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She sang, she danced, she acted, she skated, she played a sport in every season, and she had a preference for brainy boys—Cornell engineering student Don Rockwell (Class of ’56) and Nik Epanchin. Jane’s mother was an accomplished pianist and artist living with her husband in Greenwich Village when Jane was born. They moved soon after her birth to a cheap row house rental in Roslyn Heights where her younger brother Todd (’59) was born. In second grade they moved to her mother’s native Sea Cliff to be with Jane’s grandfather on Porter Place. “My transition to Sea Cliff was a horrible experience at the tender age of eight,” Jane remembers, but she soon made good friends.
When younger brother Todd began delivering Newsday Jane also began to work, helping him especially in rain and snow. “I climbed what seemed like a million steps to get that paper onto the doorsill or into a mail slot.” Two months before she would be legally eligible at 16 she landed a job in Sea Cliff’s teen social center—Dobkins Pharmacy. “Working in Dobkins was the "in" place to work.” Starting pay: $0.35 an hour. But, “That was where everything seemed to be happening except now in retrospect people only sat on stools, nursing a coke or whatever (you had to buy something or you got thrown out) and just talked. Such gossip went on in there. I bought my first lipstick there. I used to run up a tab every week and sometimes ended up owing them money.”
Jane hit a version of the glass ceiling as soon as she contemplated college. Her parents felt they had to dedicate their limited resources for college to her brother “since my brother needed to get a job and support a family and I, a girl, would be supported by a husband.” She could choose two years away at college until they had to send Todd, or live at home and attend 4 years on Long Island. “I could not wait to get out of small town Sea Cliff.” She spent two happy years at junior college in Boston and has never regretted the choice although it took another 26 years to complete her bachelor’s at night school while working full time and raising 4 children while becoming a single parent.
Jane married in September 1959 and went with her husband to Florida while he attended two years at the University of Miami. “I was having babies,” Jane says. They arrived in ‘60, ‘61, ‘65, ’70, and Jane became a stay-at-home mom. After a few years in Brooklyn and Queens, they bought a house in Westbury. After divorce in 1972 Jane found herself a single mom with children from 2 to 12. She started working with the Medical Society of the State of NY doing data entry on early computers. “There was a room full of machinery and you keyed everything in.” She also began weekend data entry for Nassau Hospital on the 4-11 shift and she started studying again for her BA. With her degree she began working in the Cleft Palate and Cranio Facial Center at North Shore Hospital in Manhasset. Across the street from her lived Bill Hall. “I had known him forever.” He was recently divorced. Soon he was married to Jane.
One day at work a woman came in with a baby adopted from Russia and born with severely cleft palate. The woman showed the baby’s doctors a video of the girl in a bleak Moscow orphanage’s crib, standing up and bouncing around with her crib mate, a baby boy. “Don’t you know anyone who wants to adopt him?” the woman asked. Jane took a copy of the video home. Bill had never had children and had not wanted any, but “as time went by he said ‘It kind of would have been nice to have one.” He was not prepared for what he saw—a baby boy with the roof of his mouth split open from his lip to his throat. Then he was ready. Jane asked herself, “Do I want to do this again? I was a grandmother already three times over. I said sure.”
Jane scheduled the boy’s first surgeries even before they left for Russia. There, in 1991, even she was not prepared for reality despite having two suitcases full of bribe goods and two more full of specialized baby supplies for both their new son and the orphanage. When they first saw him in Moscow’s Number 2 Orphanage, she noticed his slightly bowed legs, his snow white hair, then opened the baby’s shirt to change his clothes and, and seeing the deformed rib case, said, “Oh my god he’s got rickets.” The records showed that his mother may also have afflicted him with fetal alcohol syndrome. The adoption became official on Christmas Day (which is still not an official holiday in Russia) 1992.
They do everything together. With Andrew’s main operations behind them and Bill’s mother turning 100 in 1999 and living in Oklahoma, the family moved to the quiet town of Glenpool about fifteen miles south of Tulsa. Although before the move she says, “I couldn't imagine anyone in their right mind moving to Oklahoma,” she found the town was “like Sea Cliff without the water.” Andrew is a straight A student in his senior year. He plays trombone in the marching band, loves cooking and is fascinated by paleontology. Jane and Bill have never regretted their decision nor has their new son Andrew. “The day they brought him into the orphanage he just flew to Bill. Bill absolutely dotes on this child.”
Jane now works full time in the school’s special ed programs, having started in elementary school and now working with the same students in middle school. She recently went to Russia with a woman who adopted a baby from the same Number 2 Orphanage where she found Andrew. She also sits on Board of Directors of Around the World Adoption Agency.
