by Richard Hill
Mike reserved a motel room in the golfing mecca of Gaylord and scheduled our tee times at three different courses. This was the first time we ever spent that much time together, so it was definitely a bonding experience. Plus, the following incident provided Mike with something to tease me about for the rest of my life.
My prior golf experience had been on relatively easy, wide open golf courses. Plus, my memories of golf were somewhat hazy by then. So it seemed reasonable to me that buying a sleeve of three golf balls was adequate preparation for the long weekend.
The golf courses Mike picked in northern Michigan turned out to be a lot more difficult than those I remembered. The fairways were narrow ribbons of grass surrounded on three sides by dense woods. The view from tee to green was often like staring into a tunnel.
Somewhere on the second hole, I ran out of balls.
When Mike learned that I had only brought three balls for fifty-four holes of golf, he thought his new brother was the craziest optimist he had ever known.
In the following years, golf provided Mike and me with some much-needed common ground. At least once a year, we would meet somewhere to play golf.
Since I usually required a couple extra strokes per hole, Mike was extraordinarily patient with me. He offered tips when he thought it would help. But he knew I would never play more than a few times a year. He accepted me as I was.
On the other hand, there would be one or two holes per game on which he struggled and the ball bounced well for me. When I happened to tie him or even win a hole, he was always good natured about it.
As my son, Mark, grew older, Mike and I began to include him. Mark has a natural athleticism that I lack and it wasn’t long before he was playing closer to his Uncle Mike’s level than to mine.
As an adoptee, I think a lot about the questions of nature versus nurture. Do our genes predetermine certain traits? Or is our childhood environment a bigger factor?
Even though we had the same mother, Mike was a more natural athlete than I was, even choosing physical education as a career. His father, Leonard, had been a star athlete in high school. If Mike inherited his athletic abilities from his father, did that mean my biological father was the captain of the chess club?
On the other hand, Mike and I also had vastly different childhood environments. Raised mostly by his grandparents, Mike grew up in the same household with a young uncle, Richard, who was more like a big brother.
I didn’t see my Dad much, because of his work schedule. And none of my uncles or cousins lived in Ionia. Besides, Dad was fifty years old by the time I was ten. He taught me things that were popular with men his age—to bowl, fish, and shoot a gun—but not to pitch a baseball or throw a football.
I wondered the same thing about my own children. All three were good at sports. Had they inherited some kind of athlete’s gene from Pat’s family? Or was their athletic success merely the result of our taking the time to involve them in so many sports at an early age?
While thoughts like this fluttered into my head from time to time, the actual search for my birth father simmered on life’s back burner. Then, a few days after Thanksgiving in November 1989, I received an unexpected phone call from Jeanette.
The founder of Adoptees Search for Knowledge, Jeanette had been my primary search adviser and was the one who found Mike through his Uncle Richard and then his Aunt Eleanor. Jeanette and I had not talked in years, but I recognized her voice immediately.
“Are you still interested in finding your birth father?” she asked.
“Of course,” I replied. Her next sentence got my attention. “Then I have good news for you,” she said.
20
BACK IN GEAR
Although the engine of desire was still there, my search had been idling in neutral for more than five years. Jeanette’s call kicked things back into gear.
Since we last talked, Jeanette had completed her own search and found her son. But she never stopped helping adoptees and other birth parents. And many of them, like me, had sealed adoption files in Lansing’s Ingham County Probate Court.
Jeanette had convinced the judge to test a confidential intermediary program. It was the first such program in the state of Michigan.
If an adult adoptee petitioned the court to participate in this program, the judge would let Jeanette read the adoption file to learn the identities of that person’s birth parents.
Acting as an agent of the court, Jeanette could not divulge this information to the adoptee. But she could use it to track down a birth parent. If she was successful—and the birth parent agreed—Jeanette could then put the birth parent and adoptee in touch with each other.
Jeanette had already done this twenty-seven times for adoptees currently in search. Now she was going back through her cold files and decided to call me. She charged one hundred and fifty dollars for her time plus expenses. She wanted to know if I was interested.
I probably thought a whole microsecond about that before I heartily agreed. Jeanette told me how to phrase my request and I wrote my next letter to the probate court judge.
This process would not guarantee success, of course. Once Jeanette learned my birth father’s name, she still had to find him. She had a lot of experience tracking people down. But could she locate this man forty-three years after my birth? Would he still be alive? And would he agree to speak with me?
Anxious to do more than just wait, I dug out my old search notes to see where I left off. I made a list of people to contact and questions to ask.
When my search stalled out in 1984, I had been trying to reach Bill Fann. He had been a union leader at Wall Wire Products and I had hoped he might remember Jackie and any co-workers she dated. Now it was December 1989 and no one answered his Tennessee number.
I had gotten Bill’s name and number from Norm Niles, the husband of Lou Green. I tried to call Norm and Lou, but someone else now had that phone number.
I asked Jeanette for help and she soon confirmed that both Bill Fann and Norm Niles had died. She could not find Lou Green.
Another person on my list was Jackie’s landlord, the man who owned the rooming house where she lived in 1945. I had discovered his name through the city directories, but had never gotten around to calling him. Now I reached his home and learned that he, too, had died a few months earlier. The widow had not been around Plymouth when Jackie was alive.
I began to berate myself for letting my search slide for five years. Many of Jackie’s contemporaries were now deceased. And those who survived to retirement may have moved to warmer climates.
That thought reminded me of Max Wachowiak, the vice president at Wall Wire Products. He had retired to Sun City, Arizona. His Polish name had caught my eye, since my non-identifying information had my birth father as Polish. Plus, the judge had written that my father worked with Jackie.
I checked long-distance information and found that name in Sun City. I called and spoke to the man who answered.
I had found the right guy. Max had joined Wall Wire in 1947. So he’d started too late to overlap with Jackie’s 1945 employment. He did not remember hearing her name. He did tell me that the company employed about two hundred people back then.
Most of the hourly people belonged to the International Association of Machinists union. He suggested I contact the union headquarters in Wisconsin to see if they had any employee records. I added that to my to-do list.
In addition to her full-time job at Wall Wire, Jackie had worked part time as a waitress at Cavalcade Inn. The only Polish coworker I had uncovered there was a manager named Art Kopersky.
Five years ago, Norm Niles had told me that Art was involved in a nice restaurant up north. But he didn’t know the name of it.
The previous summer, Pat and I had dined up north at the Brookside Inn in Beulah, Michigan. We noticed a posted article that said the owner was Kirk Lorenz. The name caught my eye, because I had interviewed Ralph Lorenz, who owned the Mayflower Hotel in Plymouth.
If
Kirk were also from Plymouth, he might know which northern Michigan restaurant Art Kopersky was involved in. I called the Brookside Inn and asked to speak with Kirk.
Sure enough, Kirk was Ralph’s son. The Lorenz name was Austrian. He had heard of Art Kopersky. Art’s northern Michigan place had been the Sandtrap Restaurant at the Grand Traverse Resort.
I knew that name. The Grand Traverse Resort was famous for “The Bear,” a well-known golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. Neither Mike nor I had ever played there. It was much too difficult for me and too expensive for both of us.
Kirk went on to tell me that Art had returned to the Detroit area. He did not know him well enough to have the phone number.
Checking information for the Detroit area, I confirmed that Art had a phone, but it was an unlisted number. I then called the Sandtrap Restaurant. But it was located at the golf course and closed for the winter.
I passed all this information to Jeanette. If the Polish name in my file turned out to be Kopersky, she would know to look in the Detroit area.
I remembered Mike’s Aunt Eleanor telling me that Jackie was seeing the owner of the bar where she worked. Tom Martin, the man responsible for my mother’s death, had owned Cavalcade Inn when Jackie was alive. Yet no one else I had talked to ever saw the two of them as a couple. And he wasn’t Polish.
Still, I decided it was time to interview Tom Martin before he, too, was dead. If Jackie had been involved with someone who worked at Cavalcade, Tom would have known about it.
Earl Smith had told me that Tom had moved to California and had done well in the furniture business. I searched some business directories in my company’s library and eventually found his home phone number.
In hindsight, I should have let Jeanette make the call. But I had become so comfortable and successful at interviewing people that I felt confident enough to make the call myself.
A woman answered, presumably his wife. She sounded pleasant enough. But when I asked for Tom, she asked who was calling. I gave her my name. I could hear them talking in the background. Tom did not recognize my name, of course, and sounded annoyed by the interruption.
When Tom got on the phone, I confirmed that he was the Tom Martin who had owned Cavalcade Inn in Michigan back in the 1940s. I then gave him my usual spiel about trying to contact people who knew my mother. But when I told him Jackie’s name, he claimed he did not remember her.
I reminded him of the Jeep accident involving Jackie and her sister, Joyce. He said he did not know what I was talking about and he could not help me.
Jeanette would have known what to say next. But I didn’t have a clue, so the conversation ended. I had blown my chance to learn something useful from him.
I reported my failure to Jeanette. If we still needed information, Jeanette would call back later and try to catch his wife alone. Women are often more sympathetic than men, she said.
Jeanette had not yet heard from the court regarding my request for her confidential intermediary service. But she promised to let me know when the process got started.
With Christmas approaching, I decided to be patient and wait. On December 22, 1989, I received a letter from the judge. He had approved my request and authorized Jeanette to access my adoption file.
That same evening Jeanette called me with some of the most heart-thumping news I’d received in many years. She had read my file and knew the name of the man Jackie had listed as my birth father
21
CONRAD
Due to her position as an agent of the court, Jeanette could not yet tell me the man’s name. It was indeed Polish but different from all the names we had found. Jackie had described him as a coworker at Wall Wire. Based on information in the file, he would now be about seventy years old. Jeanette would start looking for him the next day.
Observing a family custom, Pat and I spent New Year’s Eve at home playing cards and board games with the kids. The eighties were almost over. At midnight it would be 1990.
Early in the evening, the phone rang unexpectedly. It was Jeanette. She had tracked down and contacted my birth father. Best of all, he had agreed to speak with me and now she could tell me his name. It was Conrad Perzyk.
In terms of raw excitement, this call ranked right up there with her call eight years earlier when she told me she had reached my brother’s aunt, who remembered me.
Jeanette certainly had my attention and I urged her to fill me in on the details.
Conrad lived in Adrian, Michigan, about seventy miles southwest of Detroit. He was, indeed, just five foot eight inches tall, as described in my file. He had brown eyes and his hair had darkened over the years to dark brown. Born in 1919, he had been seven years older than Jackie.
Conrad had indeed dated Jackie in 1945. But he never worked at Wall Wire. They worked together at a bar where he was a bartender and Jackie was a waitress.
“But Jackie told the court they worked together at Wall Wire,” I protested. Jeanette’s reply was direct.
“She lied.”
“Your file also says that Jackie was concerned about losing custody of Mike due to this out-of-wedlock pregnancy. I suspect she lied to avoid further damage to her reputation. Waitressing in a bar was not considered respectable employment for women back then.”
“So they both worked at Cavalcade Inn,” I suggested.
“No,” replied Jeanette. “Conrad remembers Cavalcade Inn and even hung out there some, because they had a band and dancing. But he never worked there. And he did not meet Jackie there.”
Jeanette continued. “The bar where he and Jackie worked together was on the southwest corner of Plymouth and Stark, just outside of Plymouth in Livonia Township. He can’t remember the name.”
Something sounded familiar about that intersection. Later, when I checked my notes, I found an earlier reference to the same bar. Ray Bonie had caught his sister’s husband, Bill French, there with Jackie’s mother, Marion. Ray had not remembered the name of the bar either.
My notes also reminded me that Jackie’s mother had lived a few blocks northeast of that same intersection. After her breakup with Leonard, Jackie moved back in with Marion for awhile. So the bar would have been an easy walk from their home and a convenient place for Jackie to get her first job.
“Good grief,” I said to Jeanette. “When I learned that Jackie had worked at Cavalcade Inn at the time of her death, I just assumed she also worked there before my birth.”
“Never assume,” replied Jeanette.
She and I discussed the facts some more and were able to construct a scenario that made sense.
After leaving Leonard in December 1944, Jackie worked two jobs: full-time at Wall Wire and weekends at this bar at Plymouth and Stark. After discovering she was pregnant in late 1945, she quit both jobs and moved to Lansing before her pregnancy showed.
Not wanting to field questions about where she had been for so long, Jackie would have made a fresh start when she returned to Plymouth after my birth in May 1946. She got a full-time job at Burroughs and began waitressing part time at Cavalcade Inn. We already knew those were the places she was working at the time of the accident.
I then asked Jeanette when I could speak with Conrad. She told me he had suggested that I call tomorrow after the Rose Bowl game was over.
Michigan is playing USC, I thought. I hope this doesn’t mean he’s another Michigan fan.
The next day I also watched the Rose Bowl. I always root for Big Ten teams—even Michigan—in bowl games. But my heart wasn’t in it. The game didn’t involve my Spartans, who had beaten USC in that bowl game two years earlier. Plus, I had an important call to make and the game seemed to crawl.
The game ended with Michigan on the losing end of the score. Not knowing if Conrad was watching the game at home or not, I waited another thirty minutes and then called the number Jeanette had given me.
A woman answered, presumably his wife. She said Conrad was out and her voice sounded cool. I gave her my name and said I would try ag
ain later.
On my second try, Conrad answered the phone. It was January 1, 1990, and I was finally speaking with the man my mother had named as my birth father.
Conrad was friendly and approachable. Jeanette had already told him that Jackie named him as my father in the adoption records. So I filled him in on how I happened to search for my roots.
In my logical mind, the next thing to establish was that our alleged father-son relationship could be true. But asking a complete stranger if he had been sexually intimate with your mother seemed awfully direct.
I worded my question more delicately, asking him if it were physically possible that he could be my father. He said it was and went on to tell me his story.
Conrad had quit school after the tenth grade and joined the National Guard. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, his unit was called to active duty. He spent most of World War II at a radar installation in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. He was a sergeant.
Since those islands were considered a combat zone in the Army’s points system, he qualified for a discharge before the war ended. In August 1945, he got his first post-war job as a bartender at the tavern on the corner of Plymouth and Stark. He had never mixed a drink in his life, but he started working on a Saturday night and learned on the job.
That’s where he met Jackie. She was one of five waitresses who worked on weekends. After a couple weekends of working together, Conrad asked Jackie out. They dated for a few months. He was crazy about her and even took her to meet his parents. At one point, he asked her to marry him.
She turned him down. The painful breakup from her husband was still fresh and she was not ready to take another chance on marriage.
Besides, she was enjoying life as an attractive, single woman. Although she liked Conrad, she refused to date him exclusively and continued to go out with other men. Wanting a more lasting relationship than she did, Conrad broke up with her.
“When did she tell you she was pregnant?” I asked.
