Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 29, 1994 TAG: 9401290169
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Crystal Wilson didn't transfer halfway across the country just to play basketball for Roanoke College.
She was searching for the missing person in her life. She found her father - and much more.
"It never scared me to leave Nebraska," said Wilson, the Maroons' junior center. "I guess I have been naive about a lot of things, but I've always been a person who wanted to see different places and do different things. Right from the start, I thought that finding my dad would be the best thing that could happen to me."
Wilson's story began at Roanoke Memorial Hospital on March 9, 1973. She was born to Bob Wilson and Elaine Nielsen. Their daughter's name even has roots at Roanoke Memorial.
"Elaine was in second-floor pediatrics," Bob Wilson said. "I was in the room and Elaine said to me that we still didn't have a name for the baby. Her bed looked straight out onto this beautiful fountain in front of the building. The water, the way it shot up and came back down, with the sun behind it, it made prisms with different colors.
"I said, `It sparkles like crystal. That will be her name. `Crystal.' "
Eight months later, her mother moved with Crystal and her older sister, Cara, to Nebraska, where Nielsen's mother lived.
"Crystal's mom and I were good friends," Bob Wilson said. "It wasn't long after Crystal was born and I fell in love with another woman. Elaine decided to move and that was fine with me. I just wanted to do the right thing about the child. I sent her $35 a week."
Wilson said he stopped the payments after a while. He married and then Elaine Nielsen married in Nebraska and Wilson got word that the money was no longer a necessity. The last photo of his daughter that Wilson saw arrived when Crystal was 2. Crystal's mother wrote to her grandmother in Roanoke.
"I knew Crystal was being taken care of very well," Bob Wilson said. "She was part of a family there. When Elaine married, I just assumed Crystal would be adopted and her last name would be changed to Elaine's husband's name," Noble.
Crystal grew up in Potter, a hamlet in western Nebraska. "I didn't really start thinking much about who my father was until I was in junior high," she said. "You know, my friends and I would be together and someone would say, `My mom and dad did this,' and I'd say, `But I don't have a dad.' "
She began to ask questions about a man she only knew as Robert William Wilson, because his name and birth date were on her birth certificate. As her high school graduation came and went and she enrolled at Hastings (Neb.) College, she became more determined to find an unknown man from her birthplace.
She contacted a couple of programs for finding missing persons, but "I couldn't find out anything," Wilson said. "It finally happened when I went to the public library in Hastings last spring."
Using a computer databank of U.S. citizens, she keyed in "Robert W. Wilson" and "Virginia." The list "had thousands it seemed," she said. "Then I noticed there was only one Robert W. Wilson in Roanoke. I didn't know if it was my father, but I figured the person might at least be related. It was a good starting place and so I wrote down the address and phone number."
Once she had that information, Wilson was too nervous to use it.
"I couldn't just call and ask him if he was my father," she said. "So, I called, told him my name was Jenny and said I was working on an advanced statistics project. I didn't give him a last name. I just told him I'd like to ask his birth date because we were trying to see if we could correlate two events.
"He was very nice. He told me his birthday. It matched what I had. I said, `OK, thanks,' and hung up in a hurry. I couldn't tell him I thought he was my father. What would he have done? He'd be in shock. What would I have done?"
So, Wilson wrote the self-employed tree service owner in Southeast Roanoke and told him about that phone call, about her. "I wrote, `I have reason to believe that you are my father,' and said I'd like to meet him," she said.
Retelling this story is difficult for Bob Wilson, and not because he doesn't enjoy it. Sitting in a Roanoke College classroom at the Bast Center last week, he began crying when he recalled how he knew his daughter wanted to see him. He had never tried to search for her, although her hometown of Potter was still in his memory bank.
"I just didn't want to intrude on another family," said Wilson, 55. "If I had gone out there, I would have just wanted to stay in the background, just to see her, to try and see what kind of person Crystal was. I never wanted to interfere."
When Crystal's letter arrived in a Roanoke mailbox, about 10 days after the somewhat strange - and duped - phone call that he had forgotten about, the postmark was Hastings, Neb. In his shaking hands, Bob Wilson knew what he had.
"I knew it was from my daughter," he said, wiping his eyes at the recollection. "I hadn't opened it. I just knew it."
Crystal returned to Potter after completing her sophomore year and second season as a backup on the Hastings basketball team. She was in for another surprise. In a "strange phone call," her maternal grandmother told Wilson " `something good is going to happen to you.' So, I called my mom at work. She said she couldn't talk then, and she'd tell me later.
"I wondered if it had something to do with my father. It didn't. My mother said, `You have an older brother.' Talk about being stunned. She had never told me or my sister that before. She said she had a son when she was very young and had put him up for adoption. He was living in California."
Wilson called David Morrow and invited him to Potter. "We talked on the phone probably for two hours," she said. "I thought, `He's exactly like me.' He came to visit on May 23.
"We were sitting there talking when my dad called back. The same day. Is that amazing, or what?"
Bob Wilson, in response to his daughter's letter - now framed - had phoned her room at Hastings College and left a long message on an answering machine. "He said he was nervous, and his accent was just unbelievable," Crystal said.
Crystal called back, missed her father, and phoned again. Bob Wilson couldn't compose himself enough to speak to her, so, Crystal said, she talked to an uncle and aunt she never knew she had. Finally, Bob Wilson took the phone.
"When we finally talked, we were on the phone for over an hour," Crystal said. "He was crying. I was crying, and my brother I never knew I had a few weeks before was getting all this on his camcorder at our house in Potter."
On June 7, Crystal Wilson returned to Roanoke for the first time since she was in diapers. She had sent her father her high school graduation photo. She had no idea what her father looked like when she stepped off the commuter flight from Washington, D.C.
"I walked into the terminal at the airport and looked around," she said. "I was really embarrassed, so I opened my purse and started to look into it like I knew what I was doing. Finally, this man pointed to me and motioned to me to come over.
"He said, `Crystal.' I said, `Yes,' and then I just started bawling. I know I didn't say anything else right away. I couldn't talk."
Her dad, at the airport with family and friends, was using a camcorder to record the moment. Crystal walked in as one of the last passengers off the plane.
"I said, `That's her, that's her,' " Wilson remembered. "I'll never forget that moment. I've had two heart attacks and I thought to myself later that maybe this was the reason I've made it this far. I figure Crystal has added 10 years to my life. She's so smart. I'm so proud of her."
She found more surprises as they drove away from Roanoke Regional Airport and onto Interstate 581.
"My hometown has about 350 people," Wilson said. "Some people here say Roanoke is small, but to me, this is a huge city. Five shopping malls in a small area. We used to have to drive 80 miles to a mall. And three lanes of traffic each way . . . Wow!"
It's little wonder her new teammates have kidded the Nebraskan they call "farmgirl." The change of scenery hasn't all been beautiful for her, but her father's relatives have been warm, she said. She's lived with both her dad and her grandmother, Elizabeth Campbell. However, because she misses the college life she had at Hastings, Wilson has moved onto campus at Roanoke.
"My grandmother is great. She said she'd still wash my clothes if I wanted," Wilson said.
She's also found what she calls several "incredible" similarities to her father. At Hastings, her friends gave Crystal the nickname "Willie." She told her father that one day not too long ago.
Bob Wilson pulled up his shirt sleeve and showed Crystal a tattoo just below his right shoulder. It says "WILLIE."
"My friends called me that when we were kids playing baseball at Wasena Park," he said.
When Crystal arrived here, she wasn't certain she would stay and transfer schools. She tried Virginia Tech, but was told no more applications were being accepted. She enrolled at Roanoke, showed up on orientation day and walked into the athletic offices at the Bast Center.
"I wasn't here," said Lady Maroons' coach Susan Dunagan. "She talked to Page [Moir, the men's basketball coach], and said she wanted to try out for the women's team. I was somewhere else on campus and when I got to my office, Page came in and said, `Hey, there's this 6-foot-3 girl walking around here who wants to play for you.' I knew that was too good to be true and I didn't believe him, because he likes to pull jokes like that on me."
Dunagan and Moir walked through the milling students on campus and found the 5-11 Wilson. "She's been a tremendous surprise," Dunagan said of Crystal, who is the starting center and the team's No. 2 scorer and leading rebounder.
About half of her Hastings credits didn't transfer. A business major with an emphasis in accounting, Wilson plans on graduating from Roanoke in three years. She has another season of basketball eligibility after this winter, then might play a season of volleyball.
"I still miss my old school tremendously," said Wilson, who went home to Potter for 2 1/2 weeks during the Christmas holidays. "I was on top of everything there. I was vice president of my sorority. If I walked into the cafeteria to sit down and eat, I could sit with just about anyone and know them.
"Here, I didn't know anyone. Outside of my basketball teammates, I don't kn ow many people. I've kind of been an outsider. But I love the school, I'm meeting more people and I really like the professors. Still, Potter is my home.
"Here, it's like I've found a whole new family I never had. It's like having two Christmases. My mom has been super with it. She said that's exactly how she was at my age, wanting to travel away from home and meeting new people . . . "
"When all this happened, after I found my dad and said I was going to come out here, my mom did ask, `Crystal, have you thought this through?' I had. I had dreamed about finding my dad for years. This is the farthest I've ever been from home."
Wilson has gotten to know new relatives. She learned her father has more family, most of whom live in Florida. And while she's experienced the sprouting of her family tree, she's also prospered academically with a first-semester B-plus average at Roanoke.
"The most difficult thing has been fitting in with everything, from family to school to basketball," Wilson said. "My father is always introducing me to people and telling people about me. He's put me on a pedestal. He's really made me feel great.
"My family in Nebraska, I told them they weren't going to lose me forever. I still love them. I love my family here."
Bob Wilson doesn't mince words on his daughter's appearance.
"Crystal tracking me down is the biggest thrill of my life," he said.
by CNB