November 15, 1975 AD
Birth of Karl Matthew Jenkins
Karl Matthew Jenkins was born at 4:12 in the morning at Flinders Medical Centre in Bedford Park, the first child of Elizabeth Jenkins, a twenty-three-year-old teacher at Glenelg Primary School, and Thomas Jenkins, a twenty-five-year-old mechanic at Adelaide Motors. The delivery was without complication. Thomas met his son through the nursery glass and declined the nurse's offer to hold him, leaving the handling of the infant to Elizabeth.
Karl Matthew Jenkins was delivered at 4:12 in the morning at Flinders Medical Centre in Bedford Park, in Adelaide's southern suburbs. The birth was attended by the hospital's midwifery and maternity staff and passed without complication. He was the first child of Elizabeth Anne Jenkins (née Thompson) and Thomas Michael Jenkins.
Elizabeth was twenty-three and in her second year of teaching at Glenelg Primary School. Thomas was twenty-five, a senior mechanic at Adelaide Motors on South Road, a position he had taken eight months earlier for the security it offered a family with a child on the way. The couple had been married for nearly two and a half years and rented a weatherboard cottage in Panorama, in the southern foothills.
Thomas did not hold his son that morning. He saw him first through the glass of the nursery window while Elizabeth recovered from the labour. A nurse offered to bring the baby out to him, and he declined. The infant seemed too fragile and too foreign to him, and he took it as settled that Elizabeth was the one who would know what to do.
Karl was named in honour of a close friend of Thomas's, a fellow tradesman who had died the year before.
