In my youth I was fond of the occasional shenanigan (or travesura, as my friend Juan Carpio might call it). When I was in my undergrad degree at LSU, from 1983–87, I decided to play one of my pranks. At the start of each school year you register and get your student ID, parking pass, and so on, and also take photos for the LSU “Gumbo” yearbook. For the Gumbo Yearbook, Class of 1985, in Fall 1984, when I was starting my second year of college, I realized they did not check you identity when you had your yearbook photo taken. So I convinced several of my friends to swap names for the photos. Thus, my picture is shown under the listing for Garett Juneau, whom had worked with as a stockboy at Bon Lieu Supermarket; Chris Kershaw is shown for Kevin Kinchen (both former Catholic High School classmates); Stephen Zachary, another CHS classmate, is shown for Norman Kinsella (that’s me); Keith Jarreau is shown under Stephen Zachary’s name, and so forth.
The next year at registration I told two female friends, Shannon Savoy and Cindy DeLaney, about my prank the previous year and persuaded them to swap with each other. I thought both of them were cute and it would be fun to talk them into this. I soon started dating Cindy and later married her. My plan worked!
I had forgotten about this little prank until about a decade later. I was by now almost 30 years old, married, practicing law, and living in Philadelphia (with Cindy). Now, as explained in my biography, Adopting Liberty: The Stephan Kinsella Story, I was adopted from birth and unlike my brother and sister, who were also adopted (from different biological parents) I never had any interest in finding my birth family. But my birth mother, Gail Doiron McGehee, had been trying to find me for many years and had enlisted the help of her daughter Crystal, my half sister, in the search.
After years of searching, Gail was having no luck, since it was a closed adoption, common in those days. She had vowed to stop searching if she had not found me by my 30th birthday, which was approaching. As luck would have it, just a month so before that date, they finally found my adopted name (my birth name had been Farrell Wayne Doiron), with the help of the corrupt Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards and a private detective. Gail’s family had a small seafood restaurant in Zachary, Louisiana, and one day Governor Edwards (then in his fourth and final term as Governor) had lunch there. As explained in Adopting Liberty, ch. 7:
Gail[] pulled [Gov. Edwards] aside and beseeched him to use his resources to help locate the son she had given up for adoption. Within weeks, Gail received an envelope in the mail with a list of male births in Louisiana on October 1, 1965—some 200-300 names in all with a Louisiana driver’s license. “My mom and I sat in a room each day after work and called every name that we could match a phone number to,” Crystal explained. Upon using a third-party to further the investigation, they learned that he had probably been an LSU student. Crystal said that she and Gail went to the LSU campus and began perusing yearbook photos. However, in one of the high jinks pranks of his youth, Steph had switched his picture with that of a friend at registration. This became a confusing roadblock in their search, as Gail did not see any resemblance in the photos to herself or Steph’s birth father.
When they finally contacted me they told me the yearbook photo had confused them, since my friend Stephen Zachary whose photo was under my name in the 1985 Gumbo did not at all resemble Gail or my birth father. The mystery was soon solved.
