BOULDER — On an unseasonably warm day in January 2012, Shayne Madsen bought a bouquet of flowers and drove with a friend to an apartment in a northeast Denver retirement community.
They parked, and Madsen waited in the car.
Madsen, adopted as an infant in 1949, was on the verge of a breakthrough in her own story.
She’d recently been awarded a packet of documents relating to her relinquishment, and, through social media and ancestry websites, found an address for a woman named Charlene Bates, whom Madsen believed was her biological aunt.
Madsen’s friend approached the apartment door, and, sure enough, Bates, in her 80s and with declining health, appeared along with her daughter. The friend gave them the flowers and nervously explained the purpose of the surprise visit.
She told them Madsen had been adopted long ago by a Loveland couple and that she’d never been given any information about her biological family, its medical history or the circumstances surrounding her adoption. Madsen was hoping to connect with her biological mother.
Appeals court ruling
Like hundreds of thousands of adoptees in the United States, Madsen, who now lives in Gunbarrel, was for decades denied access to any and all adoption records, including her own birth certificate.
But a 2009 ruling by the state Court of Appeals — one in a series of legislative changes over the past 15 years that allow open access to adoption records in Colorado — had granted Madsen her first clues.
In 2014, Gov. John Hickenlooper signed a bipartisan bill that granted adoptees and the parents who relinquished them access to original birth certificates, relinquishment forms and medical records. On the legal side, adoptees’ battle in Colorado had essentially, and at long last, ended.
Now, Colorado has the broadest spectrum of adoption records available in the country, save perhaps for Oregon.
With those opened records came a long-awaited glimmer of hope that Madsen might finally locate her birth mother.
At the Bates apartment, she watched from the car as her friend walked out with Charlene’s daughter, Melanie Bates.
Madsen introduced herself and learned that Melanie Bates knew Madsen’s mother well; she was her niece, and the extended family lived in the Denver area.
“You look like her,” she told Madsen, before offering to call her aunt.
Madsen’s first meeting with her mother came two weeks later at a Mexican restaurant in Northglenn. For Madsen, the resemblance was immediately striking — Laverne Lippoldt had Madsen’s nose, smile, even her haircut.
“I’d never seen anybody who looked like me, other than my son,” says Madsen, now 66.
Their initial conversation was one for which Lippoldt had methodically prepared.
“She was a geyser of information,” Madsen recalls. “She told me where my biological father lived, what his address was and that his sons lived across the street. She told me what she was like growing up, and she told me she liked wearing black pants and ballet slippers and liked to dance — just like me. It’s like she had a checklist. She wanted to get it all out on the table.”
Lippoldt also shared the painful story of their separation. She became pregnant at 16 by a boy one year older and was admitted into the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers in Denver.
She was among the nearly 3 million American women, the Department of Health and Human Services reports, who gave up a child in the 30 years following the end of World War II. Most of them did so under immense institutional and societal pressure, and few received counseling regarding a mother’s inherent rights.
“She told me that she did not want to relinquish me,” Madsen says. “In fact, there was a two-week period between the time I was born and the time the documents were signed, and that was very unusual because the norm was to make the girls sign it immediately upon birth. But she told me she felt she had no choice. The system was such that this was just what was going to happen.”
Baby Scoop Era
The years between 1945 and 1973 are now known as the Baby Scoop Era. At its peak in 1970, experts estimate, roughly 80 percent of infants born to single mothers were relinquished.
“In most cases, adoption was presented to the mothers as the only option,” professor Betty Reid Mandell wrote in 2007. “Little or no effort was made to help the mothers keep and raise the children.”
In medical school in the early 1960s, Lois Tochtrop — a former Colorado state senator closely involved with the recent fight for open access to adoption records — served for about six weeks on rotation in a small ward of a St. Louis hospital where mothers were “coerced,” she says, into giving up their newborns.
“Nobody ever talked to these girls to say, ‘You have a choice.’ It was sort of like, they were going to deliver, see the baby one time, go home and that’s pretty much the end of it.”
And that’s precisely what happened to Lippoldt. When she left Florence Crittenton, she hid what had happened from everyone but an older sister.
She led a happy life, by all accounts, from then on, with a new husband and four children in Broomfield. But for 65 years she was quietly, intermittently tortured by guilt and curiosity.
Happy childhood
Growing up, Madsen thrived socially and academically in Loveland with her late adoptive parents, Evelyn, a homemaker, and B.I., who worked in real estate.
She graduated from the University of Colorado and then attended law school at Washington University in St. Louis. Madsen now lives in Gunbarrel and heads the public policy and regulatory affairs arm of the national law firm Jackson Kelly.
But Lippoldt was never privy to any of that information. She didn’t know who had adopted her child or that the new parents had changed Madsen’s birth name to Shayne.
“Mom was so relieved to know that Shayne turned out all right,” says Diane Lippoldt-Johnson, who is Madsen’s 62-year-old half-sister.
After Madsen and her mother met for the first time over lunch, Lippoldt gave Madsen’s number to Diane but intentionally kept her other children in the dark, fearing they weren’t ready.
She never had to make the call because Madsen reached out first, via Facebook. The two agreed to meet for lunch in spring 2014, and they have met a half-dozen times since. Lippoldt-Johnson calls it a “budding friendship.”
Madsen describes meeting her biological half-sister and mother — who died in March of cancer at the age of 83 — as a personal triumph.
