A Street Corner Crusade
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I GREW UP IN A SMALL TOWN CALLED DONORA, PA., AND THIS IS WHERE MY LIFE STARTED TO ROT AWAY.

Paul and Paula were born Oct. 13, 1948. The Child Abuse Man says the 13th was an unlucky day.

They were the youngest children of (father) and (mother). They had an older brother, Tommy, a sweet, severely disabled boy who was born with "water on the brain." They had an older sister, and an older brother, whom everyone called (nickname omitted).

(mother's sister) had just been in the Donora hospital a month earlier, delivering her first child. The hospital staff remembered her and so it was her they called regarding her sister, (father).

"I can remember word for word what they said," (mother's sister) says. "They said, 'Your sister is in the hospital' - I knew she was due - and they said, 'Are you sitting down?' and I thought they were going to tell me she was dead. They said, 'She had twins and we can't locate her husband. Do you know where he is?'"

(mother's sister) and the other sisters - (names omitted) - rushed to the hospital to be with (father). When they got there, the nurses told them the rest of the story.

"She doesn't want the twins," they said. "She didn't even name them."

The sisters named the babies Paul and Paula. "We talked her into keeping them," (mother's sister) says. "Maybe we shouldn't have."

(mother's sister) and (mother's sister) went to see the babies at (father)'s house about a month after they were born.

"When we went in the house in November," (mother's sister) says, "there was no fire (heat), and she had them wrapped in a blanket. When she unwrapped them, my sister and I started to cry. They looked like birds, scrawny little baby birds."

One of the little birds nearly didn't make it through childhood.

"Patient was admitted here on June 30, 1951, at the age of 2 years, following a fall at home," a doctor wrote in a report. "He was brought to the hospital where physical examination revealed multiple contusions over the entire body and a severely contused head. He also had persistent vomiting during the first week of hospitalization here and appeared to be anemic and undernourished."

The Child Abuse Man spent 48 days in the hospital.

"The doctor said, 'This little boy's not going to make it,'" (mother's sister) says.

(mother's sister)'s voice over the phone from Syracuse, N.Y; is cool and flat as she tells the story. Approaching 70, a successful accountant, it's a story she tells reluctantly. She wants people to understand that the rest of the family wasn't that way and that no one really knew what was going on. "When Paul contacted me, maybe four or five years ago, and sent me this book - I couldn't believe it. It upset me so badly when I read the things he said. It was almost unbelievable."

But she went back to Pennsylvania just three weeks ago and took Paula aside. Look, she told Paula, Paul's been telling me these things, and I want to know the truth.

Paula hugged her. "Aunt (name omitted)," she whispered, "believe it. Everything Paul told you is true."

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