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What we do know about her is this. She was the result of my father's very first love affair. It happened during the summer after his sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin, when he was only seventeen. Robin's mother, a woman named Marilyn Baldwin, met Dad while playing as his bridge partner at a pick-up game in the Student Union. They were attracted to one another almost immediately and, after the bridge game broke up, they went out for dinner. They spent many hours talking and then, a couple of days in a torrid non-stop sexual encounter.

Dad had intended to quit school after that summer and was going to join the Army as soon as he reached the age of 18. But when Marilyn informed him that she had become pregnant from their brief romance, he returned to school and the two of them struggled with what to do next. They discussed abortion with some older friends, which was illegal at the time, but since both of them were opposed to it, Marilyn decided to have the child. Dad offered to marry her, but she refused, citing his age as the reason (she was 5 years older). Instead, she returned to her home town, Steven's Point, Wisconsin, and married her high school sweetheart and birthed Robin in March of 1955. She also asked Dad to vow to never reveal to Robin his paternity, so that she would think that Marilyn's husband was her father. Dad promised.

And so it remained for almost thirty years. However, a little over a decade ago, Dad retained a private detective...who owed a friend of Dad's for computer services and wanted to work it off...to try to find out, quietly, what had become of Robin. dad told him the whole story and asked him to honor Dad's pledge to Marilyn.

It took him two years, but he finally discovered the following, to the best of my knowledge: An aunt of Robin's had inadvertently blurted out the fact that Robin's "real" father was someone else, when Robin was only ten. When she asked her mother about it, Marilyn told her that her father was a "Jewish man from New York City." So, either Dad is not Robin's father, or, Marilyn was trying to maintain the fictional version, now slightly altered. Marilyn had already divorced the man Robin thought was her father and, along with the aunt, died of lung cancer when she was only in her late thirties or early forties. The only surviving member of Marilyn's family was her grandmother, Marilyn's mother, herself old and ailing.

The private detective, still honoring Dad's long ago promise, refused to tell him of Robin's whereabouts, revealing only that she is married, is a nurse, has no children and lives in South-Central Wisconsin somewhere. Dad asked if he would, instead, pass on a "letter of introduction" from him to Robin, containing details of the rest of Dad's children as well as an invitation to meet. This would leave the choice entirely up to Robin.

But, there was another hitch. Robin's grandmother, when she heard about this, asked the P.I. to hold off until she had passed away, and he agreed. There it has remained until this day. We assume that the elderly woman is still alive or that, at this late date, Robin wanted no part of Dad or his/her "other" family. We simply do not know.

So there it is, the capsule stories of all my brothers and sisters. I publish this last story because we, all of us, would like to finally know the truth, whatever it might be. It is hard for me to believe that if Robin is indeed my sister, that she would not wish to know something about me and the rest of her siblings...she is related to eight of us by Dad's DNA...and, this will give her a chance to do so, no matter what the P.I. finally decided to do. It's still HER choice...

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