'The real story is I was saved': The untold story of Barbara White Walker

Roger Heineken, who coordinates the Sundays on the Porch Program Series for the William Allen White Community Partnership, Inc., noted that board member Beverley Buller was familiar with Hanks’ and Bickel’s work.

“I originally reached out to Bev to do a program on Barbara White Walker, because of her continuing research, writing and publishing about the White family. She suggested I contact Amy and Kathy,” Heineken noted. “When Mrs. Walker passed away in March of this year, we dedicated this season’s Red Rocks programs in her memory. We thought it was a good idea to present a retrospective on her life as the first program.”

“Every time we’d come to Emporia,” Bickel said, “we felt the stories of William Allen White, Bill, and Mary — and now Barbara. We wanted to know more.”

Hanks added, “We’ve talked about writing this story for years, but really started the first time we met Barbara in May of 2018. We’d finally heard she would be back in Kansas. One of her grandchildren was graduating in Manhattan and she was there.”

Future conversations continued largely by telephone.

“The first time we interviewed her [Barbara White Walker], she told us about the musty, smelly Burberry trench coat that Bill wore when they first met in London,” Bickel and Hanks explained. “It was still in the closet just months ago when we last met with her. That trench coat was Barbara’s first memory of Bill.”

William Lindsey “Bill” White, the only son of “The Sage of Emporia,” William Allen White, had a difficult act to follow. His father was a world-renowned, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and confidant to leaders of the free world. The elder White established a world-wide network of political and literary associates, and held great influence over his son’s actions.

Bill and Kathrine originally planned to honeymoon in Bermuda, but William Allen nixed that idea, and told them they were going to New Orleans instead.

“One day in 1935, on this same porch, William Allen White was lying on the hammock. He told his son that if he and Kathrine moved away from Emporia, he would no longer be a big fish in a little pond,” Bickel and Hanks related. “They left anyway, first to Washington, D.C. and then to New York. But Bill was fired after just two months at the Washington Post.”

It was then that Bill’s troubles burgeoned. He suffered from the same depressive episodes that plagued his parents. William Allen and Sallie, however, took long periods of rest in California, Colorado, and New Mexico to ease the effects. Bill did not have that luxury.

Bill was a struggling journalist when he left for London in 1940 to cover the escalating war in Europe. Before he left, Kathrine requested he “uplook kids.” As Bill sailed, three-year-old Barbara had just arrived at a foster home in London.

Barbara was born in Ipswich, on the east coast of England, in 1937. Her mother, Dora Kemp, had escaped from an abusive husband by climbing out a window when she was pregnant with Barbara. Dora tried to stay with her own mother, but there was not enough food. While working at a millinery factory, Dora would leave Barbara in a dresser drawer upstairs, sneaking up to feed her when she could. Eventually Dora got a housekeeping job at a well-to-do barrister’s home.

During this time, the German attacks on England began. Dora and her sister took Barbara to a foster home in London. Dora told her three-year-old daughter it was a party, and that she was going out for ice cream and cake. But she never came back. Barbara waited, inconsolable, at the window. Until the end of her life, Barbara remembered the sound of her mother’s heels clip-clopping away down the street.

The London Blitz started on Sept. 7, 1940. The Luftwaffe attacked London 57 days in a row. Young Barbara spent every night preparing for the nightly raids, drawing close the blackout curtains and sleeping in the subway tube.

Bill arrived in early October, one day after St. Paul’s Cathedral was damaged by bombs, and quickly immersed himself in covering the war. In between his war coverage, he began looking for a child through the National Adoption Agency. He was first introduced to five-year-old David, a painfully shy child. The agency then introduced him to Barbara, and Bill could immediately tell that “she had character.”

Bill decided to take both children to Anna Freud’s war nursery for testing. Daughter of the famous analyst Sigmund Freud, Anna established Hampstead Nursery for the youngest victims of the war. She and her staff, which included trained Montessori professional Hedy Schwarz, performed behavioral tests on the children in their care, and tried to give them lives with a semblance of normalcy.

Unfortunately, David failed the tests. But Bill saw himself in the little boy, and believed that he could eventually catch up developmentally and emotionally. Anna Freud gave Bill the whole, hard truth: keeping up with a family like the Whites would be difficult, if not impossible, for David.

Barbara, on the other hand, passed the tests easily. She was, however, considered a difficult child who was rebellious, angry, and outspoken.

“Do you want to cry?” Schwarz asked Barbara when the child first arrived at Hampstead. Barbara continuously rubbed her dry eyes.

“You won’t smack me?” Barbara asked.

Reassured, Barbara began to sob, finally releasing emotions of fear, abandonment, and confusion that had been held in for most of her short life.

From that very first night at Anna Freud’s Hampstead Nursery, Bill fed both the children dinner and put them to bed. He stressed daily about how to get both children back to the United States. It would prove impossible to secure two extra seats. In the end, he took only one child — Barbara — in place of luggage. She sat on her new adoptive father’s lap all the way on the long journey back.

Kathrine took over immediately upon their return as the primary parent. Barbara’s transition to life in America was not easy. For months, she insisted the family turn out the lights and close blackout curtains — the only life she remembered. The child had never seen a green grass lawn. Bill and Kathrine had to teach her table manners.

Bill worked on his novel, a fictionalized account of Barbara’s adoption, “Journey for Margaret,” keeping in touch with Anna Freud through letters. A Life Magazine feature about Barbara came out the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Soon, casting for a movie based on the book began. MGM wanted to cast Barbara as Margaret. The Whites were not keen on that idea, but ultimately did not have to make the call. Barbara was seriously injured in an auto accident as the family drove to their New Jersey farmhouse, and was hospitalized for several weeks. Margaret O’Brien played Margaret in the movie.

Barbara grew up in a stylish brownstone in New York City, enjoying frequent weekend and summer trips to the family’s farm in New Jersey. She lived a privileged lifestyle, including private school. Her father told her, “You can spend as much money as you want on books.”

The family traveled frequently to Emporia as well, where Bill was running The Emporia Gazette after his father’s death. Just like her father, Barbara began helping out at The Gazette at an early age. “Everybody has to pitch in with a family business,” Barbara said.

But she was never pressured by her parents to go into journalism, or take over the family business. While her parents encouraged her to attend Radcliffe, the exclusive women’s liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Barbara instead chose California’s Stanford University. It was at Stanford that she met her future husband, David Walker, who was her college roommate’s brother.

The couple were married at the Congregational Church in Emporia. A lavish reception was held on the porch at Red Rocks, the White family home. The wedding cake was ordered from an exclusive New York bakery, but it did not arrive in Emporia in time for the wedding. Local women came together and baked a table full of cakes that were served at Barbara and David’s wedding reception. Life Magazine covered the affair with a multi-page spread.

In 1972, Bill was stricken with cancer. Barbara and David moved with their four young children back to Emporia. In 1973, after Bill died, Kathrine took over running The Gazette until her death in 1988. Barbara took on the mantle of running the paper that year.

Dora Kemp, Barbara’s birth mother, was still alive in 1982, living in an Ipswich nursing home and crippled with arthritis. Along with Kathrine, Barbara visited Dora during a business trip to Europe, learning that she had two sisters — one now deceased, and one who’d been adopted by the barrister who’d employed Dora when she and Barbara were still together. Dora died in the mid-1990s.

Hedy Schwarz, assistant and friend to Anna Freud, actually wanted to adopt Barbara when they first met at Hampstead Nursery in London, but Bill had already decided to take the child back to the United States. Hedy and Barbara connected again, but again lost touch. No one informed Barbara when Hedy died in 1991.

Barbara didn’t like to talk about her early life in England. Bickel and Hart emphasized that there was one thing she was adamant about: “I wasn’t a war orphan. The real story is I was saved.”

Amy Bickel has been a journalist for more than two decades and began her career at The Emporia Gazette working for Barbara White Walker. Bickel grew up in Gypsum, Kansas. While she was in college, Pat Kelly offered her a job at The Gazette. She has written for both state and national media groups and is the author of “Dead Towns of Kansas” and the “Complete Guide to Kansas Fishing.”

Kathy Hanks has written for several Kansas newspapers and national agricultural publications. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years. Hanks and Bickel met in 2002 when both were working at the Hutchinson News. Her deep love of England blossomed during a summer spent at Oxford’s Oriel College, where she studied existential literature.

Bickel and Hanks are no strangers to joint projects. Together they have written numerous articles and presented podcasts about life in rural Kansas. They won the William Allen White School of Journalism Burton Marvin Award for their in-depth coverage of depleting aquifers in Kansas. They have won multiple first-place honors from the Kansas Press Association.

“Saving Bill” is the working title of the book Bickel and Hanks are currently researching and editing.

“We originally called it ‘Saving Barbara’, but in essence, it went both ways,” Bickel and Hanks said. “Bill saved Barbara, but Barbara saved Bill, too.”

They spent countless hours with Mrs. Walker and have made numerous trips to both Emporia and England in pursuit of the rich story. “We talked with Barbara just a couple weeks before she died. We’d sent her all the quotes we want to use in the book, and she’d approved them. She talked about moving back to Kansas, maybe to Manhattan.”

The book will be published by University Press of Kansas with a tentative release date in late 2024.

The 2023 Red Rocks Program Series is dedicated to the generosity and memory of Barbara White Walker. The next program, “Mary White’s Mandolin,” will be presented on Sunday, June 11, 2 p.m., at Red Rocks Historic Site, 927 Exchange St. All Sunday on the Porch programs are free and the public is invited to attend. The Red Rocks Program Series is an initiative of the William Allen White Community Partnership, Inc. in cooperation with the Kansas Historical Society.

Red Rocks Historic Site is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Admission to the site and tours of the historic William Allen White House are free. The Visitors Center offers a selection of books and Kansas gifts for purchase. For more information, call 620-342-2800, email kshs.redrocks@ks.gov or visit their website at https://www.kshs.org/p/red-rocks-home-of-the-william-allen-white-family/19569.