All’s Well at Clinic as Son, Father Meet After 15 Years

When a clerk called out the name “Robert McDonald” in the waiting room of a Naval Hospital clinic here this week, two men promptly stood up.

Both were about 6 feet, 2 inches tall, with Irish blue eyes, fair skin and strong, angular noses. Moments later, the men were tearfully hugging each other and trembling, overcome by the strange reunion of a father and son after 15 years.

“It’s a miracle,” Robert Charles McDonald Sr., 59, said Thursday as he stared at Robert C. McDonald Jr., a 21-year-old Marine corporal based at the El Toro Marine Air Station.

“It’s unbelievable,” said the son, who lives in Huntington Beach. “I wasn’t sure if he was alive.”

The younger McDonald was only 6 when his parents split up in a bitter divorce and he, along with his two sisters, was placed in a foster home in Orange. His father, a former military man who said he had spent time in prison and drifting around Southern California, lost touch with his children.

But after virtually bumping into each other in the clinic, and then comparing notes with the help of the hospital staff, the two McDonalds shared lunch and were making plans to keep in contact the rest of their lives.

“I looked at his face and stared into his eyes and it was like looking at myself in the mirror 40 years ago,” said McDonald Sr., a native of Beaumont, Tex. “This is too good to be true.”

It wasn’t always that way.

With his natural parents continually mired in personal problems, McDonald Jr. grew up with foster parents in Garden Grove and attended Rancho Alamitos High School. He eventually accepted the foster family as his own.

“I’m still close to my guardians,” said McDonald Jr., who has not seen his natural mother since he was 12.

A few months ago, McDonald Jr. attempted to locate her. He learned that she lives in Nevada, just north of Las Vegas, but he has not tried to contact her.

He had no idea his father, who has lived in an RV park at Camp Pendleton for 10 years after hitches in the Navy and Air Force, was so near. “I always wondered what he was doing and where he was at,” the son said.

Then last Tuesday, McDonald Jr. arrived at the base hospital for the last of three appointments with an orthopedic surgeon. He sat in the clinic waiting area, directly behind a heavyset, gray-haired man who had experienced chest pains over the weekend and came in for an examination.

When the name McDonald was called, the older man got to the clerk first and was ushered to the examination room. The other McDonald first rose, then sat back down, but later asked the receptionist for the older man’s middle name.

“When she told me ‘Charles’ I was sort of in shock,” he said. “I was wondering if it could really be happening.”

A clerk went back to the X-ray room, found the older McDonald and told him “there’s somebody out there who might know you.”

The two men were introduced, and then stared at each other before McDonald Sr. asked, “Bobby?” Then they embraced.

“His eyes are like mine, his nose is like mine, his ears stick out like mine,” McDonald Sr. said. “We may not have the same jaw, but from the nose up, it’s me. That’s my son.”

Both men hesitated when asked where they go from here. “Just knowing he’s OK is fine for me,” the father said.

“We just need to sit around and talk for a while,” the son said.