Together at Last

Sitting at the kitchen table and eating macaroni salad with a man she had not seen in half a century, Sharon Sylchak realized she had not only found her father, she had found herself.

“He has the same characteristics as my George,” said Sylchak, 54, referring to her eldest son. “For the first time in 50 years, I finally have an identity. I finally have peace.”

Sylchak and her father were separated when she was 4 years old, after Earl David Papkie and his wife divorced. Sylchak’s mother got custody and took her away. Though her mother never discussed her father, Sylchak never forgot the man who was excluded from her life.

Sylchak searched for him for three decades without luck. For his part, Papkie, a burly onetime truck driver and assembly-line worker at Ford Motor Co., said he had once hired a detective to track down his girl, without success.

But where detectives failed, the Internet succeeded. It was while Sylchak was surfing the Internet about 10 days ago that she discovered her father lived about 200 miles from the Detroit hospital where she was born.

“I got something in the mail for 100 free hours on the Internet,” Sylchak said. “I popped in the disk, and less than three hours later, my life changed forever.”

She used a program that hunted down names and addresses. She plugged in his name and an address came up in St. Helen, Mich.

Papkie, 75, an energetic man with an often wry and salty way of talking, had trouble holding back the tears as he recalled the summer day in 1949 when his daughter was taken away.

“I’ll remember it until the day I die,” Papkie said, lighting a cigarette. “It wasn’t fair for her mother to take her away. She was my pride and joy.”

Sylchak remembered her father scooping her up in his arms to say goodbye. Her mother, Antonia, gave her a Hershey bar to ease her tears.

When the girl was growing up in Michigan and California, her mother forbade her to even speak about her father. In that era, divorce was a scandal and her mother didn’t want people to know about her other life.

Sylchak’s mother died in 1986.

After finding Papkie’s name, Sylchak picked up the phone, still not believing she’d really discovered the man she’d tried to find for so long. Reaching an answering machine, she left a message, then went outside and busied herself working on the backyard fence.

Twenty minutes later the phone rang.

“A man on the other end was really out of breath,” Sylchak said. “He said, ‘You may be my little girl.’ ”

With family and friends around them, the two were reunited Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport. Back at Sylchak’s house, they tried to catch up on decades-old family news and exchanged photographs.

Papkie had no other children. His second wife died recently after about five decades of marriage. After that, his longing for his daughter only grew. Having survived nine heart attacks and a stroke, he believed the reunion was a gift from God.

“All I can do is hug her,” he said. “I’m going to hug the hell out of her.”

Sylchak is equally thrilled, and equally convinced it was the work of a higher power.

“I’m not a real religious person, but I truly believe it was the hand of God,” Sylchak said. “And a little bit of technology.”