Interview with Bob Bryntwick

Bob Bryntwick grew up in a home where six infant siblings were sold into Montreal’s black market baby ring. More than 60 years later, Bob, the siblings he grew up with, and the adopted siblings were all re-connected when they supplied DNA samples to ancestry.com and 23andMe.

Watch: https://youtu.be/S67TtPu7zUs

Unedited Transcript.

Jim Allan: It's not every day that I get to talk to someone who had their story in the Washington Post, but I do today. Welcome, Bob Bryntwick.

Bob Bryntwick: Thank you, Jim.

Jim Allan: Well, thanks for doing this, first of all. It's quite the story, so let's just get it all out there. So this is my version of things. In a story entitled DNA Doesn't Lie, People Lie. Right. You found out through modern DNA testing, first of all, that the person who you thought was your father actually sold several infant children that your mother delivered to adoptive families.

Bob Bryntwick: No, I didn't find it out through DNA. I was actually there when he was selling them off. I was the oldest child, so I knew.

Jim Allan: You knew at the time, but you kind of knew or you didn't know? You knew.

Bob Bryntwick: I knew, yeah.

Jim Allan: You knew, okay. I knew he was selling them off, and as they came out, he was basically selling them off.

Bob Bryntwick: You knew your mom had a baby every year for 10, 11 years or whatever. They were always at home, pretty much every single one of them was home births. And I was there for, I mean, I'm a young child and I'm hearing my mother screaming either on the main floor or second floor, depending upon where we were. That was something you have to remember.

Jim Allan: You were a child yourself. You were five, six, seven, eight, nine years old kind of thing.

Bob Bryntwick: Yes. I mean, obviously when I was two or three, they were coming out every year. So when I was two or three or four, I didn't really know. I knew they'd just disappeared.

Jim Allan: This was just normal for you.

Bob Bryntwick: I had no recollection of any of them until I was probably about four or five.

Jim Allan: Okay. Some of the babies stayed and you grew up with them and some of them did not. Is that fair to say?

Bob Bryntwick: Yes. My sister, she's now the eldest in her full family, full Sib family, Barbara. She was the first born from Mike Mitchell and she stayed and my mother I think had every intention to just have a family. She liked to have children. Her mother had a lot of children and she wanted to have a lot of children for some reason, even though she couldn't afford it. Then all of a sudden, they kept on disappearing after Barbara. I believe the reason was because the one right after Barbara was a twin actually, Sharon had a twin sister. That became overwhelming for my mother. It was around that time that my mother actually reached back to her family, her oldest sister, Catherine, and asked her to send her oldest daughter, Sophie, to and help out with the kids. I think that's when all of a sudden the selling off the babies in the baby market back in Montreal started happening.

Jim Allan:  I want to point out that it wasn't illegal to do this in the 50s just to put up a baby for essentially sell a child. In Canada or the United States, the unusual part of this story is there's multiple children from the same parent, same mother, and what the article goes into a lot of depth about this, this is post-war, post-World War II, so everyone's, there's pressure on a lot of people to have babies. There's actually somewhat, if maybe people can't have children for whatever reason, they don't have their own children, but there's a there is actually a lot of extra value in these particular children because Mike was Jewish, is that correct?

Bob Bryntwick: Yes.

Jim Allan: So your mother, Anne was not Jewish, but Mike was.

Bob Bryntwick: That's right. So, or they had to, quote unquote, look Jewish or whatever. They had to fake it, basically. My mother never went to any of these meetings with the lawyer and the whoever had to arrange for these adoptions. So I think Mike learned from his mistakes because the very first adoption he put up was Sharon, and he ended up putting Anne Bryntwick as the mother, and this caused a problem, I think, because you weren't allowed to adopt. If you're a Jewish couple, you have to adopt Jewish babies and you adopt a non, and the Jewish baby is only Jewish because of the mother. That's how they count Jewishness is based upon the mother. And of course, Anne Bryntwick didn't sound like a Jewish name, and I think that was the issue. And the very next adoption, I think, I forget who it was, I think it was Rain. I believe she was, her mother was named as a Jewish mother, and it happened to be, I think, Mike Mitchell's mother's name. I'm not quite sure, but I think that's where, well, Reese did all the research so she should know. So that's basically how he kind of sharpened up his act and said, okay, well, we'll have to put in a Jewish name as a mother. And he never put himself in as a father, I don't think. I don't think they cared. They just needed to know that the mother was Jewish.

Jim Allan: We have some time, so I just want to kind of paint a bit of a picture here. So you're growing up in Quebec, in Montreal?

Bob Bryntwick: Yes.

Jim Allan: In the 50s and 60s?

Bob Bryntwick: Yes.

Jim Allan: So describe your mother for me.

Bob Bryntwick: She likely had 11 children in total. But I think it was probably 13 or 14 in total.

Jim Allan: So tell me about your mom.

Bob Bryntwick: I thought she was a very nice woman. To me, she was really good. She kept a very neat house and gave us a lot of sense of pride in who we were and our surroundings, even though they were very poor. Had a sense of pride for herself as well. Did a lot of cooking and cleaning and sewing. She was very good with the sewing machine. She never worked outside the family, so she never brought in any revenue. But she was a very diligent mother, did well with the kids, was a good disciplinarian, so you couldn't talk back to her because she'd, back in those days, give you a slap, and usually it crossed the bump. So very, pretty nice, nice lady, and I loved her as a mother. She didn't really have that kind of relationship with my sister, Barbara. But other than that, she was very loving to pretty much everyone else in the family.

Jim Allan: Now, as you look back, you didn't have a lot of money. So what did you think at the time?

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah, we were in a very poor neighborhood. So most of the people that are around us probably had a little bit more coming in. I mean, they got toys for Christmas, which we never did, and a whole bunch of stuff. But at least we were well fed. And I just thought this was a normal situation. I was a little bit embarrassed when things became, when I began to understand that being a bastard in this society, because I basically got labeled as one, I forget how.

Jim Allan: So you're essentially growing up where there's no father in the home.

Bob Bryntwick: No father, and I knew that my father, or who I thought was my father, wasn't married to my mother. So that was a little embarrassing. And there were secrets that you wanted to keep about the family, about the fact that my mother kept on having children and they kept on disappearing. That was something that you had to keep kind of a secret. There were some secrets in the family that I knew were unusual.

Jim Allan: Right. So again, I'm just trying to paint a picture here. So tell me about the man you always thought was your father.

Bob Bryntwick: Mike was a very tall guy. He was about six foot two. Very fancy dresser. Always came in with, came to visit us in a black Cadillac. He loved Cadillacs and always brand new and all that kind of stuff. Never found out where the, where, you know, how he enjoyed his lifestyle and what he did for a living. Even now, I don't think even his kids know what he did for a living. But I think he was in a political system in Montreal and I don't know what he was doing there, but that's what he was doing.

Jim Allan: But he never actually lived with you as a family or anything.

Bob Bryntwick: No.

Jim Allan: You just, you thought he was your father. Everyone thought he was a father.

Bob Bryntwick: They told me he was my father, yeah. So he- My mother and my brother.

Jim Allan: So he would drop by a couple of times a year?

Bob Bryntwick: No, no. Oh, more frequently.

Jim Allan: Oh, but he just didn't live with you, but he was there.

Bob Bryntwick: Every couple of weeks or so, he would and sometimes he would take us out and we'd go riding in his big fancy car and out to the, out to the suburbs somewhere. And I think we had a few picnics a couple of times with my mother and the kids. And then he would, he would stay the weekend and then he would disappear and he'd be off for about a couple of weeks. And then he'd come back again. So he was a fairly frequent visitor to the family.

Jim Allan: So you had a relationship with him then?

Bob Bryntwick: No, he actually never started a relationship with me.

Jim Allan: But you saw him a lot?

Bob Bryntwick: I saw him a lot, but the conversations, et cetera, were always with my mother and my older brother.

Jim Allan: So you think he deliberately didn't have, didn't want to make a connection with the children that were in the house?

Bob Bryntwick: I think so. I do believe so. He made a little bit better of a connection, I think, to Barbara. He would, you know, do more with her. I think he knew that I wasn't his son, but I didn't know that until much, much later.

Jim Allan: Right, okay.

Bob Bryntwick: But yeah, he never really wanted a relationship with me, but he had a fairly decent relationship with my mother and my older brother.

Jim Allan: So in the article, you say this about your mother. Every year, year and a half, she was having a baby. The newborn children were always gone after a few days or weeks. No one explained what happened to them. Now, your mother, Anne, in the article again, it said, you know, every once in a while she had seemingly bouts of... This weighed heavily on her, I gather.

Bob Bryntwick: I didn't know why it weighed heavily on her. All I knew is that...

Jim Allan: Being a child, you know.

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah, you know, I had no idea. All I know that I remember when I was about four or five and my sister, my younger sister Barbara, was about, I guess, four. We were about a year and a half apart. We heard our mother wailing like crazy downstairs. We thought she was going crazy. And we just, I grabbed her and we decided to hide in the closet until all the noise died down. And she had been, every now and again, she would go into this grief thing or whatever that was. It was quite sad. But I had no idea. I never even connected the two together with, oh, she had just had a birth or whatever. All I know is that every now and again we had this issue with my mother having this strong emotional reaction to something that would cause us to be very concerned.

Jim Allan: This cycle of events just sort of ended when you were about nine. It ended in a very particular way.

Bob Bryntwick: What had happened was Michael came along. He was my youngest brother at that particular point. He was eight years younger than me. And she wanted Michael. So she wanted to keep Michael. And there was some discussion about that. I don't think Mike Mitchell was very pleased. But my brother had quit going to high school in grade 10. And he could have gone to grade 11, but he decided to start earning some money for the family. So that made us a little bit more independent from this money that was coming in from the kids. We weren't getting a lot of money for the children. He was getting probably about $10,000 a piece I think from his scheme. But we were getting a small amount. And that wasn't enough to really do anything for us. And my brother quit, went to work at Dusky's Hardware in Montreal, and then could afford it. So my mother decided that she can now afford to keep her kids. So she had Michael. And then right after a year later, she had, we called him Richard, although he's now known as Bram. And Mike at that particular point refused to let her keep Richard. And there was a big argument about this. He finally took Richard away from us. And that was the last straw for my mother. And there was a moment when my brother was telling me that my mother was going to go out for a bit because Mike was coming over. And they were going to end their relationship.

Jim Allan:  I guess she wanted to keep Richard.

Bob Bryntwick: She wanted to keep Richard, yeah.

Jim Allan: And then that, and then Mike came in and grabbed the baby right out of one of your sibling's arms.

Bob Bryntwick: Barbs, hands, yeah. Barbs.

Jim Allan: And that, is that perhaps what set your mother off?

Bob Bryntwick: I believe so. I think that was- That was the last straw. The end of it, the last straw. She didn't want to do this anymore. And she decided that she could now support her kids. And she didn't need him. I didn't need whatever revenue was coming in because of it. And she would move on. And I remember seeing, I was, I was on the second floor looking at a little window with my brother at my shoulder. And I see this Cadillac, which I knew was my father, who I thought was my father, drive up. I saw my mother get in on the passenger side. Sat there for about 15, 20 minutes, doing some kind of conversation. Got out, slammed the door. He drove off. And that was the end of Mike Mitchell.

Jim Allan: And that's when- So you never saw him again after that?

Bob Bryntwick: I never, well, I saw him, I saw him the year my mother died, about maybe a month after my mother died. I was on mountain sites at the time. I was living with my brother. I was going to university. And my brother saw Mike Mitchell right at the, there was a up in our little corner store. And he saw him there and he said, look, there's Mike.

Jim Allan: So 10 years later.

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah. And I recognized him and we didn't wave or anything. He saw us. And then he just got quickly into his car, drove off. And that was actually the year that he left Montreal and went out to BC.

Jim Allan: The father? 1967.

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah, 1967. I knew that my father had another family, was married, had children as well. And I always wondered, well, how could he do this? How could he have family at the same time as he had us and yet not help us in any way to support us and let us really live a very menial existence? And so when I eventually got older, I was trying to think about ways I could find out a little bit more about my father. I was just about to turn 70. I was pretty sure he was dead by then. And I decided to pursue his side of the family to find out who he was. I wanted to piece together some kind of ideas to who was this man that could do that.

Jim Allan: So just to, yeah, just again, to paint a picture here, was it sort of every other child was put up for adoption?

Bob Bryntwick: Every single one.

Jim Allan: Pardon me?

Bob Bryntwick: Every child.

Jim Allan: Every child in, well, some were kept by your mom, but there was five or six consecutive children.

Bob Bryntwick: There were eight. He had eight children. And six were put up for adoption.

Jim Allan: Right.

Bob Bryntwick: So he had, yeah, my sister was the oldest, Barb. She was kept with us. And then there were about five before Michael. And then Michael, who was eight years younger than me, he was kept. And then Bram was the last, the sixth one to finally be put up.

Jim Allan: : Right. And the way the article is written, and I'm sure the writer had many sleepless nights about how to write it.

Bob Bryntwick: Yes.

Jim Allan: Because the fact that Mike ended up having his own family. At the same time. The same time with eight children is a bit of a bombshell to me in the article. Because even my wife who is, we were kind of reading it and she hadn't finished it. You got to finish the article because there's this bombshell at the end where it turns out he had this other family simultaneously, and there's probably about eight of them.

Bob Bryntwick: Yes. Eight kids.

Jim Allan: They lived a pretty standard middle-class lifestyle by the sounds of it.

Bob Bryntwick: Well supported, yeah.

Jim Allan: I mean, $10,000 is a lot of money. It's a lot of money today. A fortune back then. And if he was, that was probably just maybe his cut too. I mean, there's probably commissions being paid by certain people. So the money is going to his family, his middle-class family, and not your own.

Bob Bryntwick: That's right. And that it wasn't going, as the quote goes, going to feed his family, it wasn't going to feed ours.

Jim Allan: And you're pretty angry in that article. I could feel it coming off the page.

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah. Yeah, I did. I felt resentful and a little angry that he couldn't find a better way to be supportive of us. I understand now that it was a big secret, so it's hard to support a family when you're running kind of a secret situation. But yet again, he should have realized that when he comes in with his fancy clothes and his big fancy car in the neighborhood where the cars are all jalopies and things and people are running around in rags, that that is something that's going to puzzle a lot of people and it's going to make me feel like there's got to be money there to be able to be spent on us. And yet all you would do is spend time with my mother and give us maybe 50 cents to go and buy some ice cream to get rid of us for a while. Um, but you knew at the time that there seemed to be a little bit, when he's around, there's a little bit more money around. You ate better and that sort of thing. It was obvious to me. Even as a young kid, I knew that here's a guy that had a lot of money and there we were. And I was one of the poorest kids from all of my friends. I mean, all my friends were doing a lot better than me. And yet here I have this father that had more money than virtually any of their fathers. I could tell. And yet, you know, we weren't being treated very, very fairly by him.

Jim Allan: You know, when my parents died, it's like, it spurred me to do a lot of family tree research. So family tree research. So, you know, so there was a lots of, I had the advantage of having the internet at my disposal even 20 years ago. And so lots of ordering of birth and marriage and death certificates from the old country, Scotland. But your family tree found you. In a sense, that's how I kind of see it anyway.

Bob Bryntwick: Very true.

Jim Allan: Did you send a DNA sample to ancestry.com then?

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah, I went to ancestry first. My motivation was to find out a little bit about my father. I didn't think it was any way I could find out anything about my siblings because they disappeared. From my point of view, they were gone. I had no idea.

Jim Allan: Right.

Bob Bryntwick: Even with DNA, I didn't think any of them would be looking for me or for the family. And this was about four or five years ago. I was just about to turn 70 and I thought, okay, let me see if I can find his family because I wanted to find out who he was. I wanted to talk to his family, his current family that grew up with him. I wanted to find someone who knew him. And of course, my adoptees, my half-sibs, they didn't know anything about him. So I wanted to find out about him. My motivation was, what is this guy all about? So that's when I put my ancestry DNA in there and then Sharon popped up and she comes along and says- She's a half-sibling.

Jim Allan: She's a half-sibling.

Bob Bryntwick: I didn't know it at the time. Yes, but there's just sort of a partial match. Yeah.

Jim Allan: That's how it comes up.

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah. She comes along and says, oh, I think we may be close relatives or family. I'm not sure.

Jim Allan: So she contacts you. It turns out she was doing a lot of her own research. She was checking out for her twin sister. So independently, these other half-siblings at different times are also signing up with Ancestry.com or 23andMe. And then in various ways, you start getting connected with these lost siblings. Somewhere along the line, you find out that Mike isn't your biological father and someone told you that, again, in the article, very dramatic.

Bob Bryntwick: So- Risa. Risa told me he wasn't my father. She figured it out.

Jim Allan: Everyone's kind of doing their own sleuthing on their own time. As the article says, she had a very difficult conversation with you and you didn't. That was a shock for you.

Bob Bryntwick: It was a shock. It wasn't difficult because I actually like the fact that he wasn’t my father because I didn't like him very much.

Jim Allan: Right.

Bob Bryntwick: But the funny thing is I was kind of stupid about this because when Sharon came on with the results that she did, the only reason I knew she was a sister of mine is because on her birth certificate Anne Bryntwick was her mother. So I said, Sharon, you're not a close relative. You're a family member. And then so I got curious about that because it looked like it was a fairly distant relationship.

Jim Allan: Why wasn't it an immediate family?

Bob Bryntwick: So I had my brother submit a test and her submit a test to a lab in Oakville. And when the results came back, they were 99% family and I was 39%. And I'm thinking, wait a second. That doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. How come I'm, you know, like we have the same father, we have the same mother. What is this? And I didn't put it all together. I was, you know, still working. So maybe I was busy doing it, but I think it was just stupid about it.

Jim Allan: Right.

Bob Bryntwick: And then that's when when Risa had pointed that out, then it all began to click to me and say, ah, well now I can understand where, you know, Sharon and Michael are definitely, you know, totally from the same parents and I'm not.

Jim Allan:  I can relate to the family tree research part because you're doing it. When I did it, it was kind of backwards and there were little mysteries that were kind of solved. Like my grandmother and grandfather turned out to be first cousins, which was common back then, but that was a bombshell for me because, well, wait a second. That means, you know, we share great, great, whatever it is, great, great grandparents or whatever it is.

Bob Bryntwick: So everyone had their own reason to be doing their own searching. For instance, as you say, one was searching for a lost twin. One was, I think she had cancer. And yes, again, common reasons people start searching up for their birth parents because she had cancer and she was worried about her own daughter. That was Risa. And so everyone had their own reasons. And the surprise was that there were all sorts of full and part partial matches.

Jim Allan: So how did you find it? Was it a phone call, a letter, email or?

Bob Bryntwick: Well, Risa got, I guess she got kind of tired of the fact that 23andMe wasn't getting her any more information. She's very curious. And she decided to go into Ancestry where I was. And then all of a sudden I pop up and then she says, okay, so let's look at the centimorgans, you know, the amount of relativity we have with each other through DNA. And then the numbers were definitely, you know, not supporting us having a common father, only the common mother. And this is all communication via texts because what happens is Ancestry says you can email and then it'll be the go between. And then if you send someone an email, which I did to Risa saying, well, why don't you email me directly at my Gmail account? So we began to do kind of text messaging that kind of way just emailing each other. And that's when she finally said in a text to me that I have shocking news for you or whatever. I forget what she had said that you're actually not, you don't have the same father as I do. And I thought, really? And then finally I figured, yeah, she was right.

Jim Allan: To this day, you don't know who your real father.

Bob Bryntwick: I have an inkling as to who he may be. There were five brothers that came to Canada. I found out recently from one of my first cousins that the all the brothers were actually born in Ukraine. I always thought I was half Ukrainian and half Jewish because my mother was Ukrainian Orthodox and I had a Jewish father whom at that particular point I thought was Mike Mitchell, who's Jewish. But then I found out from my first cousins on my father's side that there were five brothers all born in the Ukraine who then moved to Poland and grew up in Poland. So actually I'm full Ukrainian, which is kind of prideful with the fact that all the things that are going on with Ukraine right now made me feel like a good identity there. And I found out that out of the five brothers, I've kind of narrowed it down to two and maybe eventually one of them will eliminate the possibility and I'll actually know who my real father is.

Jim Allan: So your mom died when you were a teenager?

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah, I was 18.

Jim Allan: And then by the sounds of it you all kind of scattered and moved on with your life. So pretty much through your 20s and 30s were you still in touch with them or did they just everyone just went their own way?

Bob Bryntwick: We were in touch but my sisters moved out to BC and started their own families in BC. There wasn't much contact with them. My brother moved to my brother stayed in Montreal for a while. We had a pretty rocky relationship. I think he had done his duty as an older brother to be I guess father figure for the family from all the way from when he was 18 to 16 until he was about 24, 26, something like that when my mother finally died. And I think he was fed up and he wanted to pursue his life and he went away and did his thing and stayed in Montreal. We had him over every now and again and my wife and I married when I was 22 and we had him over there and then eventually moved to Toronto and until we moved to Toronto we had a relationship that was off and on but our relationship with my and my younger brother he just took off. He was sent to Waredale House and he escaped there within about six months and was dragged back within a year and then finally went to my sisters in BC and then we lost contact with Michael. I hadn't even had contact with Michael for 34 years, my youngest brother. So as the title of the article suggests DNA doesn't lie.

Jim Allan: Are you glad you know all of this?

Bob Bryntwick: That's by the way that's Reese's quote just to let you know as a perspective. I'm glad it all came out. I love my family. I didn't realize that even after 60 years of not knowing them that I could get to know them very well and feel them in my life as well as I do. It's been now four or five years since we've started getting to know each other.

Jim Allan: And you've connected. It hasn't been easy I'm sure with the pandemic but you've had reunions and things.

Bob Bryntwick: We have. We've connected. Some of us connect better than others. Some of us are a little bit more reserved.

Jim Allan: It's a lot of people.

Bob Bryntwick: A lot of people, yeah. And some people that only thought that they may have just one sibling or no siblings they just want to find out about their mother and father and all of a sudden they have this huge family to put in place. That's kind of a daunting task. But I've enjoyed the experience. I think it's worked out very, very effectively for me for my own mental growth for my emotional growth. And I really enjoy reaching out to my siblings and letting them know me a little bit better and letting them know their story. They needed to know their story. And I was, I mean Barbara knew the story as well but she wasn't as talkative and she didn't want to get involved in the beginning with all this stuff. It wasn't until some real efforts on Reese's part to get her connected to us that she finally did connect. And so, you know somebody had to kind of let people know why this mysterious thing happened. I want to give a shout out to my cousins on my father's side not that I'm going to name any of them but they had submitted their DNA through I think it was 23andMe. I'm not sure. Yeah, 23andMe. So when I submitted my DNA into 23andMe I came up with the first cousin and we connected and she said well how could this be? I mean, you know how could you be a first cousin? And I said well this is what I think happened or whatever. And she was really, really nice. She opened up. She was the one that told me well there were five brothers. She was the one that told me that I have she had a sister and a brother as well who were my first cousins. She had a couple of other people that had shown up on 23andMe that were also my first cousins from another brother. So, you know, things began to fill in and then we had a really nice reunion in Montreal when we came for the reunion for our first reunion through my half-sibs with Bram and Michael. I brought Michael to Montreal as well. When we had our first reunion there I also decided to have dinner with my first cousins. And they were very welcoming. It was just beautiful. They welcomed me into the family. One of my first cousins Ronnie was Johnny was checking up my hands. He says yeah you have hands of you know one of my like one of my fathers. They feel like it and all that kind of stuff. So that was really, really nice. So it's kind of nice to be welcomed by a family that you didn't even know you're related to.

Jim Allan: And now my question is okay let me fill out I want to get to know what these men were like these five men and how they got to be where they were. So the five men one of which is probably your father.

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah is my father. But I just don't know which. Sooner or later the mystery may be solved. Oh I don't know how. They're all working on it. They're all working on it. Well it just takes a DNA test. That's all it'll take. Mike's family they don't want anything to do with this story. They don't want anything to do with it and neither does my half-brother or potentially half-brother half-sister on my father's side. They don't want to have anything to do.

Jim Allan: Right and I could get that. I get that. But yeah which it blow it could you know this kind of stuff can blow up a lot of a lot of families I suppose.

Bob Bryntwick: I actually had a conversation with David Mitchell which is one of the mid children. Right. In on the Mitchell side. He wasn't connected to me in any way but he wanted to know a little bit about you know he didn't believe Risa that his father whom he thought was a really upstanding gentleman.

Jim Allan: Right.

Bob Bryntwick: Had any other family or life other than his own. And so I said well you know call me or I'll call you and I'll talk about what I know about your father. And then we had a very long conversation for about an hour and a half. He was a very nice guy. And I think Naomi's going to be visiting with him fairly soon in April sometime in Calgary to talk a little bit more directly with him and see if she can get into his his siblings as well to get some communication going there.

Jim Allan: You're very well adjusted about all of this.

Bob Bryntwick: It's I guess you've lived with it for a few years now. But I've had my wife has a lot to do with my adjustment to tell you the truth. We met as high school sweethearts. Got married when I just finished university. She brought me out of my shell. I had a big shell around me a big wall around me. I remember there are a few songs in my life that I would identify with. I'm a rock. I'm an island. You know, the Garfunkel. Because I always kept my feelings buried. I remember when the Supremes came out with a love child. I identified with that because I was a love child. Basically, I didn't realize how true that was. Now that I understand that. Resonating. I was basically only one child to the sky that even probably didn't even know I existed. And then, of course, you know, these things play in your mind. And she brought me out of my shell. She worked very hard to kind of make me emotionally.

Jim Allan: This is over 40 or 50 years.

Bob Bryntwick: No, this was just the last five years. No, no. I'm talking about when we first met.

Jim Allan: Right.

Bob Bryntwick: I was quite shut off at 18.

Jim Allan: You were a project for her.

Bob Bryntwick: And she got into psychology. So it became a good project for her for sure. And then she brought me out of my shell. Brought me out of my emotional disconnect. And that's where the adjustment came from. And her family were terrific. I didn't have a really good family relationship. I was the kind of guy that as long as I was doing well in school, Bobby was there to do for himself. I was a middle child basically in my family. And it was kind of like not ignored, but, you know, as long as he was doing OK, we don't have to worry about him. And it was kind of like, OK, well, you know, now that I'm an adult, I've got to get connected to my emotions and I can't just distance people away from me. And she was very good at doing that. So my well adjustment, my good adjustment comes from my wife and all her diligence around keeping me sane.

Jim Allan:  Did you grow up going to church or anything?

Bob Bryntwick: Well, my mother never went to church, but she grew up as an Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox person. So we celebrate Easter and we celebrate little Christmas as well as the regular Christmas. My brother took up Catholic faith because I think his father was a Ukrainian Catholic, Alex. And so he grew up in the Catholic faith. But by the time I was eight or nine, I had no faith. I mean, I didn't believe in God or I'm not really.

Jim Allan: So you were, you were, it took a toll on you, whatever was going on around, whether you understood it or not.

Bob Bryntwick: Yeah.

Jim Allan: You were eight, nine, you were.

Bob Bryntwick: It has a toll, yeah. You were a cynical, hard edge. Yeah, bright guy. So that's about the only thing that kept me sane was the fact I was able to get into university. I was able to, I never got a scholarship, but I was able to pay my own way.

Jim Allan: Right.

Bob Bryntwick: I was able to take my own path. And I think I'm the only one that ever went to university within my family. So that was always a sense of pride from my mother and my brother. So that was kind of nice. I felt some kind of pride for the family over my accomplishments and what I was doing. Everybody else has it. The funny thing, Jim, is everybody else has their life pieced together now. All of my half-siblings now know the complete story. And the guy who wanted to kind of find out the complete story is the only one that doesn't know that's me now. So it's kind of strange. It's kind of a very, very funny twist.

Jim Allan: You're remarkably well-adjusted considering. I guess you don't have a choice to see that go out of your mind.

Bob Bryntwick: No, it's been really, really good. It's been a very nice existence. My wife is one of the best women that I would have ever met. We have a nice family, accomplished kid. Emily's doing really well. So that's a good sense of pride for me. The fact that it ended up in a good note. And I still have my faculties and I'm still doing okay. So life is good. You just have to give it a chance to get there sometime.

Jim Allan: Thanks, Bob. Thanks for doing this.

Bob Bryntwick: Thank you, Jim. Appreciate it. Very generous of you.