A Dying Wish to Find a Daughter

“ Blow you you old blue norther ,

Blow him back to me ... “ --”Someday Soon,” a song by Ian Tyson

All Bobbie Beavers has left of the past are four photographs of a little girl who may despise him for deserting her 30 years ago.

If you’re out there Vikki Lynn, your dad is sorry.

Bobbie abandoned Vikki and her mother, Jean Alice Sutherland, in the San Fernando Valley in 1961 when Vikki was 14 months old. Much as he loved his little blonde “Princess,” he loved the unpredictable life as a rodeo cowboy more.

Now, despite surgery and 63 radiation treatments to remove his salivary glands and lymph nodes, Bobbie is dying of cancer at age 56 in a mobile home in Colorado Springs.

As Samuel Johnson said: “Depend upon it, sir. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

“I don’t regret my life--I’ve done what probably 99% of the population would do if they had the courage,” says Bobbie in a raspy, cancer-ravaged voice. “But I think about Vikki all the time. She is of my blood and I do love her.

“There’s things that need to be said.”

“ He loves his damned old rodeo,

As much as he loves me ... “

Bobbie lost touch with Vikki Lynn about six months after he rode off into the sunset in a battered blue ’53 Chevy. He says he mailed six or seven $100 checks for child support, but his letters came back marked “Return to Sender,” either because Jean Alice had moved or because she was too angry to accept his money.

“I never did dislike Jean Alice. I was just immature and not able to handle responsibility,” Bobbie says between sips of the ice water he depends upon to wet his throat since his salivary glands were removed.

But he is well aware that Jean Alice and Vikki still may dislike him.

“It is my major fear,” he says. “I really don’t know how to deal with it if it comes up.”

Still, Bobbie persists in his search. But he has been unable to trace Jean Alice’s family and cannot remember whether the Sutherlands lived in Granada Hills or Northridge.

Bobbie has no money to hire detectives. He and his second wife, Jerri, live on $1,000 a month--barely enough for rent, food and the pack a day of Tareytons that Bobbie continues to smoke.

Bobbie hopes that Vikki or Jean Alice or someone who knew them will read this and get in touch. In the meantime, he spends his last days poring over the four snapshots of Vikki that are all he has left of their brief time together.

In the clearest of the photographs, it’s Nov. 2, 1960, Vikki’s first birthday.

Both parents stand behind her, but it’s Bobbie she clutches for balance.

“We were inseparable,” Bobbie says of himself and Vikki. “Whenever I’d go bowling, I’d carry her in with me, and she’d sit like a little lady when it was my turn.

“The first words she ever spoke that we understood were ‘da-da.’ ”

Then how could he bear to leave her?

“I hadn’t really thought about what it would mean to lose Vikki,” he says. “I knew she’d be better off in a stable situation with a regular income and a house rather than traipsing across the country and living in sleeping bags with no guaranteed income.”

“ Someday soon , going with him . . . “

Bobbie speculates that he learned to shirk responsibility from his father, whom he adored despite his alcoholism and restlessness. Vikki’s paternal grandfather bought and sold farms and restaurants in Indio and Winfield, Kan., until he died in a car crash en route to see Vikki three days after she was born.

Bobbie couldn’t shake his grief. He began to feel trapped in the Hollywood studio apartment with the Murphy bed, where he lived for $110 a month with Jean Alice and Vikki, supporting them by delivering groceries. To make ends meet, he sold his motorcycle and the candy-apple red 1947 Ford coupe he customized after finishing a four-year stint in the Air Force.

Before leaving for good, he went to Las Vegas for two months and worked for $8 a day as a shill, gambling at empty tables and turning over his winnings to the casino.

He sent for Vikki and Jean Alice after a Denny’s restaurant hired him as a cook for $24 a shift.

But that was no balm for a rodeo heart, and he moved the family to Santa Barbara and to San Diego before giving up and sending Jean Alice home to the Valley.

“There wasn’t any particular challenge to cooking a hamburger or an egg--not like there was to pitting myself against a 1,500-to-1,700-pound brute of a bull for eight seconds in a rodeo,” he says.

For the next eight years Bobbie traveled the rodeo circuit from the Thunderbird Ranch in the Valley to Kissimee, Fla., to Yankton, S.D.

Whenever he’d break a leg on the rodeo circuit--and that was often--he’d have the doctor set a spur into the cast and he’d climb back on the bulls in the next town.

“You might say I’m used to pain,” Bobbie says.

But the emotional pain is harder to endure. His daughter by his second wife is now 25. Watching her as she grew reminded him of the daughter he left behind.

“I’ve missed so much of her life,” he says with regret.

Over to you, Vikki Lynn.

“ ... Someday soon.”