It doesn’t seem fair to leave you hanging with John and Wanda’s story, but Mother didn’t learn any more for more than twenty years. It came by way of John’s second wife, Cathy, who had no particular reason to lie.

John never mentioned any of this. John got out of the army after the war but stayed in the Army Reserves for twenty-five years. He went to law school on the GI Bill, but decided to teach instead. He later became a principal and married a teacher. They both taught the children of migrant workers dividing their year between South Texas and California.

When they were teaching in California, a young man approached him, telling him he suspected John was his father. He was one of twins and had been born a Holdaway, but was told his father was killed in the war before his birth. His mother married an old boyfriend who had adopted the babies, raising them as his own.At the boy’s insistence, the two couples met. The sister had married young. John didn’t meet her.

It looked like the Wanda’s father engineered the whole train wreck story to break up the young marriage, if indeed there had ever been a marriage I couldn’t find a record of John’s and Wanda’s marriage. The young woman’s father was as long-dead, so both couples decided to let it all let it drop, not affecting their long marriages. Wondering if it could possibly be true, I searched and found the twins’ birth and marriage records for Wanda and her current husband. Indeed, there was a person by the right name, born in the right time period born to Wanda. She did have a marriage recorded shortly after the boy’s birth. Unfortunately, John and Cathy never had children.