Man whose son vanished in 1955 recalls dark day

NEWTON, Iowa - The man on the television screen bore a resemblance to him, Jerry Damman admitted Wednesday as he watched the 6 p.m. local news in his farmhouse filled with pictures of his two sons and six grandchildren.

There were no signs of his firstborn here, 2-year-old Steven, who was whisked away from an East Meadow market on Halloween in 1955.

- Click here to see the latest photos, and exclusive photos from our archives, in the controversy over a Long Island toddler missing since 1955

But on the television screen was John Robert Barnes, the man who has a suspicion he may be Steven Damman.

"He did kind of look like me but he looks older and I think bigger," Damman said with mild excitement on the phone with a friend. When the news segment aired, Damman's wife, Charlotte, turned up the volume.

"He's bald like me," said Damman, who had Steven Damman with his former wife, Marilyn, now of Kansas City, Mo. "He looks like he's a pretty big fella."

Until now, Damman's only memories of that dark time are the yellowing newspaper clippings and aging photos he has tucked into a large envelope labeled simply, "Steven."

Inside it are pictures of a young family in Long Island: Marilyn and Jerry Damman and their firstborn son.

There's Steven crawling on the floor in a diaper, Steven clutching a stuffed animal next to his crib, Steven playing in a wheelbarrow.

"I remember that wheelbarrow," Damman, 78, says sitting on the porch of his 440-acre farm here. "It was so long ago."

The unassuming Iowan native rewound some 50 years ago to his first marriage and life in Long Island, to Oct. 31, 1955, when his first son disappeared from the front of the East Meadow Food Fair.

FBI officials are analyzing DNA data, sources say, to see if John Robert Barnes is Damman's long-lost son. Damman and other relatives of the boy who vanished hope a DNA match can solve the mystery.

"I went through all this when I was 25 and just a farm boy and it wasn't easy then," Damman said. "And it's not really now, but at least you don't have a loss like you did then. You try to keep up hope. But then after all these years, I just can't say."

Damman said his son Dwight spoke on the phone with Barnes Tuesday but Damman doesn't plan on meeting him or getting his hopes up until officials confirm that it's really him.

Damman said he believes a man who came to his house in the fall looking for him may have been Barnes. His wife, Charlotte, who figured the man was a salesman, told him her husband was working down the street.

"He didn't pursue finding me," says Jerry Damman. "I wish he would have."

Memories fade with age, but for Damman, the night that his son disappeared when his first wife left him and his 7-month-old sister, Pamela Sue, outside in a stroller is crystal clear.

"It never leaves you," Damman said.

Damman was serving in the Air Force, working as an office manager when he got a call from his wife saying she had left the children outside of a store and that Steven was gone.

He stayed awake for more than two days, hoping his son would be found, alive. "After this all happened I was just worn out," Damman said. "I went the longest I ever went without sleep."

- Click here to see the latest photos, and exclusive photos from our archives, in the controversy over a Long Island toddler missing since 1955