Brother reunited with family after 25 years
Published: August 31, 2005
Twenty-five years of Woody Robbins’ life went by before he discovered a second set of parents and 15 siblings.
The story began nearly 80 years ago in a financially strapped home in Brown County, where homes were being bought and destroyed to make way for the Brown County State Park.
Mr. Robbins’ biological parents, Joseph and Ora Crouch, scrambled to get the money together to relocate. Mr. Robbins, 79, was 3.
When Joseph Crouch died in March 1930, Ora Crouch was alone with four young sons.
Her older children and five other children from Joseph Crouch’s first and second marriages had already left home.
“She scrounged around to do odd jobs,” Mr. Robbins said. “She even chopped wood.”
Ora Crouch took her sons to the Nashville trustee and from there to Francis Comfort Thomas Orphanage at Illinois and Cherry streets in Columbus.
One brother, now Don Chandler, was immediately adopted by Samuel and Emma Chandler of Columbus; Mr. Robbins was adopted by Claude and Doris Robbins of Indianapolis the next year.
Brothers Grover and John grew up in an orphanage. The Chandlers felt it was important that their son stay in touch with his brothers. He met John when he was 11, who introduced him to Grover. All they knew about Mr. Robbins was that he lived in Indianapolis.
Mr. Robbins grew up in Southport, played football at Southport High and met Connie, a cheerleader who he later married.
After graduating from high school, he served in the U.S. Navy. He came home, married Connie, went into the coffee retail business with his father and started a family.
When Mr. Robbins was 25, his father sold the business.
“I went to the Board of Health to get my birth certificate,” he said. “They looked and looked and said, ‘Are you sure you weren’t adopted?’”
Mr. Robbins tricked an aunt and uncle into telling the truth.
His father was temperamental and his mother sensitive. Fearing conflict with his dad and hurt feelings from his mother, Mr. Robbins chose not to confront his adoptive parents about the secret.
Instead, Mr. Robbins and his wife began to investigate his past and heard about the orphanage.
They drove from their Greenwood home to Columbus in 1957 and went to the police department for directions to the orphanage.
Moments after he inquired if anyone knew John Crouch, Grover Crouch, who drove the CPF wrecker, walked in.
“When he walked in the door and I saw him and he saw me, it was like looking at myself,” Mr. Robbins said.
A few weeks later, Grover and his wife hosted a reunion at their Columbus home. Mr. Robbins met a few of his much older half brothers and sisters and his brothers John Crouch and Donald Chandler. He also met his birth mother.
“She was a little 4-foot-11 stick of dynamite and 110 percent Pentecostal,” Mr. Robbins said of his mother, who, by then had raised five more children.
Those moments were overwhelming for a young man with two young children and another extended family in Indianapolis.
Later, he drove to Trevlac in Brown County and, after nearly 30 years apart, had lunch with his birth mother.
“She said it was the hardest thing that could ever happen, to give up her kids.”
Developing relationships with 15 lost siblings and his birth mother remained a touchy subject between Mr. Robbins and his dad until Claude Robbins died in 1973.
Doris Robbins understood her son’s need to explore his birth family. She died in 1978.
Since being reunited in July 1980, Mr. Robbins, Don Chandler and their wives have traveled the United States.
While the brothers threw a line on a local river, Mr. Robbins said he turned to his brother and said, “John’s not long for this world, you know.”
The brothers packed up their fishing gear, got in the car and drove to Shelby County for a visit with John Crouch.
“It kinda broke the ice,” Mr. Robbins said with a smile. “We’re kinda back together again.”
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