Mich. man claims to be NY boy who vanished in 1955

[Whoa_Nelly]

Source: AP

EAST MEADOW, N.Y. – More than 50 years ago, a mother left her stroller outside a Long Island bakery and returned minutes later to find her 2-year-son had vanished.

Police and residents searched ditches and homes for the blond toddler. Investigators chased down leads around the country. But the sensational case soon went cold. No one knew what happened to little Stephen Damman.

Now a Michigan man has come forward to say he is the boy, and federal officials are awaiting DNA test results to determine if he's right.

The revelation stunned Long Island residents old enough to remember the futile search, and it renewed hope among Damman's relatives, including Stephen's 78-year-old father.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090616/ap_on_re_us/us50_years_missing

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Sure hope tests prove this claim to be true. Would be quite the story.

[Sebass1271]

1. where has he been? and why appear now and not before?

[Whoa_Nelly]

2. Seems the FBI and other authorities are keeping things on the QT

until tests and investigation are completed.

Will be looking for follow-ups to this story, that's for sure.

[Yupster]

17. Wild speculation

Maybe the mom who brought him up just died and had told him his story before she died.

[Mz Pip]

3. resolution

even after all this time would be pretty incredble.

I am still haunted by "The Changling" and the woman who never stopped looking for her son and what kind of life that must have been for her.

I am a cynic and don't hold out a lot of hope that this is true but it would be amazing if it were.

[Sebass1271]

5. I saw that movie and it still haunts me..

now, it seems harder for me to move on and be more free with my own children after watching that movie. I don't trust anyone with them! I should have never watched that movie.

[JenniferJuniper]

8. Good movie.

I've done some additional reading on the case and the film was remarkably accurate, minus a major character and the fact that Walter's fate really was never in much doubt after the nephew came forth.

Show me the DNA on this one or don't tell me anything, though. The child was only a baby when he disappeared and he supposedly found out about "himself" on-line.

[Wickerman]

4. wow, would be a cool ending to the story if true

oddly, reading the story I see I know, or, rather know of the family he is trying to connect to but didn't know about this event.

[undeterred]

6. Hard to believe there was a time when parents

didn't fear complete strangers running off with their child. How much the world has changed since then.

[timeforpeace]

10. No, it's hard to believe anyone would leave a baby in a stroller

while they went inside to shop. Gimme a break. There's never been a time when people did this, unless it was called The Stupid Epoch. You gotta remember, this would be when the mom was what, late teens, early 20's? Folks that age aren't exactly known for wisdom. No offense intended.

[undeterred]

11. No, if you read the article- that's what it was like in the 50's

I was born in the 50's and I'm sure my mother did the same thing. Little girls went off trick or treating and selling girl scout cookies door to door without anyone worrying that we were going to be poisoned or molested. You trusted that the world was made up of good people.

[dysfunctional press]

13. even in the 60's/70's, trick-or-treating was a lot different than today.

nt

[Yupster]

16. During the summer we took off on our bikes

at 10 am and came home for dinner at 5.

Whoever's house we were close to, made us lunch.

Mom never worried, we never called. We were playing baseball, or basketball or at the swim club. We slept in a tent in the backyard with the neighborhood kids during the summer some nights and went walking around the neighborhood at 3 am. No air conditioning back then.

Them's were good days to grow up in. Really was like the Cleavers.

[dysfunctional press]

18. same for us.

but we didn't have a tent, so we'd put a tarp over the picnic table in the back yard.

[ejpoeta]

24. it was like that for me growing up. i was born in 72, and we were told to go out and play

in the morning at some point after breakfast. We would go to our friends, ride our bikes.... all over in fact. Didn't have to say where we were going, just be home for dinner. Don't know about it being safer as much as more trusting, I guess. I know there is no way in hell my daughter who is approaching the age I freely did all this is going to be going anywhere without me knowing where she is. I almost feel like i need a background check on any parents whose house she goes to.

[a la izquierda]

25. Me too, and I was born in '77.

[Yupster]

33. I'm quite a bit older than you

I've had people tell me it was never like that, but that's how I lived and it's not rose colred memories. That was my childhood, and I lived in a large city.

[Dappleganger]

28. Yes, same here.

And my 11 yr. old son tries to pull that shit on me and gets the riot act thrown at him! He has so many friends around here that he becomes nearly impossible to find, argh.

[get the red out]

37. That was our neighborhood

And I was a kid in the early 70s.

[Stellabella]

15. I did that when I was only 8-9 years old.

Went door to door selling Girl Scout cookies and trick-or-treating. That would really be unthinkable today.

[dysfunctional press]

12. they do it in parts of europe...

i remember a dutch(?) woman visiting in nyc not too long ago who got arrested for leaving her kid in a stroller outside the cafe they were in.

[Dappleganger]

27. People used to do it a lot, and it wasn't considered 'stupid.'

Back then people did this out of courtesy for restaurant patrons who wished to dine in peace, and babies on the sidewalk were lovingly admired by passers-by. I know my dear friend from Denmark said that she could still do it in her home country, although dare not do it here.

[Mnemosyne]

30. It was a much different world then. n/t

[Arkansas Granny]

31. Actually, it was quite common. People left their children in the car alone

while they went into stores to shop, also. It wasn't just the young, stupid or inexperienced parents. I don't recommend the practice, but it happened all the time.

[hedgehog]

34. It's the way I was brought up, and someone threatened to call the cops on me

when I did it with my own kids. I'd never leave a young infant alone, but along with a couple of grade school kids in a car for a few minutes? I had no idea how paranoid society has become.

[hedgehog]

32. I saw mothers leaving babies in carriages outside stores in Ireland in the 70's.

This was in small villages, not in Dublin. I also remember reading the autobiography of William Allen White describing his early life in a small town about 1880?, 1890? He described wandering all over his little town at a very young age.

Neighborhoods used to be very isolated, and people knew each other and knew who was a stranger. There were more kids around then, too, and all adults tended to keep an eye on all the kids.

[Xithras]

36. Taking a stroller inside a store back then was very difficult.

In the pre-ADA 1950's, store aisles were often narrow and crowded with items on sale. Strollers of that era also tended to be large, with fixed wheels that didn't swivel. Maneuvering a stoller around would have been a very difficult thing to do. Shopping carts were still uncommon in the 1950's, so a womans only alternative would have been to carry the child in her arms AND carry a basket for her goods.

It was a different era, and people didn't worry about kidnappers. Child abductions were considered rare and most thought they only happened to wealthy families who could afford ransoms.

[kskiska]

14. It was very common back then.

Back in the 40s my mother and her girlfriend would walk their toddlers, me and her girlfriend's son downtown in two strollers, which were large wicker-type affairs in those days (way too large to bring into a store). They'd park the strollers outside the door and go into a drugstore and drink Cokes at the fountain.



A number of years ago I remember reading about a Danish woman who left her baby outside a restaurant in Greenwich Village while she ate lunch. She was arrested and was stunned because this was commonplace in Denmark.

It's hard to imagine how safe it was back in those days. However, a year or so after the posted kidnapping case, there was another case in 1956 on Long Island I remember well. An infant, Peter Weinberger, was taken from his backyard where his mother put him out for some air. While she ran into the house for something he was kidnapped and later killed. After that people became a lot more vigilant and less trusting where their children were concerned. Times had changed.

[CoffeeCat]

7. Wow, this does sound promising...

It says that the man had DNA tests done with a woman who would have been his sister. It was confirmed that
the tests revealed that they could be related.

That's totally amazing.

[JI7]

9. very interesting, i hope it's true also, especially since the parents are still alive

[mackerel]

19. When did you all grow up? It was never safe where I lived and that

was in the 70's. A lot of bad stuff happened to the kids in my neighborhood.

[moonbatmax]

20. Yup!

A lot depends on the neighborhood where you grew up, and bad ones have been around since we first came up with cities. I count myself lucky to have grown up in the sort of neighborhoods where a kid could roam safely.

Mostly.

One of them recently turned out to be home to BTK.

Take a grain of salt from Will Rogers: "Things ain't what they used to be and never were."

[EFerrari]

22. Welcome to DU, moonbatmax.

:)

[EFerrari]

21. In the late sixties, my brother and I went out on Halloween

on our own and stayed out until we were too tired to walk. Hours. And, we were told to be careful about our candy but we were safe all night. The whole neighborhood was out and if you looked around, you could usually see an adult that you knew.

By the time my kids were that age, I couldn't let them do the same thing even though we were in the same hood. We didn't know everyone any more. There had been a big shift, not so much in who lived there but in how much time everyone had to get to know each other.

[bitchkitty]

26. I know, right? We ran wild all night long.

Halloween was always my favorite holiday.

[hedgehog]

35. People used to fear the stranger, but since then we've learned that the real

hazard is the friendly teacher, the coach, the priest or uncle, or even a woman! Or maybe we haven't learned that lesson: My diocese requires anyone who works with kids to have a background check and take a training course. After sitting through the entire session discussing how pedophiles get to know their victims and spend time grooming them, we were told that all the doors would be kept locked to ensure that strangers didn't enter the building! Even after an entire morning going over facts, it was the unknown, faceless boogy man that people still worried about!


I don't know what went on in your neighborhood, but it's my gut feeling that the average kid is more likely to be hit by a car or bit by a dog than kidnapped by a stranger. More people are killed in car accidents than plane crashes, but people worry about flying.

[Historic NY]

23. some good comments over there to go with the article.

[latebloomer]

29. I see a big difference between 8 or 10-year-olds running around town

(although I would never have permitted that either), and leaving a 2-year-old and an infant unsupervised.

I was a small child in the 50s and I know my mother would never have done that. I attribute it to visceral Eastern European fears, handed down through the generations.