For This Woman, Motherhood Arrived by Airlift
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/nyregion/long-island/26colli.html
By ROBIN FINN
Published: April 22, 2009
GARDEN CITY -- THE year was 1974, and Lana M. Noone, a music
professor at Nassau Community College and a flutist in local chamber
orchestras, was six years into a happy marriage but in despair
nonetheless. Her personal tragedy was that after several miscarriages
she had given up on being able to conceive a child the natural way.
All of her married friends, colleagues, neighbors and relatives had
children, but not her, and it stung.
She and her husband, Byron Noone, a poet and an English professor at
Queensboro Community College, decided, wearily, to look into
adoption. To end the waiting for an infant Godot who was never going
to materialize the way that they had dreamed. To end what had felt
like a dead end and a failure. Fateful decision.
Their pastor sent them to a New York City agency where, with dropped
jaws, they were told there was a two-year wait for a Caucasian child.
Not that they expected instant gratification, but two more years of
childlessness seemed like two years too long. The counselor asked
them if they would do something far outside the box: adopt a child
orphaned by the war in Vietnam, which was making headlines at home
about body bags but had not loomed large on their
desperately-seeking-parenthood radar.
Previously, it had taken an act of Congress for United States
residents to adopt a foreign child. Operation Babylift, an innovation
that ultimately extricated 2,508 Vietnamese children from the war
zone on 26 flights over a hectic three-week period in 1975, broke
with precedent. The Noones exchanged complicit glances and took the plunge.
"The proverbial light bulb went off in our heads," said Ms. Noone,
62, now a widow (her husband died of brain cancer in 2002 at 57) and
a grandmother of two. Dressed in a pink suit, she sat last week in
the living room of her 1920-ish Tudor here, alone not counting an
abundance of memorabilia, including a colorful quilt made of the
native clothing worn by some 600 of the babies upon their arrival in
the United States, one of four made by Shirley Barnes, the
Denver-based adoption coordinator.
"It was controversial at the time, but what occurred to us both at
that moment was that these kids were not at the top of anybody's
list," recalled Ms. Noone, who on Monday evening will be in
Washington as a panelist for "Operation Babylift: Saving Children
From the Vietnam War," an event organized by the Smithsonian Asian
Pacific American Program. She is being recognized not just as a
fervent Babylift activist (she and her husband were the only parents
to adopt two nonsibling orphans) and author ("Global Mom: Notes From
a Pioneer Adoptive Family") but also as a continuing ambassador of
the global adoption community. A noncelebrity Madonna.
Her 34-year-old daughter, Jennifer Nguyen Noone, a social worker who
returned to Vietnam to work there and whose current assignment is
teaching English in Bogotá, Colombia, is also on the panel. So are
Ross Meador, field director of the fledgling airlift that carried the
first 57 orphans to safety, and Phil Wise, a pilot of the plane that
crashed days later, on April 4, 1975, after its rear cargo doors
mysteriously flew open shortly after takeoff from Saigon. Only a
third of the 343 children and adoption escorts on board survived.
Ms. Noone's first adopted child was supposed to be on that flight but
was bumped to the following day. A short-lived respite. Gravely ill
with pneumonia, Heather Constance Noone, as her new parents had
christened her sight unseen, arrived in the Philippines on April 5,
1975, and was transferred to a succession of hospitals before landing
at Kennedy Airport on April 23. Her condition worsened, and on May 17
she died at Long Island Jewish Hospital in Manhasset of pneumocystis
carinii, an opportunistic infection that is also a major cause of
AIDS-related deaths.
Heather lived at home with the Noones for six days, smiled at them
just twice and at four months weighed only six pounds. Two days
before Heather died, the devastated Ms. Noone cooed a promise: "I
told her I would never let Operation Babylift be forgotten or allow
her short life to have been lived in vain."
On the evening of Heather's funeral, the Noones received a call from
the same Denver hospital that had discharged Heather: three babies,
all girls, remained from the final airlift of June 5, 1975. Two were
ready for adoption. Would the Noones like a replacement for Heather?
"I told them we were flattered, but that it was too soon, that we
were still grieving for our baby Heather," Ms. Noone said. She was
informed that the third baby might not survive, but if she did, were
the Noones interested in taking her? They were. It was, she recalled,
a no-brainer. She and her husband were on the same page.
On June 5, 1975, Jennifer arrived at Kennedy Airport and met her
forever parents. Unlike Heather, Jennifer, also about 4 months, was
robust. "We called her our little truck driver," Ms. Noone said.
Jennifer thrived, but the Noones concluded that being an only child
might not be the optimum way for her to grow up, and they decided to
adopt again. Jason Paik Noone, now 32 and a social studies teacher at
Hempstead High School, arrived from South Korea on Dec. 11, 1979. The
family circle was complete. When Jason and his wife presented Ms.
Noone with her first grandchild a few years back, she felt, she said,
as if she had been born again. They named the baby Heather, a double
gift to the pioneering parent who turned a very personal setback
the inability to conceive into something very public and positive.
"I used to think that being a mother would be my therapy," she said.
"Instead it became my mission."
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