I’m still surprised that no one ever told me about the incubator baby kidnapping. To be fair, it happened 63 years before I was born, but it also happened half a block from where I was born, and little Marian Bleakley was perhaps the most famous baby in the country even before she was kidnapped. My great-grandfather’s uncle, moreover, was the county attorney who got the kidnappers convicted. Marian went on to graduate from my high school and attend the college where I now teach. And yet, I’d never heard of her until a few years ago, when I stumbled across a bizarre headline in a digitized newspaper archive: INCUBATOR BABY AGAIN KIDNAPED [sic].
Yes, “again.” It turns out that Marian’s 1909 abduction from her Topeka home was just another chapter in perhaps the most dramatic custody dispute since the one adjudicated by King Solomon—although I may simply be surrendering to that comparison after seeing so many journalists use it. Thousands of articles were published about little Marian between 1904 and 1914— sensationalistic, gossipy, confused, and often contradictory pieces typical of the news at that time. It didn’t help that journalists had landed “Pretty baby girl and boy for adoption, free.”) But because the two-pound preemie was in danger of dying, Merrifield turned her over to the Imperial Incubator Concession Company, a popular exhibitor at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Visitors thronged the incubator display, drawn to the novel sight of impossibly tiny babies struggling toward viability in newfangled artificial wombs.
