Bob Scofield was working on restoring a 1966 Mercedes at his home near Sacramento, Calif., his hands covered with grease, when he received the call he'd been anticipating for 50 years.
The woman phoning from Atlanta told him her name was Kathy Christensen. That she was born Sept. 16, 1949, in Fresno, Calif. "And," she said, "I think I may be your daughter."
He knew, from the clues she gave, that she was right. "I really came apart," he said.
Scofield, 81, was a teenager in 1948 when his then-girlfriend became pregnant. Under pressure from their disappointed families, the couple gave their baby up for adoption and eventually went their separate ways. The reunion with that baby, more than 50 years later, was remarkable enough.
What happened next for Scofield, a hobbyist trumpeter, and Christensen, an avocational singer, is the stuff of musicals and make-believe. They discovered that they both loved the American songbook, teamed up as a duo, made beautiful music together and recorded a compact disc of jazz standards, "Past and Present," that is doing nicely on CD Baby.
"To have Dad in a chair right there and I've got the microphone here and he's that close to me and to see how easy it was to sing and play together ... it's kind of unbelievable," Christensen said.
"I’ll tell you what," Scofield added, "it was something I had never dreamed of being able to do in my life."
Christensen, 61, of the Lake Claire area near Decatur, has always been a librarian with the heart of an artist. She is semi-retired after 26 years in the reference department at CNN, though she still consults with PBS on a project that involves archiving public radio and television material. She also teaches exercise and yoga classes.
As a child she sang frequently at church and her life with her adoptive parents was a happy one, though marked by loss. When she was 4 years old her adoptive father, Dale Christensen, came home from one of his plumbing jobs and complained of feeling tired. Within a week he was dead of leukemia. He may have contracted it during World War II as a serviceman engaged in the occupation of Hiroshima after the atomic bombing.
Her adoptive mother, Ruby, was left with a 4-year-old daughter and her 1-year-old sister, Karen, also adopted, and a much older biological son, Chris. Ruby raised Kathy and her two siblings on her own in the farming country of the San Joaquin valley, working in a Del Monte peach cannery and at a Sun Maid raisin plant. She never remarried.
"I never had this intense desire to find my birth parents," Christensen said. "Once you open a door, anything could be on the other side of it."
But when Ruby, now 91, encouraged Christensen to look, she did, hiring an investigator to help.
Soon Christensen had a telephone number and a name, Joann Knapp. But making that call to her birth mother was frightening. She didn't know if the news would be welcome.
"It was like a grenade going over the wires from here to California," she said.
To her relief, she was received well. Though Knapp had suffered a stroke and felt too physically and emotionally fragile to meet in person, they had many conversations. And Christensen heard some clues that helped lead her to her father.
Knapp never revealed her father's name, but she learned that he was from the central coast, that he probably went to California Polytechnic, that he played in the jazz band and that he studied horticulture. A trip to Cal Poly's library in San Luis Obispo yielded the yearbook from 1953 with Bob Scofield's picture in it.
At her first meeting with Scofield, who was retired from the sod business, Christensen brought along a compact disc of recordings she made of herself singing songs she loved. One of them was "When I Fall in Love," with the lyric, "When I fall in love it will be completely, or I'll never fall in love."
Years later Scofield made the trip east in his motor home and they found themselves at producer Trammell Starks' Alpharetta studio, recording that same song and falling in love completely.
"They had a really great rapport," said Starks, "as if they'd been together all their lives. It was just a wonderful thing to watch."
This Father's Day Christensen and Scofield will speak on the phone and they will probably play their record. And fall in love again.
To hear songs from "Past and Present," go to www.cdbaby.com/cd/kathybob
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