Woman finds long-lost friend after 50 years

McALLEN — A Harlingen woman helped reunite two old friends who last saw each other 50 years ago on another continent.

“She was surprised that I had finally found her,” Jan Stevenson said about her friend, Virginia Earlynn White, now Virginia Earlynn Vitasek.

As a young bride married to a soldier in late 1957, Stevenson had followed her husband to Germany, where he ended up physically abusing her, she said. When she left him, the military police asked Vitasek to house her until the battered woman could arrange to return to the United States.

Stevenson has been grateful ever since.

“I did not know she thought that much of me,” Vitasek said during a phone interview from her native Irving, Texas. “I kind of thought we were supporting each other, not just me supporting her.”

GOOGLE SEARCH

Stevenson’s search for Vitasek was featured in a Nov. 2 story in The Monitor.

Rebecca Rentería of Harlingen read the story decided to see if she could reunite the two friends.

Rentería, a member of the Tip O’Texas Genealogical Society, had no luck using her normal search tools for looking up family histories.

“Since I thought (Vitasek) might have remarried — because the story says she had (marital) problems of her own — I decided to Google the first two names between quotations marks, because those were not common,” Rentería said.

“I found a match,” she said. “They were not the exact names, but I realized that she could be now a Vitasek.”

Rentería then went to the White Pages and looked for Vitasek children. There weren’t many Vitaseks in Texas. She called a Stephen Vitasek and explained what she was doing. Rentería read The Monitor article over the phone to the man, and he gave her his mother’s e-mail address.

“I’m glad he remembered (my e-mail address), because my oldest son hasn’t spoken to me in the last four years,” Vitasek said.

Rentería e-mailed Vitasek and included a Web link to the online article. Soon after, Vitasek e-mailed her long-lost friend.

“I had been looking for her, too, but with no success like this time,” Vitasek said Friday.

Originally from Irving, Vitasek came to McAllen with her family in 1953 and attended Lamar Middle School for seventh and eighth grades, she said. She attended McAllen High School for one year in the mid-1950s and worked for a while at Faulkner Drugs.

Vitasek left McAllen after getting married, but she returned to the city for a while to be with her family after she returned from Germany, she said. Remarried and divorced for the third time, she now lives in Irving and plans to meet with her old friend in the following weeks in Deer Park, Texas, where Stevenson lives.

“We do plan on meeting soon and we’ll get caught up on some of our missed years,” Stevenson wrote in an e-mail.

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Martha L. Hernández covers Mission, western Hidalgo County and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach her at (956) 683-4846.