Brothers find each other after 75 years

By Tory Brecht | Friday, July 21, 2006

He fought in two wars, earning three Purple Hearts. But 81-year-old Jonathan Skinner was as scared as he could ever remember while talking on the phone Tuesday night with a mild-mannered Iowa housewife.

“Is your husband’s name Kenneth?” the Bettendorf man asked.

“Who are you?” she replied.

“Well, I had a tip he might be my brother that was adopted out of the orphanage,” he  continued.

The woman asked his last name and he answered “Skinner.”

“Yep, that’s him,” she said.

“Is he still alive?” he asked.

 “Yeah, he’s sitting right here. Do you want to talk to him?” she answered.

After a pause to muster his courage, Skinner said he responded, “ ‘Well, yeah.’

“I don’t even know what was going through my mind. I was so completely shook up,” he added this week.

When Kenneth — whose name had been changed to James Finley — picked up the phone, it was the first time Skinner had heard his little brother’s voice since Kenneth was a squalling 9-month old about to be adopted from the Annie Wittenmyer Home for Orphans in Davenport.

Both are stoic, ex-military men — Skinner a Marine, Finley a 20-year Navy vet — but Skinner confessed to breaking down after the short phone exchange.

“I was shocked, amongst other things,” said the 75-year-old Finley, who lives in the small Mississippi River town of Montrose, Iowa, between Fort Madison and Keokuk. “When my wife answered the phone and said, ‘Your brother’s on the line,’ I said, ‘Huh?’ It surprised the hell out of me.”

Seven Skinner children were dropped off at the Davenport orphanage in 1929 after their father died. Ranging in age from 9 months to 10 years, only little Kenneth was adopted.

The rest, despite being at the same location, drifted apart in the institutional setting during the Great Depression.

“We were all in different cottages, the girls on the left-hand campus, the boys on the right,” Skinner recalled. “I’d see my older sister Wanda once in awhile because she was a nurse out there. But we weren’t a real close-knit family.”

Meantime, Finley grew up in typical Midwestern fashion in Fort Madison before joining the Navy in 1948.

“I had a good childhood. I didn’t lack for too much,” he said, noting that it was rare to be adopted during the Depression when many families struggled to feed their own children. “I knew I had brothers and sisters, but I was content with my lot in life. I never knew them.”

Skinner said he made a small effort to find his brother’s whereabouts after he left the service in the 1950s, but when he ran into sealed records, he gave up the attempt. Skinner assumed none of his siblings were left alive.

“It had been years and years since I thought about my little brother,” he said. “It’s something you just put behind you.”

It was a friend of Finley’s wife, Mary Marsh of Phoenix, with a gift for genealogical research, who eventually connected the dots between the two brothers.

“She’d helped me do my family history,” Sandra Finley recalled. “And in passing I told her about Jim being adopted. She asked me one day to get information on him. I didn’t tell Jim because I felt if it never went any farther there’d be nothing lost, nothing gained.”

But the adoption records, plus the discovery of the Skinner children’s father’s World War I draft card revealed the two men had been living in eastern Iowa less than 150 miles apart.

“I tell you, Jon Skinner said to me, ‘I really think this is a miracle,’ and I told him I think it’s just something that’s meant to be,” Sandra Finley said. “Even if they only have each other for six months, at least that’s something. I saw my husband get choked up and that’s something he really hates.”

There likely will be more tears Sunday when the two meet face-to-face for the first time. This weekend is the annual Annie Wittenmyer orphans reunion, and Finley has agreed to drive up and see the cottages where the rest of his family spent their childhoods.

“I go up to the Arsenal every three months to get medication and I used to drive by the orphanage, but I  haven’t in a long time,” he said. “I forgot where it was. We’ll probably get together and visit and so forth.”

Mary Lou Rolax, who lived at the orphanage in the 1940s and organizes the annual get-together, said long-lost reunions such as the one involving the Skinners are rare.

“It’s good that he found him,” she said. “A lot of people don’t. It’s heartbreaking. We’re all getting old and moving on.”

Tory Brecht can be contacted at (563) 383-2329 or tbrecht@qctimes.com.