IN THE PHOTO that ran in Ladies Home Journal in the mid-1940s, Dorothy Wallin looks perky. It is an ad for Evenflo baby bottles, and she is standing in the kitchen, all dressed up, pouring formula into bottle after bottle. Her husband, Marv, sits in a chair holding the triplets.
Marv is dressed up, too. Tie and suspenders. The boys - Scott, Craig and Kent - are squished together on their father's lap. They look as if they might be squirming. But at least no one appears to be crying.While people loved to see pictures of triplets, no one wanted to see triplets crying. The country had had enough tears. Optimism prevailed in the United States in 1945.
World War II had just ended. Soldiers were coming home, falling in love, getting married. The future looked prosperous, bountiful. The Wallin family was a perfect illustration of the American mood. What could be more bountiful than having a baby? Having three babies. What could be more optimistic than a man holding three babies while wearing slacks and a tie that might have to go to the dry cleaners?
Looking back 50 years, at photos of these three Utah boys, you can get nostalgic for a more innocent time. The Salt Lake newspapers took dozens of photos of the Wallins and of other local triplets. Each birthday was another public occasion.
Today, parents of triplets can join a support group. Today, they can find studies and expert advice about raising children of multiple births. But unlike the parents of triplets 50 years ago, they probably won't find the newspapers calling. Not unless there is some Oprah-worthy twist to their situation.
Perhaps as a society we have become more jaded, less moved by the sight of three toddlers playing happily in a sand pile. Certainly triplets were more unusual 50 years ago than they are today.
Improvements in neonatal care mean more tiny triplets are kept alive these days. Also, these days more older women have babies. The older the mother, the more likely she is to have twins or triplets. And above all else, the invention of fertility drugs has dramatically increased the numbers of multiple births. Last year, nearly three-fourths of triplets registered with the the National Triplet Connection were born as a result of fertility drugs or procedures.
Between 1972 and 1989, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, there was a 152 percent increase in the number of multiple births to white mothers between the ages of 30 and 34. The increase in multiple births to mothers of all races, for the same time period, was 113 percent.
Still, triplets are rare enough to inspire awe. The National Triplet Connection estimates triplets occur once in every 9,800 births.
The average Utahn is not likely to know any triplets. Even during 1993, which was the bumper year for bountiful births in Utah, only 11 sets of triplets and one set of quadruplets were born. Only 37 babies - out of 37,000 Utah babies born that year - came in bunches.
Deonn Stott of Heber is the president of the state chapter of the National Triplet Connection. She estimates there are 100 families with triplets in Utah.
Stott was three months pregnant when she had a sonogram and discovered she was carrying more than one baby. Having an early warning is perhaps one of the main differences between being pregnant with triplets in the 1990s compared with 50 years ago.
Dorothy Wallin was eight months pregnant before she learned she was having triplets. Because the doctor was concerned about how large Dorothy was getting, he took an X-ray. It showed three little spines, topped by three little skulls.
Dorothy says she had never been around babies. She remembers thinking of all the fun, not all the work, these triplets would be.
She was young, perhaps naive. However, she says, she was also ambitious, and motherhood was her goal in life. She had educated herself for the life she wanted by majoring in home economics at Utah State University. She met Marvin Wallin at college. They married in 1943, just before he went into the service.
When the war ended, they were living in Detroit. Marv was stationed there as a second lieutenant, in the business of winding up the war contracts.
Marv was at work when his wife called in the fall of 1945, and said, "Are you sitting down?" In the movie scripts of the 1940s, that's what wives always said to their husbands when they were about to announce multiple births.
Marv took the news much better than did the man who sat at the desk next to his. "My friend was already a father and he said, `If I were you I'd go so far away it would take three weeks to reach me by airmail letter.' "
"But Dorothy and I were euphoric," Marv remembers. "We didn't think of bottles and diapers. Triplets were going to be a lark."
Reality hit the day after the babies were born, says Dorothy. For her delivery, she went to Henry Ford Hospital, under the care of Dr. J.P. Pratt, whose previous claim to fame was delivering Charles Lindberg's children. Pratt was about to retire and told the Wallins they had fulfilled his lifetime dream of delivering triplets.
As was the practice of the day, Dorothy was anesthetized. She totally missed the arrival of three boys who each weighed between 4 and 5 pounds. The nurses let her rest for a day. Then they presented her children to her.
That's when she went into shock, says Dorothy. She realized there were three nurses, each holding a baby. One woman per infant. She realized she was accustomed to seeing motherhood as a one-on-one activity. Her brain strained to invent a picture of one woman and three babies.
Fortunately, her mother came from Cache County to help. Fortunately, too, says Marv, the babies came home from the hospital one at a time over the next three weeks. First Craig, the largest. Then Scott. Then Kent, who'd developed an infection.
Grandma, Mom and Dad each chose a baby to be responsible for. As Wallin recalls the routine, all the adults sat down together to feed the triplets every 21/2 hours. Each feeding took 45 minutes. "They could only take 2 ounces," says Marv Wallin. "But I had Craig, and he was the biggest and sometimes I could get rid of 3 ounces."
The babies were a novelty in Detroit. The Army public relations department had a great time, and so too did Marv, coming up with quotes like, "I learned in the Army never to make fewer than three copies of anything" and "It's that Detroit mass production!"
A diaper service offered free diapers. Carnation gave a year's supply of milk. And Evenflo called, wanting to feature the Wallins in ads titled "How to Raise Babies Wholesale."
But perhaps the nicest perk that came their way as a result of the triplets was that Dad got discharged almost immediately after their birth. Soldiers were sent home according to a point system. Recalls Marv, "You got 12 points for each dependent, so I went from being last on the list to high point man overnight. The major said to me, `You know, Wallin, some guys will do anything to get out of the Army.' "
Underlying all the banter about their children the Wallins heard this: People are charmed by the idea of triplets.
When they stop to think about their lives, Scott, Kent and Craig can't really figure out why triplets are so charming. To them, growing up triplet doesn't seem much different than growing up in any family with three boys who are close in age.
Kent Wallin says, "People make assumptions about you because you brought a couple of guys with you on the day you were born." For the most part, he says, he and his brothers are as different as any three 50-year-old men you might choose off the street.
Craig Wallin says he's been thinking a lot lately about getting older. But when he reflects on his life, being a triplet is not one of the most noteworthy aspects. "I imagine we were interesting to the people who were around us while we were growing up." But Craig never reveled in being a famous Wallin triplet. "I didn't care for a lot of attention."
Scott Wallin says, "I happened to come into the world with both a fraternal and an identical twin. But personally, I don't think that makes me special." He would like to be remembered not for being a triplet, he says, but for being a good dentist.
The Wallin brothers turned 50 last month. Their parents had a party for them and their spouses at the Lion House in Salt Lake City. Kent, who is an attorney, lives in Salt Lake City. Craig came from Logan, where he is a manufacturing engineer and owns a business. Scott, the dentist, came from Spokane.
After they talked about the uneventfulness of being a triplet, they began to reminisce about their childhoods. Listening to them and to their parents reveals that in some ways growing up three is an unusual experience. Just as the rest of us suspected all along.
Scott and Kent are identical twins. Craig is their fraternal twin. In the days before artificial insemination and fertility drugs, that was the way triplets happened more than three-fourths of the time: two eggs, one of which splits.
If we are entranced by the idea of triplets because we think they are three identical people, we should rethink our fantasy. Only in extremely rare cases does one egg split three ways. And now that fertility clinics are involved in the business of making multiples, the most common type of triplet is three separate eggs, three babies who are genetically no more alike than any other three children of the same parents.
Fifty years ago the story of triplets was likely to be the story of two babies alike and one different. From the first, the Wallins recall, Craig was different from Scott and Kent. "He was the ringleader," says his mother. "He was the one who crawled out of his crib and taught the others how to do it."
When the babies came home to Utah they came first to their grandparents' house in Smithfield, where two grandparents and one parent took care of them until their daddy could get discharged and drive his car across the country and find a job and buy a little house in Salt Lake City. Then it was one mom taking care of them all day and one dad and mom trying to get some sleep at night.
Dorothy Wallin bought two playpens and kept rotating the boys throughout the morning as she did her housework. She'd put two together and one alone until the pair started fussing or the one got lonely. Then she'd switch.
When they were tiny, she took them out for walks. She had a big buggy and laid the boys in it with two heads at the top and one at the bottom with his feet between the others' heads. This arrangement worked until the babies started to get mobile. Then it was unsafe, she says. They all tried to crawl out at the same time.
Eventually, through trial and error - which consisted of the boys escaping early in the morning to make havoc throughout the house - the Wallins decided to turn the babies' bedroom into one big playpen and tied the door shut at night. Then the triplets tipped their dresser on top of themselves, so the Wallin parents learned to tie the furniture to the walls.
The next skill the boys mastered was crawling out the window. At 5:30 one morning Dorothy and Marv Wallin woke to a phone call from a neighbor. Their three 2-year-olds were playing in the middle of 3300 South.
The toddlers also managed to break a hole through the wallboard of their bedroom and escape into the house at large. In short, says Kent, "We were quite rambunctious. We tended to feed off each other. When we got older we used to do the meanest things to our female cousins. Tease them. Tie them up. They speak of us now with some affection. But I think they harbor emotional scars." Their mother remembers triplets as more fun than work. "Her memory has faded," says Kent. But everyone in the family agrees on this: The triplets were each other's main entertainment when they were little.
It was a major production to take them anywhere, Dorothy Wallin recalls. As toddlers, they went out so rarely that they were amazed by other people. When the Wallins went to the zoo, while the crowds looked into the animal cages, her little boys stood next to the bars and looked back at the crowd.
Marv Wallin recalls one winter day when Dorothy took the triplets on a shopping trip to Sugar House. One minute she was holding the hands of three little boys in red snowsuits, and then, somehow, there were only two little boys.
Dorothy called Marv at work and he said, "Don't worry. You still have two." She didn't laugh, he recalls. She went off to find a police officer. Now, she can laugh about it. At the time she was distraught and welcomed the offer by a store clerk who volunteered to watch the other two while she and the policeman made their search, but the other two got loose and the police officer found them, one at a time, and returned them to Dorothy Wallin, who repeated, "No, no, that's not the one who is lost." After 20 minutes that seemed like hours, the missing toddler turned up.
Says Craig Wallin, "You've got to hand it to my parents. What with all the work of cloth diapers and mixing formula . . . , I can't imagine them having more children after having three to begin with." But the Wallins went on to have five more.
Sherrie came next. She was never jealous of the triplets, she says. "Maybe if they were girls I would have been." Instead, she says, their notoriety made her feel part of an important family. When she was young, she figures, she probably ended up doing more housework because of the boys. She ironed their shirts. And Craig often strong-armed her into doing the dishes when it was his night.
The real benefit of having three older brothers became apparent when she was a teen. Three older brothers meant three times as many guy friends stopping by the house. Sherry met her husband, Paul Kasteler, when he came to visit Kent.
In the family's early home movies, three little boys frolic through life, all dressed alike. "It was adorable," says Scott. Only he didn't think so at the time. As soon as they were old enough to pick out their own clothes, they didn't want to look alike.
The only advice the Wallins got about raising triplets came from their doctor, who said, "Let them be individuals." Dorothy says it was good advice. Even though the grandparents liked to see the boys' pictures in the paper every year on their birthday, Dorothy was the one who put a stop to it, after 10 years or so, when she could see it was making the boys uncomfortable.
The Wallins always tried to encourage individual interests. When Marv was their Little League coach, he taught them to play different positions. Individuality was a little inconvenient when, during elementary school, the boys wouldn't even wear the same color jeans. Blue jeans were more readily available than green or tan jeans. But the Wallins bought the boys different colors because that is what they wanted.
Craig Wallin says, "I always felt like I was my own child and the other two were buddies and did things together. I probably chose it that way. You see it with kids and their friends all the time. Three kids have a hard time. Two do well."
The two identical twins were studious. Craig was the mechanical triplet, the tinkerer, always in the furnace room building a motor.
As grownups, Craig says, the identical twins continue to be closer. He knows Scott and Kent call each other often. He says he rarely gets involved in the philosophical discussions that intrigue his brothers.
Even today, when people find out he has an identical brother, says Scott, they are fascinated. They want to know if he and Kent communicate on some unspoken level. They do think alike, says Kent. But then, he adds, his wife often knows what he is thinking, too. And Scott says yes, his wife is as likely as Kent is to know what he is thinking. But, unlike Kent, "my wife doesn't always agree with me."
If the task of growing up is to learn who you are, then that task is complicated by being a triplet, says Scott Wallin. Craig agrees. He says, "It probably would have been better if I had just had my own slot."
Who would have thought it, to look at the photos of three little boys in the 1940s, wearing striped T-shirts just alike? Could there be a difficult side to being a triplet? Something more serious than pranks and mix-ups? If so, did the triplets' reading public want to know about it back then?
The angst of individuality aside, Scott Wallin says he wouldn't trade his childhood for anyone else's. Why was his childhood happy? Maybe because he had those two brothers. Maybe it was just because his parents were happy to be parents. Maybe it even had something to do with the innocence, the prosperity, the optimistic mood of the time and the place in which he grew up.