WHEN NEWT GINGRICH announced that his solution to welfare was to put children of teen-age mothers in orphanages, my phone started ringing off the hook. It seems that every editor and television producer shouted at the same time, "Get me an orphan."
I recently wrote my memoirs describing my days at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York, so people assumed that I was a house orphanage expert.
I was placed in the home because my mother was ill and my father could not take care of me and my three sisters. Technically, we weren't orphans and we didn't spend a lot of our childhood at the institution. We were sent to a series of foster homes, which was a different can of worms from doing time in that ugly red brick building on the hill.
But I wasn't going to miss my chance to brag about what it was like to be an orphan -- as long as the New York Times, Newsweek, "Nightline" and "Entertainment Tonight" asked me to bear witness.
The first reporter asked, "Was it terrible?"
I replied, "Go to Blockbuster and rent 'Boys Town' with Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy."
"Is that what it was like for you?"
"No, it wasn't, but Newt Gingrich thinks it was, and it's his welfare bill."
L "What did you do in the orphanage?" a second reporter asked.
"I was 5 1/2 , so I stared out the window a lot."
"What for?"
"I was hoping that my father would come back and take me home."
"Did you blame your father for putting you there in the first place?"
"No. When you're a kid and something bad happens in your family, you blame yourself. I was sure that I had done something wrong or I wouldn't be there. I think that Gingrich can expect kids to carry a lot of guilt once he locks them up in the dorm."
A third reporter said, "Do you think that children are responsible for the fact that their mothers can't get off welfare?"
"If the Republicans say they are, who am I to argue the point? After all, the GOP won the election, so now the welfare kids are their responsibility and they can stick them wherever they want to."
"Do you remember anything good about your orphanage days?"
"Well, we didn't have to hang around with a lot of snotty kids like Mickey Rooney. And we didn't have to take any guff from Father Flanagan, either."
"What would be wrong with that?"
"We were in a Jewish orphanage, and we lost all our dessert privileges if we took orders from a Catholic priest."
Art Buchwald is a syndicated columnist.