MORNING KISS-Deloris Lind Kisses Duff, a Vietnam orphan who is the newest addition to the Lind family. Her husband, Chuck plays with Grant, Ruth and Boyd, the couple’s three other adopted children. The Linds have two children born to them, red and Gate (photo by Steve Kohls).

WINTHROP — After surviving the plane crash Friday which killed more than 100 Vietnamese orphans,3-year-old Duff Lind is playing today with five new brothers and sisters in Winthrop.

His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Lind, were not aware that he had been involved in the crash until they received a message Monday night saying his name was “on the living list.”

“I’M GLAD we didn’t know,” said Mrs. Lind. “Evidently he wasn’t injured at all, but he was put in a hospital in Saigon along with others involved in the crash.”

Due to Tuesday night’s storm in the area, Lutheran Social Service couldn’t get through to them by phone, said Mrs. Lind, but a relay of messages came through in time for the Linds to meet their new son at 1:40 p.m. Thursday at Twin Cities airport.

The family, now totaling eight, lives in a 14-by-70-foot mobile home on the farm of Lind’s parents, the Stanley Linds.

Four of the children are adopted, and the oldest child, Grant, is 61/2.

“At one time, we had three new babies in 15 months,”said Mrs. Lind. She explained that they had been advised by a doctor to adopt a child after she had had two miscarriages.

JUST TWO months after Grant joined their family through adoption, a daughter Gale, now nearly 6, was born to Mrs. Lind. A year later Rex was born.

Since then the Linds have adopted three foreign-born children, including Duff. Ruth who will be 4 in June also is from Vietnam and Boyd, 17 months, is an Indian-Spanish child from Ecuador.

“We both love kids” is Mrs. Lind’s explanation for their family. Lind, native of the Winthrop area, came from a family of five and his wife grew up on a farm at Herman with seven brothers and sisters.

MRS. LIND says it helps to be on a farm where her husband can spend time with the children. “‘The children are with him a lot,” she said.

The children from Vietnam were adopted through the Friends for All Children organization of Boulder, Colo.,working through the Lutheran Social Service. For the adoption of the baby from Ecuador, the Linds went through a missionary nurse whom they know.

The Linds who have three bedrooms in their mobile home have no plans for building on. “However,” Mrs. Lind said,”we have been talking about putting a basement under the trailer which would help a lot.”

Home studies have been done for each adoption, she said. “You really feel nervous,” she admitted. “You want to say the right thing.”

She explained that the real reason for the studies is to help the parents examine their ideas of raising children.

Mrs. Lind does all her own housework and laundry with her mother-in-law and others helping out with occasional baby-sitting.

“We usually go places where we can take the children,” she said, explaining that the family attended a church camp together last summer.

Although the Vietnamese government has set up very strict adoption rules, which include age of parents and the number of other children in the family, the Linds are breaking most of the regulations.

She said they overcame some of them through a special letter directly to the president of the country. This followed “a whole package of form letters to be filled out.”

New Ulm Daily Journal

April 10, 1975