Rural Missouri roots shaped course of memoir writer’s life

Delores Swigert Sullivan grew up in the Hannibal/Palmyra area, the daughter of noted musicians Al and June Swigert. She has written a memoir of the days of her childhood. The book, “A Good Place to Live, A Girl Comes of Age in the Rural Midwest,” is available via Amazon.

MARY LOU MONTGOMERY

During Delores Swigert Sullivan’s lifetime, she had a number of professions. She worked as a registered nurse, and as a fashion model, a model agent and model scout for Ford Models in New York. In addition, she served as a social activist for the American Adoption Congress.

And, after earning her graduate degree at the age of 52, she adopted yet another role: that of a psychotherapist, helping people deal with trauma.

She retired in March 2025, venturing upon still another career path:  that of a memoir writer.

It’s something she felt compelled to do.

Her new book, “A Good Place to Live: A Girl Comes of Age in Rural Missouri,” (Available via Amazon) reflects upon her upbringing in the Hannibal/Palmyra area, where she maintains deep friendships and fond memories.

Delores lives along the Oregon coast with her husband, writer Randall Sullivan. They met when he wrote a story about her adoption rights advocacy for Rolling Stones Magazine.

She is the daughter of locally renowned musicians Al and June Swigert, long-time Hannibal area musicians. She has a unique story to tell. It is reflective upon the era she came of age in - the 1960s - an era with social mores that no longer exist.

When she was a teenager, her parents’ marriage was irretrievably broken. Her mother moved to Oregon, and Delores stayed behind in Palmyra with her father.

Then, at the age of 16, she learned she was pregnant.

The expected action for a white girl in her circumstance was to hide and be ashamed, she said, and she lived up to those expectations.

In Palmyra, during that era, pregnant girls weren’t allowed to continue in high school.

She didn’t want to lose the ability to get her diploma, so she went to live with her mother in Oregon. There, she was allowed to continue attending classes.

“In Oregon they had night classes; they didn’t care if you were pregnant or not. I knew that if I stayed in Palmyra,  I would have to quit school and never get my diploma.”

She completed her junior year of high school in Oregon, and gave birth to her son in 1968.

She relinquished her newborn to a closed adoption, as did 98 percent of white middle class girls in a similar circumstance, she said.

Then she moved back to Palmyra to live with her brother, who had returned from a tour of duty in Viet Nam, and their father.

“I didn’t feel a connection to the huge impersonal high school I attended in Oregon,” Delores said. “It had a whole different feeling. I missed my classmates (at Palmyra High School). I graduated May of 1969 with the kids I had been with since kindergarten.

“I didn’t tell people,” about the pregnancy, but the principal at Palmrya High knew, she said.

“The principal tried to stop me from going back to school; he tried to stop me from returning,”  she said, because the belief at the time was that she would be a bad moral influence on the other students.

“He demanded I confess to him that I had been in Oregon and had a baby. If I said yes, he would have kept me from going to school, so I told him, ‘it seemed to be a rumor.’

“He tried to make me sit for an hour until I confessed; I refused to confess. I had transcripts (from Oregon) and had good grades. Basically I ‘out sat’ him until he was so mad he slammed his fist on his desk.” He told her she couldn’t date anyone. “I stayed and finished school. He never broke me.

“He had to shake my hand at graduation, but he wouldn’t look me in the eyes,” she said.

“It was the way it was.”

Another big fear about coming back to Palmyra was facing the gossip. “There wasn’t really gossip, that’s what I decided; i found out that nobody really knew why I was gone.”

Advocacy

The closed adoption system was prevalent from 1945 to around 1972. “Things started changing  in 1973-74,” Delores said. “More women like myself wanted to keep their babies.” The stigma started to go away.

Now, she said, “Everything has changed.” For example, “Not until Title X came in 1974, were pregnant girls allowed to stay in school. Schools were required by Title X to provide good classes.

If she has learned anything from her life experiences, it is that, “Nobody needs to hide anymore,” she said. “In those days you had to go away and hide, from the mailman on down. To hide and feel ashamed.

“The heart of my story is my experience; it is not the whole book, just the last couple of chapters. The book is really about how I grew up in rural Missouri, how it shaped me, the people that lived around me and how they helped me.

“I chose to write the book in a focused way; I didn’t want it to be an adoption book. It is a memoir with my adoption stuff in it.”

As her life went on, she saw a need to change societal standards. She took on a challenge to allow for previously closed adoption records to be opened, if the child, upon coming of age, were to reach out to the adoption agency.

“I spent 14 years looking for him,” Delores said of her son, all the while working to open closed adoption files.

 “The records were closed. I spent $400 asking the state to help locate him. They knew where he was, but unless he sent in his paperwork, they couldn’t connect us.

“I spent $200 to buy a record of all the young men born on that day in Oregon who had a driver’s license. The last one on the list had been adopted,” but it wasn’t her son. “That’s what you did in 1986.”

Finally, “When I got involved on TV and in court, someone slipped me his name.”

When she received the name, “It was like someone said: ‘Would you just shut her up?’ It was in a coffee shop in Eugene, Ore. That was the key, once I got his hame, I found he lived in Pittsburgh. He moved there when he was 7 when his parents divorced.

“Everything (the adoption agency) had told me, none of it was true. I was promised he was going to get it all.

“He didn’t get the life I had hoped for. He ended up not faring well. Today he is a good daddy with a wonderful wife, a good wife, and he’s done the best he could. We have a careful relationship; he has deep, deep pain about being relinquished.

“We didn’t know it would be traumatic to our children.” Mothers were told that adoption was the unselfish thing to do; “we had to give (our babies) over to a family with better social assets.

“If you look at adoption as a whole, 70 percent go well; adoptees never get over the fact that they are placed outside their original family. They have a lot of heartache that their mother gave them away. That’s where my son is stuck.”

She is grateful that before his biological father passed, they two were able to meet.

Adoption is just a portion of this memoir, Delores said. 

“That is a piece of it. The book is really about how I grew up in rural Missouri, how it shaped me, the people that lived around me and how they helped me.

“I chose to write the book in a focused way; I didn’t want it to be an adoption book, it is a  memoir with my adoption stuff in it.”

I made it succinctly about growing up those 18 years in Hannibal and Quincy and Palmyra. I wanted to recognize the value of midwestern life, as well as how it gave me confidence to leave and see and broader view of the world. I left and never looked back.

“But I remember all the stories.”

Delpres Swogert Sulliven has penned a memoir about her early life in Hannibal and Palmyra, “A Good Place to Live, A Girl Comes of Age in the Rural Midwest.”