by Richard Hill
On the way home, Pat and I talked about the need to stay in touch with Mike and work on building a good relationship. We hoped he would visit us in the coming months.
That brought up a scary thought. My adoptive mother, with whom I had never discussed my adoption, had a habit of dropping in unannounced to see her grandchildren and us. What if she showed up sometime when Mike was there?
After thirty-five years, she still assumed my adoption was a secret. Reluctantly, I realized it was time for me to open this subject. Besides revealing that I had known and kept quiet about my adoption for the past seventeen years, I would have to tell her that I had now found my brother.
13
CONFESSION
I have never enjoyed confrontations, verbal or otherwise. And, frankly, I was terrified of confessing to my adoptive mother that I was only pretending to be ignorant of my adoption and, furthermore, I had actually searched for and found my brother.
Would she cry? Would she get mad? Would she walk out in a huff? Having seen all those reactions from her over much smaller issues, I decided to write a letter.
Some would say this was a coward’s way out. I like to think of it as an act of courtesy…giving her a chance to absorb the entire message and reflect on it privately before we talked.
I saved the messy draft of my letter. So I can quote the key parts of it here:
Dear Mom,
I have some good news that I want to share with you. I hope you will see it as good news, too. But it deals with a subject that you and I have avoided discussing for thirty-five years: my adoption.
When I was growing up, you and Dad never told me I was adopted. Or if you did, I wasn’t paying attention and can’t remember it. When I was eighteen, Dr. Campbell casually mentioned my adoption during an office visit just before I started college.
Although many people today are more open about this subject, I understand that things were different when I was born. So your secrecy is certainly understandable. And I don’t believe that the secrecy or my finding out about it later caused me any harm.
Knowing about my adoption has never made me feel any differently about you. While almost anyone can conceive a child, it takes real love and commitment to raise one.
I wanted to talk to you about this for many years. But you and Dad seemed content with the ongoing secrecy. You never brought it up and I never found the nerve to speak first.
Then, during one of my lunchtime visits with Dad during his year at Kent Community Hospital, he suddenly mentioned the subject. He told me that Wayne and Mickey Woods put my birth mother, Jackie, in touch with you. He also explained how Jackie lived with you for awhile, and how you brought me home from the hospital right after I was born.
Dad then told me about Jackie’s death in an accident. And he also told me that Jackie had an older son who would be my half brother. In fact, he kept urging me to find my brother. But Wayne and Mickey were already gone. And I knew you were going through a rough time, so I chose not to ask you for information.
Mom, I know how special your brother and sister were to you. So you can understand how I might want to find the brother I never knew. To make a long story short, I have recently found him. We’ve talked on the phone, exchanged pictures, and this past Saturday I finally met him.
His name is Mike Bojanzyk. Some non-identifying information I got from the Probate Court says my birth father was also Polish. So please take it easy on the Polack jokes!
I’ve learned a great deal about my background and the people involved. It has been fascinating. Plus, knowing the truth about myself makes me feel more complete. I’m mature enough to handle it now and I’m sure you are, too.
Knowing the situation with my birth mother, I feel even more thankful that you and Dad got to raise me. I will always consider you my real parents.
My brother, Mike, and I will be getting together again from time to time. Perhaps you will meet him someday. I’m sure you’ll like him.
In the meantime, I hope we can discuss this subject freely. Dad certainly felt relieved to get this subject out into the open and I’m praying that you will, too.
I signed the letter with “love” and added a P.S. We were going to see her on Sunday. So I let her know she was welcome to call me at home or at work should she prefer to talk before then.
A couple evenings later, the phone rang at home. It was Mom and she was ready to talk.
Mom said she had received the letter and was not upset. She explained that she and Dad had told me about my adoption when I was quite young. They even read to me from a book called “The Chosen Baby.”
But a neighbor treated me as an outcast and would not let her children play with “the little bastard.” So they decided to shut up about my adoption to prevent discrimination.
What a moron, I thought. Did that neighbor think her kids would catch something from me—cooties, perhaps? Was adoption itself some low-class form of parenthood?
I was beginning to grasp the different thinking that prevailed in the 1940s.
Now I could guess why I had gone all though elementary and high school without ever encountering an openly adopted child. Their families were also sidestepping prejudice by not talking about it.
Mom’s story made sense to me. I did not remember anything from my toddler years. So I could not have remembered any stories about adoption. Plus, psychologists say that children cannot grasp the concept of adoption until they are at least five years old.
By the time I was five, my aunts and my parents’ women friends had all stopped bearing children. So I never saw anything in my early childhood years to make me wonder about the origins of children. I can’t even remember seeing a pregnant woman until I was probably ten years old.
By then, the wall of secrecy surrounding my adoption had been in place for years.
Now that Mom had explained the secrecy, I moved to the question I was dying to ask.
“Did Jackie ever say anything to you about the identity of my biological father?”
Mom replied that Jackie had not told them anything about him. She thought she heard somewhere that he had been in the army.
I’m sure I smiled into the phone. Since my conception occurred right at the end of World War II, that clue, even if true, could only narrow my search to a few million men.
I next asked her if Jackie’s ex-husband, Leonard, could have been my father. She was certain it was not him.
I told her I had heard a rumor that it might be someone in Mickey’s family. She said Mickey had checked out that rumor and found it to be false.
Unable to think of anything better to say, I mentioned the other rumor about my father being a doctor. She said that Jackie would not have run in that kind of crowd.
Mom then made her opinion of Jackie quite clear.
“She was a tramp. She couldn’t wait to get rid of you and get back to her parties.”
I didn’t like hearing that, but I respected Mom’s right to have an opinion. I wondered if her harsh assessment was partly due to jealousy. She had yearned to bear a child but could not. Yet this young, fertile woman had done it twice by the time she was twenty.
Mom then discouraged me from getting involved with Jackie’s family, calling them a bad bunch. Yet the only one Mom could have known was my biological grandmother, Marion. Since other people had already positioned Marion as an alcoholic and a home wrecker, I didn’t know what to say about that.
“One more question,” I asked. “Where did my name Richard come from? I know it is not a name from our family. Did Jackie suggest it?”
“No,” came her terse reply. “It was just a name your Dad and I liked.”
If Jackie had suggested my name, Mom was not about to give her any credit. I thanked Mom for the call and we ended the conversation.
None of this was mentioned the following Sunday when Pat and I saw Mom in person. It was as though the letter had never been sent and the follow-up discussion had never happened.
One thing a
pparently did stick: from that day on, I never heard Mom joke about Polacks.
14
PAPER TRAILS
Having achieved my immediate goals, I could have stopped my search. After all, I had learned the identity of my birth mother, confirmed Dad’s story of her death, and met my brother.
Diving into my search, I had neglected every other facet of my life. What’s more, between my own phone calls and Jeanette’s, I had incurred hundreds of dollars in long distance charges in just two months.
While the cost was high, I did not regret any of it. Unfortunately, I did not experience any sense of closure. I think this was partly because I could not meet my birth mother. In addition, my list of unanswered questions was getting longer instead of shorter.
What did Jackie look like? I knew she was short with blue eyes and dark hair. But no one I had met yet, not even Mike, had any pictures of her.
Who was my father? Could I be 100 percent certain that Mike’s father was not my father, too? A short, light-haired Polish guy, Leonard matched the physical description in my non-identifying information.
Only the religion didn’t match. The court said my father was a Protestant. The Bojanzyk family was Catholic.
Who was the rumored father that Carol’s family was protecting? Had Mickey Woods actually confirmed that rumor was not true? Or was my adoptive mother just trying to keep me from searching further?
Had Jackie been dating the Cavalcade Inn owner who crashed the Jeep and killed her and her sister, Joyce?
Could I find Jackie’s older sister, Marilyn, my biological aunt, or the daughter of Jackie’s younger sister Joyce, who would be my cousin?
My initial search had proceeded like a car racing down the highway. Now it seemed reasonable to let up on the accelerator a little. But there was no way I was going to hit the brakes.
This was a crucial part of my personal history. I now felt compelled to learn all I could about my birth parents and their families.
As a father of three, I realized that I wasn’t only searching for my own benefit. I wanted a complete family history to pass on to my children and grandchildren.
That was one reason I kept careful notes of my research, phone calls and meetings, plus copies of all correspondence. Beyond that, my educational and career paths had embedded in me a disciplined approach to learning.
I had been a college student for a long time. I spent four years getting my BS in physics at MSU. Then I took night classes my first two years in Los Alamos, getting halfway to an MS in physics. Returning to East Lansing, I invested nearly two years getting my MBA.
My job at Alexander Marketing Services also required constant learning. Unlike most ad agencies, we did not work with clients selling consumer goods, such as toothpaste, where product features and benefits were obvious.
Instead, we specialized in industrial marketing where my science background helped me understand complex products and market them to engineers, scientists, and business executives.
Although my first title at the agency was account manager, I spent much of my time writing copy for ads and brochures on products like dock levelers, ion exchange resins, and computer hardware and software.
Fortunately for me, the precise, methodical approach I used in other areas of my life served me well in the search for my personal history.
It was still January when I received another envelope from the Michigan Department of Public Health. Remembering my second request for a birth certificate using the name Richard Bojanzyk, I wondered if the ploy had worked.
Yes, it had! I now had my original birth certificate. My name on the certificate was Richard Harold Bojanzyk. Harold was my adopted father’s name, but there was no way to tell who came up with “Richard.”
Jackie’s full name was Jacqueline Lee Hartzell. Her birthplace was Detroit and her address at the time of my birth was on Jewel Street in Lansing, my adoptive parents’ apartment.
This birth certificate listed my father as Leonard Richard Bojanzyk. Leonard’s presence on the document did not surprise me. Conception occurred before their divorce was final. So the law considered Jackie’s former husband to be my legal father.
I was surprised to learn that Leonard’s middle name was Richard. The idea of Jackie naming me after her ex-husband seemed ludicrous. I preferred to believe that my name came from Leonard’s kid brother, Richard, whom she reportedly adored.
My collection of false birth certificates was growing. I had the false one that swore I was the biological offspring of my adoptive parents. And now I had one that was almost certainly half wrong, listing Leonard as my father.
I wondered if Jackie and Leonard’s divorce papers might contain some worthwhile information. I called and then wrote the Wayne County Clerk’s office for a copy.
Next, I received a call from Mike’s aunt, Eleanor, the one who had convinced him that I was in fact his brother.
Without any prompting from me, she had appointed herself my research assistant for the Detroit area. Once again, I was amazed and pleased that people like Jeanette, Carol, and now Eleanor kept pitching in to help with my search.
Eleanor’s first stop had been the funeral home in Plymouth that handled the funeral for Jackie and Joyce. She searched the home’s old records without finding any paperwork on the deceased sisters.
Next, she went to Grand Lawn Cemetery. Since it was still winter, she had to wipe snow off tombstones. But she eventually found the markers for Jackie and Joyce, side by side.
The tombstones listed them as Jacqueline Hartzell and Joyce Clark. Jackie had taken back the Hartzell name after her divorce. Joyce, a year younger, was married to a Clark at the time of her death.
Records in the cemetery office showed the date of death as June 11, 1947. Jackie’s age at death was twenty-one years, three months, and seventeen days.
Marion Ratkewicz had made the cemetery arrangements. The girls’ mother apparently was still using her second husband’s name. But Eleanor knew that Marion was living with Bill French, whom everyone called “Frenchy.”
Armed with the exact date of the accident, Eleanor’s final stop had been the Detroit Public Library. She checked the old newspaper records on microfilm and found articles in the Detroit News and the Detroit Times.
The accident occurred a little after midnight when the Jeep they were riding in went out of control and hit a viaduct. Joyce died instantly at the site in Oakland County. Jackie died a little later at the Northville Hospital in Wayne County.
The driver of the Jeep was Tom Martin, age twenty-nine, part owner of Cavalcade Inn. The surviving passenger was a woman named Lou Green. I assumed that was a nickname for Louise.
I had already decided that the driver of the Jeep was not a nice guy. The fact that the Martin name was not Polish gave me hope that he was not my father.
I added “Find Lou Green” to my to-do list. She might know if Jackie and Tom Martin had been romantically involved.
After thanking Eleanor for her hard work, I wrote again to the Michigan Department of Public Health. I now had enough details to request copies of Jackie’s birth and death certificates.
Within a couple weeks, I had received both certificates plus the court record of her divorce from Leonard.
I learned that Jackie’s father, my grandfather, was Horace Hartzell. Her mother’s maiden name was Marion Garlick. Horace had worked for Michigan Bell Telephone Company.
The death certificate made me shudder a little when I read the cause of death: “Internal hemorrhage and shock following crushing injuries to chest. Auto collided with viaduct.”
That description was a lot more real and personal than the simple fact that she had died.
The divorce papers provided some insights into Jackie’s life. She and Leonard were married in Napoleon, Ohio on October 2, 1942, by a justice of the peace. Jackie was only sixteen, possibly too young to get married in Michigan.
I knew that Mike was not born until late October 1943. So Jackie’s early marri
age was not due to pregnancy.
Jackie moved out of the home she shared with Leonard in December 1944 and signed divorce papers in January 1945. Later in the divorce proceedings, she listed her employer as Wall Wire Products in Plymouth.
In April, she took Michael to his grandmother Bojanzyk’s home. She testified that she had no place to keep the child with her and did not want to board him with strangers.
A Friend of the Court report revealed that Jackie had later arranged to live with her sister, Marilyn, and take Michael back. Unfortunately, Marilyn’s husband was transferred to Kentucky and Jackie’s plan fell through.
These details made me feel proud of Jackie. She acted in Mike’s best interest and had not given up on getting him back.
The judge signed the divorce decree on December 18, 1945. He awarded Jackie custody with the understanding that Michael would remain with his grandmother until Jackie could provide a suitable home.
On the date her divorce was final, Jackie would have been four months pregnant with me. She must have known it and would soon leave the area to live with my adoptive parents in Lansing.
Shortly after receiving these documents, I had a meeting with a software client in Ann Arbor. On my way home, I decided to detour through Plymouth and Northville. I had never been to either town, but they were central to the life and death of my birth mother and possibly my birth father.
Using information from the newspaper clippings Eleanor had sent and my growing collection of legal documents, I made several stops. The first one was Plymouth High School where the Hartzell and Bojanzyk kids went to school.
I found the large boarding house where Jackie lived during her divorce proceedings and the small house on Blunk Street where she was staying when she died.
Next, I located the former site of Wall Wire Products, where Jackie worked after leaving Leonard. Then I drove by the Burroughs plant, where she was working as a shipping clerk at the time of her death.