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Adoptee, 70, finds his birth family Mail Tribune / Bob Pennell Bob Johnson, 70, found his 90-year-old birth mother, Elsie Haugen, in Eugene after a 30-year search. He�s holding a picture of her as a young woman. After years of hoping, the adoptee also found siblings, aunts and cousins. Newly opened records allow for a reunion By Jonel Aleccia Of the dozens of snapshots Bob Johnson took last week, the one he likes best shows the burly Central Point man with his arm around a tiny, white-haired woman in a pink sweater. She�s 90, and she�s his mother. "See? It�s the one where she�s looking up at me like �You�re mine�," says Johnson, 70, a gruff-voiced flooring sales executive. "That is one of my favorites." The photo is a souvenir of Johnson�s first meeting with the woman who relinquished him after his Ashland birth in 1930, a meeting made possible last May. That�s when the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Oregon adoptees such as Johnson to gain access to their birth records. The state Health Division began mailing birth records June 2; Johnson received his thin white envelope on June 9. Seven weeks later, he found himself seated on a couch in a Eugene nursing home, surrounded by siblings, aunts and cousins, face to familiar face with Elsie Haugen. "There�s such a resemblance," says Johnson. "There�s no doubt who I came from." Doubt, of course, is all Johnson had had since the age of 7. That�s when the only child of Carl and Helen Johnson of Portland learned he was adopted. "My parents had split up and remarried," Johnson explains. "There was a heated argument and my stepfather said to my mother, �He�s really not your child; what are you worried about?� I rode my bike over to my dad�s and asked him about it. My stepmother said, �Why don�t you tell him the truth?�" The news didn�t affect Johnson, he insists. Still, when the family moved to Seward, Alaska, he struggled through school and life. "I was a troubled child," he says. "I think things were bothering me." Adoption was the last thing on his mind at age 15, when Johnson�s adopted mother shipped him to sea with the Merchant Marines. "I had a grown-up education by the time I was 17," says Johnson. "There wasn�t anybody who could whip me. I was the meanest thing around." And adoption wasn�t a pressing issue when Johnson joined the Air Force, served in World War II, and came back to become a husband and father of five. After his adoptive parents died in the early 1950s, Johnson thought about searching for his birth family, but the pressures of life intervened. A car accident that stranded Johnson in Southern Oregon in the early 1970s changed his attitude. He knew he�d been born in Ashland to a millworker and his homemaker wife. He knew his grandfather had been a minister. And that was all. "But as I went around places, getting a haircut, getting a beer, people kept mistaking me for someone else," Johnson said. "I thought, �My God. Maybe I�m a twin�." Inspired to search, Johnson encountered nothing but dead-ends. Oregon�s sealed adoption records kept the facts of his birth secret. "We talked to judges, we talked to congressmen, we wrote to the governor," he says. "When I heard that Measure 58 had passed, I was one of the first to get my application in." Enactment of the 1998 measure allowing adoptees access to records was delayed by objections of six birth mothers. "I had no use for them," Johnson recalls. But by May, Johnson�s long search was nearly over. Through July 28, the state Health Division had received 4,181 orders for birth records and had processed 2,935, mailing them at a rate of 75 per day. Johnson�s revealed that he�d been born April 5, 1930, at 999 B St. in Ashland. His parents were Fred Jones, a 28-year-old sawmill worker, and Elsie Handsaker, a 22-year-old housewife and mother of four. Jones was too common a name to offer much hope. "But I had friends in Eugene who married a Handsaker," Johnson says. "I started there." Dozens of calls, e-mails and faxes later, Johnson found himself on the phone with the wife of the man who is his brother. "I was just almost speechless," he says. That was two weeks ago. By last week he had met or talked to three of his six siblings. By last Friday he was in Eugene. "My brother and I, we met for the first time, and we just joined," Johnson says. "It�s just everything is so similar. I had red hair, he has red hair. We both have blue eyes. We just knew we belonged to each other." Meeting his mother proved more difficult. Elsie Handsaker, now Elsie Haugen, said she didn�t remember giving up a child, much less why she did it. Still, she didn�t dispute Johnson�s birth certificate, and when she saw him for the first time, she was kind. "She looked at me and said, �Boy, he�s a big one, but he�s good looking. I think I�ll keep him�," says Johnson. "But really, she acted like she didn�t know anything." A family reunion of sorts is set for next week in Eugene. At 90, Elsie Haugen may have granted all the grace she can to a long-lost son. But at 70, Johnson says he�s happy just to know where he belongs. "I feel like a big hole has been filled in my life," he says. "For years I had this void. I�ve got somebody now. I never had anybody before that I could say was my brother." Obituaries | Sports | Business | Classifieds | Tempo | Prime Times | So Oregon Sites | Outdoor Journal | Subscribe | Contact | Movies | Advertise | Real Estate Showcase | Archive | Editorials | Letters to the editor | Religion | Wake-up Call | NIE | Cyber Chef | Job Network | So Oregon Weather | WSJ Northwest | Forums | AP Wire | AP Money | F.A.Q. | Awards Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. The Community Newspaper Subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co, Inc Copyright �The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA