Years ago, Dorothy Berry told her daughters about a day in 1947 when a tall, beautiful woman, carrying an 18-month-old blonde-haired girl, showed up at their Fort Ord, California home.
She’d come to see Berry’s husband, Cecil, who was in the military.
As their daughter, Donna Bullock, tells it, the woman said, ‘Berry, this is your daughter. I don’t want anything from you, but I need to find a job. I’m going to go to San Francisco and when I find a job I’ll come back and get the baby.’”
Dorothy, who was seven months pregnant with Donna at that time, cared for the baby who was nicknamed Sandi, Bullock said.
It’s unclear how long the baby was left with the Berrys, Bullock said, but the baby's mother Lillian Stewart, returned one day and said, ‘I found a job in San Francisco. I’m here to take my baby.’”
The couple never saw that baby again. But through a strange mix of circumstances, Bullock and her siblings met that baby, their half sister, for the first time this weekend in Greenville.
Saundra “Sandi” Wannemacher, a 70-year-old recent retiree from ScanSource in Greenville, was that baby. And her mother, Stewart, told her the same story about leaving her and trying to find a job in San Francisco.
But unlike most of Cecil Berry’s other children, Wannemacher lived most of her life thinking she was an only child. Then, she learned she had a half brother.
She found out about the six other siblings last year after a friend began an online search for her father’s family.
This weekend, three of Wannemacher's sisters — Bullock, Sue Berry and Pat Seesing and a brother, Bruce Berry — traveled from Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama for a first-time family reunion.
It was the culmination of a search the three sisters had been on for years was when they pulled up in Wannemacher’s driveway, together in a silver rental van.
One by one, and then as a group, they embraced, eyes moist with joy.
Absent was the awkwardness that often comes with meeting someone close for the first time.
Before actually meeting in person, they’d come to know each other in other ways since finding out about each others’ existence in late fall 2015. From that time on, they’d been connecting via phone calls, texts, and in a Facebook group.
“It’s kind of like we already knew her,” Seesing said to the agreement of her sisters.
After making their way into the home, they sat side by side — little to no space between them — on the sofa, chatting, touching, hugging.
They talked about the resemblances, the curly hair they’d inherited from their father, and how, for years, they’d searched for the baby their mother had told them about.
“Over the years, we’d heard about this beautiful blonde baby that was just a precious human being, but we didn’t know where she was,” Sue Berry said. “I’d look in magazines, look at people and see a red-headed adorable lady or a pretty girl like us and I’d (think), that must be our sister.”
They also initially thought that Wannemacher was Clint Eastwood’s girlfriend, actress Sondra Locke.
“We did some research,” Bullock said. “Her mother was a single mother, but we never thought Sondra Locke looked like us.”
“When we found out who Sandi really was, I went to my girlfriends that I’ve had for many years, they all knew about her,” Sue Berry said.
“You’ve been the topic of discussion — my son knew about you, my husband has known all about you,” she told her new oldest sister.
The shock, said Bullock, is that we all connected and how we all connected.
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