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A Memoir of Virginia Values and Tragic Results

HarperCollins

This month, the United Nations announced that forty percent of births in this country are to unmarried mothers.  While it's become much more accepted today, Virginia journalist and author Mary Carter Bishop reports that such a thing was scandalous in the 1930’s when her half brother was born.  She’s now written a book about him.

Mary Carter Bishop was an award-winning reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and had just finished a big series when she returned to her home state of Virginia.

“I rented a log cabin outside Lexington and just took it easy for a while," she recalls. "Eventually I just didn’t want to go back to the big city, and that’s when I came to the Roanoke Times where, unexpectedly, did my best journalism.”

And where she would discover a huge family secret.  A man she thought was her cousin turned out to be her half brother – born ten years before her to a mother who’d been sent to stay with relatives at Christmas.

“There my mother met a man who gave her her first alcohol. They had sex, and a few months later she was sent to a home for unwed mothers in Lynchburg.”

She lived there until her son, Ronnie, turned one.  Then it was off to Roanoke to find work.

“She had no childcare for him, and so he went to a foster family,” Bishop explains.  

The foster couple begged to adopt Ronnie, but Bishop’s mother refused to let him go – opting, instead, to send him to an orphanage.

Credit Mary Carter Bishop
Journalist and author Mary Carter Bishop grew up in Keswick and wrote for the Roanoke Times.

“He believed that the foster parents were his birth parents until she told him, when he was six years old, on the way to the orphanage.”

Two years later, after she had married, Ronnie’s mother brought him to live with her on a farm in Keswick, where she cared for a rich couple’s baby.  It was 1943, and she kept her son a secret.

“She didn’t want to have to explain who he really was, so she told everyone he was her cousin,” says Bishop.

After Mary was born, the boy was pushed out of the house – left to live on his own.

“He was sleeping in the barns.  He built himself a little cabin back on the mountain and lived there I think when he was about 12 or 13.”

He began stealing food from the neighbors and spying on them, prompting a community meeting where the locals confronted Ronnie’s mother.

“She either reigned-in Ronnie or our family would have to leave the farm.”

The couple enrolled Ronnie at the Miller School – a prestigious private place today, but – at that time – a home where wayward boys were sent. After two years he returned to Keswick and – again – got into trouble.

“The sheriff’s deputies came and took him to Western State Mental Hospital in Staunton.  He lived there for most of a year and was given electro-shock at least five times,” Bishop says.

Eventually, doctors determined he was not mentally ill or developmentally disabled.  They put him in a training program for barbers, and some years later Mary Bishop found him cutting hair in Roanoke. His story broke her heart.

“My mother, who really would do anything in the world for me and sacrificed so much for me, sent me to college --  I was the first person in the family to go to college, was also the mother of this very unhappy boy.”

He was also an unlucky soul afflicted with a rare disease that causes the pituitary gland to continuously secrete human growth hormone.

“His hands and feet and brow, jaw and other parts of his body grew and grew, including his heart, and it just wreaks havoc from one end of a person to the other.”

Before his death, at the age of 55, he would spend weeks in the hospital, and Bishop would spend hours by his bedside, learning about his life. She returns to Keswick on October 30th at 7 to speak at Grace Episcopal Church about her book: Don’t You Ever – My Mother and Her Secret Son.  

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief
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