Elizabeth Gail Dobbs

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Elizabeth Gail Dobbs Johnson Lindsay was the lead character in a series of children's Christian books written by Hilda Stahl.

[edit] From Aid Kid to Acclaimed Pianist

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Elizabeth Gail Dobbs was the daughter of Frank Dobbs and Marie LaDere Dobbs. After her father abandoned her at a young age, her mother became quite promiscuous, and had little if any patience towards her daughter. She had been sent away through the foster care system and then subsequently returned to her highly abusive mother. She eventually made peace with her birth father, before he died.

Usually, she was returned to her mother so she could receive state aid money to help raise her. This explained why she was derisively called "Aid Kid". The final straw came when her mother locked her in a closet after beating her severely with an extension cord. This forced the courts to put Marie under a restraining order.

Meanwhile, Gwen Miller, a social worker from Social Services, took Elizabeth Gail, sometimes called Libby, out of this abusive household, and brought her to a farm outside of town.

She soon became the foster daughter of Charles and Vera Johnson. Charles, called Chuck, was a farmer who also owned a store in the community, and Vera was a housewife. They had three children of their own, oldest Benjamin; daughter, Susan; and youngest son, Kevin.

Chuck's heart went out to Elizabeth when he first saw her with her little suitcase trying to get back into town. He made it clear that he would protect and love her. And that he did.

Elizabeth would later discover that her former social worker would marry Luke Johnson, Chuck's widowed brother, and become her Aunt Gwen. Although she had been rough to deal with, Elizabeth loved Gwen the best of all her social workers.

At first, Libby didn't know what to think. She had been through so many foster homes over the years that she wasn't sure how long she would last at this one. However, she felt deep inside that she belonged, and the family made certain that she was. They gained another foster child, Toby Smart, and after some fits and starts, Libby and Toby became family.

Elizabeth had a dreadful fear of the Johnson's pet goose named Goosy Poosy, but with time, she got over her fear of and grew to love the friendly goose.

However, her conniving mother enlisted another vicious social worker, a Ms. Marla Kremeen, to take Libby from her new home, and back into a life of unhappiness and abuse. Fortunately that failed, thanks to the help of her maternal grandmother, who had a lot of animosity towards Marie. Cowed, she signed the papers, allowing the Johnsons to adopt her.

However, not long after she had been adopted, Marie enlisted the help of her equally promiscuous and conniving sister, Phyllis LaDere, to kidnap Elizabeth, and try to get her back. When Chuck and the police in Chicago had come to her rescue, both Marie and Phyllis and their male companions had disappeared. This spelled the end of Marie Dobbs and any other attempts to separate Elizabeth and the Johnsons.

As she became more and more part of the family, and becoming part of their home and religious life, she became a better person. All the while, she made friends, and also had some rivals in her life.

At first, the Johnsons' neighbor daughter, Brenda Wilkens, hated her for being an Aid Kid, and Libby, at first a person who clearly knew how to fight, due to being exposed to abuse most of her life, broke her nose. As she matured however, she stopped lashing out physically.

Some time later, she and Brenda became friends. Then she gained another rival in rich and snotty Joanne Tripper. Brown nosing Joanne made clear her disdain of Elizabeth and her friends and family. Joanne's mother, apparently, was wealthy. She never became a part of Libby's friends.

Elizabeth dreamed of playing concert piano, and took lessons from a former pianist named Rachael Avery. This irritated the arrogant Joanne who said, quite loudly, that Aid Kids shouldn't take piano lessons. Yet Elizabeth proved her wrong, although Joanne would be her chief rival through the rest of the book series.

In fact, many of her friends were from the foster care system that she had gotten out of finally. Chief among those were Jerry Groesbeck, whom she despised at first, but then was his girlfriend when they were in high school; he eventually married Elizabeth's adopted sister, Susan Johnson.

Her best friend was a girl named Jill Noteboom, who wanted to be a writer. Which she succeeded in doing, and she also eventually married her best friend's adopted brother, Ben. Jill gave birth to their son, Matthew.

She was also close to identical twins April and May Brakkie, who had been in a foster home where the husband, a man named Morris Stern, sexually abused both May and Elizabeth. Sadly, the wife, Evelyn, didn't believe May or Elizabeth, but it took Chuck to finally get someone to believe the girls. Eventually, Morris and Evelyn Stern moved out of the community, and until a new family took them in, they stayed with Elizabeth and her family.

As time grew on, they all grew up. Eventually, April married Adam Feuder, who was a close friend of Elizabeth's; and May married Brenda Wilkens' brother, Joe. Elizabeth was also close to Adam's beloved Grandma Feuder, until she died. She willed a teddy bear that she loved very much to Elizabeth, who kept it.

While she was at Maddox School of Music, Elizabeth met Badden Lindsay, a concert pianist who was in demand at the time. During this time, she discovered that her look-alike cousin, Tammy LaDere, was her half-sister. (Their father was Frank Dobbs, and he had an affair with both Marie and her sister, Phyllis)

As such, Tammy became part of the Johnson family as well. She married Nolen Brown, a ranchhand at the Sandhills Ranch that Frank had left to both his daughters. Tammy remained in Nebraska, while Elizabeth finished school.

Then, during a time when Badden was recouperating from a long concert tour, which almost burned him out; he fell in love with Elizabeth, during a stay at the farm, and soon after, they too were married.

They became a concert piano team, since they had the same manager, a man named Marv Secord. The little Aid Kid who started out with absolutely nothing, soon had everything she had ever dreamed of, and more.