The Right Call
Yuman decides to answer phone call from stranger; it leads to a journey of self-discovery and a meeting with her long-lost sister
At the height of the recent presidential campaign Carolyn Stallworth received a phone call that she initially wanted to ignore. But she answered anyway, and she’s glad she did because that call would lead to the revelation of who she is, where she came from and produce a reunion her with a sibling she never knew until she neared her mid-70s.
It was August 24, 2016, when a woman who was searching for her own answers concerning her family called her.
“I usually don’t answer a call from someone I don’t know during the election season, but for some reason I answered a call from a woman who lives in Fresno, California,” Stallworth said.
The woman, Stacy Hawkins, was searching for her father because she too, like Stallworth, was adopted.
“She had two names, and wanted a DNA test on the one who lives in Yuma, and wondered if I knew him, as he had a friend by the last name Stallworth,” she said. “I told her I was also adopted and shared my story with her.”
Stallworth’s own story began on the day Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941.
“My dad, Jesse Linder, was working in a gas station in Phoenix,” Stallworth said. “My mother, Florence Marie Olsen, happened to walk by and heard his radio announcing the bombing, and asked
if she could come in and listen. So she did, they went to dinner, possibly got a room, and I was conceived.”
“My dad was married at the time, so the relationship was just a day or two, as he was sent to Hawaii for the war,” she added. “He was career Army.”
Following the discovery of her pregnancy, her mother “somehow became connected with the Red Cross, who then notified the Army,” Stallworth said. The Army then contacted her dad in Hawaii, and he signed the adoption papers that her mother sent to him.
“Needless to say, he was quite shocked. He signed the papers, and sometime after that he received a letter from my mother, requesting him not to sign the papers, as she wanted to keep the baby (me).”
By that time, Stallworth said, it was too late, and she was born Sept. 10, 1942, nine months and three days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Stallworth was adopted 20 days later by Virginia and Hal Hulsey.
Twenty years later, in 1962, Stallworth was working in Yuma for an attorney, and she had a friend who was a clerk at the Arizona Supreme Court.
“Birth records are more available now than they were then,” Stallworth said. “Then, it was impossible to open them. The attorney contacted him (the clerk), asking that he sneak into my birth records and find out who my parents were. Reluctantly he did, and provided me with the names of my biological parents.”
While at a friend’s house that same year, Stallworth said she found a phone number for Jesse Linder in Phoenix and called him.
“I can’t believe I did that,” she added.
Stallworth then asked Linder if he could have had a child born in 1942.
“He said he could, and that he would call me later. He was still married to the same woman. My friend had advised me to use a fake name, which I did — Ann.”
Following the call, Stallworth’s father sent her a letter, which she still has to this day. The letter was intended to ensure that Stallworth had informed her adoptive parents that she had contacted him.
“He felt it was only fair to them,” Stallworth said.
She noted that she did not tell her adoptive parents at the time because she knew “they would be upset.”
Stallworth made arrangements to meet her biological father in the latter part of 1962 or the early part of 1963 in Long Beach, Calif., because Linder was stationed in San Pedro, Calif., at the time.
“So I drove to Long Beach and I met my dad at the prearranged place, an ocean park in Long Beach. We had lunch, and I spent the afternoon with him. He was very nice, we had a wonderful day, but he didn’t want any further contact because of his wife.”
It was from her biological father that Stallworth learned the story of how he met her biological mother.
After returning to Yuma, she told her adoptive parents of her quest.
“They were both very upset and said that was not my father ... This was very strange, because Daddy was adopted.”
Stallworth explained that she refers to her adoptive dad as “Daddy.”
“He was my daddy and no one will ever take his place,” she stressed. “But, because of their reaction, I had a little doubt in my mind that Jesse Linder was my dad.”
Between the years of 1962 and 2016, Stallworth said she made many attempts to find her mother.
“The only success I had was in 1995. Arizona had initiated a program whereby if you filed a petition seeking your biological parents, they were then contacted by a mediator, and if they wished contact, we could be put in touch.”
Stallworth was then contacted by the mediator, who informed her that her father, Linder, had died in 1993 and that her mother did not want contact.
“Needless to say, that was very discouraging news.”
Fast forward to 2016, Stallworth said that after she told Hawkins — who was searching for her own father — of her story, she decided to help her find her family members.
“We talked for three hours. She is an expert at finding people and tracing their bloodlines, and wanted to hear my story and see what she could do. So, over the next four days, she found the Linder family and the Olsen family, and this is how I was able to find out who I was and know that I have a halfsister and half-brother,” Stallworth said.
Her half-sister from her father’s side of the family, Pat Bennett, lived in Tucson, and her half-brother from her mother’s side of the family, Greg Geffe, lives in Indiana.
“I called my sister, Pat Bennett, in Tucson, and we talked for three hours,” she said. “She is just great and we have so many things in common.”
About six days later she met her sister after Bennett ventured to Yuma and stayed for two days to get acquainted with Stallworth. Bennett also met Stallworth’s family and friends.
“I have also talked to my brother Greg several times and we can’t believe we are siblings. He was an only child, as was Pat.”
After speaking with Bennett, Stallworth found that she had been searching for a long-lost sibling.
“Pat has also been looking for me. On the internet she called me her Missing Linder,” Stallworth said. “When I first called her I said ‘I am your Missing Linder!’ She remembered her mother telling her about the call from the Arizona mediator in 1995, looking for my dad, who died in 1993.”
From that information, Stallworth said she felt that no DNA test was needed. She learned that she is of half-Scandinavian on her mother’s side, and half-German and half-English on her father’s side.
“I was always an inquisitive person,” Stallworth said. “I can remember filling out forms in school of your heritage and I didn’t know what my heritage was and that always bothered me. I put down what my adoptive mom and dad were because that’s all I knew but I wanted to know what mine were.”
Although she said she had a good life with her adoptive parents, Stallworth wanted to know more about her lineage, as well as meet more members of her family.
“I was happy with my life, I just always had to know. I think it’s amazing that it was so late in life that we found each other. I knew my biological parents were probably dead and so I just resigned myself to thinking there was just no chance.”
Before she met Bennett, Stallworth said she had “no actual proof and never was 100 percent sure” that Linder was her biological father.
Stallworth’s connection with her new-found sibling, however, would be short-lived. A few months after the two found each other, Stallworth said she received a call from Bennett’s son informing her that her sister died of a heart attack.
“To say I was shocked is an understatement. So many emotions running through my mind. I had just found her three and a half months ago, and now she’s gone? She was my sister and she can’t be gone.”
Stallworth said the bond between her and Bennett was “immediate.”
In a piece that was written before her death, Bennett relayed her part of the story.
“In the mid-sixties, I became aware that I probably had a half-sister out there,” Bennett wrote. “When I was in the hospital having my only son, my mother got a call from a young lady who said she was ‘Ann’ and was calling from Yuma. She wanted to talk to my dad, Jesse Linder.”
Bennett’s piece explained that her father was stationed in San Pedro, Calif., but was in Phoenix at the time.
“Apparently, he arranged to be there for the birth of my son,” she wrote. “When he got home that night, my mother gave him the message that ‘Ann’ had called and Dad said in his roughest voice, ‘I’ll take care of that!’”
Bennett wrote that was the last she and her mother heard of the issue until her father died in 1993.
“Then, my stepmother received a call from someone asking so speak to Jesse Linder, and she told the caller he had died. The caller said he was doing genealogy, and she gave him my phone number and begged him to call me.”
Though Bennett never got the call from the man, she made her own attempts at finding her sibling.
She wrote: “In the meantime, I put up a page on my website, trying to find ‘My Missing Linder.’ Fifty years later a woman named Stacy Hawkins from Fresno, California called my sister Carolyn in Yuma one night in August 2016 during the election madness.”
After searching for the name Linder online, Hawkins found Bennett’s “Missing Linder” page.
Bennett wrote: “She read what I had written on there, which mentioned Ann from Yuma calling, and Carolyn realized this was the connection she had searched for for 56 years. She didn’t know about me, but I always knew about her.”
When she met her sister, Bennett said she found that the two not only looked alike, but acted alike as well.
“And the best part of it is, we like each other. We’ve seen each other four times now and plan on many more,” Bennett wrote.
Stallworth said she and her sister wanted to share their story about finding familial companionship unexpectedly late in life.
“We became sisters in the true sense of the word. I loved her, and she’s not here. She visited Yuma two more times, and my grandson Luke and I traveled to Tucson and spent the weekend with her and met her husband and her good friends.”
“Although she’s gone, I will always be grateful for the short time we had together,” Stallworth added. “It was a closing to the question I had all my lifewho am I? Now I know.”