Little City resident finds biological father after 30 years

Having lost the adoptive parents who raised him to adulthood over the past couple years, Joe Dus of Schaumburg grew weary of watching his family diminish.

Using Facebook and his knowledge of his original last name, the 39-year-old Little City Foundation resident found his long-lost biological father on the day before Father's Day and met him face-to-face for the first time in more than 30 years this weekend.

The backdrop of their reunion was Little City's annual Parent, Family and Guardian Picnic on its main Palatine campus Sunday.

Dus was born with learning disabilities that keep him from living completely independently as an adult. But he is a high-functioning office employee for Little City, as well as one of the leaders of the Little City Advocacy Group that lobbies on behalf of special-needs issues in Springfield.

This weekend he was delighted by his meeting with his biological father, Joe Monti, and his wife, Ginny, who live just south of St. Louis.

"It's like a whole new family!" Dus said.

Dus also has a brother, 43-year-old Tony, who was similarly adopted by the Dus family as an older child.

Tony Dus, who met his own biological parents when he was 21, said he was originally skeptical of his adoptive brother's plans but ultimately decided it couldn't hurt for him to know his own father.

"I think it's a good thing," Tony said at Sunday's picnic.

Joe Monti said the story of his separation from his son was a complicated and painful one.

The little boy was born Nov. 25, 1970, to parents who were then still teenagers.

Monti said he and the boy's mother believed they could make a marriage work, but ultimately they separated when their son was about a year old.

Little Joe went to live with his mother in an Illinois suburb of St. Louis, while Monti stayed on the Missouri side.

Monti said he managed to maintain at least an irregular presence in Joe's life during his early years, but Joe's mother eventually ran into serious legal problems.

Monti acknowledges that taking in his son at that stage would not have been easy, but Illinois law at the time made it an impossibility as he was still a single male.

He persuaded his former wife that the best thing for their son was to put him up for adoption. Though he knew in his heart it was the right thing to do, he realized when he signed the papers how painful it was going to be.

Joe entered foster care when he was 7 years old and was eventually adopted by the Dus family in Willowbrook when he was 9.

Both Joe and Tony Dus said their adoptive parents were everything they could have hoped for and raised them well and lovingly. Their adoptive father died two years ago, and their mother died last year.

Monti said he knew there was nothing he could do but wait to hear from his son again, as he was legally prohibited from ever learning his new last name. And without the creation of Facebook, their reunion would still have been unlikely even now.

Monti said both the first contact on Facebook and the first face-to-face meeting were highly emotional experiences that he struggled to put into words.

His wife, Ginny, helping him, said, "It's like one of those things you hope for, but you don't know whether it'll ever happen."

"That's a pretty good way to say it," Monti said, his voice cracking and his eyes filling with tears.

Both father and son said it's too early to know what amount of face-to-face contact they'll maintain, but they are thinking about arranging a visit by Dus to his father's home in Missouri.