`Practice Baby' Says She Still Hurts -- Orphans Were Used As `Props' For Home-Economics Classes

PORTLAND - As a baby, Shirley Kirkham served as a real-life doll for 34 students learning to juggle blankets and diapers.

The angel-haired infant was one of dozens of "practice babies" borrowed from orphanages and state institutions as part of a home-economics program in the 1930s at Oregon State College in Corvallis.

"I'm sure I got excellent care. That's not the hurtful part," said Kirkham, now 65. "It's that I was used.

"I strongly believe that if you're handled at such a young age by so many people and you don't get a chance to bond with anyone, that you will have troubles later on in life."

Kirkham, who lives in Turlock, Calif., is trying to find who her birth parents were and whether she has siblings. She also is hoping to locate other "practice babies."

She was interviewed when she came to Portland to search the state Bureau of Vital Records.

Roughly 1,515 students cared for 50 babies from 1926 through 1947, when the six-week program operated at what is now Oregon State University.

Among Kirkham's keepsakes is a yellowed milk advertisement from a 1934 newspaper that shows her and another "practice baby."

There's also a newspaper story that states the school was able to use Kirkham, then called "Baby Jean," even though she was born a sickly, premature baby.

Because she has no access to her medical records, she has no idea what health problems she had.

It hurts her to see the lock of fine blonde hair from her first haircut, cut by one of 34 caretakers, and to look at her dogeared birth certificate, marred by heavy black lines.

Kirkham has spent countless hours squinting at that certificate, trying to match it with scraps of information from agencies.

Sketchy information shows she was born in Salem on March 19, 1933, to an unwed 17-year-old named Shirley Keaney, who cited a 28-year-old farmer as the father.

She said her adoptive mother was efficient but chilly; her adoptive father was an alcoholic who only showed his love in his last years.

Kirkham married so many times she's embarrassed to reveal how many. Each union failed because "I couldn't seem to get close to anyone," she said.

Raising her own four children, she often felt that "I didn't know how to love anyone, I just felt dead inside."

She is convinced that her first year of life was in part responsible for the pained relationships.

Psychologists say the experience of having so many caretakers could be good or bad, depending on whether there was "consistent warmth flowing," said Drew McWilliams, program director at the Morrison Center in Portland, a agency for abused and troubled children.