Rearing three sons wasn't enough mothering for Opal Lovern. As a foster mother, she provided a loving beginning for 98 newborns.

She was a disciplinarian who operated her day on a schedule and cared for as many as three newborns at a time. Twice nightly feedings, a mountain of diapers daily, routine and emergency doctor visits were factored into her schedule.

Family photo (ENLARGE)

Opal Lovern, surrounded by sons Charlie Lovern (from left), Bob Lovern, Jim Lovern and Wayne Lovern, was foster mother to 98 newborn children from 1959 to 1966.

"She had a routine, but those babies were taken care of like her own," said Evelyn Burry of Winder, a former neighbor who baby-sat when Mrs. Lovern had to take another infant to the doctor. "She got up in the morning and did everything on a schedule. Everything was done by time."

As for that mountain of diapers — which her husband and sons helped her change — it was just another task on Mrs. Lovern's schedule. In a 1961 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, she was hard-pressed to say how many washer loads or how many diapers she went through in a day.

"I'm so used to it. I just fold them up and don't count them. I don't bother," she said.

Mrs. Lovern's oldest son, Jimmy Lovern, of Pine Mountain was born in 1939, and that's where her midnight feedings and diaper duty began. In 1959, she began caring for newborn foster children placed with her through the old Child Service Association. When she ended her foster-mother career in 1966, she began offering daycare to infants of working mothers.

"We're a baby-loving family," she explained.

The funeral for Opal Crews Lovern, 89, of Clarkston, who died of complications from Alzheimer's disease Wednesday at Golden Living Center in Decatur, is 1 p.m. Friday at A.S. Turner & Sons.

Mrs. Lovern's late husband, Samuel S. Lovern, worked shifts at the Atlanta Transit System. "When he was on the late shift, I got lonesome," Mrs. Lovern said. "So we decided to try being foster parents."

The family lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house on an acre that Mrs. Lovern's husband maintained. A center room in the family's house became the babies' room, said daughter-in-law Aileen Lovern of Stone Mountain.

"That was always called the babies' room, even years after she was not doing this," she said. "When we moved her out in 2000, that was still the babies' room."

Despite agency rules against it, Mr. Lovern and her husband persisted in adopting one of their foster children, a handicapped infant who had been declared unadoptable and had lived with them for two years.

"She knew he was better off with them," Mrs. Burry said. That son, Charles Lovern, has since died. "She would do without herself to do for those babies.

"She would do it in a heartbeat."

The hardest part, Mrs. Lovern said, was giving the babies up after a few months in her care. "You grow attached to a baby in a hurry. Especially if they get sick. The more you tend to a baby, the more you love it," she said.

She lovingly recorded those early days for each newborn. She kept a notebook with every child's name, birth date, how old they were when she got them, the dates they arrived and left and whether the infant was adopted, returned to its mother or placed in another foster home.

"She was somebody you just couldn't help but admire," her daughter-in-law said.

Survivors include two other sons, Bob Lovern of Wellington, Fla., and Wayne Lovern of Stone Mountain; eight grandchildren; 12 great-grandchildren; and a great-great-grandchild.