The Thrill of the Find

I guess I'm a very nostalgic person. I couldn't wait to go to my first high school reunion back in 1992. The excitement before the 20 year reunion in 2002 was even greater because my wife, a graduate of the same year, same school, was to accompany me. And she had a much better time than she expected to.

A frustration of mine lately has involved the years after high school, the four years I spent in the United States Air Force. Outside of my two best friends from high school, I bonded more closely with a group of guys in two different areas of the world while I was in the Air Force than I have done since. Approximately eight years ago I attempted unsuccessfully to find some of these guys via the internet, and all that attempt yielded was my eventual marriage to Mrs. Farrago(!), but I'll explain that one later.

Two of the guys with whom I was stationed in Germany have been mentioned in this blog, "Rudy" and Vince, both of whom I contacted and visited in the latter months of 2005. Another of the gang was Pete K. Pete was six foot four, overweight by Air Force standards, a heavy smoker and, aside from the physical requirements of the Air Force, rather sedentary. But Pete was a guy who could take a joke as well as he could dish it out, could always be counted on to be there when you needed a hand with something, and was a part of every moment with our small group of guys. He left Germany on leave about a week before I processed out of the Air Force. He had often talked about his mother who worked at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, and he was spending part of his leave time to stay with her at her home there. Airmen such as myself processing out of European bases did so at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, which put me in fairly close proximity to a friend I had made in Montana, who was, at the time of my discharge, married and living in the Washington, D.C. area, and to my oldest brother who was then an officer in the Air Force, stationed at Andrews Air Force Base, also near D.C. When I told Pete of my plans, he gave me his mother's phone number and told me to call him when I got free.

I did just that, and one day he took me around the city, as far as he knew it, and to my brother's house on base at Andrews. We spent the day together, and that was the last time I saw or heard from Pete K.

Over the past few years I had made a few attempts to find Pete through phone books and the internet, usually finding no mention of his name in either. Nor could I find his mother's name mentioned in any references in and about Williamsburg, Virginia. Then today I made a glancing attempt, just entering his name in the Google Search window. The only close hit was a Peter K. in an obituary for a woman, born in 1937, who died in October of 2005 in Oneonta, New York, named Annette S. It was certainly a near miss, since upstate New York is a long way from Colonial Williamsburg. But as I read on, Mrs. S. had been married only 15 years to Mr. S., and had once worked in the Visitor Relations office at Colonial Williamsburg!

I found Pete K! I can't be one hundred percent certain until the Pete K. I found, whose address I tracked down in the Yahoo! people search, responds to the letter that goes out on Monday, but how many Pete K's. can be out there whose mothers once worked at Colonial Williamsburg? The downer is that it took the death of his mother to get his name published in a newspaper which has an online entity. I made sure in the letter to express my condolences to both Pete K's., the one who IS the right guy, and the one who ISN'T.

So that was my excitement for the day. I'll keep this blog posted on Pete K's. response, if any, to my letter.


dassall!