Sister act 79 years in making

Sister act 79 years in making
Both married twice. Both had 5 kids. Both became nurses. Neither held out hope for a family reunion.

Peggy Lill last saw her little sister, Gladys Nohlquist, 79 years ago at an orphanage in Troy, N.Y.

Lill, who was 4, recalls that Nohlquist, then 2, was wearing a sunsuit with a duck on the front. She is sure of it.

Nohlquist insists that wasn't her.

"Did you have blonde hair?" Lill, 83, asked her sister.

"No, I had brown hair," said Nohlquist, 81, after the two were reunited recently in Lill's Glenview home.

Some of the mysteries of their youth will never be solved. Too much time has passed since they were abandoned at the orphanage with three other siblings shortly before the Depression.

But even after the years apart, the sisters act like they have known each other for decades.

And perhaps, in a sense, they have. Their lives apart bear uncanny similarities.

Both were raised on farms. Both were married twice and had five children--four girls and a boy. Both went back to school in middle age and became nurse practitioners.

Both say they often felt like throwaway kids, with no sense of their personal history or themselves.

If it wasn't for Lill's daughter--Lynda Von Duhn, 62, who tracked down her Aunt Gladys through an extensive genealogy search--the sisters say they might have never seen each other again.

When Von Duhn, of Voorheesville, N.Y., reached Nohlquist a month ago and told her she was her long-lost sister's daughter, the older woman became overwhelmed with emotion.

"I had given up years ago finding any family," said Nohlquist, now living in Florida, and then she began to cry on the phone. She kept thinking, "If only my other sister was still alive."

That sister, June Elizabeth, was raised with Nohlquist by the same adoptive family. But June Elizabeth has been dead for 12 years. Two older brothers, Hugh and John, are also deceased, according to Von Duhn's research.

Lill made brief contact with John in the mid-1940s, but otherwise had not seen any of her siblings since the orphanage.

After learning of her older sister's whereabouts, Nohlquist had the urge to fly to Chicago to see her, but she was scared of getting on an airplane. She thought about waiting until summer. Then she changed her mind.

"Neither one of us is getting younger," Nohlquist said. She arrived early last week and returned home Friday.

On Thursday, they sat and chatted with each other, squeezing a lifetime of a relationship into a few days.

Their conversations were far ranging, from their shared belief in reincarnation to their very different interests: Lill likes crocheting and painting; Nohlquist said she does not know how to do anything creative.

And of course, they reflected on the circumstances that tore them apart, then reunited them.

According to Von Duhn's research, state authorities took the five siblings away from their mother because she was neglecting them.

Von Duhn said the children's mother left them, all under the age of 10, alone in the house for days at a time. Money was scarce and, the story goes, their father was away working in other parts of the state. One day, the oldest boy tried to pour kerosene into a stove while the children were alone and the house caught fire. The state interceded and they were sent to an orphanage.

It's unclear whether either of the parents attempted to retrieve them.

Lill said she imagined nobody wanted to adopt "five squirmy little brats."

She was taken first, by a family who lived not too far from the orphanage on a large farm.

Nohlquist and her older sister were taken next by a Swedish couple who lived on a small farm in western New York.

John, the middle child, found a home a few years later, but Hugh, the oldest, eventually joined the military.

Lill said that when she was 18, she went back to the orphanage to get information on her family, but officials wouldn't release any.

As children, the girls were often shunned because of their mysterious past, Von Duhn said.

"It's a story of real life," Von Duhn said. "It's not always a pretty picture."

Last week, the women tried to write a happy ending.

When Lill first noticed Nohlquist wearing tan leather moccasins, she went to her closet and grabbed white ones that looked a lot like her sister's so their feet matched.

They peered at each other, searching for resemblances, but acknowledged it was hard to tell. Nohlquist dyes her hair brown, while Lill's hair is white and she wears eyeglasses. Nohlquist decided finally that they resemble each other across the eyes and forehead.

Since Nohlquist didn't bring any photos, they sat and looked at Lill's photos from when she was a young woman.

"She was prettier than me," said Nohlquist, looking at her sister's black-and-white photos.

"I don't think so," said Lill.

"Well, you didn't see me when I was younger. I was an ugly kid," Nohlquist replied.

When the talk reverted to their similarities and differences, Nohlquist told her sister she had never been out of the country but she had been on three cruises. Immediately, Lill exclaimed, "I get seasick."

Both had an adventurous streak in their early years.

When Nohlquist was a teenager, she took flying lessons. In 1944, at age 20, she joined the Women's Army Corps, commonly called the WACS. She wanted to become a commercial pilot.

Lill said she, too, wanted to fly planes, but her foster parents would not allow it.

Instead, she received a write-up in a local newspaper when she became the first girl in the area to take a shop class in high school.

As the women talked, Lill's husband, Bill, flitted around the living room exclaiming in amazement every few moments, "Can you believe it? All of the coincidences? They are so uncanny."

In fact, he said, another similarity may make the women's first meeting in decades their last. Although both loved airplanes as young women, now neither is eager to fly.

"The likelihood of these two women ever seeing each other again is pretty nil," Bill Lill said.

But when asked Thursday about the future, Lill turned to Nohlquist.

"Well, you should come to Florida," Nohlquist said.

"I haven't gotten an invitation," Lill responded.