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City's Handy Triplets, Ready For Junior High, 'Fun To Raise'

City's Handy Triplets, Ready For Junior High, 'Fun To Raise' image
Parent Issue
Day
12
Month
July
Year
1960
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Copyright Protected
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
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City’s Handy Triplets, Ready For Junior High, 'Fun To Raise’

“I’d like to do it all over again—if I were 12 years younger!” laughs Mrs. James C. Handy, jr.

She was referring to the business of raising triplet daughters to the age of 12, a task which would leave most women weak even to contemplate.

The Handy triplets—Nancy, Becky and Mary—were born in St. Joseph Mercy Hospital back in 1948. Now 12, they’re ready to enter Slauson Junior High School this fall.

Raising triplets has been “a wonderful experience and it’s gone by very fast,” Mrs. Handy says.

“I was an only child and frankly I think it’s fun to have a big family!” She means it because, in addition to the triplets—the first set born in Ann Arbor in at least two decades at the time of their births—the Handys have three other youngsters, a daughter, 16, and two sons, aged 3 and 18.

The triplets are now “completely different from each other. Up until this year they were very, very close, but now their individual personalities are coming to the fore,” their mother says.

The Handys have kept the three girls in separate classes throughout their elementary schooling. Their school records have been almost identical.

The girls dress alike at times, but they are allowed to help choose their own clothes and sometimes they pick different articles.

The triplets’ dad, who is controller at King-Seeley, says raising three of a kind “has been different and interesting.”

Can he always tell them apart? “Once in a while I miss when I’m looking at one of them from the back or side. They usually let me rave on and then when I’m finished they inform me I’ve been addressing the wrong girl.”

TRIPLETS ARE 12: Looking just as pretty and just about as much alike as they did when photographed by The News 10 years ago (below) are the Handy triplets of 1116 Valley Dr. The girls are 12 years old and all set to enter Slauson Junior High School this fall. They're in the same left to right order in both pictures--Mary, Nancy and Becky.