About Common Folks, Even as Many of Us

    For a while yesterday, I felt fine.

    I got up on the right side of bed (which in itself is no easy feat for a Monday), showered, talked for a while about nothing in particular with my wife and kids, had a leisurely breakfast, and drove unhurriedly to work.

    Things were going fine.

    A first-edition Mirror News, fresh off the press, was waiting for me when I arrived at the office and sat down at my desk.  It was folded, on top of my typewriter.

    The ritual, with me, is to open it and skim the headlines.  All of them — Page 1, Page 2, right on through.  Then I start over.  Read the stories that interest me most.

    That's the way I began it yesterday, Page 1.  The actors were on strike.  That was the main line.  Taxpayers favor trash fee.  Finch jurors ponder, L.A. youth on crime spree.  Colonel's son chews out GI.

    Then, per my custom, without reading any of the text, I turned the page.

    And that's when I read the story about Alice Marie Combs.

    It was an AP wire story out of New Jersey, and it related how  the State Board of Child Welfare was trying to take the 4-year-old girl away from her foster parents.

    The couple, Richard Combs, a 25-year-old $120-a-week sheet metal worker, and his wife, stood accused by the state of being "too common" to be entrusted with the care of Alice.

    This the state decided after letting them raise the girl from infancy and letting the girl grow to know them as her parents.

    I had to read the story a couple of times before I felt the full impact of its astonishing stupidity.

    Four-year-old Alice, a state spokesman pointed out, had a near-genius IQ of 138.  The Combses, he said, couldn't give the girl the proper "opportunities for intellectual and cultural development."

    That the Combses gave their foster daughter love and security apparently didn't enter into the state's decision to try to take the girl away.  That the girl loved her parents didn't sway the officials, either.

    The board didn't look upon Alice Marie Combs as a human being.

    She was more of a machine.  Kind of baby Univac whose commercial possibilities should be exploited to the fullest — and to hell with the kid's personal feelings in the matter.

    This kind of logic might be acceptable in a Chinese commune, or under the eye of "Big Brother," where human values are shuffled into the background for the glorification of the state.

    But in a democracy like the United States, we don't work that way.

    At least, we didn't — until the New Jersey State Board of Child Welfare decided to take Alice away from the young couple she knew as her natural parents to relocate her with other "parents" more prepared, financially and intellectually, to develop her genius.

    It's the basic right of any American to rise above his parents.  We've been doing it for years.  And getting along just fine.

    I don't say this to belittle Mr. and Mrs. Combs, who- from what I've been able to learn about them- are a pretty typical couple.

    They're not geniuses.  But how many of us are?

    I've never read any reports that Abe Lincoln's parents were.

    But nobody bothered to evict him from his log cabin and stick him in a mansion where the candle-power was a little brighter.  If they had, I get the feeling that American history books would be in for a big rewrite job.

    In a "better environment," Lincoln might have become a millionaire slave-trader.

    Now that the story of Alice Marie Combs has been made public, I doubt very much if the New Jersey State Board of Child Welfare will have the courage to back its odd convictions.

    But it has already proved, beyond any doubt, that the "child welfare" part of its title is an unfortunate misnomer.