone caught up for the last 31 years of our lives which will take some time, and there are still plenty of people that I haven’t yet had the chance to meet but I will make sure I waste no more time doing so.”

Louise Curlee was simply carried away.

“Before Jody came,” she says, “I was just cleaning house like crazy. I wanted everything to look good. But she was so excited I don’t think she even looked.”

And their joy brought back memories of those 116 children she and Claude fed and dressed and played with and sent to school and rocked to sleep and loved.

Not that they’re alone now, even though the foster parenting days are over. They still have Ronnie Sellers, who came to live with them when he needed a home after his foster child days. And Kenny Patterson, Claude’s nephew, who really couldn’t look after himself. And their legally adopted daughter, Crystal, who’s the real daughter of one of the foster children.

‘Like starting over’

Joy, who started it all, and her family live next door.

“When she was born in 1953,” Louise says, “the doctor said I wouldn’t be able to have any more children.”

But she had more love to give than one child could handle.

“And Claude and I didn’t want to raise her alone,” and his mother, Ruby Curlee, had kept foster children.

“If you don’t want to raise her alone,” she told them, “get you some foster children.”

They thought about it a while as the years went by, and finally they applied, but they heard nothing and gave up.

“And out of the blue,” Louise says, a social worker called. She’ll never forget the date.

“It was May 17, 1958. “And it was a boy, Kevin. He was about one and a half.

“We just took him in and started loving him. It was like starting over. He was real good, fun to have around. And Joy was thrilled to have a little brother.”

She remembers when they got him a tricycle. He kept saying, “Is it mine? Is it mine?”

They loved them all, she says.

“It was hard to give them up. We cried with every one of them. We would have adopted every one, but they wouldn’t let you adopt and have foster children, too.”

The last two years she kept abused children.

“We had one little girl in a full body cast. Her mother’s boyfriend broke her thigh bone, kicked her with a steel-toed boot. They took the cast off one week, and she went back the next. I hated to see her go back. She didn’t want to go.

“She was the hardest that we had to take care of. My mother was with me, and another foster son, and my husband, too. It took all of us. She couldn’t sit down and couldn’t stand up. We bought a fold-up bed so we could lay her down. But she was just as happy as she could be until she found out she was going home.

“I saw her once in Wal-Mart. She cried after me, but I just kept going. I didn’t want to get her upset.”

Mama and Daddy

When the children first came, they weren’t sure what to call them, “but when the other kids called us Mama and Daddy, they called us Mama and Daddy.”

But Paul, originally one of the foster children, touched their lives with tragedy.

Davidson County officials placed him in their home, and unlike Rowan, allowed them to adopt him. He had no home and wanted to belong, but two months before they were scheduled to get the final papers, he killed himself.

“He gave us no sign anything was wrong,” Louise says.

In November, a classmate had hit him on the head with a bottle that had ice in it. It deafened him in one ear and fractured his skull. He killed himself in March.

“And after he did it, the doctor said it was all that pressure on the side of his head. He was in so much pain.”

But most of the time it was fun having all those children — and talking about their family.

When people asked Claude how many children he had, Louise says, he’d tell them, “About 100.”

Once a woman he was working with took him seriously.

“She said, ‘What? All by one woman?’ and he said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Well, did your wife know about it?’ and he said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have lived with you!’

“He kept her going,” she says, still enjoying the joke.

“We had a lot of laughter and enjoyment, some sadness, but so much happiness seeing them growing up.”

Finally in 1995, a bad heart forced her to stop.

Big family

But she baby sits with a neighbor’s child. She has Crystal and Ronnie and Kenny. Joy’s next door with her husband, Eddie, and their children, 11-year-old Kristy and Kevin, though he’s stationed in Germany now with the Army.

And Joy still jokes about the size of that big, wonderful family.

“I tell everybody I’m an only child,” she says, “but I’ve got 116 brothers and sisters.”

And who knows when one of them — like Jody — will show up again?

Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com .