Helping Old Friends Reach Across Years

Eighty dollars doesn’t go far in these tough economic times, but for hundreds of people it has been a small price to pay to revive a priceless friendship.

Michael Franks, owner of Old Friends Information Services, has reunited more than 100 people across the nation who have lost touch with old chums.

Ask Dennis Horlick and Joel Resnick. They were best friends in grade school and often played stickball and hung out at New York bowling alleys.

But they lost touch in the early 1960s after graduating from high school.

“At first it felt strange,” said Resnick, 52, of their initial reunion by telephone. “We were just talking about old things. He has a comic book collection still. . . . Here we were, 13 years old again. And in some respects maybe we were talking like 13-year-olds.”

Both now live in California and met face-to-face last month for the first time in about 30 years.

They reminisced about football in the streets, a favorite neighborhood delicatessen and hustling people with Resnick’s hidden bowling talents.

“He looks like he did back then,” laughed Resnick, whose hair is still jet black, while Horlick’s has grayed.

“It’s sort of cathartic,” said Horlick, 53. “You can’t believe it when you reach across 30 years.

“You can’t say no time has gone by. But between us, no time has gone by.”

Franks started his lost-and-found company a year ago when he wanted to find an old friend but couldn’t afford a private detective.

He keeps fees low because searches are done through mailing letters and an automated phone directory.

The longest search has taken about a year, the shortest just eight days.

Franks, who has a success rate of about 70%, isn’t the trenchcoat-wearing, super sleuth of cheap detective novels.

“We cannot do what private investigators do,” he said. “We really are an information service. All the information we have is publicly available.”

An initial fee of $40 begins the search, which is restricted to the United States. Franks sends a series of letters to the missing acquaintance’s relatives, friends, former schools and associations.

When Franks confirms a person’s whereabouts, the client pays another $40 for the address and phone number. But, if the missing person doesn’t want to be found, Franks will not divulge the information and the client does not pay the additional fee.

It usually takes a bit of patience--and sometimes luck--before a person is found.

World War II buddies Charles Bloom and Roy Lundstrom were reunited after a four-month search. Bloom called Franks after unsuccessfully searching for Lundstrom for more than 15 years on his own.

Letters sent around the country ended up in the mailbox of a Mr. Lundstrom in Duluth, Minn. He wasn’t the man Bloom was looking for.

But he was close. It turned out the wrong Lundstrom was a brother-in-law of a cousin of the right Lundstrom.

“It was just lucky,” said Roy Lundstrom, who now lives in Arizona. “I often thought about how nice it would be to get together but never knew how to go about it.”

The two served on the destroyer J.C. Owens, which went to Okinawa, Japan and the Philippines.

Bloom found about 10 others from the ship and arranged a reunion.

“It was quite wonderful,” Bloom said. “It was a very emotional thing. It’s always nice to see old friends.”

Kim Konar, 32, initiated a search for the father she last saw when she was 7.

“My whole life I just knew of this guy named Larry,” Konar said of her father, Larry Gallegos. “He was like a missing link in my life.”

When Konar’s parents divorced, she was adopted by her stepfather and was not allowed to see her biological father.

It turned out they live about 40 miles apart in Southern California.

“I had such goose bumps,” she said of their meeting in October. “This is my father. I could never say ‘my father.’ ”

The day was equally joyous for Gallegos.

“It was one of the happiest days of my life. It was something I always dreamed of,” he said.