27, 1945-they’d been together about two years. They’d met in Biloxi, where Tallos was stationed with the Air Force and Sipple was working as a bartender. They planned to be married, by proxy, as soon as possible. Sipple’s boyfriend, Julius John Tallos-"Johnny"-had just shipped out to Panama. In the spring of 1946, Sipple, then in her early 20s, moved with her infant daughter to Memphis, where her 2-year-old son, Robert, a child of a previous marriage, was staying with friends. This is the story she heard unfold over the next few days, Alma Sipple’s story. It’s something else when you hear the circumstances that go with it.” It’s one thing when you find your birth mother. Kimbrell reflects, “At first, it was more than I really could take in. She also wanted to know, “Mom, where did you get that accent?” (Sipple is a self-described Kentucky “hillbilly,” who gives both Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ wall space in her mobile home). Sipple says, “She wanted to know what happened, how, what I looked like, how many brothers and sisters she had.” Her daughter let out such a scream, Sipple says, that she had to hold the telephone at arm’s length. “You know you’re adopted?” Yes, she knew. So now she had a number-but what was she going to say to this woman, a stranger whose life she was about to turn upside down? “I could feel my blood pressure shoot up,” Alma Sipple says. Returning home, the Sipples picked up the message on the answering machine. She didn’t know it, of course, but she was calling a mobile home park in Carson where Alma Sipple and her husband, Steve, live. Kimbrell called the California number the next day. Seven months later, with the help of that group and Marilyn Miller, an independent search consultant in Harbor City, Calif., Sipple found her daughter. Viewers searching for their birth parents, or parents looking for their children, were advised during the show to contact Tennessee’s Right to Know, a volunteer agency that reunites families separated by adoption, in Memphis. I felt like going through the television.” I said, ‘That’s the woman that took Irma!’ My husband said I turned white. “When they showed her picture,” she says, “I let out a scream. Sipple recognized Tann immediately-that face, that air of authority. She sat forward on her chair, transfixed, as Robert Stack told the story of the late Georgia Tann, an infamous Tennessee social worker who’d made a fortune running a black-market baby adoption ring in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. 13, scanning the TV dial, Sipple happened on NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries,” a program she wasn’t in the habit of watching. This nice woman was going to take the child to a hospital for a checkup.Īll these years, she has lived with the pain of her loss, with her guilt, with a gnawing need to know if her daughter was alive. Everything about her said “authority"-and that’s why Sipple had handed over her infant daughter. It had been 44 years since Alma Sipple had seen the woman, and then only briefly, yet she could not forget her-the no-nonsense brown hair, the rimless glasses, the air of authority.
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