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Dec. 25--CATAWBA -- A Christmas card for an 81-year-old lady who has to be fed through a tube came in the mail a few days ago.
The tiny handwriting mentioned how well a woman named Julie, a music teacher who runs a dance studio, was doing.
It was signed "Buck & Gerry," written by the woman in a careful hand, like Christmas cards from couples married a half century always are.
The card came from thousands of miles away. Because Buck and Gerry know that 81-year-old Faye Simpson, who lost her stomach to illness but not her heart, was a foster mother to 118 children in Colorado from 1962 to 1988.
Simpson moved to Catawba six years ago to live with her eldest daughter, Nancy Rutland, because of her failing health.
As a foster mother, Simpson cared for Indian babies such as "Little Dove" and white babies and black babies and a half-Eskimo baby and a half-Japanese baby.
"We are all half something," Simpson said. "Babies are babies. They need love."
Some had been beaten, some were children of drug addicts, some were just unwanted.
"I had brothers and sisters for a few days, or we had them for years," Rutland said. "My mother treated them all like her own."
Some had tiny broken arms or skulls or were premature births.
Simpson took them all.
"They would let 'em get to five pounds and bring them to me," Simpson said.
Elmer and Faye Simpson had three children of their own at the time. Elmer worked, and Faye raised children. In those days, the Simpsons received $2.40 per month for each foster child, and food had to come out of that.
Faye Simpson never drove a car.
"She used almost all the money she had on taxis, taking kids to the doctor or wherever they had to go," Rutland said.
Simpson hung all the clothes and diapers for all those years on the clothesline because she never had a clothes drier and disposable diapers cost money she didn't have.
Faye Simpson would stay up nights sewing dresses for the little foster girls to wear to church. Elmer Simpson, who died in 1995, would work all day and come home and play with his own children and the children who had come that day or the week before or the year before.
The last foster child Simpson took in, a girl, stayed five years.
Simpson has only one regret.
"I'd still do it if I could, but I got too old," Simpson said.
But age and her own health problems and the death of her husband don't keep Simpson from mothering. She takes money from her monthly Social Security check -- and you can imagine it isn't much when Simpson never worked a regular job because she was helping to raise 121 kids -- and sends $24 a month to each of five children through a Christian children's fund.
One boy in Guatemala and four girls. One in Mexico, another in Zambia, and two in Indonesia.
Then Simpson sends extra money, cash, to those children in the mail. Once in a while, she gets a letter from one of the children, saying the child used the cash to buy a chicken for the family to have something to eat. Or notebook paper to do homework.
Rutland, 9 years old when the first baby came in 1962, remembers the day as vividly as any in her life.
"We named her Kathy," Rutland said.
The name was so important that Rutland years later named her own daughter Kathy.
The foster child Kathy stayed nine months, until a family adopted her. More babies replaced her in the Simpson home.
A few weeks after Kathy left, a traveling salesman knocked at the Simpson door to sell his wares, like door-to-door salesmen did in those days. Simpson told him about how she was a foster parent. She showed the salesman a picture of Kathy.
"That's my baby," the stunned salesman said. "My wife and I just adopted her."
The salesman's name was Buck, from the "Buck & Gerry" who sent that Christmas card a few days ago. The couple who adopted a girl called Kathy who grew up to teach dance and music. She was a girl who Buck and Gerry named Julie.
The first of 118 foster children to be loved by Faye Simpson.
But not the last.
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Herald, Rock Hill, S.C.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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