My father and mother divorced when I was 4 years old and my father was granted custody in 1951. He had served in the U. S. Coast Guard during World War II, mostly on a troop transport in the Pacific, and his last assignment was as a recruit training instructor at the Coast Guard's training center in Manhattan Beach, New York. Rather than move back to the small town of Ohio in central Illinois, he stayed in the New York area after World War II, met my mother there and I was born. He didn't feel that New York was a good place to raise a kid so we moved to Miami where his sister Norma already resided and loved it. We flew on an Eastern Constellation after he shipped things south. I saw my mother a year or so later when she came down to Pompano, FL, and we went up to visit for a day. I didn't see her again until I was 19 and in recruit training with the USCG at Cape May, New Jersey. We were granted liberty for two weekends in a row and I took a chartered bus for Coasties to New York both weekends for an overnight stay with my mother.

My mother and I had exchanged birthday cards, holiday cards and Christmas cards every year but there were no telephone calls or visits during that 13-year time frame. When I first visited her for an overnight stay I learned that I had a younger half-sister named Jackie. I knew that I had a younger half-brother Jimmy and an older half-sister Patty but had never met or talked to the younger half-brother. My mother never sent me any photos and while she may have mentioned names in her letters she didn't specifically tell me who was who. Jackie greeted me on the corner of her street at Kings Highway and introduced herself and I was quite shocked to learn that I had a half-sister.

In the early 1970's my mother moved to St. Petersburg and I visited her there twice, once in 1973 and once in 1976. In 1978 our annual Christmas card was returned "addressee unknown" and I never heard from her again. I presume that she passed away and no one bothered to advise me in the past 30+ years.