Once-homeless dad is reunited with daughter -- 35 years later


Richard Nary had burned all his bridges. He fled his home in upstate New York 35 years ago, leaving a wife and five children to fend for themselves. He had sunk so low that he was sleeping inside a cardboard box in the parking lot of a Sacramento gas station.

His body and mind battered from years of alcohol abuse, Nary had lost all hope of seeing his family again.

Everything changed last summer when a stranger came into his life offering help and friendship.

On Thursday, thanks to that serendipitous connection, Nary got a piece of his family back.

"Hi dad!" Krista Szymborski, who flew in from Wisconsin, said as she spotted her father waiting for her at Sacramento International Airport.

The two smothered each other in hugs. "It's been a long time," Szymborski said. "We have lots of catching up to do."

Nary's face lit up as he draped an arm around his daughter.

Yet the reunion, both acknowledged, is complicated.

"I hated him when I was growing up," Szymborski, 38, said of her absent father. "My family had a hard time, because we were poor. We didn't have our dad in our lives. It will be hard for him to step into the role of father now, when he was never there for us."

Nary, who will be 68 Saturday, said he harbors deep regrets about the past. But both believe in second chances.

"I'm going to find out if he wants to be a friend," Szymborski said. "We'll take it from there."

Nary, a military veteran who has worked as a trucker, welder and horseman, blames alcohol for the splintering of his family more than three decades ago. After he left New York and moved to California, he saw his children just a handful of times, mostly at funerals.

For the last six years, he has mostly lived on the streets of Sacramento.

Nary said he thought about his family over the years, but shame and fear prevented him from contacting them. He drowned himself in liquor to numb his pain.

"I just faded away," he said.

Nary's most recent job was at Cal Expo in 2007. He worked with horses and lived in a trailer on the campus.

After that work dried up, he found himself back on the streets, scrapping for food and other necessities, dodging violence and once nearly dying from alcohol poisoning.

Although he qualified for Social Security benefits, he never sought them. He set up a makeshift home in a gas station parking lot, shivering through winter nights in his cardboard box. Staffers of a nearby restaurant, Buca di Beppo, gave him pasta and did their best to look out for him.

"He was a very nice guy who never bothered anyone," said Gino Galli, who liked to talk baseball with Nary. "He was respectful. Not scary or intimidating at all."

But Nary was a broken man. "I went to bed with a bottle of booze, and I woke up with a bottle of booze," he recalled. "I just didn't care about anything."

This past summer, one of the restaurant's regular customers spotted Nary, a slightly built man with a weathered face and raggedy beard, and after getting to know him offered to take him in.

"He was on the edge, and it broke my heart," said Todd Reiners, a computer specialist who works for The Bee. Soon Reiners was shuttling Nary to various government offices in an effort to get him a California ID card and Social Security benefits. Nary, who said he stopped drinking after being hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, had a warm bed, a modest bank account and a stable lifestyle for the first time in years.

With Nary's permission, Reiners began searching for relatives.

A few days before Christmas, he found Szymborski on Facebook, where she had posted a holiday wish for a Coach purse "and finding my father."

It turned out she and her husband Craig had been searching for Nary for nearly two years.

"My mom always told us that when we got older it was up to us if we wanted to find him and get his side of the story," she explained.

It was time. "Even though things were hard for us because he left, I felt a void in my life, and I realized it was him. "

She called the Social Security Administration, homeless shelters, funeral homes and police departments. "I got nowhere," she said, until she heard from Reiners.

Two days before Christmas, Szymborski spoke on the telephone with her father, their first conversation in more than 25 years.

Nary learned he had 13 grandchildren and four great grandchildren. Szymborski sent him photographs. Nary mailed her a Christmas card, the first one she ever received from him. It brought her to tears.

Since that first conversation, the two have spoken almost every day, but so far have avoided talk of the painful past. Two of Szymborski's four siblings are equally interested in getting to know him again, and one of them is flying in today to reunite with him, she said. Two others are less certain, as is her mother.

"I'm excited, but I'm very, very nervous and I'm not sure why," Szymborski said on the evening before flying to Sacramento. "He doesn't really know me. Is he going to leave me again? Will he be here for me? I'm still a little bit angry, but that will go away. I'm letting down the walls that I put up for all these years."

Szymborski has invited her father to move into her family's home in Wild Rose, a tiny town north of Madison. Nary said he is unsure about the cold Midwestern winters, and is putting off making any decisions for now. For the next few days, he said, his goal is simply to get to know his daughter again.

"I'm hoping that he will feel lonely for his family and want to come home with us," Szymborski said. "After all, he's part of my life now.

"We're never going to lose each other again."