A long journey home

By ERIN O'BRIEN
Posted 12/12/19

By ERIN O'BRIEN When you meet Ruth and Peter, there's no mistaking it - they're definitely mother and son. But for more than 70 years, they were separated by many miles - and a family secret. Billy Lowe, now Peter Binns, was not even 3 years old the last

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A long journey home

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When you meet Ruth and Peter, there’s no mistaking it – they’re definitely mother and son.

But for more than 70 years, they were separated by many miles – and a family secret.

Billy Lowe, now Peter Binns, was not even 3 years old the last time his mother, Ruth McComis, saw him. In August 2019 they were reunited in California, and earlier this month, Ruth, now 90, traveled to Rhode Island to meet more of her family.

Ruth Lowe was the third of six children, growing up with her brother and four sisters in Mattapen, Massachusetts. After the death of her father, Frank, her mother, Edith, became despondent.

“She did the best she could,“ Ruth says.

Ruth was 16 years old when an older friend suggested they take the streetcar downtown to see the sailors. In the post-World War II season of hope, Ruth and her friend were like many young women of their day. But an adventure like this would have lasting consequences.

“‘Something’s wrong with me,’ I told my mother. I didn’t feel good, and I was gaining weight. When my mother told me I was pregnant, I said, ‘What?!’”

“My mother never told me anything,” she added wistfully, “and he never came back.”

“She would hide me in the closet when people came over. My mother told me never to tell a lie. She had a priest come to the house, but she didn’t tell him about me.”

The Lowes couldn’t afford a doctor, so Edith took charge of all the prenatal care. After a hospital stay of five and a half hours, Ruth gave birth to an eight-pound son whom she named Billy, who arrived 10 days before her 17th birthday. On the birth certificate, the mother’s occupation is listed as waitress; the father’s name does not appear. Underneath is noted: Corrected 5/23.

“I never went back to school,” Ruth said.

Billy’s great-grandmother lived across the street from the church the family attended. After mass, the priest stood at the church door, and Ruth’s grandmother would look outside her window. She never knew about her great-grandson growing up right around the corner.

“My mother used to curl his hair,” Ruth smiles. “Blonde,” she recalls dreamily. The following year, however, the young mother’s life would change dramatically once again.

Son taken from her

“It was horrible the way I lost him,” Ruth says, her expression changing, shaking her head. “My sister – that’s how I lost my son. She bought me an outfit for my 18th birthday.”

With the prospect of an early celebratory birthday lunch in a new outfit, Ruth could not imagine the events that would transpire that day. “I don’t remember anything,” she says. “I woke up; some man was holding my hand, in a uniform with four stripes. He was showing me a piece of paper, in front of my face.” Ruth waved an imaginary paper in the air.

“I’m your husband!” the man in uniform informed her.

“What do you mean? I’m 18 years old!”

Thinking quickly, she told him she was going to use the bathroom. Ruth escaped, and ran home to her mother’s house. However, the man in the uniform had already been there, looking for her. “He went to my mother’s, and he made a scene. The police and social workers came. “But I don’t know this man!” she pleaded with them.

With her family on welfare, the marriage of the child’s parents in question, it was determined the child was a burden to the family, and the social workers stepped in. “The nuns took him. They just let me look at him, and then they slammed the door. This has been with me all these years.”

Ruth remarried, and settled in San Francisco.

“‘Mama, who is that baby?’ my children would ask.” A picture in her drawer was her only connection to her secret son. “I never told anybody,” Ruth said, “not even my husband.” As the years passed, Ruth went on to work as a librarian, retiring with a pension. She now owns the apartment building where she lives in San Francisco.

Billy, renamed Peter, grew up as an only child. He knew from a young age he was adopted. His family moved from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Smithfield, Rhode Island.

“My adoptive mom reminded me I was adopted when she got mad – which was often!” admits Peter, with a wink.

He has fond memories of his grandfather, Alf. “He had such values. He was stern, but lovable. He was a supervisor of the Worcester textile mills, and lived on a lake in Uxbridge. I probably still remember how to get there!” Peter adds fondly.

Peter Alfred Binns was named for his beloved grandfather, Alf.

Now residing in Cranston, Peter and his wife, Sandra, whom he met when she was 17, decided their four sons, Peter, Patrick, Alfie and Josef, would also share Alfred as their middle name.

When he was 17, Peter traveled to see the first home he remembered in Worcester. When he knocked on the door, he discovered new owners lived there. Yet he was curious about his very first home, the one he shared with mother Ruth and his grandmother Edith.

Search for his mother

In the days before Ancestry.com, answers to such musings ended in speculation. “Something was always missing,” Peter felt. Lawyers and investigators were expensive, preventing him from pursuing his past sooner.

Earlier this year, Alfie Alfred Binns of Warwick was searching the branches of his family tree on Ancestry.com. About 3,000 miles away, so was another young man named Dante. As Alfie browsed through the website, he received a message from someone in California. He hurried to tell his father. Peter’s search for his mother was closing in. “I left a voicemail, and asked if his grandmother’s maiden name was Lowe,” Peter says tentatively. Dante said he’d ask her. “I’ll be waiting by the phone,” Peter promised.

Dante responded with a photograph of himself with his grandmother, Ruth. With one look Peter said, “I just knew.” They have the same nose, perhaps the same eyebrows – and a shared history.

Alfie and Dante turned out to be first cousins.

Together with his wife, three of his sons, one daughter-in-law, and one of his grandsons, in August Peter flew to San Francisco to meet his mother, Ruth. “I wanted to surprise her,” he confided, but time was of the essence. He knew his mother would now be 90 years old.

Ruth calls it a miracle. “I never dreamed I’d see him again. Even after he was taken, I always prayed for him.” At a hotel in San Francisco, she was overwhelmed when she saw Peter and his entourage. “Am I related to all of them?” she wondered.

Peter must have felt much the same when he met his nephew Dante, and his mother’s three daughters with their families, including 26 grandchildren between them.

The similarities did not end with the physical traits. Says Peter with a smile, “We’re both in good health, and we don’t like doctors!”

Ruth’s youngest daughter, Michele Hernandez, noted her mom and brother were both dressed in yellow at their reunion in August. “He’s gentle, like her,” Michele lovingly observes. “He’s her Prince Charming.”

“I inherited more of her genes than my father’s!” Peter says decisively. Once an only child, Peter now is older brother to his three sisters, Debbie, Camellia and Michele.

At the August reunion in San Francisco, Ruth decided she wanted to see how her son Peter’s life had turned out. “She wanted to see how I lived,” says Peter. Ruth had not been back to New England after leaving Massachusetts and later, New York.

“She also wanted to meet the rest of my family,” as not all made the trip to California, Peter explains. This included one more grandson and five more great-grandchildren.

Earlier this month, Peter welcomed his mother and sister Michele to Rhode Island and was their personal tour guide. “We went to Iggy’s,” Michelle noted.

Ruth need not wonder any longer how well her son did in life. Peter has had a successful career in demolition and construction for almost 30 years.

Peter took Michele and their mother to the site of the first place he called home – 32 Mildred Ave. in Mattapen, just outside Boston. It’s now an empty lot, a space in time where a young girl named Ruth grew up in a hurry, family secrets covered shame, and a little blond-haired boy was loved by his mother and grandmother.

Peter grasps his mother’s hand. “Everything is just the future now. What was in the past, we left there.”

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