Fifty years ago, Karen Anderson of Brush Prairie, Washington, celebrated Mother’s Day as the mom of newborn quintuplets.
And the woman who brought the world the story, Milly Wohler of The Oregonian, notched her success in scooping her own son to deliver what became an international headline.
The front page of The Oregonian on April 27, 1973.
Jeff Wohler, one of Milly Wohler’s sons, was on a reporting trip to Panama as a reporter for the Oregon Journal, a competing newspaper, when he saw a headline that said a woman had given birth to five babies at the now-defunct Bess Kaiser Hospital in Portland. It wasn’t until he returned home that he learned the backstory of the exceedingly rare birth, he said.
For months, his mother had been tracking the pregnancy of Anderson and her husband, Eric, who initially thought they were having quadruplets and already had two older boys. Milly Wohler never whispered a peep to her son about the reporting for her worldwide exclusive, he said.
“She had known about this for several months of Sunday dinners and never said a word,” said Jeff Wohler, who joined The Oregonian when it merged with the Journal in 1982.
It wasn’t that she scooped her son that brought her joy, he said. “She relished the story process,” he said of his mother, then 51.
Milly Wohler would go on to become assistant managing editor of The Oregonian in 1980, according to her 2001 obituary, which noted she was “one of the first women to break tradition and reach executive rank at the newspaper.”
The paper chronicled many milestones in the lives of the quintuplets, from their baptisms to their birthdays to their high school prom. The babies arrived in the span of 11 minutes on their mother’s 28th birthday.
Reached Thursday, Karen Anderson said her youngest children all just turned 50.
— Beth Slovic; bslovic@oregonian.com; 503-221-8551
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