Life Magazine
January 1999
WORLD

And the Winner Is…
By Vanessa Bush

Meet the trio who came out on top in our 1998 "I Want to Meet" contest.

If you could meet anyone in the United States, who would it be? That's the question LIFE posed in June when we invited readers to enter our contest by telling us about their fantasy encounter. The 2,176 responses-and the emotions behind them-were overwhelming. Here, we follow those three lucky readers whose dreams we fulfilled.

Vikki Sloviter
Sloviter has no memory of the day that changed her life. It was April 11, 1975, Saigon was falling, and Sloviter, then two, was one of more than 400 children from Vietnam's An Lac orphanage facing an unknown future at the hands of the invading Vietcong. In a frantic rescue, Sloviter and 218 others, most under the age of 10, were packed up with little more than baby formula and the clothes on their backs, crowded in to American planes and flown to Fort Benning, Ga., during what became known as Operation Baby Lift.

That dramatic effort had been coordinated by Betty Tisdale, an American who was An Lac's president and chief Fund-raiser. Sloviter, now 25 and a primary care coordinator in Boston, wrote to LIFE hoping to come face-to-face with the woman known as the Angel of Saigon: "Meeting her would allow me to give her a hug worth a thousand grateful words."

We brought Sloviter to Tisdale's home in Seattle, where the two immediately embraced. Sloviter brought slides she had been given of the rescue; Tisdale, the divorced mother of five adopted Vietnamese daughters, showed her keepsakes from the orphanages, including an embroidered silk dress once owned by An Lac's founder, Madame Ngai (Tisdale gave it to Sloviter as a gift.).

As they sat in her living room flipping through scrapbooks, Tisdale said, "It took three years before I could look at all my clips. It was such a traumatic experience." Sloviter as well as her mother, Dolores, a federal judge, and father, Henry, a retired professor, is grateful that the visit helped fill in some of her own fractured history. "It's almost the opposite of closure," says Vikki of the reunion. "It's really the opening for whatever else might be out there. " Indeed, Tisdale now plans to attend Vikki's June wedding. Already, she says, "She's like one of my daughters."

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