Hollywood actresses Sara Buckner (O’Meara) and Yvonne Lime (Fedderson) first met on the set of the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, when they played the bubbly girlfriends of Ricky and David Nelson.
Their mission for children began in 1952, when they were sent on a government sponsored goodwill tour to visit troops in Japan.
Learn more at Childhelp.org
On the streets of Tokyo after a typhoon the actresses came upon a group of cold and frightened children, huddled together for warmth. Learning they had no parents and were born from American troops during the Korean War, the young women took the children to their hotel room for the night with the idea of placing them into an orphanage the next day. They bribed a maid with a cashmere sweater not to tell the hotel management. When the colonel in charge of the goodwill mission said the army could not be responsible for the children, Sara and Yvonne tried to find an orphanage that would take them. However all the orphanages would not take children of mixed blood.
Eventually they found a very good hearted woman, known as MaMa Kin. MaMa Kin lived with 10 orphans. She had barely enough money to feed them; but she took in the additional 11 children that Sara and Yvonne brought her.
They raised money from sympathetic soldiers to help MaMa Kin, but an unsympathetic colonel told them that they were hired as entertainers, not as social workers. and that they should be on the next plane back to the States
Much later in 2006 a movie called For the Love of a Child was made about the Childhelp organization that began from this humble beginning.
Sara and Yvonne ask the unsympathetic Colonel what he would do if these were his children. He had a change of heart. The next day loads of provisions were delivered by the army to MaMa Kin’s orphanage.
Before they left Japan they had over one hundred children in their care.
In California they raised enough money to return and to found four orphanages. They went on to help thousands.
By then there was a controversial war raging in Vietnam, where, called upon by the US Congress, they managed to set up five more orphanages and a Children’s Hospital, before the bombs began to fall.
Then most of the orphans had to be evacuated.
It was known as Operation Babylift
“It was heartbreaking,” Sara recalls. “But every single child we brought to the U.S. was adopted, and that made it all worth it.”
Back in the States with help in funding from their friends Debbie Reynolds and Connie Stevens, Sara and Yvonne founded their first orphanage. As if this wasn’t enough they were then asked by Ronald Reagan to address the problem of child abuse and neglect in the United States.
“But”, said Sara and Yvonne, “we don’t have the funds”. Nancy Reagan spoke quietly to her husband and the money was forthcoming.
The first orphanage was built at Beaumont in California.
Sara’s journey took a deeply personal turn when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer in her early 30s.
“I was given less than three months to live,” she shares. “It was everywhere, and I was devastated. I had two little boys to raise.”
Despite the grim prognosis, Sara’s unwavering faith led her to a spiritual encounter that changed everything.
“I heard about a healing service at the Shrine Auditorium, and I knew I had to go,” she says. “I wasn’t even supposed to leave the hospital, but I prayed and believed.”
She recounts the moment with tears in her eyes.
“I felt my body lift, and I saw a pink cloud surrounding me. The evangelist called out, ‘There is a woman in the balcony being healed of cancer,’ and I knew it was me.”
Miraculously, Sara’s cancer disappeared, and she credits that moment with reaffirming her life’s purpose.
Kathryn Kuhlman told Sara that she too had the gift of healing and this vocation was confirmed by the Catholic priest, Father Ralph DiOrio, who was also a renowned healer.
Father Ralph was born in 1930 in Rhode Island, USA, and came from a large, extended family of Italian immigrants. From early childhood he felt a vocation to become a priest. His confessor, Father Piccolo persuaded him to go to a seminary in Chicago to join the Scalabrinians.
In 1887 Bishop Scalabrini had resolved to organise a group of missionary priests, who shared the language culture and religious history of Italian immigrants, whose needs they would serve in foreign lands such as America, Brazil and Australia.
Ralph, named after the Archangel Raphael, had some misgivings about whether the order was right for him, but he accepted. He was always to feel that that his vocation was to a wider constituency than just immigrants.
..After his ordination in 1957 he worked in a succession of Chicago parishes and his third parish was Holy Guardian Angel Parish, which had been the home of Scarface Al Capone, the original chief of the mob.
He said, “I heard many tales of the old days when they had been gun battles between rival gangs. The motion picture, Knock on any Door with Humphrey Bogart had been filmed there. The central character, Nick Romana, in his boyhood was depicted as an older boy in our church.
Turning people toward God had always been my priority. One cold and windy winter afternoon a police cruiser pulled over and one of the officers called, “Hi Father Ralph, how are you doing?”
“Hello Fred, I didn’t see you at Mass Sunday. You missed communion. Is there anything wrong?” “I’ve been really busy Father, but I’ll get down to confession soon.” “I’m not going to let you get away this time. You’ve got to get your peace right now. Suppose something happens today and you haven’t made your peace with God.” Fred’s partner took a walk and Fred sat behind the wheel and I sat in the passenger seat and heard his confession.
Once in a flop house, full of poor derelicts, I ran into a group of desperate characters, who wanted to know what I was doing there and who I was working for. I had the impression they were peddling narcotics. They seemed to think that my Priestly clothes might be a disguise Maybe I was with a rival narcotic gang or maybe I was an undercover agent.
“What are you doing here?” “Taking care of souls.” “Soles? Are you a shoe repair man?” “No the kind of souls I’m after never wear out, but sometimes they go in the wrong direction and have to be helped.” “Who are you working for? I’m working for JC.” “What do you mean JC ? Justice Courts?” “No bigger than the courts. My boss JC is Jesus Christ Superscar.”
Drug peddlers are particularly evil criminals, for they frequently seek out young people and entice them with free samples, but once a youngster is hooked the drugs are no longer free. Drug use was the biggest problem among the youth in the parish. I decided to start a teenage club. I told him about our problem with the Teen club.
I needed something visible -pool tables or television sets for example – to draw them toward Something invisible, namely God. But I didn’t have the funds to buy them. One member of the parish – I’ll call him Al – was extremely well dressed. Everybody seemed to respect him.