An Army Helps Marshal the Missing Kin

A mother called a bar in search of her son. He was not out on an all-night bender. He had been lost to her for nearly 40 years, taken by his father for reasons she is still not sure of.

It might have been a pay-back thing, she muses now: revenge for her rejection. “He didn’t want me to leave him,” said Mary Gloria Fitzgerald of her first husband. “He threatened to jump out the window the night I walked out on him. And I said, ‘Go ahead. I’ll help you. I’ll push. . . .’ ” The bar and grill she called in Massapequa, Long Island, bore the surname of her son: Gannon. She thought he lived in the area with his father. The father was a good-time kind of guy, remarried to a woman with a little money, Fitzgerald said. She might have bought him a bar, she figured.

Besides, it was the only Gannon in the phone book, and a name was the only thing she knew about her son. She had not seen him since he was 5.

She did not find him then. Wrong number. Wrong Gannon. Wrong town.

The ad she put in the New York Daily News yielded nothing, either. “Happy 18th Birthday, Dennis Gannon,” it said, and told her son where he could contact her.

So that she could look for work, Fitzgerald made her parents legal guardians of her son after her divorce. It was 1947, she was 25 and a high school dropout living in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

Now seated in the living room of her mobile home in Rancho Dominguez, she recalled that her church didn’t help in her search. A letter to the bishop at the Catholic Diocese in Brooklyn brought a reply, she said, that said: “We can’t do anything about this. You have to hire a private detective.”

‘For the Best’

Fitzgerald, her face handsomely gaunt, her pretty blue eyes magnified by thick spectacles, shrugged. “Well, I never had money to hire a private detective.” From a wheelchair, she glanced past her absent legs toward the floor, then looked up and smiled.

“Everything happens for the best they say. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

She is 65 now. Her legs have been amputated--complications from arteriosclerosis, the cause--and two fingers from her right hand are missing--the unyielding swiftness of a milling machine in a factory, the culprit. Responsibility for her apparent grace, good humor and the will in her Brooklyn-cultivated voice, she must bear.

A silk-like white blouse draped narrow shoulders that her step-father once called broad.

“ ‘You got broad shoulders, you can handle it,’ ” she said he told her, just before he disinherited his two other children, left all of the little he owned to her and triggered a recurring theme in her life: family discord and alienation.

It is an endless variation of that theme that separates parents from children, brothers from sisters, husbands from wives--people lost, hurting and hoping to be found, even when they don’t know it.

“Basically, most people are willing to be found. Some are surprised that someone is looking for them, cause they didn’t consider themselves lost,” said Maj. Gerry Hood, missing persons coordinator for the Salvation Army for the past four years and an officer for 35.

The Salvation Army, which was founded in England in 1865, has been looking for missing people since 1891. You’ve got to find a soul to save a soul, might have been the subconscious motivation. The immediate cause was a lost child.

“We had a daughter who came to America who didn’t contact her family,” Hood said. “So the mother went to the Salvation Army and said, ‘My daughter went to the Colonies and I can’t find her.’ ” The Salvation Army did.

Fulfilling a Need

“Then somebody else came in looking for a relative,” Hood said, “and then somebody else and finally they decided ‘Hey, there seems to be a real need for this.’ A lot of times families coming from the old country into the new . . . would lose contact because they were so caught up in trying to survive.”

Similar reasons might exist now.

In the past 1 1/2 years, “we’ve been getting a lot of requests on homeless people,” Hood said. “They are almost impossible to find. A mother will say the last time (she) heard from her son, he was on the streets of L.A. Well, it’s almost impossible to find somebody unless you can (constantly) roam up and down the street.”

Until syndicated columnist Abigail Van Buren of Dear Abby wrote about it in 1984, few people were aware of the Salvation Army’s missing persons service, Hood said. That year, requests for help almost doubled in the Southern California territory for which she is responsible--Santa Maria south to the border. “We had 1,180 new cases. That’s a heavy, heavy load,” Hood said, but it has gradually diminished.

In 1985, the organization had more than 600 cases and last year, 554. On the average, it is able to solve 25% to 30% of its cases by searching through state motor vehicle, Veterans Administration and Social Security records. Searches usually take six months to a year and the person looking is charged $5.

The missing person can live any place in the world, Hood said. The service has a staff of more than 70,000 in 83 countries. “We have a hard time in Russia because, of course, the Salvation Army is underground there,” Hood said. But they do have a few contacts. “It has to be made through the Salvation Army in Berlin who works through the Salvation Army in East Germany (where it is also underground) and we’ve gone through Sweden and Norway.”

Mary Gloria Fitzgerald didn’t have to search the world to find her son, Dennis Gannon. During the 40 years she wondered where he was, he had twice lived within minutes of her--once, just around the corner.

Fitzgerald had given up trying to find him until she read the Dear Abby column. She called Hood.

“I really didn’t think they could do anything when they asked me for his Social Security number” and she couldn’t give it, Fitzgerald said. She knew virtually nothing about her only child, and that increased her sense of separation, this life-long void. She feared the search would lead to rejection--either the wrong person found or the right one telling her he didn’t want to see her. “I didn’t know what he had been told about me,” she said.

Hood proceeded anyway, calling the New York Department of Motor Vehicles. “They sent us back an address and we wrote him.” No response. She wrote the post office to ask if the address was correct. Hood was told that a Dennis Gannon was receiving mail at that address. “I wrote to the missing person again, certified mail with a return receipt requested so we would know someone got it,” Hood said.

The Dennis Gannon who got the letter didn’t know any Mary Fitzgerald. And the letter never specified who Mary Fitzgerald was supposed to be to him.

Avoiding Embarrassment

“We never state the relationship,” Hood said. It might be the wrong person or it might cause embarrassment to the missing person, she said.

This Dennis Gannon, however, was the right one. And he had been looking for his mother. But he only knew her by her middle name, Gloria.

When Gannon’s girlfriend saw the certified letter she persuaded him to call the Salvation Army. He hesitated. He was afraid that it wouldn’t be her. His previous attempts had ended with rejection. But he called.

“They said, ‘Your mother is trying to get in contact with you.’ I was kind of knocked out at that point,” said Gannon, 45.

He called his mother immediately. She picked up the phone and he asked her name. She asked him who he was. “There was a long pause and I gave her my name. She kind of broke down at that point. Then basically, I asked her, ‘Where you been?’ And she said, ‘Lookin’ for you.’ ”

Gannon, who lives in Lindenhurst, Long Island, and owns a trucking company in Queens, N.Y., said his father and stepmother forbid talk of his mother. They tried to convince him that she had abandoned him.

He started to become a behavior problem in school when he was about 10, Gannon said. He was sent to a school psychologist. After three sessions the father asked what was wrong and the psychologist said “ ‘Nothing really,’ ” Gannon said. “ ‘He only wants to find his mother.’ ”

Gannon said his father never let him go back for treatment after that. He said the separation from his mother affected his personal life in later years. He has three grown children and is twiced divorced. He admitted to a lot of “anger and resentment” over feeling abandoned. “There is always this sense of being unloved that gets played out psychologically.”

Hopes and Prayers

Said his mother: “Every night I hoped and prayed, just about, I’d see my son.”

They met after 40 years in September. Shortly after, Fitzgerald had her right leg amputated. It hasn’t slowed her. Over the holidays, she, her second husband, her son and his girlfriend went to Las Vegas. “I stayed up till 3 a.m.,” she said, beaming.

“And the funny part of it is, that he lived right around the corner from me for a year with (his stepmother’s) parents,” Fitzgerald said. “I didn’t know it.”

Years later, when her son was grown, he lived in a Queens, N.Y., neighborhood, 20 minutes from her house, Fitzgerald said. Gannon’s stepmother is still alive, but his father died in November, two months after Gannon and his mother were reunited. Gannon says he does not know if his father found out. He did not know about his father’s death until weeks after his passing. They had not spoken in more than 12 years.

Now that they’ve found each other, Fitzgerald and her son plan be tobicoastal.

“I’ve already ordered my tickets. We’re going back to see them on May 22,” Fitzgerald said. And her son is going to take her to see all her cousins. “I wrote them and we’re all going to get together because I haven’t seen some of them in 18, 19 years. And they want to see my son, because they only saw him when he was a baby, too.”

“Common,” Hood called this case and most of her others, “but interesting. The feeling you hear in their voices when they call and say ‘I just heard from my son, or I just heard from my brother or I just heard from my uncle. It makes you feel good. . . . We’re giving a service to the Lord. God called me to be a Salvation Army officer. This is the way, walk ye in it . . . I really feel if it wasn’t the Lord’s will, I wouldn’t be here (bringing families together). Maybe that’s why I enjoy it so much.”