By Teresa Sullivan For The Mountain Times
My suspense was overflowing. I was standing in the kitchen with scissors poised to cut the strings and open the package in my hand. My husband walked around the corner and gasped “You can’t open that! You need to let Sid do it!” The package was clearly a newspaper rolled up and wrapped tightly in paper which had yellowed from age. My late father Wayne Fuller addressed the paper to Sydney Poole years before. There were but two thin kite strings between me and knowing what was inside. I stared at it as the anticipation of seeing the contents melted away. He was right. I decided at once that I was going to make a trip to New Zealand to deliver it. That was November of 2023.
Why New Zealand, you ask? Well, I must give you a brief family history. My grandfather Vinton Fuller worked in the shipyards repairing battleships that had been damaged at Pearl Harbor. He joined the navy in 1942. My grandmother Elicia (Jean) Running was born in Northern Ireland. At eight years old her family moved to New Zealand. I was told that they picked New Zealand because there were no snakes. Sounds like a wise choice to me. She was a nurse and met my grandfather on a blind date. They were married, and shortly after their first son John was born. Jean had a large family. She had 10 siblings. It must have been hard for her when they moved to the United States in 1946.
Later that same year Vinton and Jean’s second child Wayne was born. This is the part where I come in. He was my father. I have been a resident of Sandy since 2006. We moved Wayne from his Portland home to the Avamere care facility in 2015 so he would be closer to me. He passed away in his sleep in 2017. He also had a younger sister named Diane.
I have met several of my Kiwi relatives over the years. Some visited when I was young and others more recently. With the wonders of the internet and social media, I get updates often. I met Sid (Sydney) when I was young and saw him again about five years ago. So I knew who he was when I saw his name on the package. He is my dad’s cousin. I sent him a message via Facebook, and the planning started right away. I began looking at the weather, best seasons to visit, and making sure the people I wanted to see would be available at those times.
My thoughts became consumed by the package. I kept looking at my father’s handwriting and the address it was originally going to be mailed from. The way my father signed his own name seemed foreign to me. He never wrote his name with that type of print that I ever recall seeing. The address it was originally to be mailed from was not one that I recognized either. I went down a rabbit hole searching for answers.
When my father passed, I acquired many of his things. I pulled out an old wood suitcase and rummaged through the contents. The suitcase has my grandmother’s name and address on the outside. I was told this case made her original trip from New Zealand to Oregon. Currently it is piled to the brim with old photos and childhood memories. Many of the items contained my dad’s
handwriting. He was a track star at Madison High School. He had many ribbons, pictures, and news articles with his name on them. I flipped over the large M patch made for a letterman jacket and noticed that the handwriting matched the style on the package! I also noticed that his childhood handwriting practice pages looked the same as well. I began to wonder if he was just a child when this package was wrapped!
Next, I opened my dad’s old military trunk. He was in the Army and spent time in Alaska and Vietnam. Inside was an old dress uniform, piles and piles of pictures, patches, pins, slides, and a whole shoebox full of letters he had written to my grandparents. I noticed a couple of the return addresses on the letters also matched the strange way he wrote his name on the package. I ended up reading all those letters. I wish I had read them when he was still alive. I would have had many questions. It was amazing to know more about what he went through at that time of his life.
I decided that I needed to reach out to my uncle John to find out the significance of the return address. He was a wealth of knowledge. The amount of information that he can recite on genealogy, dates, history, and places without looking up any notes is impressive. He said they lived at that address from 1956 to 1964. Meaning that my dad was somewhere between 10 and 18 years old when the package was wrapped. Other than that information, I was just going to have to wait to find out until it was delivered.
Taking a trip to New Zealand is not as easy as just buying a (17 hour) plane ticket. Ugh! I don’t like flying to begin with and there are a lot of steps. I asked my daughter, son, and his fiance to go with me. That meant all those steps were done four times! I knew this would likely be a once-in-a-lifetime trip for me so we had a packed schedule for all of our stay. We had lots of family to visit and many sights to see. With the amount of the country I wanted to cover, there was a lot of planning time involved. There is no way I could have thrown together plans to be there in a short amount of time.
Finally, on November 23rd, 2024, I stuffed the mystery package in my carry-on and hopped on a plane headed for Auckland. There is a considerable time difference between our countries. We left on a Saturday evening, and arrived on Monday morning at 6:00 AM. That long flight gave me a lot of time for reflection. My dad passed just after his 70th birthday. He talked about family history a lot and there was much family pride for him in that place. I broke down thinking about the fact that I was there without him. He did visit once when he was eight but always wanted to go back. My happy tears flowed when the plane touched down.
Once we arrived at the airport and got through customs, we stopped at the bottom of some stairs. We were discussing where we were headed next when a man came up and gave me a strange look. We both paused and stared for a minute before I cautiously asked, “Sid?” He gave me a huge smile in return and went in for a big hug. The kids stood there staring and wondering who this stranger was so I introduced him. Sid gave everyone that same big hug and then walked us over to the rental car area. He said he was going home to pick up his wife and would meet us at his daughter Ali’s house.
Shortly after we were all seated at a table together, and I handed Sid the package. We watched as he carefully cut the strings with scissors, as I had wanted to a full year before. The newspaper, having been curled tight for so many years, did not want to lay flat. We each carefully held a side and began to read. The paper was a copy of The Oregonian. The headline read PANORAMA OF A CENTURY, OREGON OR BUST. The dateline, Wednesday. February 11, 1959. The subtitles read Migration, Exploration, and Discovery of our state between 1859 and 1959. There were articles about ‘The good ole days,’ ‘Union Pacific,’ and ‘Why we should be proud of Oregon,’ and ads for ‘Sears’ and ‘Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty on Broadway.’ Sid and I carefully looked through every page of that paper. Sid said he would enjoy looking at it again later with his son.
I was awed. At 13 years of age, my dad was wanting to share our Oregon history with his cousin in New Zealand. Here I was doing just that in his place 64 years later. It felt as though things had come full circle and I was complete. Each day of our trip after that was a new adventure. Many sights were seen, and many memories were made, but that first day was my absolute favorite. Thank you for letting me share my adventure with you, of “Going There and Back Again.”