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- <text id=92TT0778>
- <title>
- Apr. 13, 1992: American Notes:Families
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Apr. 13, 1992 Campus of the Future
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- NATION, Page 31
- American Notes
- FAMILIES
- Lost and Found
- </hdr><body>
- <p> It was the sort of bittersweet tale Hans Christian Andersen
- might have spun. An old man with a vacant stare was discovered
- sitting in a wheelchair at a dog-racing park. Two attached
- notes identified him as an Alzheimer's patient in need of
- round-the-clock nursing care. Outrage and sympathy poured in
- from around the country, and complete strangers offered to take
- him in.
- </p>
- <p> The old man will not long be dependent on the kindness of
- strangers. Accompanied by her sister-in-law, last week Nancy
- Myatt of Dickson, Tenn., flew to Portland, Ore., to be reunited
- with the man she recognized from news photographs as her
- long-lost father John Kingery. Myatt found Kingery at the
- Laurelhurst Care Center, a nursing home from which he had been
- removed in early March by her half sister Sue Gifford. Myatt
- explained that she lost touch with her father, a former
- autoworker, after he remarried in 1964 and just "slipped away
- from us." After a time, Myatt assumed he was dead. "It's
- something," says Myatt, "to think that you didn't have a dad,
- and now he's alive again."
- </p>
- <p> As authorities continue their investigation of the
- abandonment, the saga of John Kingery seems destined for a
- heartwarming ending. Myatt and her siblings want to move Kingery
- to a Morgantown, Ky., nursing home so they can better watch over
- him. Says Myatt's brother Charles, a Morgantown resident: "We
- want to bring him back here, close to the family." Although he
- will probably never be able to grasp it fully, John Kingery has
- a lot of grandchildren and even great-grandchildren waiting to
- welcome him.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-