A Lost Child Finds Himself in Adulthood

She spent hours at the local library, poring through news clippings on schoolchildren and graduating classes. She stared at reels of microfilm in a building that sat perhaps 10 minutes from the house into which her second son had been adopted, searching for Michael Ray, a boy who did not exist.

Fix It or Shut Up

Cathy McManus used to watch Michael Reese Hoffa work -- mostly at sports -- and found herself amazed at the resilient young man he had become. As he matured, he grew closer and closer to his new family, but he never bared emotions about his old one.

"He has always been one to look forward and plan his future," McManus said. "He used to say, 'If you don't like things the way they are then fix them or shut up.' "

Reese spent years trying to fix his past, working silently to solve its mysteries. When he traveled to sports competitions throughout Kentucky, he would comb through the local phone books, looking for Lamont by skimming through the entries that began with "Chi." The task was arduous as he had no idea how to spell his former last name. Was it Chizm? Chizzum? Chism? Chisholm? He said he wrote letters to three males named Lamont who had last names resembling Chism, but got no responses.

He could not even begin to search for his birth mother. He did not know her first name.

"I just wanted to know what happened," he said. But "it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack."

The Search

Though her closest friends knew about her son Lamont, Diana Chism told none of them that she had, in essence, lost another. She did, though, relate the story to a man named Mark Watts, an attorney at her Louisville firm whom she married in 1990 at 30.

Chism, who became Diana Watts, kept several grainy, yellowed pictures of her sons in her bedroom. In one of her favorites, Reese stared at the camera with a serious, almost mournful expression. For years, she studied the droop in his eyes and the little flip at the bottom of both ears, searching for those attributes in any light-skinned black males she encountered that appeared to be his age. She once called Newsweek magazine to inquire about a young man in a photo that seemed to resemble the Reese she remembered.

"She'd been trying to find him ever since I had known her," Mark Watts said.

Mark Watts weathered the bad days that resulted from false Reese sightings. If his wife saw someone she thought was her son, she would fall into hours of melancholy. And the issue of having children, Mark and Diana Watts hashed over for years.

"I was never going to have children again," she said. "Everything that had happened was just so traumatic."

But at 38, eight years after her marriage and 25 years after the birth of Lamont, Diana Watts gave birth to her third son, Adam Sinclair Watts.