Betty Tisdale, “Angel of Saigon” Operation Babylift and Helping And Loving Orphans (HALO)
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Transcript
Betty Tisdale & Operation Babylift
Interview by Miae Kim
Tape Sync by Scott Bartlett of Jack Straw Productions
Date: 12/1/04
1 CD, 18 Tracks
TRACK 1 – 1:32
BETTY: I am Betty Tisdale. I am founder of an organization called HALO, Helping And Loving Orphans that’s only about four years old. And before that I had worked in Vietnam from 1961 until Vietnam fell in 1975 and then went back again and I’m there now.
Thomas Park Clement, Author
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Thomas Park-Clement
Interviewed by Miae Kim
2005
Thomas Park Clement: [00:00:00] I’m Thomas Park Clement and I am from Bloomington Indiana. Well let me see as many adoptees. I’m not sure exactly what date I was born. So it was somewhere around 1950 1951. And at the latest nineteen fifty two and as you probably know the war started in June 1950 and the cease fire was around July of 1953 and I have quite a few memories from that period. I have a theory that if your childhood is fairly uneventful then you will have a hard time remembering back to an earlier age. But because of the war it was so eventful that I can remember when I was 2 and 3 years old.
Thomas Park Clement [00:01:06] The, my, I lived with my birth mother and father for approximately four years. And when I was around four and a half years old my father disappeared and then right around that period my mother had brought me to a street corner and told me to look down the street and not turn back. And that was the last time I saw her. So I was living on the streets for a while. I have no idea how long until I was found by a Methodist missionary nurse and I am half and half. So she was on the lookout for – we call them hop hoppers which is half Caucasian half asian children and she brought me to an orphanage and I was there for perhaps two years and then Congress had passed a acceptance of international adoptees in 1957 and I was adopted into the U.S. in 1958.