Scott Swanson
Elias Negron of Lebanon was visiting Sweet Home several years ago with his wife Deshawnda, when he decided to go for a run at Foster Lake.
“I’m married to a lady from Sweet Home and years back I used to park across from the (Gedney Creek) boat launch and go running,” he said. On this visit he left his truck at The Point restaurant and started running along the lake shore.
Negron, 42, said he normally limits his runs to three or four miles, but he was feeling particularly good that day as he wound his way clock-wise around the lake. As he reached North River Road, he was still feeling pretty strong when he encountered a county road worker patching holes in the pavement.
“I asked him how far it was all the way around, but he didn’t know. So I asked if it would be farther to keep going or to turn back. He said to keep going.”
A couple of miles further, Negron was beginning to feel the creep of exhaustion and he realized the worker had either been wrong or misled him.
“I was severely dehydrated by the time I got back to The Point” after completing the 71/2-mile loop, he said. “I was angry.”
As he drank a bottle of water he’d brought in his vehicle, he was approached by an older man smoking a cigarette.
“He asked if I was looking for a place to stay and I said no, I wasn’t,” Negron said. The man continued asking questions and making comments and Negron said he started getting irritated.
“I try to be respectful of people but I was really tired and he was smoking another cigarette.”
Then, suddenly, things got interesting.
“He said, ‘Where are you from?’ I said, ‘Puerto Rico, sir.’”
“I’ve been there,” the man said.
“I said, ‘Yeah, right.’”
“I’m serious,” the man said. “I’ve been there many times. I’ve been to Utuado.”
“I almost hit the ground,” Negron said. The man had mentioned his home town – an Indian name – and pronounced it correctly. Utuado, located in the mountains, has a population of slightly over 35,000 – about twice the size of Lebanon.
“When I lived on the East Coast, I met 20,000 Puerto Ricans and I never heard any of them mention Utuado. When I heard this guy say it at the lake, I couldn’t believe it. I’m from Utuado.”
The stranger, who, Negron guessed, was in his 70s, started telling a story about how his mother had been an art student, the daughter of a wealthy Puerto Rican family, who had begun corresponding as a pen pal with a soldier stationed in the Northwest. She had gone to the United States, ostensibly to go to college, but had instead met and married the soldier.
“Her family found out she wasn’t in art school, but by the time they got to Oregon, she was already married,” Negron said.
“I said, ‘That’s an amazing story. What a coincidence.’” Negron noted that there aren’t too many Hispanics in this area and even fewer from Puerto Rico.
“I was going back to my truck and then it clicked: ‘What was her name?’”
The man said his mother’s name was Candida Perez.
“I got goose bumps on my legs. I started shaking. ‘You said your mom is Candida Perez?’ I said, ‘Sir, just give me a second. I have to make a phone call.’”
Negron called his mother in Puerto Rico and told her what the stranger had said.
“My mom said, ‘You need to calm down. You’re going to have a heart attack.’”
She told him that Candida Perez was his grandfather’s aunt, adding that Negron should tell the man he was part of the Mattos family. Both his grandparents on her side and his grandfather on his father’s side were related to Candida Perez.
“I thought he’d said his name was Bob Perry, so I said, ‘Bob, do you know that you’re related to me?’
“I couldn’t believe this was happening in Oregon. There are not very many Hispanic people here.”
Negron himself came to Oregon after working for Georgia Pacific railroad in Georgia and meeting a young woman from Oregon. He’d settled down in Toledo but
Photo by Scott Swanson
ELIAS NEGRON, left, holds a photo of some of his Puerto Rican ancestors, while his distant cousin, Frank Perry, holds a photo of his grandmother Candida, center, as a young woman, and of him with Candida before she died.
that relationship didn’t work out and he eventually met Deshayanda Dye of Sweet Home and they married. They now live in Lebanon.
Promising “Bob” that he’d reconnect, Negron headed home and that’s where the story went cold.
Negron said he spent “at least an hour a week” for the next several years, trying to locate Perry. He Googled “Bob Perry” in Sweet Home and came up empty.
He stopped at the Post Office and at the library. He asked around at places where he thought the guy might hang out. He remembered the man had told him he’d served as a soldier in Korea, but that was about it.
“Nobody can tell me anything,” he said. “I was looking, looking, looking, spending months making phone calls, talking to people.”
After a few years of dead ends, Negron decided earlier this year to give it one more shot. During his Google research he’d come across numerous obituaries and the thought occurred that maybe the man he sought had passed away.
So he called Sweet Home Funeral Chapel and was told that there was no “Bob Perry” in its archives, but that a “Bud Perry” had died in Sweet Home in 2009. Except, the deceased’s full name was Jose Manuel “Bud” Perry.
“That’s probably why people looked at me like I was crazy,” he said about the confusion over the name.
The funeral home staff member wouldn’t give him phone numbers, but there were relatives’ names in an obituary posted on the funeral home website.
“I learned that he had a son, Franklin Manuel Perry and another son, who had been a really good wrestler, Edgar DeWane Perry, who lived in Sweet Home at that time.”
With names in hand, Negron went back to Google and quickly found some family members. He located Edgar DeWane’s house on a map and decided to pay a visit. Driving up, he spotted the car that Bud Perry had been driving on that day several years previously, parked outside.
“I was excited,” he said. He knocked on the door.
“A big guy with red hair came out. I thought, ‘This guy doesn’t look Puerto Rican at all.’”
But it didn’t take long to establish that they were, in fact, related.
“Edgar was pretty excited to have me go to his house,” Negron said.
Last week, after several extended phone conversations, he met Frank.
“Dad had mentioned before he died that he’d met this guy, but I thought he was just kind of pulling my leg,” said Frank Perry, 56, who now lives in Albany.
“These people were living all around me and I didn’t even know it,” Negron said.
“We probably walked by each other and didn’t even know it,” Perry added.
He said he has visited Utuado twice, in 1976 and 1996, but since he doesn’t speak Spanish, his ability to communicate with the family there was limited. He said that side of his family is wealthy.
“They had a half-Olympic-sized swimming pool and chauffeurs – nothing I was used to,” he said. His grandfather owns a mountaintop plantation that grows coffee, tobacco, oranges, bananas, grapefruits and guavas.
Candida’s relatives own a neighboring property.
“I never could figure out where I got my facial features,” Perry said. “Then I went there and met one of my relatives. He was my twin, except he was 20 years older.”
“It’s incredible because Frank has been trying to connect to his family,” Negron said. “We talk for hours on the phone. One day we talked for an hour and a half.
“All the family right now is talking. I have two grandparents who are still alive. They remember Candida.”
“It’s a small world,” Perry said.