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Seigenthaler walked the streets, checked the police, the hotels, the credit bureaus of a dozen Texas towns. A fortnight ago, by rarest coincidence, he saw a grey-haired, bespectacled man with an oddly shaped left ear step off a bus in Orange (pop. 21,174), Texas. Seigenthaler was instantly discouraged: the man limped badly. But the reporter followed his quarry through a quiet neighborhood to a white, comfortably unkempt frame house. The thin, limping man was Thomas D. Palmer, a television salesman. His wife, a motherly looking woman, worked as a court reporter and often toiled at home after hours, typing legal documents. They had six children—two married daughters, a son in the Marine Corps, a crippled 14-year-old boy named Duncan, who walks with elbow crutches and braces, and two younger girls, Margaret, 16, and Mary Ellen, 12. Seigenthaler checked for three days. Then, certain that the Palmers were really Tom Buntin and Betty McCuddy, he introduced himself to them. Resigned, troubled, they soberly admitted their identity.
Seigenthaler offered them $1,000 for their story. They refused. "If money had meant anything to us," said Betty McCuddy, "we wouldn't have done what we did. We were in love." But in the days that followed, some of the tale emerged anyhow. The course of love had not been easy. Running away had not cured Buntin of drinking. In Brownsville, where the couple settled in the early '305, he had lost job after job as a car salesman and service man. A fall from a curb had damaged his hip so badly that he had walked on crutches for years. All during their hard new life together, Betty had worked to make both ends meet.
"After All These Years." But for all that, it was obvious that the two were happy. In his way, Tom Buntin had met the harshness of life bravely enough. He lost jobs, but he always got new ones. He was cheerful and well liked, even by men who fired him. He became a good salesman and as the years passed, drank less and less. The Thomas D. Palmers lived for their children, and in the end their fortress was their big, respectable, close-knit family.
Last week Tom Buntin and Betty McCuddy savored some of the joys of rescued castaways: Tom Buntin talked to his aging mother on the telephone, and Betty McCuddy talked to her father, who had long since given her up as dead. Betty learned for the first time that her mother and only brother were dead. "After all these years," she cried, and bit her lip. The Palmer children were shocked and disturbed. Two days after the excitement began, daughter Elizabeth Ann bore her first baby. The child was dead. Reporters besieged the green-roofed house. After their 22 years, middle-aged Tom and middle-aged Betty were back again in the world they had abandoned.