Vanna White wrote a memoir, "Vanna Speaks," in 1987, and in it, she gave a huge shout-out to her mother, Joan Marie Nicholas White. She says that her mother made sure she had a loving yet fun childhood growing up in Myrtle Beach, but she also says that just how the family ended up in South Carolina was shockingly non-traditional.
Joan was born to an unmarried mother in Syracuse, New York, in 1936, and since it was 1936, the idea was pretty scandalous. White says that although her mother's parents wanted to marry, their families forbade it ... so what were they going to do with this socially unacceptable baby? Little baby Joan ended up being taken in by a distant family relative and her husband, and it was all very hush-hush. White came to know the couple as her grandparents, writing, "Because the adoption was not handled through the courts and was not technically legal, my grandparents took Momma from the hospital when she was just a few days old, and immediately left the town where they'd lived all their lives to move south."
They had no idea where they were heading when they left, and they settled in Myrtle Beach. When Joan was 12, her biological mother died and she was legally adopted by the couple who had welcomed her into their home. The family stayed in Myrtle Beach, and White remembered their home as being a little run-down but "enough for them."
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