Sibling Revelry : A Brother Returns for a Holiday Feast With a Family He’s Never Known

Thousand Oaks businessman John Johnson went for 38 years believing he was the only son in a family of five.

That was until last week, when a man claiming to be his long-lost brother contacted Johnson. He said his name was Dean Gilbert.

Astonished at the thought of having a grown-up brother, Johnson telephoned his parents in Orange County and discovered that they had harbored a secret for 35 years.

They had actually had five children, instead of three, and had given up a boy and baby girl for adoption. The baby boy had grown up as Dean Gilbert. Neither parent had breathed a word to their other three children. But since the sudden appearance of Gilbert, the children and their parents say they have reconciled themselves to what happened in the past.

Now they are planning a Thanksgiving reunion--a little on the late side. Eighteen members of the Johnson family will gather at Johnson’s home Saturday to meet their new-found relative for their first Thanksgiving dinner together.

“I always wanted a brother,” said Johnson, a contractor who owns JH Johnson Industries Inc. in Lake Sherwood. “It’s made our holiday season.”

Gilbert, a respiratory therapist at Kaiser Permanente medical center in San Diego, said he knew about his adoption since he was 18 but has always dreamed about meeting his birth parents.

Just before his 35th birthday on July 20, Gilbert decided to find his parents so he could piece together his medical history. As he searched for the parents he had never met, he became consumed by the need to recover fragments of his past, he said.

“I wanted to find these people. I felt that this was a missing chapter in my life,” he said.

With the help of a genealogical expert, Gilbert found about 10 couples who shared his birth parents’ names: John and Marylou Johnson. Only one was in the right age range.

After combing through public records at the Registrar of Voters and the Department of Motor Vehicles, Gilbert located the couple in Buena Park and wrote them a letter. Before he received an answer, he found the phone number for the Thousand Oaks man that Gilbert believed to be his brother.

John Johnson said he was skeptical when Gilbert identified himself.

“I thought it was somebody trying to con me,” Johnson said.

But as Gilbert began describing his parents and details of the Johnson family history, Johnson was convinced that the man’s claims were authentic.

Soon the two brothers were sharing intimate details about themselves and their childhoods. They spent hours on the phone comparing notes on how they grew up, Johnson said.

While researching his origins, Gilbert discovered that his parents had also given up a baby girl for adoption. Now the family is searching for the long-lost sister who was born in 1958, Johnson said. They hope to locate her before Christmas.

Since Johnson told his older sisters in Arizona and Oregon about the discovery of a lost sibling, they have been excitedly making plans for seeing the brother they never knew before.

Helen Weber, 43, of Eagle Creek, Ore., said she was 8 years old when her brother was born, but she remembers nothing about it. Weber said she was overjoyed to learn that she has four brothers and sisters instead of two.

But the revelation has affected her parents differently, she said.

Weber said there may have been a good reason that her parents never mentioned her other brother. “I know they felt like they didn’t have money,” she said. “I imagine there’s some guilt there.”

The other sister, Pat Adams, 40, of Phoenix, said that, even as a 5-year-old, she knew that her father worried about how to make ends meet due to a pending layoff from his job at Douglas Aircraft.

“It’s hard to be in my mom and dad’s shoes . . . 35 years ago,” Adams said.

Marylou Johnson was a 28-year-old mother of three when she gave birth to a child at Centinela Hospital in Los Angeles. Although her husband was working at the time, they both decided that they could not handle another child, she said. The decision was heart-wrenching, but she and her husband have never looked back.

“In those days, it was something you didn’t talk about,” the 63-year-old mother said. “It just wasn’t mentioned, that’s all. It’s something that happens, and life goes on.”

Gilbert said he is not angry at his parents for choosing to give him up for adoption.

“I respect them for that decision,” Gilbert said. “In today’s world, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

Though a little frightened by the prospect, Gilbert is anxious to make up for lost time by introducing his wife and four children to the family he has never met. The reunion will be a little late for Thanksgiving Day, but Gilbert doesn’t mind.

“It’s been 35 years,” he said. “I think a couple of days won’t hurt.”