Big events were happening. A world away, tanks clashed in the desert. In Washington, the president extolled the "four freedoms" in his annual State of the Union message. Here at home, Atlanta's new mayor vowed to do something about the city's "awful traffic."
And, on an Atlanta doorstep, an infant lay wrapped in a blanket. Night was falling — the temperature, too. A young woman inside the home on Sherwood Road heard its cries, brought the baby inside and contacted Grady Memorial Hospital. The nameless boy topped the scale at 8 pounds. Doctors figured he was no more than two hours old.
The child “had more than the normal amount of good traits for a baby,” an Atlanta Constitution reporter wrote. She dubbed him “Baby X.”
That was Jan. 7, 1941. Now, Jerry Hopkins of Moultonborough, N.H., wants to learn all he can about that waif’s birth. Who were the infant’s parents? Did he have siblings?
He has a right to ask. Hopkins, 74, is Baby X.
“I think it would be interesting to find some siblings,” Hopkins said earlier this week. “I think they’d be interested to find me, too.”
The earliest days of Hopkins' life are a mystery. Officials theorized he was mistakenly left at the woman's home instead of with her next-door neighbor, an officer in the Salvation Army. Hopkins has a birth certificate identifying him as the biological child of Wightman Bishop "Pete" Hopkins and Naomi Eidson Hopkins. The birthdate is correct; Hopkins knows now that the other information is not.
Dad was an Atlanta firefighter, badge No. 34; she was a homemaker. They lived on Fletcher Street but moved out of the city, settling in Fairburn. There, young Jerry Hopkins began to question his origins.
“I’d hear little words” from other family members, Hopkins recalled. “They’d say things like, ‘When they (his parents) got you’ instead of ‘When you were born.’”
He kept his doubts to himself, even during a day that remains etched in his memory:
He was 11. They were hunting rabbits. He and his dad stopped in the middle of a field. The father pointed to a big rock. The son sat. The man chose his words carefully. “Your mom’s got something to tell you,” he said. “But now’s not the right time.”
But what’s a kid going to do? Young Jerry decided he’d wait on his mom. He kept his suspicions to himself.
Others weren’t so quiet. When he was 20, a sweetheart pulled him aside. She had news from an unimpeachable source: the beauty parlor. One of Hopkins’ cousins, his girlfriend said, had been getting her hair done in Fairburn. His name came up.
“It was like a flood gate opened,” Hopkins said. His cousin laid it all out – the baby on the doorstep, the adoption, the family secret. He was an abandoned child, a foundling.
Foundling. It's a word not used much anymore, but it's one Rory Cathcart knows well. A Charleston resident, she's a genealogist who's conducted workshops for people searching for their roots. Hopkins, she said, may have a tough search.
Because his birth certificate lists only his adoptive parents, Hopkins has no idea who his biological parents might be, she said. Compounding his difficulties: Atlanta then, as now, was a big place; it’s easier to be pregnant and anonymous in a sprawling city than in a smaller community.
“I hope the best for him,” she said. “It’s really difficult, not knowing where you came from.”
‘A curiosity for me’
In 1985, Hopkins — by then a commercial pilot, based in the Northeast — came to Atlanta. He tracked down articles about his birth in the Constitution and the evening paper, the Journal. They were on microfilm at the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library downtown. The library's microfilm machine was broken; a sympathetic clerk let him take the film down the street to Georgia State University, whose library had a working viewer.
A helpful graduate student helped put the spools in the machine. In moments, Hopkins was looking at a Journal article about his birth. He was about to change discs when the student stopped him.
“Don’t forget that there’s a photo on the back page,” she said.
Hopkins stared at her. “How’d you know that?”
An older couple had been at the library just days earlier, the young woman replied. They’d come from central Florida. The woman, perhaps 60, appeared distraught; the man, determined.
“I bet she was my mother,” Hopkins said. “I missed them by less than a week.”
His adoptive father died in 1966; Naomi Hopkins lived until 1988. Neither told him the circumstances of how he wound up on a stranger’s doorstep on a winter evening.
He’s had a successful career. Hopkins graduated in 1966 from Georgia Tech with an industrial engineering degree. Hopkins flew for several airlines, retiring from US Air when he reached 60.
For decades, home has been Moultonborough, a town on the southwestern edge of New Hampshire about 900 miles north of Atlanta. He's been on the Board of Selectmen. For 10 years, he was an assistant softball coach.
He and his second wife, Betty, raised four children — three from Hopkins’ earlier marriage, and the fourth a girl they adopted.
When he learned about DNA testing, he had a sample taken and joined ancestry.com, an online site that helps people in genealogical searches. The site has connected him with some distant cousins, said Hopkins, but that's not enough.
“None of them knew about a woman in Atlanta giving birth at the time I was born,” he said.
Now, said Hopkins, his children are curious about their dad — his grandchildren, too. Who were his biological parents? Are there any people in the Atlanta area who look like their old man?
Hopkins wonders, too. “This is a curiosity for me,” he said. “It’s a question that’s always been there.”
And so Baby X waits, and wonders.
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