"The Fire" -- a preface to Don Ray's book about his lifelong pursuit of fathers and father figures.

A fire that continues to burn in my consciousness.

 When I was six, I remember my parents' reaction to this newspaper story. For whatever reason, it had hit close to home for both of them.

It was a story about a fire that broke out in the Los Angeles home of a woman and her six children. I remember how it described how five of the children either jumped out windows or climbed down the stairs to safety.


Outside, when their mother made a headcount, her three-year-old was missing -- he hadn't made it out of the burning house.

The mother went back inside to rescue him, but they both perished.

The newspaper story said that the father was out of town on business.

That would turn out not to be true -- I would later learn that he and his wife were separated and were involved in a contentious divorce.

Her death would render the divorce proceedings unnecessary.

I had never heard of these people, but it was obvious that they were family friends. In thinking back, I don't remember my parents having had any family friends at that time.

I could never, however, erase the mental images the story had given me -- images of trying to escape a fire in the darkness of the early morning hours.

Fires became regular nightmares for me -- in one of them, my mother and sister were focused on shopping for sale items on the top floor of the Broadway Department Store on Fourth and Hill streets in downtown L.A. while a fire was spreading its way toward us.

They were oblivious, and I couldn't get their attention.

Instinctively, I would forever, mentally plan the escape route I would use should the smell of smoke set me in motion.

Later, in elementary school, one of the three or four books I remember reading at the school library was "Famous Fires." I still don't understand why third graders needed to read graphic books about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, deadly fires at circuses or theaters, and about people helplessly trapped on burning ships at sea.

More nightmares.

The only notable success I had in junior high school was winning the third place price in Burbank's Fire Prevention Essay Contest. The prize they arranged for the winners was a day that would put Disneyland to shame -- a day of climbing the fire engine's extended ladder to the top of the training tower, and then returning to the main fire station where, repeatedly, we were able to slide down the poles that firefighters used to get from their sleeping quarters down to where the trucks were awaiting during a fire alarm.

After that, on my 10-speed bicycle, I would chase the sounds of sirens so I could follow the fire trucks to the scenes of fires. As a freelance news photographer and video stringer, I shot or recorded scores of fires -- some of them deadly.

Some of those images still pop up in bad dreams.

The darkest moment of my year in Vietnam involved witnessing fire take a life. I cannot remove from my brain the smell of burning flesh.

Please don't ask me about it.

Needless to say, the tragic fire I read about when I was a child stayed with me.

I would come to know the family name associated with the fire.

My mother had met the children's father during World War II when she was taking a city bus to work. He drove the bus. I'm guessing that his love of horse racing somehow clicked with my father's, and they started getting together.

When I was in high school, I became a casual friend of one of those children who survived the fire, but I don't believe I ever let it be known that I was aware of the fire.

I guess I should fill in some other important information here. Back when my older sister and I were about seven and nine, our father arranged a "you better sit down kids" talk where he told us that they were getting a divorce. He told us that we'd be living with mother and that we shouldn't worry about us.

He told us that he wasn't our real father.

He named a couple of "suspects" -- one of them was the father of those children in the house that burned.

Last year, I discovered through a DNA match, that bus driver was my real father. He, my mother and my first "father" have all passed on -- so there's nobody living today to provide any details.

Now, of course, I know that the three-year-old who died in that fire was my half-brother.

Three of the five half siblings who survived the fire are still alive.

I'm intentionally not naming anyone in the family because I have absolutely no right to revive tragic memories in their lives -- and it's not that difficult for me to surmise that the existence of me or of my mother is not something they would wish to embrace.

I'm just guessing, however -- better safe than sorry.

Most of my friends know about the dozens and dozens of people I've helped over the years, in finding and connecting with their own missing or hidden family members.

I'm sure that my friends can see the irony here -- and how frustrating it must be to use such self-restraint.

The book I'm writing will focus not only on the fathers I had, didn't have and wished I had had, but on the challenges I've faced -- and about the astounding ways I learned to compensate -- just to survive.

It will provide details of some of the most interesting, infamous and inspiring people I've encountered, and about the things I learned from them -- in spite of or in lieu of the fathers that chose not to take on that role in my life.

I'm writing this book because I've recently discovered that I fathered a child many years ago.

There's no way that I can go back in time and be the father he deserved -- but at the very least, I can share with him, and my newly discovered granddaughters, what I learned along the way -- mistakes and all.

You see, that house fire involved their aunts and uncles as well.