Old Times Become New Times for This Family : Siblings Find Father After a 40-Year Separation: Former Husband and Wife Will Remarry

Forty years on, when afar and asunder, parted are those who are singing today. . . .

--School song at Harrow

A long time, 40 years.

For most humans, it is the better part of a lifetime. This week, for four people, that number will signify a dramatic beginning, when after 40 years separation, a family is reunited.

The era was World War II. In St. Paul, Minn., a young man named Steven Koch had gotten to know a young woman named Muriel Vesterby, and in 1943 they moved to San Francisco and married. Late the next year Muriel Koch became pregnant. Her husband, a welder, felt there were better job opportunities back home, and they returned to Minnesota, where they lived with his mother until they became parents of a son, Bob.

Father Disappears

Marital troubles, however, were brewing. Muriel became pregnant again, the couple separated, and in 1947 she moved to live with a sister in New Orleans, where she gave birth to a daughter, Lynette.

The Kochs’ divorce became final the next year, and the father disappeared. The son’s only contact with him had been as an infant. The daughter had never seen him.

The decades melted into history. About a dozen years ago the daughter, now Lynette Valenzuela of the Riverside County town of Gilman Hot Springs, found herself caught up in an overwhelming obsession: “I knew I had to find my real father before he died.”

It was something also weighing on the mind of her brother, Bob Koch, now living in Cypress: “My life had been like a puzzle with one piece missing. I knew I had to fill it in.”

The son said their mother, perhaps understandably, was less than enthusiastic. “She didn’t discourage our search,” he reflected. “But at first she didn’t help us a lot either.”

Late last year, after a frustrating search that crisscrossed much of the United States, the siblings determined the whereabouts of their father.

And this stranger-than-fiction sequence of events followed:

- They first spoke with him by phone, then got to meet him in person.

- In turn, he expressed a wish to see his former wife again, after four decades.

- Each had re-married, each had again divorced, and both now were single and about to retire. Muriel, now living in Boulder City, Nev., said “Fine, let’s get together and talk about old times.”

- Sunday, after more than 40 years, Lynette and Bob will have a Father’s Day chat with that newly discovered man in their lives. And on June 27, they will participate in a wedding. On that day, in a Nevada church, the man and woman who brought them into this world will once again become husband and wife.

Both the brother and the sister recall the day they learned about their father. The year was 1952, their mother by now had married Dee Thune, a serviceman subsequently stationed in Japan, and she and the children were about to leave their Norwalk home to join him.

Until that day, the children, who were 4 and 2 when their mother remarried, had assumed he was their real father.

“I was out in the yard climbing orange trees,” Lynette remembered. “My mother said, ‘Come in, I want to tell you a story.’ Somehow, even being that young, I felt this was a story I didn’t want to hear.”

Bob was in his bedroom, playing with an ironing board he had turned upside down to make a ship. “In walked my mother with her best friend, Kay, and my sister,” he recalled. “My mother was crying. She said she had something to tell both of us.”

Muriel began reading a letter, more accurately a statement, which she had composed. What it boiled down to was that the man the children were about to live with overseas wasn’t their father, after all.

“It didn’t dawn on me at the time that she was talking about us,” the son said. “I wanted to get back to my ship.”

Lynette, on the other hand, understood. “I began crying,” she said. “Somebody who I had felt was my father, wasn’t.”

Fast forward to 1975. Lynette joins her husband, Ross Valenzuela, on a visit to San Francisco.

“It occurred to me that since my mother and father had been married in that city, maybe he would still be there,” she said. “In our motel I thumbed through the phone book, found some people named Koch, and began calling.

“I asked the ones who answered if they knew of anybody named Steven Koch, or if they had any relative in Minnesota named Larry, his brother. Everybody on the phone was nice, but nobody said yes.”

On and on went a search that had no clues. “After that, I would go to libraries, check the phone books, and make the calls,” Lynette said. “Whenever my husband and I went on vacation, I would go through the phone book in our room. Earlier last year, in Hawaii, I found a Lawrence Koch. I hoped it might be the brother, but it wasn’t.”

Bob did the same whenever he and his wife, Diane, went on vacation--looking for the needle named Koch in the phone book haystacks.

“Did you ever live in Minnesota or were you ever married to a woman named Muriel?” he would ask.

And always the litany came back: “I’m sorry, I’d like to help, but you’ve got the wrong person.”

There had been a time, he admitted, that he felt resentment toward his father. “I resented that my parents had split up, and that he had never tried to get in touch with us children,” Bob said.

Overpowering Yearning

But this soon yielded to the overpowering yearning to be reunited with his natural father. So much so that, after having once changed his surname to that of his stepfather, two years ago Bob changed it back to Koch--”to make it easier, in case he somehow was trying to find me.”

Finally, last year, the sister and brother tried a desperation long shot. Neither they nor their mother had the faintest idea in which state Steven Koch lived--or if he was even alive--but the siblings learned that something could be tried through the Department of Motor Vehicles in California.

According to a DMV spokesperson, all that is needed are two points of reference regarding someone (such as a full name and birth date), and a computer printout on persons of that name and age holding driver’s licenses in the state can be supplied for the charge of $2 per name.

Lynette made the application last October, and was supplied with a list consisting of one name, a Steven Koch, age 64, living at an address in the East Bay town of San Leandro, but with no phone number given.

However, Lynette’s husband, in addition to being a librarian, works part time in real estate. He ran a property profile on the address, which provided the owner’s name and phone number.

“It turned out to be a woman in Castro Valley who owned an apartment building,” Bob recalled. “I explained that my sister and I were searching for our father, whom we hadn’t seen in about 40 years, and that we had reason to believe he might be living in her building--but that we had no phone.”

‘Please Call Bob’

The building owner asked the manager to tape a note with a phone number to the occupant’s door. It simply said: “Please call Bob.”

The father, the mother, the daughter and the son won’t soon forget that day--Saturday, Oct. 11, 1986.

When Steven Koch, who lived alone, returned to his apartment from an errand, he saw the note and assumed it concerned a friend named Bob. He dialed the number, a phone rang in a house in Cypress, and this conversation ensued:

Father: “Hello, this is Steve Koch.”

Son: “Were you ever married to Muriel?”

A long pause, then: “Yes.”

Son: “This is your son, Bob.”

A lot of ground was covered during the half-hour that followed. At one point the son, who is bald, asked: “Do you have hair?” Steve said he still did, but not as much as once.

“He wanted to know where Lynette and I lived, what we did for a living, if we had children--and he asked how Mom was,” the son said. Bob is childless, Lynette is the mother of two sons and a daughter.

Bob is a J. C. Penney Co. distribution center supervisor, Lynette is an instructional aide with the San Jacinto Unified School District, Steve was then a refrigeration engineer at a cold storage plant near San Leandro, Muriel was soon to find herself out of a job when the department store for which she had worked 22 years dissolved.

“I always had wanted to find my children,” the father later said. “But there was a possibility they had never been told about me, and I didn’t want to cause any trouble.”

During the phone conversation, Bob learned that Steven had re-married, had become the father of two more sons, had gotten divorced and had remained single ever since.

“I told him he had a wonderful daughter and that she wanted to talk with him,” Bob recalled. “He asked for her number and said he would phone right away.”

And a phone rang in a house in Gilman Hot Springs:

Father: “Is Lynette there?”

Daughter’s husband: “Yes, just a moment.”

Father: “Hello, Lynette, this is your father. How are you?”

Nervous and Emotional

Understandably, by now on this Saturday afternoon, everybody involved was nervous and emotional.

Both children separately told their father they wanted to meet him. He replied that he wished likewise. He also asked about their mother. Muriel also had re-married, had become the mother of another daughter and another son, had gotten divorced and had remained single since.

Later that day, when the children informed their mother about the phone conversations, her reaction was: “I’m happy for both of you.”

Steven had asked for her phone number. And about a week later a phone rang in a house in Boulder City, Nev., where three years earlier Muriel had gone to live with her daughter by her second marriage.

Former husband: “Could I speak to Muriel Thune?”

Former wife: “You certainly may.”

Former husband: “You did one hell of a good job in raising the children.”

He asked if he might call her again, and she said yes.

First, however, came the matter of the Lynette and Bob getting to meet their father after 40 years.

All three arranged to stay on Nov. 8 at a motel in Hayward, in the East Bay. After exchanging information on how each would be dressed, Lynette caught a flight on that Saturday to the Oakland airport.

“The preparations hadn’t been necessary,” Lynette said. “I saw him in the waiting room, and knew it was him as well as if I had looked into a mirror. We hugged, and he called me Lynette, but I couldn’t call him Dad, not just yet.” Bob had driven to the motel. As he and his wife pulled into the parking lot, his sister and his father were unloading their luggage from a car.

“Hi, son!” the father called out.

Later, inside the motel, the younger Koch asked his Dad how he should address him after all those years.

“Steve will be fine,” was the reply. “But if you were younger and had said that, you’d have gotten a spanking.”

The table was spread with cold cuts, crackers, soda and beer, and the three of them went over each other’s photos. “And we got a lot of things off our chests,” Bob said.

Before going their separate ways, Lynette said she planned to visit her mother in Nevada for Thanksgiving. Bob said he thought he, too, would make the trip.

The father asked if he also could be there.

It was the day after Thanksgiving last year. The father, daughter and son had driven from their homes in separate cars and had converged at a desert motel not far from Hoover Dam.

They passed the time until Muriel got off work at 7 p.m., and drove over. Bob saw her arrive in the parking lot and went out to escort her in. When the two of them walked into the son’s room, as Lynette stood watching, Steve appeared from an adjoining room.

It was the first time in four decades that the former husband and wife had set eyes on each other.

“Mom started to put out her hand for a handshake,” the son recalled. “Dad said, ‘Oh, come on!,’ and they both began hugging each other.”

Everybody started talking at once, and the conversations continued throughout dinner at a restaurant.

“The next day, Saturday, as all of us were taking a stroll, Lynette and I noticed something,” Bob said. “Mom and Dad were walking hand in hand.

“And while we were feeding popcorn to the carp at Lake Mead, we saw that he had his arm around her.”

About a month later, at Christmas, Lynette handed her mother something special. “When my mother was 18, my father had given her a peridot birthstone ring,” Lynette explained. “When I was about that same age, my mother passed it on to me, saying this was the only thing she was able to give me from my father.

“Now I felt she should have it back again.”

New Year’s Day, 1987. Lynette and her family were spending the holiday at the Cypress home of her brother. To the north, Muriel was visiting Steve in San Leandro.

As the Valenzuelas were about to leave for home, the phone rang, and Lynette answered.

“I’m calling from your father’s apartment,” she heard her mother say. “Would you believe we’re engaged?”

The next day they went out to shop for a ring. In 1943, Muriel had gotten an engagement ring under different circumstances: “I was a clerk at a drugstore in Minnesota, and he was a welder at at San Francisco shipyard. He sent me my ring by mail, plus a train ticket to San Francisco.”

They had an unpretentious wedding in the room of a church. The only guest was Larry Koch, brother of Steven.

Larry is 70 now. He is flying in from Minnesota to again be present at their wedding, this time to escort the bride down the aisle as she once more marries his brother. The ceremony will begin at 2 p.m. June 27 in the Grace Community Church in Boulder City.

Muriel Thune, 62, will marry Steve Koch, 65. Daughter, Lynette, 40, will be matron of honor; son, Bob, 42, will be best man.

One of the couple’s grandsons will sing, another grandchild will be ring bearer, another will be flower girl, two will be candle lighters.

Times have changed since the first ceremony, one trend at weddings now being to have birdseed thrown instead of rice. Another of the granddaughters will distribute such packages.

After the reception the couple will honeymoon in Minnesota, flying back with Larry.

Said Steve: “One of the reasons we hadn’t gotten along the first time was that times were tough, there was no money.”

Muriel: “It wasn’t that we didn’t care for each other--we just didn’t communicate.”

Steve: “We are both much wiser now.”

Steve has moved in with his bride-to-be in Boulder City, and they have purchased five acres in Arizona, where they plan to live in a trailer until they can have a house constructed.

“We found we have a lot in common,” Muriel said. “We like to take walks.”

Down memory lane.