Lifestyle
Natal Attraction
For 81-year-old Helen Kirk of Galveston, collecting data and memorabilia on multiple births isn’t just child’s play.
Ruby says: We are so happy to find Miss Helen’s info on the enternet. We have been twin friends for many years, but had lost contact with her. I will mail her a letter to see if the address we have is current. Our love to Miss Helen and we’ll be going to Denver to ITA this year. We do have a grandson 1 1/2 years old. Please pass this on to Miss Helen. We miss seeing her. (June 1st, 2010 at 6:00pm)
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Until her mid-twenties, Kirk led the life of a typical BOI (Galveston shorthand for Born on the Island). After graduating from Ball High School, she did everything from teach dance to sell war bonds, and in 1942 she married Jules Lauve, an advertising executive whose specialty was billboards (many people still know Kirk as Helen Lauve, though recently, more than forty years after she and Jules divorced, she returned to her maiden name). While working as an assistant to a group of doctors, she met a pregnant woman who needed x-rays because her obstetrician suspected she was carrying more than one baby. The woman, Esther Badgett, was in fact carrying four. “She was so big that she had to turn sideways and pull up her stomach to get out the door,” Kirk remembers. When they were born, the Badgett quadruplets—two were identical—created a sensation. The country was still enthralled by news of Canada’s Dionne quints, who were born five years earlier, so Galveston raced to promote its own illustrious infants.
The city donated a house to the Badgetts with the stipulation that the girls stay in Galveston until the age of eighteen and that they spend an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon in the living room so the public could peer through two picture windows and look in on them. With the family getting press across the country, Kirk began collecting articles. “She was really organized,” recalls Joan Trochesset, one of the Badgett quads, who is now 58. “My mother would get pictures of us and give them to Helen, and she would arrange them in scrapbooks.” After becoming a family friend, Kirk also started speaking to the press. “I was sort of the voice,” she says. “If a newspaper came down, they would talk to me. Mrs. Badgett was shy and didn’t like talking to all those people.” As the girls got older and began making public appearances, Kirk often traveled with them. “I remember we had one room for me and Mrs. Badgett, one for the girls, and one for all their clothes,” she says, flipping through one of her photo albums to a forty-year-old black and white picture of the girls in poof-skirt evening dresses at San Antonio’s Fiesta.
Kirk’s interest in the Badgetts quickly expanded to other multiple births. She started with two scrapbooks for twins: one for out-of-town sets and one for locals—plus two scrapbooks for triplets and a scrapbook each for quads and quints. “First I was just collecting clippings; then I got into sending cards and visiting,” she says. (One of her favorite sets of triplets was Sweetwater’s Cardwells: Faith, Hope, and Charity; the last surviving sister, Hope, died in January at age 97.) For the next half-century, her fixation never flagged, not even when she bore a daughter, Jane, in 1945—the only child she ever wanted. “I’ve never seen a family that didn’t show partiality to one child or another,” she says, adding that Jane was never threatened by her interest in other children. “She knew all the kids, though she never learned how to tell the Badgett girls apart.”
In the seventies Kirk began to gain renown, becoming the topic of newspaper articles herself. She was included in editions of Personalities of America and the World Who’s Who of Women, and in 1974 she traveled to Rome to address the First International Congress on Twin Studies. Upon retiring in 1981 from her last job—she was working for a psychiatrist—she devoted herself to her hobby. “I wonder how I ever had time to take care of a house and a child,” she says now.
On a tour of her home, she shows me her archives room, one side of which is lined floor to ceiling with storage boxes labeled with small Post-it notes. Some pieces stored here are of genuine interest: various sizes of Dionne quintuplet dolls made by Madame Alexander, a Bobbsey Twins game dating back to the early 1900’s, and a charming metal stroller made for triplets. Other items fall into the I-didn’t-need-to-see-that category, such as a photo of the two placentas that accompanied the Badgett quads. Then there are completely frivolous pieces: pairs of stuffed animals that admirers have sent her, a fabric representation of three peas in a pod, and T-shirts and bumper stickers from all the conventions.
In the scrapbooks she made for the quad or quint families before there began to be too many to keep up with, yellowed articles show slack-jawed parents and neatly dressed nurses holding four or five small white bundles. She points to a scrapbook and says, “One of these quads had triplets, but they were in vitro, so it wasn’t exciting.” Indeed, Kirk admits that her enthusiasm for her subject has dimmed slightly now that there are so many multiple births as a result of fertility drugs and artificial insemination. “It’s just not as exciting as it was when they were so rare,” she says, complaining that man-made multiples are almost always fraternal and identical multiples are intrinsically more intriguing.
It isn’t just a matter of preference: Even though it took her three and a half years to get pregnant herself, Kirk has mixed feelings about parents who have sought medical help conceiving. “I don’t think it’s right, fooling with Mother Nature,” she says. “These parents are so thrilled to find out they’re pregnant that they don’t stop to think past it—about health problems, about college.” She is particularly vexed by parents who think press coverage may bring them financial help. “Public opinion now is, ‘You asked for it by having those treatments, so don’t expect us to help you.’ There was that lady in England with eight. She thought she was going to get millions for doing publicity.” She didn’t—and all of her babies ended up dying.
Many multiple pregnancies have such unhappy endings, Kirk contends, and even if all the babies are born healthy, the stress on the parents is enormous. “When I hear that one of the parents has left,” she says, “I’m not surprised.” In fact, her disillusionment over the artificial multiples boom led her at one point to consider quitting her hobby. “But there has been so much interest that I felt I had to keep doing it,” she says, so she continues to clip, file, send out notes, and correct reporters. Right now her attention is focused on raising money to start a museum and properly display her collection; she has sold her set of good china and will hawk her crystal and other valuables as part of an estate auction, and she is also considering charging reporters for interviews. And if the museum never comes to pass, she may give her collection on twins to the Twins restaurant in Manhattan, whose owners and waiters are all twins.
“I had no idea it would grow to this,” Kirk says. And she’s equally shocked by the effects her lifelong diversion has had on her personal growth. “I was so bashful in high school, but now I’ve traveled, I’ve met people, and I’ve learned to share things,” she says. “I think my life would have been dull without it.” She smiles contentedly as she opens a box and pulls out a clown head from a birthday cake for a set of triplets in Temple, aware that in the world of multiple births she stands alone.
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