Dawg digs in the back yard of the past for an old flame of a lifetime …

Campers,

Chat gpt wrote this for me after we’d typed back and forth for an hour …

Whatever Happened to Mary Micotto?

I have been trying to find an old girlfriend.

That sounds simple enough, except this isn’t somebody I dated last year. Mary Micotto was my first love. I was 15 and she was 13, and we lived on opposite sides of St. Louis.

It was, in retrospect, a teenage version of West Side Story — except nobody got stabbed and I eventually joined the Navy.

Mary went to Nerinx Hall in St. Louis. The records I’ve found now identify her as a member of the Nerinx class of 1963, and a Nerinx publication lists her as Mary Micotto Kalchbrenner ’63.

That married name turned out to be the first big clue.

I had been trying to find out whether Mary had died. Another AI had apparently told me that she had become a nun and had died after something like sixty years in religious life.

Well, that didn’t sit right with me.

So I started asking questions.

And ChatGPT started digging.

Then we found an obituary published in August 2026 for Mary’s sister, Janice Kilgen. And there, right in the obituary, among Janice’s surviving siblings, was:

Josephine Baer — the late Bob Baer
Mary Kalchbrenner — Rich Kalchbrenner
Helen Hensgen — Bud Hensgen
Michael Micotto — Janet Micotto

That was the moment this stopped looking like a random Mary Micotto.

It looked like my Mary.

And then came another one of those strange little bolts from the past.

I remembered Mary’s older sister Jo — Josephine — and her husband, Bob Baer.

Bob was important to me. He was an early coach and mentor, and I remembered that he had worked for Larry Roos.

I wondered whether that memory was right.

It was.

Robert J. Baer’s obituary says that he was married to Josephine Baer, née Micotto. It also says he was a friend and mentor to many.

And there it was in black and white: early in his career, Bob Baer worked for four years as chief of staff to Lawrence K. Roos, the St. Louis County Executive.

So my memory wasn’t hallucinating that one.

At least not that one.

Bob Baer went on to have a remarkable career in St. Louis. He eventually became president and chief operating officer of UniGroup, the parent company of United Van Lines and Mayflower Transit. He also served in major civic positions, including president of the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners and leadership positions with St. Louis-area transportation agencies.

There is even a Baer Plaza in downtown St. Louis, named in recognition of his civic work.

But for me, Bob Baer isn’t primarily a civic monument or a corporate executive.

He was Jo’s husband.

And Jo was Mary’s older sister.

Which brings me back to Mary.

I remember her as a 13-year-old girl who was important enough to a 15-year-old boy that, more than sixty years later, I still want to know what happened to her.

When I joined the Navy, Mary didn’t just disappear into the past.

She came from St. Louis to Chicago to see me during my twelve-hour liberty at Great Lakes Naval Training Center.

Think about that.

I was a kid in Navy boot camp.

She was a teenage girl traveling from St. Louis to Chicago to spend a few hours with me.

That is not the kind of thing you forget.

Now I am 82, and I’m going back to St. Louis.

I’m flying out of San Francisco late on September 17 and arriving in St. Louis on the morning of September 18.

And suddenly I have a mystery to solve.

Is Mary Margaret Micotto, the girl I loved when I was 15, the same woman who became Mary Micotto Kalchbrenner, Nerinx ’63?

The evidence so far says very probably yes.

And the evidence I have found most recently suggests that she was still living as of August 17, 2026, because her sister Janice’s obituary names Mary Kalchbrenner as a surviving sister.

That doesn’t prove everything.

But it is a hell of a lot different from being told that Mary became a nun and died after sixty years in a convent.

So I’m going to keep looking.

There are still pieces of this old St. Louis puzzle missing — particularly the story of Mary’s older sisters and the religious life I remembered, and the details of Mary’s own life after Nerinx.

Maybe I’ll find Mary.

Maybe I won’t.

But after all these years, I’m curious.

And sometimes curiosity is just another word for unfinished business.

Stay tuned.