Decades Later, Sick, Brother Rejoins Family Twists, Turns In Story Of Man, 66, Back Home For Christmas

For the first time in more than 40 years, Robert Ball is spending Christmas with his family.

Ball, 66, lived the life of a drifter. His sisters and brother-in-law tracked him for decades. Several times they came close, but always missed him by a few miles or a few days.

Ball didn’t want to be found. He wanted nothing to do with the misery he had run away from as a young man.

Until last October. Ball was lying on a stretcher in Sacred Heart Medical Center’s emergency room, reeling from his second stroke. He realized he was dying and for the first time in almost a half-century, he longed to see his sisters and mother. He asked a social worker to start looking for them.

At the same time, Ball’s brother-in-law was 300 miles away in Nampa, Idaho, caring for his depressed wife and her ailing mother. His mind wandered to his wife’s baby brother, the man he hired as a gandy dancer for his crew at the Union Pacific Railroad in the late 1940s.

Harold Anderson had tried several times to help his wife find her lost brother. They stopped at soup kitchens and county jails. They wrote letters to him in care of the Social Security Administration.

Anderson sat down and wrote out another letter, signing his wife’s name and mailing it to the Social Security office.

When Ball surprised his doctors and recovered enough to return to his apartment at The Delaney, a low-income facility run by Catholic Charities, the letter was waiting. He called the phone number and a few days later bought a bus ticket to Boise for a visit.

At first the family made plans to move Ball to Nampa next spring. But he suffers from emphysema and his mother, Myrtle Butterworth, is 96.

He moved in for good on Friday.

“This could be his last Christmas, this could be Mom’s last Christmas,” said his sister, Barbara Anderson. “We just wanted to get everybody back together while we still could.”

His mother’s pain

Ball can’t say for sure why he dropped out of life 40-some years ago.

“I just didn’t want to talk to anybody anymore.”

He does give a few clues. Whenever Ball describes his childhood, he brings up his family’s isolation. His mother and father were both estranged from their families. There were no grandparents, no aunts and uncles, no cousins. Only poverty and hardship.

And lots of secrets. As a teenager, Ball learned that his mother had been previously married, that he had older brothers he never met and that one of his sisters, Elsie, was only a half-sister.

“Things were just too painful for her to speak about,” Elsie Beninato said of her mother. “I didn’t find out who my father was until I sent for my birth certificate.”

Once the secrets began to unfold, there was no stopping them. The children learned about their mom’s first husband, and his gambling habit. They heard how their mother abandoned that man and her two oldest children, taking only the baby in search of a new life.

The rest of the story, the siblings had experienced firsthand. Their mother’s new husband was no better, financially. He had a penchant for jobs that paid little money, which forced their mother to work long hours as well.

“They existed, they didn’t live,” Harold Anderson said of his wife’s family.

Coming of age

Ball never graduated from high school. When his sister Barbara married a railroad man, he convinced his new brother-in-law to hire him. Harold Anderson was the big brother Ball never had.

“I was very fond of him,” Anderson said.

Ball served in the Army for several years, then returned to work with Anderson. Things began to fall apart when Ball was about 25 years old.

Anderson was transferred to another city. Eventually Ball was promoted and transferred, but he balked at the responsibility.

“There was too much pressure on him,” Anderson said. “Too many things were happening at once.”

Ball and Anderson’s sister had fallen in love. Her father hated Ball, mistaking his shy personality for being lazy and slow, Anderson said. He refused to let his daughter marry Ball.

Faced with being separated from the woman he loved, a new job and a new town, Ball abruptly quit and moved back to California. He worked in fruit orchards for several years, but gradually drifted away.

Living outdoors, Ball found the freedom he wanted. He traveled the country, “Denver, Salt Lake City, Detroit and a zillion places between there I can’t even remember,” he said.

For entertainment, he drank with other transients and by himself; Jim Beam when he could afford it, beer and cheap wine otherwise.

“I really liked the life,” he said. “I could get up and build a fire, make my own coffee and there was no one around.”

He came to Spokane in 1980. Too old to get work, he relied increasingly on charity, getting meals from the House of Charity and the Union Gospel Mission.

In 1990 he had his first stroke while he was at the House of Charity. He agreed to move into The Delaney Apartments, which houses many former transients.

An unconditional friend

When DeeDee Lowry-Pembleton started her new job as social worker at The Delaney in 1994, everyone warned her to steer clear of Ball.

“They said he was very anti-social, that he would yell at you or just ignore you if you tried to talk to him,” she said.

So for months, she walked a wide path around Ball. Then one day, Ball was walking past her office and noticed a quote taped on the door: “I’ve gone out to find myself,” it said. “If I should show up while I’m out, keep me here until I get back.”

Ball laughed so hard he had to come in and sit down, Lowry-Pembleton said. She copied the quote for him and he attached it to his door with a Band-Aid.

Their friendship blossomed. Ball would stop by and share jokes with Lowry-Pembleton. When he was hospitalized, she visited him almost daily. When he got well he would bring her small gifts like a bowl of cherries or a pomegranate.

“I’m a pretty spiritual person, and I’ve always believed this job came to me by divine intervention,” she said. “I know that Robert couldn’t have gone home unless he had learned to relate to other people again.”

She drove him to the hospital during his most recent stroke. She was with him the moment he realized he was dying, the moment he asked that she track down his family.

Home again

Myrtle Butterworth kept asking her daughter, “Is it true we found Robert, or was that just a dream?”

“It’s so incredible that someone could be lost, just lost, for so long,” said his sister, Barbara. “To have him back, we still don’t realize it’s true.”

While Ball is nonchalant about the reunion - “That’s as good a place as any to die”- Anderson is reflective.

“I think that now is the right time, that Robert needed to be found,” Anderson said. “And that’s because even Robert needs somebody.

“It’s going to be a nice Christmas. It’s the first Christmas in a long time that we don’t have to say, ‘I wish we knew where Robert was.”’

, DataTimes