Phone booth foundling finds family
Steve Dennis’s birth certificate didn’t say where he was born or when, or to whom. It just said he was found in a telephone booth.
Two bread deliverymen had found him there early one January morning in 1954, near Lancaster, Ohio.
There was no telling how long he had been there, perhaps only a few hours. The baby was very cold to the touch, the paper reported, and so was the bottle of milk left with him in the box.
The mystery soon captivated the residents of Lancaster. In just two days, dozens inquired about adoption, and “literally scores of persons” tried to help police identify the baby.
Dennis didn’t learn about the phone booth until he was a teenager. He didn’t think he would ever find his birth parents, and for most of his life he didn’t think anything of it, either.
But that changed when his two children, 18 and 14 years old, started asking questions.
“They’re always really curious about, Dad, you know, where are you from? You know, what is your heritage?” he said from his home in Phoenix.
AFTERTHE BABY WAS GOTTEN RIDOF— MYSELF — HE DISAPPEARED.
They decided Dennis, a retired chiropractor, would submit his DNA to the website Ancestry.com to find out.
Within three months, he got an email. A first cousin had “matched” with him, the cousin said.
“He said, ‘You know, I think I know who your mother is’,” Dennis said. “‘We’ve heard throughout our lives that there was a baby that we were related to that was left in a telephone booth. It was just like this hidden secret.’”
The cousin put him in touch with his half sister, who then contacted their mother, Dennis said.
She was 85 years old, living in Baltimore and at first had a hard time remembering all the details. But slowly, Dennis said, it came back to her.
Dennis was told she gave birth at age 18 but that his father gave her an ultimatum: They could only marry if they left the baby. On a drive through Ohio from Kentucky, where Dennis was born, his birth father allegedly took the baby and left him in the phone booth.
“After the baby was gotten rid of — myself — he disappeared,” Dennis said. “Nobody knows where he went.”
Dennis said he will be travelling to Baltimore to meet his birth mother later this month and “will take whatever she gives me and leave it at that, because you can’t hassle an 85-year-old woman, of course.”