American Notes Families

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.

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."

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.