Searching for a father: Libby man finally finds answers

Over the summer of 1953, a teenage mother abandoned her 9-month-old baby, William Albert Davis – named after his father – on a bench at a bus station in Ephrata, Wash.

More than a half-century later, that baby, now a Libby man named Bill Inama, is just finally beginning to unlock secrets that could very well have been buried forever. The past three months have been a bittersweet journey as the 57-year-old has gained a new family, but has also suffered the heartache of imagining how his life could have been.

Inama doesn’t know if he was left at a bus station or a train station or even for sure if it was in the town of Ephrata. It’s also not clear how police identified him and eventually turned him over to the care of his maternal grandmother. His 96-year-old great aunt Opal, who raised him in Bellingham, Wash., since age 4, can’t recall all of the details anymore.

Last November, all Inama knew about his parents’ brief marriage and his birth and abandonment was what he could ascertain from his original birth certificate, which had to be unsealed by the court since he had been adopted, and information from his birth mother, which has been anything but forthcoming.

“I always wanted to know who my father was,” Inama said, “but I didn’t have any idea how to go about finding him.”

Inama, a grandpa of three, doesn’t categorize his childhood as an easy one. Before his adopted mom divorced her husband, he remembers running to a relative’s house for safety when the man turned violent toward her. The divorce ended those episodes, but it did not stop the kids from teasing him for being poor, for having a mom that worked at a bar and for having no father at all. His birth mother, who he had met on a few occasions growing up, never had a kind word for the mysterious man that he was named after.

A yellowed envelope dated 1959 and mailed from San Diego, Calif., to Bellingham holds a single-folded piece of aged paper with feminine handwriting penciled on both sides. The letter addressed to “Aunt Opal” and signed by Inama’s birth mother relates that she does not want her 7-year-old son back because she knows he is better off where he is. It also states her wish that no matter what happens her son is never given to his father.

Inama’s birth mother said his father resided in the San Fernando Valley. At age 19, Inama found a dozen William A. Davis’s in a California phonebook. He considered hitching a ride to California to find the man.

“I thought I could go down there and start asking questions,” Inama recalled. “Then I thought, well, maybe he doesn’t want me. You have them feelings because I was going on what little my biological mom said at the time. I had doubts that maybe he just didn’t want nothing to do with me.”

While Inama imagined his father in California, William “Bill” Davis was more likely in Springfield, Mo., or Phoenix with his second wife and their three sons – Bryan, from his wife’s previous marriage, Pete and Pat.

Davis had different trades during his sons’ childhoods. He worked at a steel mill alongside his father and then the two men had a landscaping business together in Phoenix.

Inama pages through a photo album filled with pictures he has looked at over and over again since receiving them only weeks ago.

“I really look like my grandpa,” he says, examining a photo of someone he has never met.

He points to the smiling, balding man and then removes his cap to reveal his own receding hairline. Then, he moves to the next picture.

“That’s dad, Pete – my oldest brother – and Pat,” he says.

They are all smiling family photos – a mother, a father, grandparents, brothers.

“I have pictures of him, at least,” Inama said. “You can tell they obviously had a good time – they took a lot of pictures.”

Inama had accepted having a father that didn’t want him, but the possibility that his mother kept him from a father that would have wanted him, is crushing.

“She took something away from me that I always wanted in my life,” Inama said. “I grew up without a man figure so I had to learn everything pretty much on my own.”

Last November a representative of “The Locater,” a television series that locates and reunites people, contacted Inama and his wife and said that she had found the William Albert Davis that they had been inquiring about. Once “The Locater” had his parents’ marriage license, it took less than two weeks to find his father in Springfield, Mo.

However, he had died six months earlier.

He had sons who had never known of Inama’s existence. He may have confided in his wife, but she is in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. 

It took Inama three days to build the nerve to call his half-brothers. 

“The one thing I wanted to know because I had heard bad things about my dad – I wanted to know what kind of man he was,” Inama said. “The first thing out of Pat’s mouth was, ‘He was a great dad.’ That even upset me more.”

William Patrick “Pat” Davis described his loving father and assured Inama that their dad would have been proud of him. 

“He was a tough guy, but he was an emotional kind of guy, too,” Davis said about his father. “I could see if he knew that Bill was out there and coming to meet him, I know he would have met him with open arms. I’m sure of that.”

Last month Inama and his wife flew to Missouri. They made arrangements with Davis’s wife to surprise the brothers with their visit. They arrived at 10 p.m., while Davis was on the phone with their brother, Pete.

“I did a double-take,” Davis said. “Then I told Pete, our brother’s in my kitchen.” 

They stayed up until 2 in the morning looking through photos. Six days later, Inama’s connection with his new family was so strong that he could hardly bear to leave. 

“It was emotional to leave,” Inama said. “If it wasn’t for my three grandbabies I have here, I may not have come back.”

Inama still has unanswered questions that will probably remain so. Did his dad willingly leave him? Did he ever wonder about his son or try looking for him?

“I’m sure he at least knew about me,” Inama said. “His name is on the birth certificate. I was named after him.”

Being passed along to different relatives and a name change that came with adoption would have made it nearly impossible to find him.

“I know my dad and grandparents and my mom – and they wouldn’t have had any trouble raising him,” Davis said about his newfound brother. “That’s just the kind of people that they was.”

Inama is still healing from the pain of imagining how his life could have been altered had he found his dad. His brothers, who he talks to on the phone about every other day, try to keep his spirits up.

“I said to him, you’ve got your wife and your grandkids, and that may have never been,” Davis said. “All we can do is move forward and enjoy the time on earth that we have left together. Who knows where we’ll be in the future.”

Inama plans to bring his whole family to Missouri for a visit this summer, and Davis said he won’t rule out someday moving to Libby.

Inama still mourns the loss of a father that he was so close to meeting, but he never forgets the blessing of what he did find.

“Even though I didn’t get all the answers,” Inama said, “I got two brothers.”