by Richard Hill
After finishing up with Conrad, I called Cordie and shared Conrad’s new recollections. Jackie’s use of the car surprised Cordie, because she had never seen her friend drive. But then, her date could have done the driving.
The idea of Jackie with the owner of Dann’s Tavern was a complete shock. Besides being married, the man was at least ten years older than Jackie. Cordie could not recall his name either. Dann had been a prior owner.
Before I could ask, Cordie remarked that I did not look like the bar’s owner. She went on to say that he had moved to Texas and bought another bar. She also remembered hearing that he had died.
That’s wonderful, I thought sarcastically, another deceased suspect.
Cordie went on. After thinking about her list of men who had resembled me in some way, she remembered that Jackie had indeed dated Bud Murphy. He was divorced at the time and lived in an apartment over Ellis Restaurant.
If Jackie was not above dating married men, Cordie added, then Harry Bowman, whose eyes looked like mine, would have been a candidate. He was a superintendent at Wall Wire.
Hmmmm, I thought. Jackie had falsely described Conrad as a coworker at Wall Wire. Maybe she was telling half the truth. Maybe Harry Bowman was my biological father and she told everyone it was Conrad to avoid revealing an affair with a married man.
The next day, I called Jeanette and brought her up to date. Jeanette was old enough to remember big-time partying on V-J Day. If that historical event had brought my biological parents together for a single, alcohol-fueled union, my father was unlikely to have known that he helped create a child.
And my chances of discovering his identity would be near zero.
Jeanette did her best to keep me motivated. As a next step, she suggested I write the Social Security Administration for Jackie’s earnings record for 1945 through 1947. That would list all the places she worked and might tell us the name of the man who owned Dann’s Tavern.
Following Jeanette’s instructions, I found Jackie’s Social Security number on her death certificate and completed the form to request her detailed Social Security earnings information.
I enclosed a copy of the death certificate to prove she was deceased. Needing to prove my relationship to the deceased, I included a copy of my original birth certificate that listed Jackie and husband, Leonard Bojanzyk, as my parents. Jeanette warned me not to suggest adoption in any way, so I signed my name as Richard Bojanzyk.
In the section asking why I needed this information, I wrote the following:
“I am writing a family history and need to know places where my mother worked before she died in 1947.”
In April 1993, returning home from a family vacation, I picked up a big pile of mail that had been held at the Post Office. Within the stack was an envelope from Social Security.
Inside was a two-page “Itemized Statement of Earnings.” The report summarized Jackie’s earnings—by quarter—for each employer. By tracking the ebb and flow of her earnings and comparing them with what I already knew, I was able to piece together her employment history.
Jackie’s first employer, right after she left Leonard, was Douglas S. Richards, DBA Dannie Tavern. That had to be Dann’s Tavern. And now I had the name of the owner with whom Jackie had gone out a couple times.
Based on the dollar figures, Jackie worked at Dann’s full-time at first. By the second quarter of 1945, her earnings at the bar had dropped dramatically and the majority of her earnings were from Wall Wire.
There were no reported earnings from Dann’s after the second quarter. That made sense, because Jackie’s waitressing dropped to part time after getting the Wall Wire job. Plus, Cordie had told me that bars routinely paid their part-time staff in cash. That would also explain why Cavalcade Inn, where Jackie worked part-time after my birth, was completely missing from the report.
One employer that surprised me was Lingeman Products. I knew it was a small manufacturing plant next to Cavalcade Inn because Earl Smith—the millionaire wife-killer—told me that he and Jackie’s sister, Joyce, had both worked there for awhile.
Earl had not mentioned Jackie working there, but Social Security reported a small amount of earnings during the third quarter of 1945. That July-to-September quarter covered the time when Jackie got pregnant. Did Earl forget to mention Jackie’s employment at Lingeman or was he hiding something?
My God, I thought, the possibilities just keep growing!
In the last quarter of 1945, Jackie earned small amounts from Livonia Grill, Ellis Restaurant, and the D&C dime store. Cordie had said that Jackie left Dann’s after learning she was pregnant and worked in a restaurant. Presumably, she was uncomfortable working with Conrad, because she did not want him to push her into marriage.
Ellis Restaurant caught my eye because Cordie had said Bud Murphy had an apartment over that business. Was that just a coincidence or did it mean something?
As expected, Jackie had no reported earnings from January to May 1946 when she lived in Lansing with my adoptive parents.
When she returned from Lansing, her first two jobs were at Daisy Manufacturing Company and Al’s Italian Restaurant. By October 1946, she was working at Burroughs, where she continued working until her death in June 1947.
I called Cordie the next day. She confirmed that Doug Richards was indeed the name of the man who owned Dann’s Tavern. In spite of Conrad’s recollection, Cordie still doubted that Jackie would have dated him. And knowing his name didn’t help much, because he had already passed away.
Cordie knew all the businesses on Jackie’s earnings report. But she only remembered Jackie working at a few of them. She told me that Wall Wire made bombsights during the war and Daisy Manufacturing made BB guns.
Next, I called Martha. The name Doug Richards meant nothing to her, but unlike Cordie, she never worked at Dann’s Tavern. She also remembered many of the other businesses on Jackie’s employment list. She and Cordie also had worked at Wall Wire for awhile before Jackie did.
Then Martha surprised me with her next comment. Unlike Cordie, she believed that a relationship between Jackie and Tom Martin was possible.
“I keep recalling some vague memory of the two of them together,” she said. “I can’t be sure, but I would not rule it out. Plus, you and Tom have the same dark, nearly black hair.”
When I hung up the phone, I felt a little discouraged. I thought Cordie had eliminated Tom Martin as a suspect, but now I couldn’t even be sure of that.
Well, I thought. What now?
For the first time since beginning my search some twelve years earlier, I could not answer that question. I was stumped. Baffled. Flummoxed.
I now knew that Conrad had been Jackie’s only steady date. He was also the only man that I knew for sure had been intimate with her. And he was the only man I could eliminate with certainty because of DNA testing. So I didn’t have any solid leads.
I had one list of men who had gone out with my mother for relatively brief periods but did not look like me. Then I had another list of men who were simply in the community and looked a little like me. Not exactly a lot to go on.
Any one of these guys could have been my birth father. But nothing made any one candidate stand out from the rest. Furthermore, I couldn’t interview any of these men, since all were either dead or old enough to be retired in some unknown location.
Even worse, the possibilities were not limited to either list of known suspects. As a pretty girl waitressing in a bar, Jackie could have met hundreds of men, including countless randy young soldiers and sailors home on leave from the war.
Jackie did not have a car. How many men, like Roy Klann, had given her a ride back to her Plymouth rooming house after work?
Around the time of my conception, Jackie also worked at two manufacturing plants: Wall Wire and Lingeman Products. She could have gotten involved with a supervisor or coworker at either plant.
Then there was the V-J Day scenario. The end of that long, dreadful war had people partying f
rom coast to coast. Under the influence of intense joy and lots of alcohol, thousands of young women were thanking soldiers in an extremely personal way for their service to our country.
If Jackie was among them—and at this point, that was sounding like a real possibility—I might never be able to identify my birth father.
My calls to Cordie and Martha, on April 12, 1993, were the final entries in my notes from the 1990s. I never spoke or even thought the words “quit” or “give up.” Yet it would be many years before I restarted my search.
30
TRANSITIONS
In 1994, Mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her oncologist performed the recommended surgery. But by February 1995, the cancer had spread, leaving her with an estimated six months to live.
Mom wanted to stay in her Ionia apartment. But a fire in a neighbor’s unit soon made that impossible. With her apartment condemned and most of her possessions ruined by smoke and water damage, Mom moved in with us.
Having lived alone since Dad’s stroke eighteen years earlier, Mom cherished her independence. In spite of deteriorating health, she demanded that we find her a new apartment. Reluctantly, we found and furnished one in a senior citizen complex about ten minutes from our home.
She stuck it out for three days.
The turning point was the second night, when Mom discovered that she no longer had the strength to climb into bed unassisted. Finally facing the inevitability of her situation, she agreed to enter a local hospice facility.
The hospice home was about ten minutes from my office and once again, I found myself having regular lunches with a parent whose life was fading away. In this case, Mom’s mind and vision were still sharp and we often played Tonk or Cribbage, her favorite card games.
Remembering how relieved Dad was after talking about my adoption, I hoped Mom would experience a similar catharsis. The adoption was no longer a secret, of course. But she and I had never re-opened the subject in the thirteen years since my “confession” letter triggered that one conversation.
Several times, I came close to bringing it up. I wanted to tell her again that knowing I was adopted had done nothing to diminish her place in my life. She had been and would always be my real mother.
Yet I also knew how hard she had tried to convince me and most of the world that she was my only mother. Fearing that forcing open that closet would cause her pain, I said nothing and waited. I kept hoping she would initiate the conversation as Dad had done.
August 1995 arrived, the final month of her doctor’s six-month projection. One day, after sitting up and soundly beating me in a game of Tonk, Mom lay back down with a satisfied look on her face. A couple of hours later, the hospice nurse called my office to report that Mom had lost consciousness. I returned to her room and—just as I had with Dad—stayed with her until she stopped breathing.
In addition to the usual sadness when a parent dies, I felt an extra loss. In all my adult years, Mom and I had only discussed my adoption that one time—and it was by telephone. Ever since our one conversation, we had both ignored the elephant in the room.
Was I right to let her die with the subject caught in my throat? Should I have been the one to break the silence? I did not know the answer.
After Mom’s death, a cousin recalled an incident from when she was pregnant. She happened to run into my mother in a downtown store. As they discussed my cousin’s pregnancy, Mom chimed in with tales of her own pregnancy, including memories of morning sickness!
Aware that I was adopted, my cousin knew this was a fantasy. But she chose not to challenge Mom’s story.
Neither female nor a psychologist, I cannot explain Mom’s deep-seated need to have borne her own child. But my cousin’s story made me feel a little better about not forcing open the subject.
While my parents were alive, I had always respected their privacy, even after beginning my search. With both of them gone, however, it was now my responsibility to search through Mom’s papers for legal documents and unpaid bills.
Naturally, I kept my eyes open for documents or correspondence relating to my adoption. I found nothing. Absolutely nothing. The paper trail had been wiped clean.
I remembered my aunt’s remark about my grandmother burning papers and letters pertaining to my adoption. Letters, I suddenly thought. Who would have written letters about me?
My birth mother, Jackie, had lived with my adoptive parents for five months before I was born. It was not unreasonable to think she may have written to them in the thirteen months between my birth and her death. Such letters would have been precious to me now. But if such correspondence ever existed, it was long gone.
Ten months after Mom’s death, Mark and Catherine graduated from high school. Jenny had preceded them in 1991. Knowing families who had frequently uprooted their children from schools and friends, Pat and I had been determined not to do that. By remaining in the same suburb for twenty-one years, all three of our children had stayed in the same school district from pre-school through high school graduation.
By the fall of 1996, however, we were empty nesters. No longer constrained by school district boundaries, I fulfilled a lifelong dream and we bought a home on a lake. The location was twelve miles from my office, the same distance as our prior home. Yet with less traffic in that part of the county, I cut ten minutes each way from my daily commute. I was thrilled.
By the time of this move, the search for my birth father had been stuck on life’s back burner for nearly four years. It would remain there for another decade.
During this long hiatus, some of the wonderful people I encountered in searching for my roots passed away. Harriet Hartzell, my grandfather Tony’s second wife and a fascinating pen pal, died in 1993. Conrad Perzyk, the Polish man my birthmother incorrectly named as my father, died in 1998.
My brother, Mike, sacrificed his bachelorhood to get married again. In 1999, he and his new wife took advantage of early retirement offers and relocated from the Detroit area to Tennessee. They built a new home—where else?—on a golf course.
Over the years, Mike and I had grown closer emotionally but were now much farther apart geographically. While personal visits became far less frequent, they now lasted one to three days. In good weather, we always included a round of golf.
I continued to play two or three times a year. Although I still wasn’t breaking a hundred, I did occasionally get through eighteen holes with only one ball.
My career was going well. The ad agency I worked for had prospered and, at its peak, employed about fifty people. Then in 2001, we sold our employee-owned company to an out-of-state holding company.
When my employment agreement expired in the summer of 2004, I jumped eagerly into semi-retirement. Working part-time from home, I cut my workweek in half. Instead of working fifty to sixty hours a week, the new normal became twenty-five to thirty hours a week.
Instead of limiting myself to six or seven hours of sleep a night, I shut off my alarm clock and started waking up naturally after eight hours or so. At fifty-eight years old, my body had already been telling me that exercise was no longer optional. So I started working out more consistently at our health club three afternoons a week.
Within months, the combination of more sleep, more exercise, and less stress was making a new man of me. I felt better than I had in at least ten years.
My work-from-home existence did have drawbacks. As expected, I was earning a lot less money. What’s more, I missed the daily interaction with longtime coworkers.
For awhile, I returned to my old workplace for brief visits. But it soon became clear that Pat and I needed to rebuild our social life in new directions not centered on my former employer.
One of those directions involved high school classmates.
During that first summer of self-employment, Pat and I attended my fortieth high school reunion in Ionia. Now that most of my classmates were empty nesters like us, talk of seeing each other between reunions was more realistic.
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p; Pat and I began getting together periodically with some of my old classmates. We started out meeting in restaurants but gradually began to gather in each other’s homes. While most of us lived somewhere in the Grand Rapids-to-Lansing corridor, which included Ionia, many of our gatherings were timed to include out-of-state classmates coming home to visit family.
In early December of 2006, we were meeting at the home of Joe Stewart, a classmate who still lived north of Ionia. We were enjoying dinner in his dining room when I happened to overhear a comment that would rekindle the search for my birth father.
31
INSPIRATION
With twelve of us seated around Joe Stewart’s long dining room table, I was hearing several discussions at once. Yet through all the hubbub, one conversation reached out and grabbed me by the ears.
Joe was telling someone about a DNA test that helped people trace their family trees. Joe had ordered the test online and was hoping to trace his Stewart line further back in time.
The search for my birth father had been on hold for nearly fourteen years. I could not even remember the last time I had thought about it. Yet my mind latched onto this discussion and blocked out everything else.
Joe explained that this genetic test measured certain markers on a man’s Y chromosome. These markers generally pass on unchanged from father to son, generation after generation. Since these men usually have the same surname, the test is a great tool for genealogists.
If another Stewart in the test company’s database is a close match to Joe, he and that person would know for sure that they shared a common ancestor. Since people who match can e-mail each other, Joe would be able to work with that match to identify their common ancestor and expand their shared family tree.
In a flash of inspiration, I saw how that test could also be a great tool for adopted men like me. If I took the test and matched someone, he would be a biological relative from my birth father’s family. Since our paternal lines had to intersect at a common male ancestor, he and my birth father should have the same last name.