Together Again

Kimberley McGee

Monday, Feb. 15, 1999 | 9:18 a.m.

Each story behind these three Southern Nevada residents stands alone in its personal tragedy, but is united in its longing for wholeness.

"You don't know that you are missing something until you get it back," Kyne, a local optical engineer for commercial airlines, says. He reunited with his father after more than half a century.

Kyne's story is one of the many family tales told in The Learning Channel's "Reunion" series, which airs at 10 a.m. weekdays on Cox Cable Channel 38.

In all the stories of people who were reunited with family members who were seemingly lost to them, the participants agreed to share the intimate details of their lives with a national television audience.

"There's something really spiritual that happens," Kyne says. "I wanted to share that."

Banyan Productions filmed every aching sob and teary smile that led to the first embrace.

"It's an opportunity," says Chris Emmanouilides, executive producer for Banyan, which produces the series. "A mother gives up a child, feels there is a hole they want to fill, a circle they want to close -- the adopted child, too."

Most involved in the televised reunions agree, saying it has broadened their lives: They can forgive the past, exult over their new-found families and finally feel complete.

"I feel needed," Kyne gushes. "I feel like I have come through a lot of things and I've survived it and now I have something to give back."

"Reunions are about the joy of coming together, not the sadness of the past," Emmanouilides says. "The intention of the show is that the viewer would watch and call that long-lost friend ... it's a show to motivate people to stay connected."

A great divide

At his house in Summerlin, three months after the first encounter with his lost family, Kyne -- a younger version of his father, Rodney "Jerry" Denny -- views the video of his reunion, wiping tears from his face.

"My mother never talked about him," he says.

A divorce between his high school sweetheart parents when he was a toddler frayed the father-son connection. Denny would carry a picture of 2-year-old Mick in his wallet for the next 53 years.

"It's like having a void in your life and you don't realize you have a void there until it starts filling up," Kyne says of the years that passed.

Banyan contacted him through an Internet site and the cameras caught him breaking down as he recounted the events leading up to the first time he would talk to his father and estranged family -- and his fear.

"I thought maybe this guy doesn't want to find out who I am," he explains. "But it was time."

A private detective hired by Kyne found Denny in Redding, Calif., in three days -- but he had to be paid a few thousand dollars before Kyne could receive his father's phone number.

Kyne finally picked up the phone and called his father, sketchy details and faded photographs his only connection.

"It was his 75th birthday that day," he recalls, smiling. "What a coincidence, huh?"

His father, suffering from advanced Parkinson's disease, let his new wife (of 40 years) talk to Kyne, letting 10 minutes pass before eventually rasping hello to his son with 53 years of pent-up emotion.

"They said this is an answer to a prayer," he says. "They never forgot me."

And never will. The Denny family, including three grown children, embraced Kyne and his wife of five years, Utthaya.

"They had talked about me all these years, it just really did a lot of healing."

The reunited family members, he says, immediately felt a connection, noticing similarities in body language, tastes and attitudes.

"When I stepped into his house, it was like coming home," he says. "This is really where I belong. There were a lot of similarities, they decorated like I would. It was perfect, very warm."

As for the TV crew that chronicled his emotional journey, Kyne says that the camera became meaningless as the intense emotions took hold. "I just needed to be with my dad," Kyne says. "It was very emotional, I want other people to be encouraged to do this."

(He is now dedicated to helping others connect with lost family or friends and can be contacted at his e-mail address, LEAHICM4@aol.com.)

Kyne's story will be told Tuesday on "Reunion."

Don't give up

"I just couldn't make it work," Las Vegan Pat Brashear recalls of her decision as a 15-year-old to give up her newborn baby, born to her in Oklahoma.

For almost a decade, every Sept. 2, Brashear placed a personal ad in the Oklahoma City newspaper asking for information on a child born on that day in 1966.

"She never thought to look there," Brashear says, shaking her head and turning to look at her only other child, younger daughter Tina Hoherz, who brings her mother a tissue.

At a young age, Hoherz found "Bgirl66" scribbled in her mother's address book and asked her about it. Her mother admitted giving up her first child for adoption. From then on, Hoherz included herself in the search for her older sister, but eventually grew skeptical.

"I thought 'It's been 30 years, if we haven't found her by now, we aren't going to find her,' " Hoherz says.

But the target of their search -- Micah Roberts -- never gave up hope of finding her birth mother and any family.

She began by sending polite, searching letters to anyone named "Patsy Ann" -- her mother's name on her birth certificate -- in and around Oklahoma City. After 16 years of constant letter writing, Roberts finally got a break when she found her mother's maiden name, McGill, in the files of the lawyer who handled the adoption.

"She found another woman named Patsy Ann McGill and the woman on the phone was rude to her," Hoherz says, carefully choosing her words to describe what her new-found sister endured. "(The woman) said not to call her again."

This defeated the previously determined Roberts.

"She didn't know what to think, if she'd found her mother or not," Hoherz recalls.

Fortunately, Roberts had already sent a letter to a final address that would yield a true connection.

The request for information about a baby girl born to a Patsy Ann McGill in 1966 would reach an aunt in Oklahoma who had helped Brashear through her difficult teenage pregnancy.

"I new from the time frame it was (Micah)," Brashear says. "I tried to call everyone in (Roberts') area right away. I was really relieved," she says, choking back tears. "I didn't know if she wanted to find me."

That, she says, is the hardest part for those looking for missing persons -- that all the love with which they approach the mission might be rejected.

Roberts has bonded with Brashear and plans to move to Las Vegas with her husband, William, to be closer to her newfound mom.

Brashear's story will be told Friday on "Reunion."

So close

When Charlene Naumec would hear the name she had bestowed on her daughter before placing her in an adoption agency, she would turn around expectantly.

"Everytime I heard 'Heather' I thought it might be her," she recalls.

At the time, she had no idea exactly how much of a possibility it was that it could have been Heather, now named Jennifer.

"She grew up not one mile away," Naumec, a waitress at the Iron Horse Cafe in Boulder Station, says. She recently moved to Las Vegas from Southern California, where she had raised her first two children for the past 30 years.

In December 1973, Naumec lost her mother, also named Heather, to cancer and was raising two small boys alone when she found out she was two months pregnant.

"I knew I couldn't give her a better life," she says. "I gave her up to the Lord and my mom and knew they were watching over her."

She thought it was fitting to name her baby girl after her mother, knowing she would give her up within days.

A search by her computer-savvy youngest son, Paul, 24 years later, would bring the small family together. Jennifer (formerly Heather) was still living in Southern California.

"She was a piece of my puzzle in my family that was not there," Naumec says.

The last piece of her family puzzle was finally put in place last August under the glare of the Las Vegas sun and the bright lights of a four-person television crew.

"They stood back and you didn't know they were there," Naumec says about the respectful TV crew, "but it was too emotional when she left. I wanted privacy for the last moment."

The two reunited again briefly last fall, as the camera crew constantly recorded their most intimate moments -- from the time they met at McCarran International Airport and throughout the sunny weekend, as they rediscovered their mother-daughter bond.

"She is just like me, it's kind of scary," Naumec says, explaining that they share the quirky dexterity to pick up items with their toes. "There's a lot of similarities. It's like finding that lost part of you."

"It has given me a different perspective. It's an intimate show," she says about the TV program, "a way of letting other people know this is possible. It's not just a dream that birth mothers and adoptees have to find each other."

Naumec's story will be told March 16 on "Reunion."

Happy endings

"They find the wholeness, the love they have been looking for and they want to share that, using their story as a springboard for others to enjoy," Emmanouilides says.

Many who have participated have gone on to help others search for lost love, encouraging them not to give up because they are proof that anything can happen.

"In a lot of ways it has helped a lot of people in Las Vegas and given them the optimism that they can search," Naumec says, "which is a good feeling."

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