She Couldn’T Be Related, Could She? Teacher’S Sharp Eye Leads To Family Reunion

This is one of those times you shake your head at and say, “Nah, no way, couldn’t happen.”

But it did.

A high school music teacher notices the facial similarity between a female student in his class and the school’s longtime security aide he’s known only by first name - Chuck.

“Her name’s Heather,” Dave Tautkus, band director at Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, about 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, told Chuck one day. “I swear she could pass for your daughter.”

The 62-year-old security aide laughed. “How about my granddaughter instead?” he joked. “What’s her last name?”

“Perry,” Tautkus said.

The security aide blinked. His last name was Perry.

“You don’t by any chance know her father’s first name, do you?” Perry asked.

As a matter of fact he did, Tautkus said. They knew each other from the Masons. His first name was Charles.

Chuck. Charles. Nah, it couldn’t be, could it, Chuck Perry thought? This couldn’t be my son. She couldn’t be my granddaughter.

“When I got home that night, I didn’t know what to do,” Chuck Perry said Friday. “It had been 35 years since I had last seen my son. He was 5 when his mother and I divorced.

“Unfortunately, it had been a pretty bitter, bad one,” he said. “What if I called him up now, and he didn’t want to have anything to do with me?”

Perry kept looking down at the phone number Tautkus had given him, finally reaching for the phone. There was only one way to find out, he knew. He dialed the number and got an answering machine.

“Charles Perry, this is Charles Perry, too,” he said into the machine. “Would you please call me back, it’s important. I think there’s a chance we may have something more than the same name in common.”

When he got home later, the younger Charles Perry listened to the message on his answering machine, sensing something big was about to happen in his life. Something he had been hoping for since he was a young boy. He dialed the number.

“I asked him two questions when he called back,” Chuck Perry said. “His mother’s name, and the names of his two sisters. They were both right.”

The men let silence hang on the line for a few seconds before Chuck finally spoke up.

“Do you know who this is?” he asked.

“My father?” Charles Perry said.

“Yeah, your father.”

They’re a real family now, Heather Perry said. No more wondering, no more hoping her dad and the grandfather she never knew would have the chance to be father and son again. They have it.

It is pretty wonderful and strange, her dad agrees. For the last seven years, he’s been living less than two miles away from his father, and their paths never crossed.

“We’re working on a great relationship now,” said Charles Perry, a machinist. “Catching up on a lot of lost time together as a family.”

Chuck Perry said not a day has gone by in his life since the divorce that he didn’t think of his kids - his son, Charles, and the two daughters he’s also re-establishing himself with now.

When divorce gets ugly, people get hurt and separated. His family was no different, he said.

“The best part for me has been Heather,” Chuck Perry said. “Seeing her every day around the campus, and thinking, There goes my granddaughter. I’m a very lucky man.”

Thanks to a high school band director who looked at a girl in his class one day and thought to himself she could be the daughter of the campus security aide.

She wasn’t. She was the granddaughter.

It’s one of those stories you shake your head at and say, “Nah, no way, couldn’t happen.”

But it did.