Word: vera
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...hungrily around a little house in Manhattan's tangled Greenwich Village. They had prowled darkly through abutting houses, peering out of windows, climbed walls, offered bribes. The bait was a baby. The baby's mother was Grace Mailhouse Burnham. The baby's father was unknown. Baby Vera had been eugenically conceived and born. Intelligent, well-to-do Mother Burnham had wanted a baby. These facts she admitted freely (TIME, Jan. 30). Newspapers empurpled columns with the history, speculated as to papa, collected opinions from bigwigs and gumchewers. To deepen the secret of her collaborator's identity...
Last week Mother Burnham awoke one morning horrified. Plastered hugely across the first page of the Daily Mirror, Hearst tabloid, was Vera's picture, heavily headlined, triumphantly copyrighted. Mother Burnham eyed it narrowly; saw it was no fake...
...with a roof repairman's tools and a bland air of industry in case he was surprised, the hours slipped by. Swaddled thickly the baby slept below. It was dusk, and no picture. The next day Sarno crept out on his roof again. Late in the morning Baby Vera stirred, tossed. The tiny head, free of loving covers, lay exposed. Sarno swiftly exposed his picture plate, scuttled happily down the skylight, "beat" the town on the most difficult picture story of the week...
...child. "There was nothing which approached promiscuity" in their relationship, she said. The young man, after performing his function as eugenic husband, quietly stepped out of her life. A fortnight ago at the Lying-in Hospital in Manhattan she gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Vera (truth). Last week an enterprising reporter of the New York World, unabashed by Mrs. Burnham's admonition ("This is not the sort of thing you would want to put in a newspaper"), gave her story to the world...
...Burnham scouted the idea of romance with the young man, said she does not intend to marry him or anyone else. She has wealth, will rear Vera in the name of eugenics. Mrs. Burnham's relatives and father, Dr. Max Mailhouse of New Haven, Conn., were reported to be "harmonious with the situation." Professor Ellsworth Huntington of Yale, geographer, whose hobby is eugenics, said: "From a purely scientific standpoint, it was the correct thing for her [Mrs. Burnham] to do, although there is some doubt that it was best from a social standpoint." The public, shocked at the thought...