Prayers United Mother & Daughter After Separation of 25 Years
By Eddie Breitz
This is a tale of theatrical people with a plot which rivals most imaginative stage creation and which reads like a page torn from fiction’s most amazing narrative.
The first act is laid in a divorce court, the second in an orphanage and the third in a Charlotte passenger station.
Between the first and second acts a period of five years elapses. From then until th end of the mythical script, one spans a space of 15 years.
It is a remarkable story of a mother’s faith in the Divine Being, of 20 years of heartaches, and of answered prayers. And it is all the more remarkable because it is true.
For 20 lonesome years Mrs. Allie Savin, wife of the well-known theatrical manager, prayed nightly for the return of her missing daughter until Providence heard and answered.
And then—just as everyone has already suspected—the curtain fell on one of those pretty fairy book settings. The train thundered in, the pent-up feelings of two decades were released, and, as Mr. Grimm would say, they lived happily ever afterwards.
Seated in her apartment Saturday, open arm thrown around her newly-found daughter, Mrs. Savin told The News the story of her 25-year search and its happy termination.
Twenty years ago, when little Elsie Chase was only four years old, her mother, now Mrs. Savin, divorced her husband in Petersburg, Va.
Believing the father to be better able to care and provide for the child, the court gave him the custody of little Elsie, the innocent storm center of the Chase domestic troubles. She was placed in the orphans’ home in Richmond.
Taught by her father and by attaches of the asylum to believe her mother dead, the girl stayed there five years. Then her father married again and she went to live at his home. She was unable to live happily with her step-mother, however, and at the age of nine ran away from home and went to New England where she was soon adopted by a kind family.
In the meantime, Mrs. Savin continued to reside in Petersburg. Once she went to Richmond and endeavored to see her daughter, but was unsuccessful. Officials of the orphan asylum told her that the child, at her father’s request, had been taught to believe she was dead.
Sick in mind and heart, Mrs. Savin returned to Petersburg. Again she sought to visit her daughter, only to learn that she had left the home. No one knew where she had gone.
Years passed. The mother had moved to Newton, N.J., where she met and married Mr. Savin. All these years she had tried, through relatives and otherwise, to obtain news of little Elsie.
The search was not abandoned until five years ago. Mrs. Savin, although refusing to believe her daughter dead, had given up hope of ever seeing her again. One night less than six months ago, she had a presentiment. It told her that her daughter was living.
Aided by Mr. Savin, efforts were redoubled to find some trace of the girl. They ended at the Southern station last Monday night.
The girl, meanwhile, had grown to young womanhood. Five years ago she married Allison Howell, a vaudeville performer and entered the profession herself. Of course, she believed her mother dead.
But on New Year's Eve, while the bells and whistles were welcoming what to Mrs. Savin promised to be only another year of sorrows and disappointments, the girl, too, had a presentiment.
She said yesterday it told her that her mother was alive and that she would soon see her.
Early in this year, Mrs. Howell, through an advertisement, located a half-brother of her mother in Petersburg. He told her where Mrs. Savin could be found. Telegrams were exchanged, then letters.
Last Monday night when a New York train rolled into the station here, Mr. and Mrs. Savin were there to meet it. A pretty young woman, with fair skin and light hair, alighted.
Mrs. Savin, despite the fact that she had not laid eyes on her daughter in 20 years, flung her arms about her.” Whether it was a mother’s instinct or what,” she said yesterday, “I knew that was my Elsie the minute she stepped from the train.
“We looked long and hard for her,” put in Mr. Savin, who has grown very much attached to the young woman, “and we are going to keep her with us as long as we can. I have never seen a woman as happy as Mrs. Savin has been this week. And you can’t blame her, can you?”
Mrs. Savin replied by bending down and kissing Mrs. Howell. The amateur playwrights can sharpen their pencils. There one has fiction in real life with plenty of “local color.”
From The Charlotte News, January 29, 1922
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