enlarge Photo by Dori Hjalmarson

Bill Lint, left, met his father Beverly Cotton for the first time last week at a cabin in Kentucky. Lint never knew about his dad, who was an Air Force sergeant.

GRAY — For 51 years, Bill Lint thought he was the son of a man who simply didn't care – an Air Force sergeant who touched down in northern Maine just long enough to get Lint's mother pregnant before moving on without so much as a backward glance.

Thus, Lint recalled Tuesday, "I figured if it was anybody's place to look for somebody, it was his place to look for me."

Except for one not-so-small problem.

His father never knew he existed.

"We weren't reunited – because we'd never met," said Lint, holding up a photo of him and his old man taken earlier this month in Manchester, Ky. "We were united."

Here's how it happened.

Glenna Lint was a 23-year-old Houlton girl when she first met Sgt. Beverly Herbert "Bev" Cotton at a church social near Loring Air Force Base in Limestone in 1957. It was love at first sight – or so they thought until that fall, when Bev left for a new assignment in Okinawa and Glenna took a deep breath and got on with her life.

Then Glenna found out she was pregnant.

She sent letters to Bev telling him the news. He never wrote back.

She went to his commanding officer at Loring, who told her there was nothing he could do and besides, her boyfriend was a "married man" with a wife and son in Massachusetts, where he'd been stationed before coming to Maine. (Actually, that wife had run off on Bev with another man and the marriage was no longer.)

So Glenna gave up. When the baby was born, she named him Beverly Herbert Lint after his father – he'd later go by "Bill" – and told him on the rare occasions when he'd ask that yes, his father knew about him and no, he was never coming back.

"I guess I pretty much took that to heart," Bill said. "I grew up believing that he always knew of me."

He also grew up in a living hell. Glenna eventually married and had three more boys with a man (now deceased) who turned out to be an abusive alcoholic – and it was Bill, the son of another man, who bore the brunt of his stepfather's wrath.

"It was very bad – and there's no exaggeration there," said Dan Lint, Bill's younger half-brother, from his home in Alaska.

Dan said he and Bill talked once, maybe twice, about Bill's father the entire time they grew up together. And the most Dan ever got from his mother were the same fragments of information that Bill had – Bill's father's name was Beverly Herbert Cotton, he served in the Air Force in Maine and Okinawa and he was either from Massachusetts or Kentucky. End of story.

Until last spring, when Dan moved into a house with a satellite dish and got hooked on "The Locator" – a cable TV show about reuniting long-lost loved ones.

"Every time I watched it, it just stirred me," Dan said. So much so that he decided to start looking, quietly, for his brother's dad.

He took out paid subscriptions to Net Detective and a handful of other Web sites that specialize in tracking people down. He called countless Cottons not just in Massachusetts and Kentucky, but also California, Maine, Mississippi ... even Alaska.

Eventually Dan found a Beverly Cotton in Kentucky. But that man, who had died, was way too old to have been Bill's father.

Then, at last, Dan hit pay dirt. A 2001 book honoring military veterans in Clay County, Ky., had found its way onto the Internet – and in it was a reference to Beverly H. Cotton (the deceased man's son) who had served with the Air Force in Okinawa, among other places, in the 1950s.

So now what?

"I didn't know what (Bill's) feelings were concerning this," Dan said. And before going any further, "I really wanted to know how he felt."

In June, Dan and his wife came to visit Bill, his wife, Christine, and their two boys. Early on the morning after they arrived, while everyone else was out sightseeing, Dan sat down...