When Karen McGuire’s daughter was born in 1967, she never got to hold her, but this morning they’ll be running around together in the Great Race.
Both Ms. McGuire and daughter, Kelly Allen, are avid runners. That’s just one of the things they learned when, 46 years into the daughter’s life, they hugged for the first time.
Ms. McGuire, still slim at 70, was 23 and a single nursing student at the University of Pittsburgh when she learned she was pregnant. She stayed in the dorm until April 1967 and then moved to Irwin to live with her oldest sister, Kathleen.
She told the rest of her family — she’s the fourth of eight children, six of them girls — that she was studying cardiology in Texas. The ruse was so elaborate, she wrote letters home and had them mailed to Texas so they might be mailed back to her parents in Brighton Heights.
On Aug. 4, 1967, in Washington Hospital, chosen because it was far enough away from any neighbors’ eyes, she gave birth to a daughter who was immediately given up to adoptive parents.
“I only got to see her one time through a glass window,’’ Ms. McGuire recalled, sadness still in her voice almost five decades on. “I couldn’t hold her.’’
No one else in her family knew but her sister Kathleen. She went back to school, graduated in 1971, and was working for the Allegheny County Health Department in 1977 when she helped organize the first Great Race and ran in it, too.
We’ll have to hit fast forward here because that’s the way Ms. McGuire has lived her life. Late in 1977, she joined the foreign service and soon flew off to Ouagadougou in what is now Burkina Faso in west Africa. She married a fellow foreign service officer, and their son, Peter, was born in 1984.
In 1991, she and her husband were posted in Mogadishu, Somalia, and they adopted an abandoned Somali infant girl as the city was falling. As heavily armed rebels circled the U.S. Embassy, they were helicoptered out.
That daughter, Mary, 23, now lives in Chicago. Meantime, the daughter she never knew had grown up in a loving family in Peters and then Atlanta. Ms. Allen became a teacher and wondered every day about her birth mother.
They’re taking turns telling this story at Ms. McGuire’s sister’s home in Ross. Blonde and blue-eyed, Ms. Allen described herself as “so Type A’’ and then looked sidelong at Ms. McGuire and smirked, “I don’t know where that comes from.”
When she began looking into her origins decades ago, the costs were beyond her means. But the advent of the Internet spawned tech-savvy volunteers known as Search Angels, who help others unravel the closed adoptions of the 1960s.
Using those angels, a caseworker with the adoption agent Catholic Charities and her own Columbo-like doggedness, Ms. Allen, a mother of two herself, tracked down Ms. McGuire. She found her birth mother was still working as a nurse practitioner in Elgin, Ill.
On Jan. 29, 2013, while Ms. McGuire was waiting in line in an Elgin pizza joint with daughter Mary, she got a call from a Catholic Charities caseworker and decided she’d better take that call outside.
When told her first daughter would like to meet her, she replied, “Absolutely. Yes. Is she OK? Does she need a kidney?’’
She waited for her sister Kathleen to return from an overseas trip so she’d have moral support when she flew down to North Carolina to meet Ms. Allen on April 15 last year.
Tears? They both said there was mostly laughter. And when Ms. McGuire met her grandchildren, Maggie, 13, and Cooper, 8, all questions about where that boy got his red hair ended.
The Allen children now have a third, loving grandmother and Ms. Allen has a platoon of new aunts, uncles and cousins. They met at a big McGuire reunion in Elgin — after Ms. McGuire dropped her “I’m a grandmother’’ bombshell while all gathered for a niece’s wedding. Her sister, Joan McGuire O’Brien, has that beautiful moment on video.
The sense of incompletion in their lives is gone.
“You don’t realize how much it is there until it’s not there anymore,” Ms. Allen said. “Until it’s lifted, you don’t know how much time is spent thinking about it.’’
Today, Ms. Allen will run the 10-kilometer Great Race and her mother the 5K, but the hardest part of their journey is blessedly behind them. They both won.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947.