ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606170092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE NOTE: ABOVE
SOURCE: MATTHEW BOWERS LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
AT AGE 50, Ruth Eason realized a lifelong dream - to find her father. Today, she and her dad will celebrate together.
Ruth Eason grew up dreaming about a knight in shining armor. This knight would sweep into her life and rescue her from the abuse and grief she suffered as an unhappy child in an unhappy home.
Eason even knew what her knight looked like - his picture sat in a gold frame on the piano in her maternal grandmother's house, defiantly displayed against the wishes of Eason's stepfather.
The man in the picture was Eason's father - her birth father, the man her mother left before Eason was born.
This knight didn't even know he had a daughter to be rescued. Still, Eason dreamed.
When she could take no more, she seized the first chance to leave her unhappy house and unhappy childhood. She married and moved out.
She was 14.
Although now free, Eason wasn't satisfied. She longed to know her father. She wanted the whole dream.
Her grandmother had told her the story of how Bruno Kunowski met Eason's mother, Josephine Hinson Moody, while on leave from his Army unit in North Carolina near the end of World War II. How they married and moved to Kunowski's native Chicago shortly before he went overseas in 1945.
Eason's mother left while her husband was gone, not telling him or his family that she was pregnant, returning to Kinston, N.C., south of Raleigh. Eason was born there in January 1946. Her mother divorced Kunowski and remarried when Eason was 11 months old. It was the third of what would be seven marriages for Eason's mother.
``I would ask questions about my dad,'' Eason recalled recently. ```Grandma, tell me about my dad.' She'd say, `Oh, he was a good dad.'''
On one weekend visit, Eason's grandmother showed her an Army ditty bag containing her father's personal items, and some pictures. Father and daughter shared identical gaps between their front teeth.
Eason felt she had to find this man.
For more than 20 years, as Eason reared her own three children, divorced and remarried, she looked for her father when she could. Armed with no more than his name, his big-city hometown and the approximate dates of his military service, Eason tried the Army and the Social Security Administration. No luck.
Her first husband, a Norfolk police officer, checked driver's license and motor-vehicle registration records. Nothing.
Over the years, when Eason traveled to or near Chicago for her home-decorating catalog business, she would flip through local phone books, calling people with her father's last name. She drew a blank every time.
Time rolled by, and the dream dimmed. Eason hadn't found her knight, but she rejoiced in the close family that had grown up around her.
``I couldn't be but so sad about it,'' Eason said. ``because of all the good things I had in my life.''
Then, in February, her middle son in a nervous voice made an announcement:
``We think we found your dad.'' |n n| Eason had a computer in her Great Bridge home, but she knew next to nothing about using it. Her adult son, Curtis L. Stewart, had no such problems - he regularly logged onto the Internet and chatted with other computer-users near and far.
One man with whom he struck up an on-line friendship on a local ``bulletin board,'' or interactive computer discussion area, was interested in genealogy. He had amassed a bunch of computer resources he used to trace his family tree.
The subject of Stewart's mother's hunt for her birth father came up.
A few days later, Stewart's computer friend phoned.
Using a nationwide telephone directory on compact disc that his computer could search, the friend had found a name matching the missing father's. And a phone number. It was in Loganville, Ga., near Atlanta. He said he'd bring the printout to Stewart's Great Bridge crafts store.
Five minutes later, Eason also called her son. She told him she was stopping by the store with lunch. Stewart didn't say anything about his friend's find.
When the friend gave him the printout with the name and number on it, Stewart wasn't sure what to do. His mother hadn't actively looked for her father for 10 or 15 years, aside from an occasional phone call when in the Chicago area. Would this reopen old hurts? Would it only be another dead end?
Stewart is close to his mother. They talk daily. He was excited about her having a bond with a parent like the bond he had with her. Or at least having a chance at one.
When his mother arrived, Stewart handed her the printout.
``Her first reaction was, she didn't believe me,'' Stewart said. ``It was like she didn't want to get her hopes up ... Like, `Oh yeah, I've been looking for 50 years, and you found him in 10 minutes.'''
While Eason stood and stared at the paper in her hand, Stewart and his friends in the store made small talk. The tension grew.
``I knew she wanted to call,'' Stewart said. ``But at the same time, I thought it was something she'd want to do on her own, without all those strangers there.''
Eason thought so, too. But it had been such a long time - half a century - that she couldn't stand to wait.
Ten minutes after she received the number, she was on Stewart's office phone, the others listening in.
But the call didn't go through. First, she found that the area code had changed. Then she wrote the new number down wrong. Then it was the right number, but the line was busy.
She waited a few minutes, and redialed. Busy again on four more tries.
Then busy again.
Then busy again.
A fifth dialing. A fifth busy signal.
The tension had become excruciating.
``I can't stand it!'' a friend of Stewart's exclaimed. ``It's like being on `Oprah' or being on `Montel'!''
Finally, the call connected. A phone chimed in Georgia.
After about four rings, someone picked up. |n n| ``Hello?'' It was an older woman.
Eason identified herself. ``I want to ask you a few questions,'' she said into the receiver, ``and I know you're going to think that it's strange.''
The woman was friendly and receptive. Her name was Ruth Kunowski.
Yes, her husband's name was Bruno Kunowski. Yes, he was from Chicago. Yes, he was in the Army at the end of World War II.
And yes, he was married a long time ago to a woman named Josephine Hinson Moody.
``By now, my heart's jumped up into my throat,'' Eason said. ``I could hardly talk.''
She told Ruth Kunowski, ``I don't know how to tell you this, but I think I may be his daughter.
``Her first response was, `How old are you? We've been married 48 years.' So I said, `Relax - I'm 50.'''
Ruth Kunowski said she didn't think he had any children. She and Bruno Kunowski hadn't had any in their 48 years together.
He had suffered a stroke two months earlier - they were headed to a doctor's appointment, Ruth Kunowski said. Would Eason like to talk to him?
``I kind of froze,'' Eason said. ``Here's this man I've looked for all my life, and he's a phone call away.''
She also worried about his health. She gave Ruth Kunowski her phone number and asked her to check with his doctor and call her back.
Eason waited an agonizing two days before calling back herself. Ruth Kunowski said the stroke had hurt Bruno Kunowski's memory, and this all was a huge surprise to them. They had been trying to get their facts and dates straight. They just didn't know if it was possible.
A few days later, the Kunowskis' niece called. She and Eason exchanged more information.
About a week after the first call, Ruth Kunowski put her husband on the phone with Eason for a brief, awkward conversation.
``Hi. How are you?'' Eason said. ``I know this is a shock.''
He was noncommittal, and apologetic.
``I really don't know what to tell you,'' he said. ``I'm just not sure.''
He had retired to Georgia about 13 years earlier after a career in manufacturing in Chicago. He lived in a mobile home in a retirement development, near two sisters-in-law and his niece. A close family. Like Eason's.
They decided to exchange photos, to see if that would help.
Eason gathered her three children and three grandchildren, took Polaroids of everyone, mailed them and waited. |n n| The names, the dates, the facts - they all added up. After 50 years, it seemed Eason finally had found her father. After 48 years of a childless marriage, it looked like Bruno Kunowski had been a father all along.
The mailed pictures clinched it for father and daughter.
``That convinced him,'' Eason said. ``He said I looked like his younger sister - he said we could be twins.''
The phone calls between Eason and Kunowski grew longer and less awkward. They talked about everything and nothing: the weather, gardening, vacations. Kunowski's stroke had affected his memory, but he still had lots to talk about.
His family became friendly with Eason over the phone and invited her to Georgia. Eason was excited about the trip, but also anxious. How could real life ever equal a lifelong dream?
Eason's husband, James, told her this was something she needed to do on her own. She headed south on the 10-hour drive with her son Curtis and daughter Penny.
Two hours from their destination, the anxiety became too much for Eason. She made her son pull off the highway because she was sick to her stomach. Finding the knight of her childhood dreams on the phone was one thing; meeting him in the flesh was something else.
In Georgia, Kunowski's extended family treated Eason's like long-lost relatives, even though no one knew they existed just seven weeks earlier. There were cards, gifts, flowers in their room. Then it came time to drive to her father's house.
He lived on lot 13 - Eason's lucky number. She took it as a good omen. But it was all she could do to lift her feet out of the car and walk to the front door.
Kunowski rose from his living room chair to greet them. His smile revealed the gap in his teeth.
``Well, if you're my dad or not, let me hug you,'' Eason told him. ``You're still my knight in shining armor.''
As the families chatted, Eason could feel Kunowski checking her over, like a proud parent does a newborn in the delivery room, counting fingers and toes.
Eason needn't have worried. They gabbed until 11:30 p.m., flipped through photo albums, watched home movies, Eason in one evening catching up on her father's life through flickering images at the end of a shaft of projector light.
They laughed, and cried.
``If we had only known,'' Ruth Kunowski said through tears that night. ``If we had only known.''
Before Eason and her children left that night, Bruno Kunowski gave her a wedding photo of himself and Eason's mother. ``I don't think I have ever had a more wonderful gift,'' she said.
The visit ``was wonderful, wonderful. More than perfect. I couldn't have dreamed it would've been more than it was.''
Said Stewart, Eason's son, ``They were so much like all of us, it was kind of strange.''
Before returning to Virginia, Eason broached to Kunowski the idea of a blood test, which would confirm to a scientific certainty whether they were father and daughter. It turned out that neither wanted one.
``I just know you're my daughter,'' Kunowski said.
The matter was dropped. ``Because everyone is so confident that it is,'' Stewart said. ``I don't know if anyone would believe the blood test, to be honest with you. It's just not necessary.'' |n n| So the daydreaming girl found her knight, not wearing armor or on a white horse, but wearing brown pants and a brown plaid shirt and sitting in a recliner in a Georgia mobile home.
He didn't rescue her from her unhappy childhood, but helped her end 50 years of not knowing, of doing without.
Eason and her husband traveled to Georgia this weekend. Today, for the first time, at age 78, Bruno Kunowski will be feted on Father's Day.
LENGTH: Long : 218 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Headshot of Eason. Color.by CNB