A number of weeks ago, I heard from a new reader who had encountered Second Watch for the first time. It turns out that in real life he had been one of Doug Davis’s roommates at West Point back in the sixties. As a result of that interaction, a case of mistaken identity sixty years in the making has now been corrected.

Each week after the blog posts, I read ALL comments. I may not respond to all of them, but I do read them. Last week one of the commenters asked if it was possible that another blog reader had attended school in Calgary back in the sixties. I happened to know that the second woman had indeed spent time growing up in Calgary, so over the weekend I sent both women the following email:

Once upon a time, I had a friend named Donna Lee Angeleri. The Angeleris lived up the street from us on Yuma Trail in Bisbee, Arizona. There were seven kids in their family and seven in ours, so when we paired off by age, Donna and I were a pair.

Mr. Angeleri worked for the mines but lounged around the house in what I’ve since learned is often called a “wife-beater” undershirt. And, although I never knew it at the time, he was true to form.

Every year, Phelps Dodge shut down the mines for two weeks and everybody went on vacation. One year the Angeleris left town for shut down and never returned.

I missed Donna dearly, and eventually I started looking for her. Decades later, I dedicated Web of Evil, the second Ali Reynolds book, to Donna in hopes of finding her. The dedication reads like this: For Donna A., the last missing piece of my childhood. I’ve been looking for you for years. That worked. Months later someone put us in touch.

Sometime in the early 2000s, Donna called me and we spoke on the phone for the better part of an hour. During that call she told me that her mother had been the victim of domestic violence. When they left Bisbee, Mrs. Angeleri and her kids been forced to live for a time in an aunt’s garage in southern California. Mrs. Angleri was a good Catholic who never divorced her husband. Years later, when her he was dying, she took him in and cared for him until the end.

Donna grew up, married, and got a good job working for Motorola in Phoenix. She told me she was surprised to learn that she had a friend from Bisbee who had searched for her for decades because she didn’t believe anyone from back would even remember her. Nonetheless, she made it clear that she had no desire to resume our friendship because she didn’t want to revisit all those bad old times. I’ve abided by her wishes. I deleted her phone number and have made no effort to be back in touch.

After the Angeleris left town, their house eventually sold, and two years later a family named Conway moved into it. They had two kids—Diana who was a year older than I was, and Joey who was the same age as my brother, Arlan.

For backwater Bisbee, the Conways were out there. The whole family rode bicycles. In Bisbee, bicycles were for kids not grownups. And the kids called their parents Joe and Sally rather than Mom and Dad. Diana played the piano, practicing for at least an hour every day. Nonetheless, she and I quickly bonded. We both loved reading, and we made weekly treks to the Greenway School Library—which was open one day a week during the summers—hauling books back and forth in the Busk family’s Radio Flyer wagon.

Mr. Conway had been hired as an announcer at the local radio station. Unfortunately, his job lasted for only two short months. At the end of the summer they left town, moving on to California, but Diana and I stayed in touch as pen-pals. The summer before I started high school, I took a train from Tucson to LA and spent a week with Diana and her family at their home in Sherman Oaks. We continued to correspond all through college, but after that, we lost touch.

In the early eighties I began looking for Diana in earnest—to no avail. It was as though she had vanished into thin air, and that’s when I wrote the following poem, hoping that someone who knew Diana might read it and put us back in touch.

Maiden Names
for
Diana Conway from Judy Busk

We were young girls together,
Eleven or twelve at most,
Yet our conversations soared to galaxies afar.
We carried books by wagonload,
Dug for fossils, climbed a rock or two
And swore that they were mountains.
We lost each other later in a maze
Of married names that easily removed all trace
Of those two friends together.
I think of you, Diana, and I know
Our paths must be in parallel.
I only hope someday they’ll cross again.

That didn’t happen, so a few years later, I tried again. While writing the first Walker Family book, Hour of the Hunter, the main character was named Diana in honor of my long-ago friend, and part of the dedication said, “… to Diana Conway, wherever she is.”

Eleven years later, that dedication mention finally paid off. While attending Left Coast Crime in Anchorage in 2001, I met a woman who held up a copy of Hour of the Hunter and demanded, “Who’s the Diana Conway in this book?” I explained that Diana was a long lost childhood friend. “Well,” the woman told me, “I know someone named Diana Conway, and she lives right here in Anchorage.”

Minutes later, I was speaking on the phone—well, blubbering rather than speaking—to my long-lost friend. Diana had attended seventeen schools in the course of grade school and high school. I had attended exactly two. She was a bit taken aback to hear from me because she hadn’t been searching for me in the same way I had been for her, but just like that, our long-interrupted friendship was back on a penpal track and stayed that way until the middle of the pandemic. After that we lost touch once more, and I’m sorry about that.

Once we reconnected I was thrilled to learn Diana’s and my lives really were in parallel because she
also became a writer. She wrote reading comprehension essays for the annual achievement tests all kids had to endure back in the day. She also wrote a weekly column for an Anchorage newspaper.

Given all this you can see how having one of my blog readers reach out to another in search of a long-lost friend really touched me. I hope the two of you have the same kind of joy in reconnecting that I found with both Donna and Diana.

Regards,

JAJance

That was what I wrote over the weekend. I’m writing this on Monday morning, and I’m thrilled to report that those two friends, following a long mixup over married names, are now back in touch with each other!

I’m counting it as a blog miracle.