Family Discovers It’s Never Too Late for Mother and Son Reunion

Gladys Nordyke stood nervously in the doorway of her tidy frame house, watching the stranger walk up her path. She had seen his face only once before. It was 67 years ago.

After a lifetime apart, they were about to come together.

Six months of searching court records, tracking leads and unearthing secrets of days long ago had delivered Donald Pieper to this door. Six decades of wondering--and now the answer was just a knock away.

Finally, they were about to meet: mother and son.

It would be the first time since she gave birth to him in January 1931.

By now, Don was a grandfather himself, his hair receding, his waistline expanding.

But to Gladys, a spry 85, he still was the baby she had given up for adoption as an unwed 18-year-old, the child she thought about every night before she went to bed.

The reunion itself was surprising enough. But something else was even more startling: For nearly 30 years, mother and son had lived just five miles apart. They had friends in common and had even crossed paths at social events.

All those coincidences were put aside that day as the two stood in the portal, melting into each other’s arms. First came hugs and kisses. Then words.

“I’m so glad,” Gladys murmured as they clung to one another. “I’m so glad.”

“This,” Don said, “is the day that we’ve been waiting for for quite awhile.”

*

Don Pieper knew long ago that he wanted to find his mother. It was just a matter of timing.

“I always had it in my mind--I wonder where she is, I wonder what she looks like,” he says now, his beefy arm draped around his beaming mother as they share her living room couch.

Don knew by age 14 that he was adopted--he had overheard an uncle refer to it--but the subject was never broached, not even once, as he grew up the only child of Roosevelt and Dena Pieper.

The Piepers farmed in Minnesota and Iowa, and young Don rose at 5 a.m., braving the raw Midwestern chill to milk the cows and tend the soil. His parents were outgoing and hardworking. Don loved them, and they him. He always called them Mom and Dad.

Don married, had four children and divorced. He farmed his parents’ homestead for a time, became a truck driver, moved to South Dakota, then back to Iowa. He now has his own trucking business, hitting the road four days a week.

Long ago, he decided that he wouldn’t search for his biological mother until his adoptive parents died because he didn’t want to hurt them.

In May 1996, his adoptive mother, a widow, died at age 95.

By then, Don was 65 and it seemed unlikely that he would find his biological mother alive. But many in the Pieper clan had lived into their 90s, so maybe, just maybe, he thought, longevity might run in his bloodline too.

Don put off his search more than a year, and then last summer, he asked a longtime friend, Madeline Sullivan-Flaugh, to help him out. She drafted a letter in Don’s name explaining his interest in locating his mother.

She had just one lead: a birth certificate that identified Don as the Piepers’ child and the town of Rushmore, Minn.

Considering the circumstances and the era, Madeline suspected, and rightly so, that Don was born to a single mother. So she called a home for unwed mothers in Sioux City. A search of dusty files stored in the attic turned up nothing for the year 1931.

Her next stop was the Department of Human Services in Des Moines. No luck there. So Madeline returned to her nugget of information, the town of Rushmore. She wrote to the county clerk.

She was referred to state officials in St. Paul who, in turn, told her that she’d need a judge’s approval to unseal adoption records.

On Feb. 9, after 15 registered letters, $36 in court costs and six months of scouring 66-year-old files, she received a packet from Minnesota officials that included 20 pages of documents, the name of a town--Fertile, Minn.--and the name of a woman, Gladys Ellegard.

“I think we’ve got the answers,” Madeline eagerly told Don, who came over and examined the papers.

Madeline then called directory assistance in Fertile, asking for anyone named Ellegard.

There was one. Ella Ellegard.

“It was electric,” Madeline says of the discovery. “We knew we were almost there.”

Madeline dialed the number and identified herself as representing a man, now 67, looking for his birth mother.

“Do you know Gladys Ellegard?” Madeline asked.

“Oh my God, that’s my niece!” replied Ella, who, as it turns out, is a sharp-minded 101 years old. “I raised her from the age of 4. I just can’t believe this. Just two days ago, [Gladys’ 90-year-old] sister remarked, ‘Whatever happened to that little baby?’ ”

“He’s no baby!” Madeline declared. “He’s sitting right here. He’s 67 years old.”

Then Madeline had one more question. This one was about Gladys.

“Is she alive or dead?” she asked tentatively.

She was very much alive. Her name was now Gladys Nordyke. Ella provided her niece’s phone number and address. It was in Sioux City, Iowa--the same town her son had lived in for nearly three decades.

“All these years,” Don says, shaking his head, “and here she is, a 10-minute drive away.”

*

Don was one call away from his mother.

But he and Madeline decided that she should approach Gladys because it might be less intimidating for a woman to deliver such shattering, life-changing news.

Madeline identified herself when she called Gladys and, calm as she could be considering the question, asked: “Did you have a baby by the name of Donald Leroy and adopt him out?”

There was dead silence.

To Madeline, it seemed like lightning jolting the phone lines.

“Oh my God, oh my God. Why now?” Gladys asked, her voice quavering. “It’s so many years ago and it’s a secret. I don’t want to have that brought up now. It’s all in the past.”

Madeline worried she had upset Gladys too much, so she told her to relax, think it over and when--and if--she was ready, call her back.

Two hours later, a calmer Gladys called. She had realized Madeline was related to her neighbor, and that broke the ice. Their conversation continued for two hours.

“We talked and talked and talked,” Gladys says. “I cried and cried and cried. You don’t think you’re ever going to find your baby after 67 years, but it was a wonderful thing.

“I never went to bed at night that I didn’t say my prayer,” she says, “and wonder where he was and what he was doing, and that’s the honest to God’s truth.”

That night, Gladys called her aunt in Minnesota. Both women, unknown to each other, had kept the same secret.

Gladys had told no one, not Kenny, her husband of 37 years who died in 1976, nor her son, Bernard, now 65, of the baby she had given up for adoption.

Gladys had gotten pregnant during the depths of the Depression, a time when unwed mothers were hidden away. As a teen with a ninth-grade education dependent on her divorced father, she says she wasn’t prepared to rear a child.

So she named him Donald Leroy, saw him when she gave birth, and then he was taken away to be adopted. Gladys says she never told the baby’s father.

Her aunt, however, had been told of the out-of-wedlock baby, but never let on when talking with Gladys.

Nearly seven decades later, after Gladys had received her surprising call, she phoned her.

“Yes, honey, I’ve known all these years,” the 101-year-old woman gently told her. “I’ve held it in my heart. I’ve got this taken care of; now God can take me any time.”

By then, Don was ready to make his call. He was on his weekly route cruising in his 18-wheeler, 30 miles west of Des Moines, when he nervously punched in her number on his cellular phone.

Neither remembers exactly what was said in that first 10-minute chat, but Don was relieved it went smoothly. “I knew things would be good,” he says.

He promised to call Gladys that weekend when he returned home so they could arrange a meeting.

They began the conversation as strangers. They ended it as family.

“Well, you don’t have to call me Gladys anymore,” she said as Don prepared to hang up. “You might just as well call me Mother.”

*

That Sunday in February, they met at Gladys’ house and chatted for three hours.

Gladys’ first concern was whether Don’s adoptive parents had treated him well. He assured her they had.

Slowly they are getting to know one another, but their happiness is tempered by the bittersweet reality that they found each other so late in life.

“You’re never going to make up for lost time,” Don says, “but we’re hoping our health is good enough so we can be together for several more years.”

Already they’re discovering each other’s habits. Both like pickled herring. And when Don visits, he brings Gladys’ favorites--Kentucky Fried Chicken or Casey’s doughnuts--and they share it on the orange table in her breakfast nook.

Some folks say there’s also a family resemblance; both have gray-green eyes that crinkle when they smile.

One of the most unusual revelations from their against-all-odds reunion was that in this city of nearly 83,000, they’ve traveled in overlapping circles and have even shared some friends.

When Gladys’ neighbor Rose married several years ago, Gladys was at the Eagles Club for the celebration. So was Don.

And when Rose’s husband died, Gladys stood next to her as she received condolences at the funeral. One of those who came by was Don.

There’s more. Don has known his mother’s former hairdresser for 25 years. One friend just happens to be a cousin of Gladys’ husband.

He also was a frequent customer and malted-milk drinker at Zortman’s, the drugstore-fountain where Gladys worked for 30 years.

“It was just unbelievable,” says Madeline, who has since become close friends with Gladys. “They had crossed paths socially, businesswise, and did not know they belonged to each other.”

But when mother and son met, they did not recognize each other.

These days when they’re together, they act like young sweethearts; they call each other honey, they giggle at each other’s jokes.

They spent Easter together--Don brought her silk flowers--and will go out for lunch for Mother’s Day. Gladys has bought two outfits at J.C. Penney but hasn’t decided which one she’ll wear.

“I just love to have him around,” she says. “I never dreamed in a million years that I’d ever see him again.”

Don has given her a childhood picture, and it’s now part of the photo collection on her living room table.

When he’s in town, he calls before 10 p.m., when she settles in to watch the news before going to bed.

And when Gladys goes to sleep, she no longer wonders what happened to the baby she gave up. She thinks about the new son in her life.

As always, she says her prayers. Now, there’s a special one.

“I thank God,” she says softly, “that he was brought back to me.”