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The Weekender Saturday, November 26, 2016
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A family — again Son reunites with father after nearly 30 years By SUSAN LYNN The Iola Register
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t first, DavidPaul Cavazos thought the letter a cruel joke. The handwritten missive began, “David-Paul, It’s me your father. Please don’t think I’m writing you for money or a kidney. I’m writing solely because I’m tired of being scared of how you would feel about me. .... You must know that letting you go was not easy for me. I knew I had to do it so that you would have a better chance at life, a good life.” It had been almost 30 years that Cavazos had last heard from his father. He was 12, his dad 36. “I thought he was dead,” Cavazos said. “Or that he hated me. That somehow I had done something wrong.” Cavazos is chief operating officer for the Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center. He and his wife, Laura, and their young family moved to Iola in 2012 from Kansas City. The letter that has changed his life arrived in mid-September. “I’m 40 years old and I’ve just now learned my dad did very much want me,” DavidPaul said as he shared his story Sunday night. That truth has “lifted a big weight off my chest. All my life I’ve secretly harbored the thought that somehow in his eyes I wasn’t lovable.” After receiving the letter, David-Paul called his father, Richard Cavazos of San Antonio, Texas, who shortly thereafter made the trip to Iola to see his only child. “We talked non-stop,” David-Paul said of the reunion. On Monday, the young
David-Paul and Laura Cavazos and their children, from left, Isaac, Ada and Abram, recently discovered David-Paul’s father, Richard, after an almost 30-year absence. Father and son embrace, lower right, in a visit from Richard in October. Richard brought with him a box of mementos of his son that he has kept since they last saw each other 29½ years ago. family left for Texas to be not only with David-Paul’s dad, but also his mother and stepfather who live in Austin. DAVID-PAUL was 5 years old when his parents divorced. At the time, his father was his primary caregiver while his mother attended classes at the University of Texas in Austin at night. “We were never more than 3 feet apart,” David-Paul said
of those tender years. “In fact, I rarely saw my mom.” When David-Paul was 11 his mother married a man who worked as an attorney for the military, causing the family to move to Kansas. It was then that his mother, Isabel, asked her ex-husband to cease all contact with their son. David-Paul has since learned how this came about. “She told Dad it was her time to create the family she
had always pictured,” he said. “Dad respected that decision. He trusted her. He told me he would write and see me again.” When David-Paul was 12 he received a birthday card from his dad — three months late. Not only did the tardiness of the card concern David-Paul, but also his dad’s handwriting had markedly deteriorated. Even as a 12-year-old, he
knew something bad had happened to his dad, perhaps he was seriously ill. That was their last communication. It was a rocky start for David-Paul in Kansas. “We had a hard time settling in,” he said, in part because his mother had enrolled in law school at Topeka’s Washburn University while his stepfather reported to Fort Leavenworth. “So we lived in Platte City, Missouri,” he said. The next year they lived in Topeka. The following year in North Kansas City, where David-Paul was to finish his last three years of high school in Park Hill. His senior year in high school his stepfather was assigned to Virginia. His mother remained in Kansas City with David-Paul the first semester, but joined her husband the second semester leaving the 17-year-old to live alone in their apartment. “I was fine,” he shrugged. “My life was swim team and studying.” David-Paul struggles to diplomatically explain his family’s dynamics. On the one hand, he felt immense pride in his mother and stepfather because of their careers. His stepdad worked for the JAG Corps, the legal branch of the military, while his mother worked as an arbitration attorney for the Department of Defense. Even so, there were countless holidays David-Paul spent alone. “I was always the young man around the Thanksgiving table that wasn’t family,” he said of those years. “I basically saw my mom and stepdad two weeks a year — Christmas and summer.” He remembers that when his mother took her new husband’s surname, that made him feel, “like the third man out. Nobody was a Cavazos except me.” His wife, Laura, has made great strides in helping DaSee FAMILY | Page A4
Iola looks to end water pact with Gas
Trump warms to climate change
By RICHARD LUKEN The Iola Register
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump appears to be softening his tone on whether climate change is real and on his stated plans to scrap the recent multinational agreement to limit carbon emissions. In a wide-ranging interview on Tuesday with editors and reporters at The New York Times, Trump said he would “keep an open mind” about the Paris accord, which he has repeatedly said he planned to either renegotiate or cancel if elected. Trump was also reported to have affirmed in the interview held two weeks after the election that human activity and global warming may be linked. “I think there is some connectivity,” he said. “Some, something. It depends on how much.” That’s a significant shift
Iola City Council members will decide Monday whether to stop selling water to Gas. City Administrator Sid Fleming is of the mind the Council should do just that, in an attempt to draw Gas back to the bargaining table, according to information he has provided prior to the upcoming Council meeting. The issue stems from the cities’ water purchase agreement ratified in 2001. The agreement carries a 30-year term, and limits Iola to being able to raise its rates for Gas six times over that stretch. Because of increased costs related to water production — including construction of a new water
plant — Iola exhausted those six hikes. Four of those increases have been since 2011 as Iola has struggled to balance its water fund (the fund was operated at a loss the four years prior to 2011.)
Quote of the day Vol. 119, No. 22
Gas City Council members have thus far resisted Iola’s attempts at a seventh water rate hike, of 3 percent, which was approved by the Iola Council in April. See WATER | Page A6
“I can resist everything except temptation.” — Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900 75 Cents
Donald Trump from Trump’s past statements that climate change is a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing less competitive. Trump has also cited winter cold snaps as evidence that climate change is a “con job” and a “myth.” “The entire country is See TRUMP | Page A6
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