Photographs of children overwhelm both the bulletin board and the refrigerator. And each photo evokes a fond memory for Billie Colbert.

This one here, Amanda, was adopted out. This one, I went on vacation once for a week and as I came back in, she was right behind me. The little red-headed twins, Kay and Carla, I spent all morning laying tile in the bathroom. I went into the kitchen to take a rest and they went in and picked all the tile up. Here grandma, here you are,= they said.

Melissa, I had her off and on for three years. They=d move her and she=d come back. She'd call her worker and say, "Bring Grandma Billie the paperwork because I'm back here".

That nickname, Grandma Billie, is well known in Wyandotte County -- not only to former foster children, but to judges and social workers and everyone else connected to the foster care system. It is estimated that Mrs. Colbert provided care to over 5,000 children in her Kansas City home during the 45 years she provided emergency foster care.

"I started in 1953," Mrs. Colbert said. The juvenile court judge gave me $1 a day to take the kids. I quit counting at 5,000. Some weeks, I'd have 125 children come in here.

Linda Hobbs, director of child-in-need-of-care for the Wyandotte County District Court, said Mrs. Colbert's contributions to foster care are immense.

"There has never been anyone who contributed more to the foster care system in Kansas City, Kan.," she said.

Mrs. Colbert left a job as a cabdriver and a hamburger stand operator to become a provider of emergency foster care. She said when she became pregnant with the first of her four children, her husband Howard, who died in 1986, wanted her to stay home.

"I didn't want to stay home with one little boy," she said. And she chose to do emergency foster care because nobody else wanted emergency because you'd be up all hours of the night.

Mrs. Colbert said her first stab at foster parenting came as a result of fate. A neighbor whose wife left him and three children ages 6, 4, and 18 months, asked her to watch the children while he secured employment in Texas. He never came back, and she cared for those children for two years until they were adopted.

"I would have raised them, but at the time I didn't have enough money to raise my own," she said.

Now 77, Mrs. Colbert wishes she still had foster children around. She quit accepting children two years ago at the urging of her own children. But she still sees many of the former foster children she cared for over the years, along with the social workers and police who brought the children to her.

"They just pop in and out," Mrs. Colbert said, right after accepting a luncheon date with an SRS social worker.

Early in her career, many of the foster children in her care came from homes that simply were too poor to provide food. As the years went on, however, more children came from abusive situations. Mrs. Colbert worked for Catholic Community Services since 1975.

Under questioning, Mrs. Colbert does acknowledge some horrific situations her former foster children were in before they came to her. She mentioned a little boy whose parents burned him by forcing his hands into scalding water. Or the boy with lashes on his back from being whipped by his father. Or the police making regular visits to photograph bruises on the children.

But Mrs. Colbert concentrates all her energy and thought to the children, not on condemning bad parents.

"You don't think about that," she said. "You think about them, the children."

Mrs. Colbert said she would never try to get a child to talk about the situation they came from, but let the talk come naturally. Often, the difficulties the children faced came out as they talked to one another, she said.

"At one time, I had 13 kids," she said. "Then -- you could almost count on it, the police would call at 2 in the morning." 'Got room?', they'd say. I'd say, "No, not really. But bring them on by. Then they would bring the kids in. Most had head lice and I'd get out the shampoo. And they'd be hungry.

"And I had five babies and five two-year-olds at one time," Mrs. Colbert said. "I'd sit in the middle of the floor with babies around me."

It was when she had a mix of younger and older children that things went smoothly. The older children would watch and play with the younger ones.

"They'd play school; the big kids would play school with the little ones. The only problem would come when the little ones would get into the big one's things. Lipstick would be all over."

Mrs. Colbert tried to make the children's lives as pleasant as possible. In the early 1960s, she began acquiring pinball and arcade video machines. She had up to 15 machines at one time. She also had a rabbit, a ferret, ducks and chickens, and, for a time, a baby billy goat.

"I had two year olds, and we'd go out and feed the goat with a baby bottle," she said.

Her own children and her husband also liked having the foster children around. She said her husband would take the male children camping. And her own children would give their clothes to foster children.

"You know what, they loved them," Mrs. Colbert said. "Janet would cry when they moved them. And my husband didn't get a lot of sleep, but he never complained."

Mrs. Colbert's attachment to the children placed in her care shows up in the extra duties she took on. Because of mental health problems due to severe abuse, one child had to leave Grandma Billie's for Rainbow Mental Health Facility. But that child, Sherry, was not forgotten.

"I'd pick her up on Sunday and we'd go out to eat," Mrs. Colbert said. "Otherwise, she would have had no place to go."

"She was my girl; when she was here, she sat on my lap most of the time."

Page Last Updated: May 29, 2001