To the father I never knew

And gratitude for the one who raised me

Jun 15, 2024

The young man in the picture is my father. Today is his birthday. He would have been 83 years old if he had lived. Sadly, he was taken from this earth fifty-seven years ago, the result of a drag racing accident. I was one year old. He only met me once when my mom had to take him to court to prove his paternity. Mom told me he didn’t even ask to hold me on that day in court. She said he just stared at the baby girl in her arms, his child.

A year later, she ran into him one night right after my 1st birthday, when he seemed to have a change of heart. “How’s my little girl?” he asked her. My mom was shocked and didn’t know what to say after two years of denial, avoidance, and court-ordered child support. She wishes she had asked him if he wanted to see me. All she said to him was “She’s good.” A few weeks later, he died in a crash that devastated the small town of Medford where he grew up. There were “rumors” that the accident wasn’t an accident. His death, which happened on the eve of Halloween in 1966, became an urban legend. “The car that hit the house,” people called it. Gawkers came by to see the accident scene and the imprint his body left after it made an impact with the fence when he was ejected from his 1933 Ford Coupe. No one knew he left behind a daughter. Those things were not openly talked about. I didn’t know about him either until I was eight and my mother told me the truth, and only because she had to, because I kept asking her why a particular cousin kept telling me I was “adopted.”

For most of my life, I knew very little about my birth father. I knew he was handsome, he liked cars, he was a good dancer, and overarching all of that was that he died in an accident. No one liked to talk about him. I never felt I could talk about him or ask about him because it was too painful for my mom and for my father’s family, with whom I had a relationship. I had a foreboding sense it was not okay. It was all too sad. And then there was the man who raised me and gave me his name, whom I called Dad. I didn’t want to betray him. It was very conflicting for me. And because my parents weren’t married, which was a HUGE taboo in the 1960s, the subject of him was coated in shame and secrecy. But I always wanted to know this man, this man whose blood ran through my veins, whose face I saw when I looked in the mirror, whose skin was dark and swarthy like mine, who didn’t take shit from anyone.

When I was forty-two years old, I finally decided if no one was going to talk about him, I would find the people who would. I decided to contact my father’s high school friends, so I placed an ad on Classmates.com. One by one, people began to contact me. At first, folks thought it was a prank, but then slowly one person led me to another until I was able to meet almost all my father’s closest friends. I even went to his 50th High School reunion.

I learned about him through the lens of the things he loved most: hot rods, music, dancing, and the beach. When people learned I was his daughter, instead of scorn, which I was expecting, I was welcomed with open arms. Because they loved him, they loved me. I heard over and over again what a wonderful and talented young man he was, how down-to-earth he was, one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet, a loyal friend, funny as hell, smart, a bit of a daredevil, how women were just crazy about him, how he was a good listener. It made me proud. That was 17 years ago. But the novelty of meeting someone who once knew my father never wears off. Whenever I do, and they tell me stories about him, it is like a part of him is alive through them. It is all I have of him, these stories. I have no birthday cards, no pictures of him and me together, no recording of his voice. I have a couple of his belongings - some photographs and a short film clip of him given to me by one of his classmates.

I cherish that piece of film; it was the first time in my entire life that I saw a living image of my father. I remember I played the DVD of it continually, freeze-framing my father when his image would come into the frame. His life-sized picture would fill the screen of my TV as if he were there with me in person. He was alive for those few seconds. Even though today he is 83 years old, he will always be the young man in this photograph for me. I am now 40 years older than he was in that picture. For some reason, he and I were not meant to be on this earth together at the same time. He wasn’t meant to be the man I called “Dad.” I don’t know why. There is no reason why.

And I have to reiterate that none of this takes away from my love for the man who raised me, who is my Dad, who worked three jobs to put food on the table and give us a good home and a comfortable life, who helped me with my homework and took me to the library and taught me the importance of hard work, whose family embraced me from day one with loving and open arms, who cherished me like one of their own and never once made me feel less than.

The longing to know your origin, where you came from, the pull is strong. No one who knows both of their birth parents can probably understand this, and who probably can’t understand feeling torn between your loyalty to the parents that raised you and the need to connect with the source of who you are.

In the end, my journey to uncover the truth about my birth father has been bittersweet. Despite the absence of tangible mementos, the stories shared by my father's friends have breathed life into the enigmatic figure of my past. Through their anecdotes, I have pieced together a portrait of a man I never knew but whose legacy I carry within me. While the longing to bridge the gap between my two worlds persists, I find solace in the love and guidance of the man who raised me, honoring both my origins and the family who shaped me into the person I am today.