HAYDEN - In recent years, when Gary Miller would see men about 6 feet tall, dark hair, he would silently ask himself a question.

Could that be my son?

"Maybe you're my child," he would wonder.

"For 61 years, I thought about the child," the Hayden man said. "For 61 years, I went through that. All these years, I kept wondering if I would get that knock on the door."

The wondering is over.

The day after Christmas, he met that child he had that he never knew.

His son, John.

After an exchange of phone calls and emails, after a search for his father by John Hall, after all those years of not knowing each other but wondering if each was out there, they came face to face at the front door of Gary's home.

"I'm 79 years old," Gary said. "I've gone through life's emotions. Witnessed death, birth, been married, had kids, made and lost a fortune. I never had an emotion like the emotions I've gone through waiting for John. It's like a new birth."

John C. Hall, who lives in Laguna Beach, Calif., was excited to meet his biological father.

"I knew this was a pretty important day," he said as he sat in the Millers' living room, sharing the same couch as his father.

In the first hours of their conversation, they traded stories of their lives, their families, their homes, their jobs, their hobbies, their goals.

"We've been everywhere, haven't we, John?" Miller said.

John laughed, adding he didn't know he had scores of nephews, nieces, sisters and a brother and cousins.

"I haven't begun to count all them up yet," he said.

Gary and Edie, his wife of 30 years, didn't have children between them, but did have children from previous marriages.

"This is our kid," Gary thought.

Miller said it took him 79 years to be in a place where he could be with his son - for the first time.

"John's been given back to me," he said.

Gary's story

Gary Miller was in Whittier Union High School in Whittier, Calif., when he met a girl named Barbara.

"I really fell in love with her, as much as a high school boy can love a high school girl," he said.

During the several-year relationship, Barbara became pregnant. They talked of getting married, but both realized they were too young, not ready for a child, college was in their futures.

"We got to thinking we couldn't really bring up a child the way a child should be brought up," Gary said.

They agreed on adoption.

Barbara was moved by her family to Seattle, Gary said, and he was cut off from her.

"I never saw her again. I never saw the baby. I never heard anything about the baby," he said.

The only word he received, he said, was when his parents told him "the baby was born."

"It hurt because I loved the girl," he said.

Gary would do well professionally. He became a physicist with General Electric, owned a construction company, and became an architect, too.

"I usually built what I designed," he said.

He married, had children, divorced and later met Edie. He told her about his first child, and Gary continued to wonder what came of him.

"I guess in my heart, I thought it was probably a boy, probably went to Vietnam, probably never came home," he said. "I was pretty well resigned to never finding my child."

Until six weeks ago.

A note arrived from his alma mater, Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. It said a man, 61, had inquired about him and his background, where he came from. He wanted to contact him "to answer some medical questions?" That age, Gary figured, would be about right for his son.

He showed the email to his wife. He worried it might be a scam.

"But there were too many facts here to be off the wall," he said.

Gary's attorney gave him the green light to contact the person behind the note.

"I think maybe you found your dad," Gary wrote.

In his response, he asked a few questions of his own, still fearing it might be some elaborate con.

Gary became convinced.

His next letter began "Dear Son."

John's story

John Hall was raised the only child of a couple in Southern California.

"I was lucky to land in a fantastic family," he said.

His adoptive parents told him at a young age he was adopted. Still, he didn't begin to try to find his biological parents until much later, around age 50 when his adoptive parents had passed on and changes in California law made gaining basic information about his biological parents a little easier.

When he became a grandfather, he began to wonder more about his parents, who they were, what they did, where they ended up in life.

He checked on the Internet and did DNA searches, but his breakthrough came when he found a bill in his adoptive father's desk. It was from a lawyer regarding "the adoption of Gary Miller."

With a name, John Hall turned to ancestry.com. He determined his father was in the class of 1950, found a yearbook. He looked at the pictures, not the names.

"I just stopped at one. I said, 'Wait a minute, that looks just like me when I graduated at 18.' And I opened the piece of paper up and it said his name was Gary Miller."

He discovered this Gary Miller went to Pomona College, and fired off a letter to the alumni department seeking to contact him.

"I wasn't real hopeful I was going to get an answer," he said.

He did.

The two exchanged notes, answering each other's questions.

"The next email I get is 'Dear Son.'"

He found his mother's family, too.

"I went from believing I was an only child to one that has five sisters and a brother, just like that overnight. It was really pretty amazing to find out all that," he said.

Sadly, his mother, Barbara, passed away six years ago.

"Her family didn't know I existed," John said.

Meeting

Gary remembers waiting Christmas night for the next morning, the day John was scheduled to arrive.

"The longest night and longest morning I can remember," he said.

Early that afternoon, there was a knock on the door.

They shook hands. They hugged. They talked. That night, they sat down to dinner together.

"It's something you really can't describe until you've been through it," John said.

Gary is proud of John, and believes adoption was the right decision at the time.

His son was nurtured, cared for and educated by a loving couple. He calls it "divine intervention."

Today, John is the owner and CEO of Rickenbacker Guitars, a company he took over from his adoptive father. He has been married 42 years and has two children.

"I couldn't have even begun to give this kind of a life to John," Gary said. He's been blessed with this kind of an upbringing."

John smiles as he glances toward his father, seated just a few feet away.

"Now I get a second chance, I get a second dad," he said, smiling. "Not everybody can say that."

They discovered similarities, too. Both are pilots. Both have been in wood working. Gary stands 6-foot-2, John is 6 foot. Both wear glasses. Neither likes fish.

"A lot of amazing little parallels that you can't directly attribute to genetics," John said.

John remained in Hayden for two days, and Gary and Edie plan to fly down to visit their son, meet his family, visit his workplace, this summer.

"I feel certain we'll be in close contact for the rest of my life," Gary said.

"Unto us a son is given," Edie said, quoting from the book of Isaiah.

Gary shared his story with his men's Bible study group at Candlelight Christian Fellowship Church. All were happy for him, and had questions. Some said they had been looking for their dad. Others, a son. They asked Gary how he and John found each other.

"A lot of people have shared what they kept locked up in their closet," Gary said.

He hopes the story of this father and son encourages young men and women to consider adoption, should they find themselves in the same situation Gary did as a teenager.

"It might take 61 years before they get the reward, but there will be a reward," he said.