I Wasn't Supposed to Live!: My Twin Died Before Birth!

By Bob Scott

Bob survived his premature birth after sharing the womb with his dead, decomposing twin. He was born in Putman county, Indiana, in a farmhouse with no hospitalization. The delivering doctor told his father he would not live through the night. At seven years of age, he was diagnosed with surviving twin syndrome. His curiosity of how things worked helped shape much of his activity in his early years. Through the years, he developed a reputation for being able to fix almost anything that quit or broke, except for a broken grasshopper's leg. Bob spent four years in the United States Air Force, serving two years in Germany as the maintenance crew chief on the ground-to-ground Mace Missile. Upon discharge, Bob went to work for ITT Electro Optics, where he spent thirteen years. Six months after leaving his position at ITT, he had lunch with his previous boss, who informed him that ITT had hired six people to do all the things he had done for ITT. Bob spent fifteen weeks behind the Iron Curtain in the Ukraine, USSR, in 1981 and 1982-years that were stressful and educational. A meeting with "the Russians" in November 1981 may have helped contribute to the fall of the USSR. In 1984, Bob took the position of motor manufacturing engineer at Chamberlain Consumer Group. Bob retired after twenty-one years with Chamberlain where he was affectionately known as the Motor Man. When informed of a need for something new by friends, Bob would design the item on his computer then produce a prototype, proof of performance product, and deliver it and the prints to the one who had the need, stating "Here you go, you can patent it." 2nd Safe, an added safety for law enforcement weapons, is one of those items. (2ndsafe.com)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098043278

Book preview

More Information on My Birth

Chamberlain had new winding equipment for the motor production line ready for shipment from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Nogales, Mexico, in June of 1991. I was dispatched to check out the equipment and approve it for shipment. The equipment checkout at Advance Machine Tool was scheduled for Thursday and Friday of one week and the checkout of the equipment at Alliance Winding scheduled on Monday and Tuesday of the following week.

Mom was living in an apartment in Fort Wayne, so over the weekend I met with her and we headed for Rockville, Indiana, to visit family. We headed west from Indianapolis on Highway 36. After passing the junction of 36 and 231, I asked Mom where the farmhouse I was born in was located. She told me to turn left at the Putman, Park County line road. I made the left and drove one mile to a T in the road. Mom said to turn left. A half mile down the road, the road made a ninety-degree turn to the right. At the corner on the left was a small grayish-blue farmhouse with a fenced barnyard behind it. There were young hogs in the barnyard rooting the ground with their snouts as hogs do. As we pulled into the drive, Mom, seeing the pigs, screamed, Get out of here now! Go, go, go! I quickly put the car in reverse and headed back the way we had come.

Back on the county line road, I asked Mom if she was okay. She answered, My baby, your twin, is buried in that barn lot; I can’t stand seeing those pigs there. She explained that when she realized she was pregnant, she and Dad went to visit the old family doctor who had delivered most of all my aunts, uncles, and cousins in that area.

Dad was a hired hand at the Estle Brothers farm caring for 250 hogs, 25 brood sows, 8 horses, and 35 beef cattle on 400 acres of farmland. A farmhand position did not pay very much and Barbra was only nine months old. After his initial examination, the doctor had given Mom a small white pill and water to wash it down there in the office. He also gave her additional pills to take after she got home. She said she knew what they would do and couldn’t force herself to take the additional pills and threw them in the outhouse. (This was a form of abortion in 1939.) A few weeks later, Mom was sick for over a week and thought it was just morning sickness.

As time went on, whenever Mom went to the bathroom, she said the odor smelled like something dead. On October the 18th, Mom had walked to the back of the farm to the north barn to help feed and water the hogs before lunch. After lunch, Dad went back to the cornfield shucking corn by hand and tossing it on the flatbed wagon. Mom walked down the road to the neighbors to visit and spent the day with a neighbor. They were throwing things at the apples in the top of the apple tree, trying to knock them off the tree. (She credits the throwing action with triggering the birth pains.) After supper, Mom began to have contractions. By about nine o’clock in the evening, she decided to call for help. First, she called Grandma Gregg and then the doctor. After the doctor arrived, he examined Mom and stated, You are not going to have a baby tonight any more than I am. He gathered his bag and began to leave, but Grandma convinced him to stay for a while just in case things continued to progress. Grandma bedded him down on a spare bed on the screened-in back porch. Shortly after midnight, at Grandma’s urgent request, he delivered me. He then became very excited and exclaimed, You’re going to have another one. My twin was delivered still in the embryonic sack. It had been dead long enough that it had already decomposed beyond sex recognition. The embryonic fluid smelled like something that had been dead for quite some time. He wrapped the body of my twin and the placenta in newspapers, and told Dad to take it out and bury it. Dad and Grandma and Grandpa Gregg were told that if other families wanted to see Mom and me alive, they should be contacted immediately because neither one of us would live through the night.

I asked Mom how big I was at birth, and she placed her right index finger on her wrist and said, This long. I later measured the estimated length and found it to be between eight and nine inches. A record of the birth weight was an afterthought, so a fish scale was used after I had been wrapped in blankets, by hooking the blankets I was wrapped in and recording the weight, which was something less than five pounds. Mom said that I was so small she had trouble holding me without me slipping through her hands, so she carried me around on a pillow. She said I cried so much she carried me almost constantly. When I was about one-month-old, Mom was giving me a bath next to the potbellied stove when I began to cry and sob so much she was unable to finish my bath or dress me. She was fearful that I was dying, and her thoughts were made worse by the dog outside beginning to howl. After about an hour, my crying stopped as suddenly as it had started. From that day, Mom says I was a very good baby and grew stronger but remained small for my age for many years.

How could a premature baby between eight or nine inches long weighing less than five pounds, blankets and all, survive these conditions in a farmhouse without an incubator or special medical attention, especially when the twin had already begun to decompose? For the first few months of my life, bricks were heated in the fireplace, then wrapped in strips of blanket and placed on the inside of my crib to help keep me warm.

A few months after I was born, Dad heard about job openings at Firestone Tire and Rubber, a company in Noblesville, Indiana. Firestone was manufacturing tank tracks for the US Army. Dad applied for a job and was accepted, so we moved to a house on Eighth Street in Noblesville, Indiana.

I am the only person in the family Mom ever shared much of this information with. As far as I know, the only other person she ever shared any of this information with was her pastor from College Church, just days before she passed away in January 2013.

Surviving Twin Information

September 22, 2015

I ran across a study done in 2007, which was conducted with survivor twins. The following information was copied from the website because I found many of these statements to be relevant to my life.

I find it very difficult to be happy being alone. I feel a deep-seated need to share my life with another person.

"While most people begin life as separate human beings and must learn intimacy, twins are born into intimacy and must learn how to find separateness."

Loss of a twin either before, or shortly after, birth can profoundly affect surviving twins.

The sense of Something or Someone being there for a while but now gone missing, will remain somewhere in the back of the mind of the sole survivor—the womb twin survivor.

Womb twin survivors commonly report a vague feeling of ‘Something missing.’ The sense of something missing requires a pre-existing sense of ‘something there,’ which is now gone. As a way to heal this uneasy sense of emptiness, there is a strong tendency in womb twin survivors to hold onto possessions, long-dead relationships, meaningless rituals, habits and entrenched, irrational ideas. There is a very strong resistance to making life changes or letting go of anything sentimental value, as is clear from some of the questionnaire statements.

I have been searching for something all my life but I don’t know what it is 68.4 percent.

There is one room in my home, including a shed or garage, which is completely full of stuff 45.3 percent.

All my life I have felt empty inside 48.4 percent.

I find it hard to let go of unfinished projects 48.9 percent.

This inner emptiness is experienced by the womb twin survivor as a void or a ‘black hole,’ into which one can pour all manner of activities and energy but it remains an experience of emptiness. It appears to be a constant re-enactment of the brief life and eventual death and loss of the lost womb twin.

Early Life

In my earliest recollections, we were living on the L. N. Joseph farm just outside Noblesville, Indiana. The house and barn were back a long lane from the road. We had a mixed-breed dog named Skippy, which was part chow and who knows? Skippy would not let anyone into our yard, including the landlord. As far as I was concerned, Skippy was my dog; I just shared him with the rest of the family. At four year’s old, one day, while I was out playing in the corncrib, I turned over a piece of metal roofing and uncovered a big groundhog with teeth three feet long. Well, they seemed that big to a little boy. Mom was outside the corncrib yelling Run, Bobby, run! over and over, but I just froze in my tracts. Just before that, great, big, huge groundhog reached me with his teeth gnashing. Skippy came streaking through the door. There was a tremendous fight, which ended with a dead groundhog.

Many times, while playing outside, we would notice a chicken hawk circling overhead, eyeing our flock of egg layers. Mom would get the shotgun out and shoot in the hawk’s direction to scare it away so we would not lose any of our chickens. Barbra and I would play games of horse and buggy, balancing on the rockers of an old rocking chair.

In August of 1943, we had a visitor, Virgil Sands, who was from the military base near Indianapolis Indiana, on most weekends. Dad had failed the physical for the army draft and opening our home for R & R for a veteran was his way of helping in the war. Vergil was a lot of fun and exciting. He gave me many of his metals, a real army helmet with a dent on one side from a bullet somewhere in Europe. He also gave me a knife with a long, curved blade in a leather holster with brass caps at each end that were made out of brass from shell casings. The handle was made of bone with solid brass shaped like a bull’s head and an S-shaped solid brass on the blade’s side with a brass chain between them. (I kept the knife, and it was hanging on my bedroom wall when we went to Denver on vacation in 1983, but was missing when we returned.) One weekend, Virgil brought an army jeep when he came and took me for a ride through the seven hills behind the farm. What a super-exciting time this was—my first off-road four-wheel drive ride.

Virgil was visiting us in October, just before my fifth birthday, and asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I told him I wanted a quart of ice cream. The next time we went to town to shop with Mom, Virgil bought me the quart of ice cream and gave it to me in the car. By the time we got home, the back seat of the car was a mess with melted ice cream everywhere. Mom was not a happy camper! Many times he would take us on shopping sprees. He tried at one time to buy me a pony. He bought Barbra’s first grade schoolbooks. After he received his military transfer orders to a base in Ohio, Virgil came to visit one more time and say goodbye.

One morning, Barbra and I were up early before anyone else. Barbra climbed up on a chair to reach the sugar jar on a high shelf to make a butter and sugar sandwich. As she was getting down, the chair tipped, smashing her big toe and tearing off her toenail. Boy, could she scream! Needless to say, Mom was up instantly, and there was blood everywhere. Barbra had been in there jumping around and screaming.

One day, while Barbra was in the first grade, I went to school with her for some reason. On the bus to school, some kid kept taking my cap. He would put it on then taunt and tease me. I got your hat, ha-ha-ha, you can’t get it back. Barbra would get it back and put it back on my head. We both ended up with head lice a few days later.

We moved to the Archie Kinzer farm when I was five. In the corral, there was the most beautiful black horse. I was told to stay away from that horse because he was mean. When no one was watching, I would climb up on the gate and give him an apple. Sometime later, the landlord came and installed an electric fence to keep the horse from hurting the kids. I still managed to give the horse an apple once in a while, even if I did get shocked.

There was no indoor plumbing in the two-story house, but we had a path to the outhouse. I would spend time in the outhouse mimicking the old rooster when he crowed. There were times I would spend longer than the needed time in the outhouse. I enjoyed making the sounds of a rooster, and receiving a return challenge of cock-a-do-dull-dooo!

Between the house and the outhouse was a tree with a low-hanging limb that branched off and bent close enough to the ground for me to pull it down. I would climb out on the limb at a point where it forked and curved upward. This point was the saddle of my wild bronco. Clinging to the branches that went upward, I would bounce up and down and my imagination would take me to places of great excitement on the fastest horse around.

From time to time, we would have a bat in the house. Mom would close off all the doors to the kitchen area and chase the bat all around, swinging at it with the broom. Barbra would run and hide while I tried to help Mom until the bat was knocked out of the air and given a good beating with Mom’s broom.

I was enrolled into first grade in September 1945, just before I was to turn six in October. I was so small that all the kids on the school bus called me Mighty Mouse. The big bullies would take my lunch and eat it on the way to school. Barbra tried to protect her little brother, but they were too big. One day on the way home from school, they took a huge safety pin and pinned my pants to my leg. That was very painful.

My first grade teacher was a tiny little lady named Miss Crosley. Our classroom had both first and second grade students. Halfway through the year, Mom and Dad bought a house and we moved into town. I went to a new school with thirty first grade kids in the class. Fifteen years later in life, at twenty-one, I met Miss Crosley on Conner Street in downtown Noblesville, Indiana. Her son was helping her out of an old Model T Ford coup just outside the Five & Dime Store. She looked at me for a moment, then she said, Bobby Scott, how are you? I must have made a really big impression on her for one half a school year at five and a half years of age.

First day of school, coloring

Christmas 1945: Raymond, Barbra, Brenda, and me.

Halfway through my first grade, we moved into town. We had no fence around the yard, so we had to take Skippy to the police station. They were going to keep him for us for a while, Dad and Mom said. The for a while never ended. I was heartbroken; I never saw my best friend Skippy again.

It was a mile across town from our house to First Ward School on north Tenth Street where Barbra and I were enrolled. My new teacher was not nearly as nice as Miss Crosley. Every day was a struggle, and I was still the littlest kid in the class.

Our new home was a single-story two-bedroom house at 1378 E. Hannibal St. Noblesville, Indiana. Phone number: 58201.

In my second year in school, my teacher’s name was Miss Vance. To this day, my recollection of her brings to mind the wicked witch dressed in black with a wicked frown, and a look of distain. No matter how hard I tried, it wasn’t enough. At times I would sit studying the alphabet, which was across the front of the room above the blackboard, with much concentration. Miss Vance would shout, Bobby Scott, what are you doing? I would jump from my concentration and defensively say Nothing, meaning nothing wrong. She would then take me to the cloak room and give me a whipping, then make me stand in the corner for a period of time.

The school had a huge playground with a giant oak tree at the far end of the open area. I found that there were what looked like green onions sprouting at the base of the tree. I liked green onions and these were a little sweeter than the ones we grew in the garden. I convinced some of the other kids to try the tasty green onions. Not long after returning to class from recess, Miss Vance asked, Who has been eating garlic? Several of the kids told her I made them eat the green onions. She sent me home.

One day we had been told to bring something to school and I had forgotten it. Miss Vance made me walk home and get it, one mile across town and across Indiana State Highway 32. When I got home, I was in hopes that Mom would let me stay home, but I couldn’t find her in the house. I got whatever it was I was supposed to have taken to school that morning and started back to school. As I went up the alley, two houses west of ours, I looked and saw Mom was in the backyard hanging up the wash and talking to the neighbor lady over the back fence. I jumped up and down and waved my arms trying to get her attention but to no avail. Crying, I finally walked the mile across town back to school. I determined then and there that as soon as I was old enough, I would quit school and never go back.

Happy times each year were during the Thanksgiving and Christmas times. It was a three-hour drive from Noblesville to Rockville. We were always excited when the first snowfall came before Thanksgiving. As we traveled, we would sing, Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go. Each year we would alternate going to either the Scott’s at noon and then the Gregg’s in the evening or Gregg’s at noon and Scott’s in the evening.

The Gregg family included twenty-two aunts and uncles and over thirty cousins. The farm where Grandma and Grandpa Gregg lived was near the little town of Bellmore, Indiana, and is now part of Raccoon State Park. When I last visited the park in 1995, I stood at the public beach area and could picture where every building, tree, and landmark stood before it was turned into a lake. The square top to the cistern was evidently still in place because the grass was brown due to the lack of root depth. Camping in the campground brought back a ton of memories playing and running in those woods and hills chasing the horses, trying to catch them to ride and having rotten egg fights with eggs found in the hay mow of the barn with the cousins.

I wish we had all the stories Grandpa Gregg told us in some kind of a record. He would get down on the floor with us kid and play and make us laugh. One way he would make us laugh was by taking out his false teeth, puckering up his mouth and then scratch the end of his nose with his chin whiskers.

Grandpa Scott’s farm was north of Rockville and had been my great-grandparent Hadley’s farm handed down to my Grandmother Clara. Grandma had snow white hair and always had lots of cake and pies for desert after a feast fit for a king. She did all her cooking on a huge black wood burning kitchen stove.

We had loads of fun playing in the barn haymow. Donny, Larry, and I would knock hay bails out of the haymow and make a pile of loose hay in the middle of the barn floor then jump from the haymow into the loose hay. Outside the barn was a huge concrete water tank for the farm animals.