Word: dan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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UNLIKE SABREENA, DAN KNAPP NEVER RAN away or openly clashed with his adoptive mother. "He never gave me a problem. He just made me proud," says Jackie Knapp, 53, a single mom who is the education director at a Christian center in Elmira, N.Y. Placed in foster care at age 9 after his father died and his mother was unable to care for him on her own, Dan moved in with Jackie and her parents the next year. Now 24, he still remembers the meeting he attended in which his birth mother told the social worker that she was relinquishing...
...college graduate and program coordinator at a teen center in Watkins Glen, N.Y., Dan says that in some ways he has always felt like an outsider. When his last name was changed to Knapp, after Jackie legally adopted him when he was 14, "I expected everything to magically change, and it never did," he says. "I still felt like I was a foster kid." He recalls how upset he felt when Jackie's mother occasionally introduced him as her adopted grandson and how his cousins always seemed to get more presents than he did when the extended family exchanged gifts...
...After Dan got his driver's license in high school, he started spending less time at home. He also stopped talking at meals or skipped them altogether. "I kind of just closed off," he says. Jackie noticed the change in him but opted for a tolerant approach. "I just took it that he's a teenager," she says. "I just kind of gave him his space...
...Then Dan went to college, and they started instant-messaging each other to stay in touch. Although he and Jackie IM several times a week and Dan says he would like to work on their relationship, one of the few times he remembers calling Jackie Mom to her face was four years ago at church. "She was at the altar praying, and I put my arm around her, and I called her Mom. I think she cried," he says. Jackie says she knew all along that it would be hard for Dan to call her Mom. "I realized that...
...Bill Clinton's first Treasury Secretary, the pro-choice, pro-business Democrat was widely admired as a bipartisan coalition builder. Yet Bentsen will be forever remembered for a singularly potent moment during a 1988 debate. The vice presidential candidate on Michael Dukakis' ticket, he bridled at Dan Quayle, then 41 and a Senator from Indiana, who was defending his youth and experience by comparing himself to John F. Kennedy. "Senator," Bentsen said, seething, "I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy...