A Chance for Ronnie

Ronnie Kim was born without hope, a pathetic piece of flotsam tossed by the surging tide of the Korean war. His father was a U.S. Army colonel who left Korea soon after Ronnie's birth to return to the solider comfort of a wife and two legitimate children back home. Ronnie's mother was a puffy, ailing, gold-toothed Korean woman well on in years. After a year of vain efforts to keep Ronnie clothed and fed on the profits of prostitution, she died of malnutrition and tuberculosis.

Ronnie passed into the hands of indifferent relatives. When the Communists pushed into Seoul in June 1950, Ronnie was hidden in a cold shack, where he spent most of his time lying on a bare floor. There, after the fall of Inchon, officials of the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital found him still alive amid the bomb rubble.

The Adventists did their best to nurse Ronnie back to life and health. At last, his luck seemed to have turned; he was adopted by a kindly Korean nurse named Grace Kim who had already adopted a war-orphaned girl. Grace scrounged food and vitamins for Ronnie, gave him the love he needed and dreamed of sending him one day to the U.S. But Ronnie coughed more and more, and then developed even more alarming symptoms. He began walking with an old man's stoop, and, when he dropped a toy, he would fall to the floor before he could pick it up. An orthopedic surgeon gave Grace the answer: Ronnie had tuberculosis of the spine. Only a delicate bone graft could save him. Grace Kim made her decision.

Ronnie's diseased bones, she told the doctors, must be replaced with her own. Grace herself had already undergone a serious kidney operation, and the doctors were doubtful if she should attempt another, but the nurse was firm. And so Ronnie's ailing vertebrae were reinforced with healthy bone grafts from Grace's leg.

Last week the doctor chipped off a plaster cast that had held Grace Kim prisoner for nearly five months. Grace, he said, would limp for a long time to come, but eventually she would walk normally. As for her foster son, his back is still in a cast, but growing stronger every day. Smiling happily as he sat nearby in gay blue pajamas, five-year-old Ronnie Kim carefully assembled a toy out of sticks. "It's an airplane," he explained, "to take my mother to America some day."

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