Have you ever wondered why someone would enter their mind to steal children and turn them around like so many houses? Well, you're in luck, friend. Gear up, and hold on your kids, because it's time to learn about Georgia Tan: pianist, social worker, and baby-napping enthusiast. You can call it the Triple Threat.
Q Georgia was born
Beulah George "Georgia" Tan was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and by all accounts, was not baby-napped. Wouldn't that be a great origin story? In flat reality, however, Tan was raised by her father, Judge George Tan, and her mother, Beulah Yates. Judge Tan was in Hell on Georgia playing the piano, and despite an apparent hatred of the rigors of forced music, he played through college. Reportedly, his desire was towards the law, but his father discouraged him on the grounds that the chicks could not argue well.
Apparently a masochist as well as a sadist, Tan nevertheless majored in music and graduated with a degree from Martha Washington College in 1913. Although she took and passed the bar exam, she eventually studied social work at Columbia University for two summers. Once Tan completed his education, he finally vented all the fury that only years of compulsory piano lessons could be given to a person. By 1924, she became involved in human trafficking.
What, were you expecting a visual stage?
worse-than-a-scene stage
In 1922, Tan began working at the Mississippi Children's Home Society, but was fired for "suspicious child-keeping practices," which official documents don't seem to be dangerously detailed. After this termination, he and his "gal pal," Ann Atwood, packed up and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Tan became executive secretary in the Shelby branch of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, which clearly does not believe in background checks. Were.
At the time, adoption wasn't popular or chic, and even worse, for someone like Tan, it wasn't attractive. You can adopt a new baby yourself for just $7 dollars, or a little over $100 in 2019 money. For perspective, you can buy a new iPhone, or you can buy eight kids. They were, shall we say, underestimated in the market.
Tan looked at that market, and he had a solution: arrange for expensive out-of-state adoptions, skim the top, and then literally sabotage the evidence. Silly! The only problem at that time was procuring enough marketable children. It seems that Memphis hadn't produced enough orphans for Tan's liking, and there were only so many from poor families that she could coerce, so she started stealing them straight away. Think your child is safe in the hospital? Nope: There were nurses and doctors on board. What's in the park? Wrong again --- they can be taken right off the field of play. Have you just given birth and because of giving birth you are not fully aware of your surroundings? hard luck; You have just been baby-napped.
It is estimated that Tan was responsible for the trafficking of over 5,000 children in 48 states. Most of these children were placed with affluent families in New York and California, and some of these wealthy parents were also famous, including Joan Crawford, Mary Pickford, Ric Flair, and Herbert Lehman. (Don't worry: There's no reason to think that Tan's clients knew that their adopted children were kidnapped, so you're free to continue enjoying Hollywood's golden age.) If you were lucky, you were placed with a wealthy family that was stable, understanding and even loving. If you were unlucky, your experience bordered on returning to an orphanage to a plain, old death. Yes seriously.
Talk Of Death
Tan did not immediately place all these children in the semi-capable arms of the semi-endowed. It had to be placed somewhere between stealing and selling. That was the Tennessee Children's Home Society, where he was subjected to neglect that included refusing medicine and food---your native kids-definitely-need-it stuff. Many of the children were abused outright, sometimes sexually, sometimes Tan himself apparently looked in the mirror and thought "No---there needs to be more cartoon-villains." According to one report, the kids were "falling like flies"---about 500 flies, to be exact. More of a bunch, really.
You might think that sure, these many kids weren't disappearing without consequence, but alas, gentle readers, they were. Thanks to her lucrative plan, Tan had some good friends around Memphis, including Judge Camille Kelly and Mayor EH "Boss" Crump, and this doesn't sound like the kind of person who's willing to sell kids. . A small bribe. Once the ambitious kind, Tan also used his "success" to befriend Eleanor Roosevelt, although it is doubtful whether the First Lady was aware of Tan's affinity for infanticide.
