Martin City man appreciates life’s journey even while navigating rough waters

Dwelling on the hardship of the past has always been simply a waste for Ben Bruso. When at 80 years old, he completed a nearly 2-mile swim across the Saint Lawrence River he was grateful for his life.  

A Martin City resident of 10 years, his story begins a couple thousand miles away in upstate New York. It was in 1944 when Katharine Hadding dropped off her 2-month-old son at St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Ogdensburg, New York. World War II was raging and while Bruso found out decades later that it despaired her, supporting a child just wasn’t possible at the time.  

Bruso’s biological father, Leo Darmody, had a “one-time relationship” with Hadding before being sent off to the Navy, having no idea of Bruso’s existence until they met for the first time decades later.  

Ogdensburg is a charmingly quiet and rural city that peers out over the Saint Lawrence River, a ship highway of sorts dividing Canada from northern New York.  

The orphanage, which closed in the 1960s as government funded foster homes became the norm, was run by a Catholic convent of nuns. While children usually spent anywhere from a few days to four months in the orphanage, Bruso spent 12 years there.  

Under New York law, Bruso said children are meant to be placed under government care a year after being placed up for adoption, but this never happened.  

“There is nobody living that can tell me why I ended up for 12 years in St. Joseph’s Orphanage. It’s mind-blowing,” he said.  

This overlook or ignoration by the government deemed Bruso an outlier from the start, who struggled to make friends with the children constantly being filtered in and out of the facility that had unintentionally become his home. 

“I never wanted parents, I wanted brothers, sisters or cousins because that is who came to the orphanage. And they protected each other, but I didn’t have anybody.”   

Who he did become close to though, were the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart who ran the orphanage. “They became my protectors.”  

Bruso formed a close bond with Sister Eileen Murray. A quiet, red-haired and freckle-faced kid as he would describe himself, Bruso recalled being bullied by the older boys. But Sister Murray, a relatively short woman, would be there to give his pursuers a reprimanding.  

Bruso often stayed up late with Sister Murray as she mended the children’s torn clothes. Unlike the other children, he felt lucky learning to darn socks using a light bulb while listening to late-night radio shows.  

A silver lining in his situation was when the children could go swimming in the nearby Oswegatchie River that flows from the Adirondack Mountains to the Saint Lawrence River. Watching the older boys, he quickly learned how to swim by copying their strokes.   

“[Sister Murray] said I was the only one who never needed swimming lessons,” he said.  

FINALLY AT age 12, Sister Murray arranged for his adoption by a nice couple who lived in a small hamlet called Teboville, New York where less than a dozen families resided at the time, Bruso said.  

The house stood on a plateau in the Adirondack Mountains with a 125-acre farm surrounded by streams filled with trout and colorful rocks. The outside walls were plastered with colored glass that reflected rainbows on the ground when the sun hit it just right. 

Beula and Carl Bruso introduced a sheltered child to new, unfamiliar experiences outside of the structured life of an orphanage. Bruso had never seen a television, for one, and remembered being very concerned by mice scurrying between the walls, thinking other people were in the house. 

“I most of the time slept near where Sister Murray was, so I never had fear. Now all these new noises that I had no idea what they were. I had to cope with them,” Bruso said.  

Bruso’s adoptive father died a couple of years later, prompting him and his adoptive mother to move 12 miles away to the larger town of Malone. There, Bruso watched in admiration as his adoptive mother worked to earn her high school diploma after the Great Depression kept her from graduating.  

After 19-year-old Bruso graduated high school in 1963, he joined the Army, assuming he would like the similarly structured life he experienced in the orphanage.  

“I fell in love with the Army immediately,” he said.  

Bruso spent 24 years as an intel officer stationed all over the world, including Germany as a French interpreter and Vietnam with the special forces. He left a decorated veteran, earning himself two bronze stars for meritorious service.  

WHILE STATIONED in Rochester, New York, as a counterintelligence officer, 30-year-old Bruso decided it was time to find his biological parents. His adoptive mother had died earlier.  

Finding his mother was no easy process, but his many years gathering intelligence for the military certainly helped. Starting at the since-closed-down hospital in New York City where he was born, Bruso followed lead after lead, talking to a former priest at the orphanage, making calls across the country to Los Angeles, where he suspected his mother lived, before finally being led back to his home in Rochester, which through phonebooks he found many of his long lost relatives including a sister he never knew.  

He eventually located his father by tracking his last name to a Catholic church also in upstate New York. 

When Bruso learned of a family tradition of swimming across the Saint Lawrence River from Canada’s shore to Ogdensburg, New York he immediately took the opportunity to do something he said he’d dreamed of doing since he was 7 years old.   

But he did not just stop at one swim, he crossed again at 52 and in August for the third time at 80.  

It was a particularly gloomy day on Aug. 6, and the sea and sky blended into one gray, indiscernible mess. Bruso and his family still in high hopes took their boat across the river to the Canadian shore where he plopped himself into the water. 

He planned to follow the boat, but the fog impaired his vision. Disheartened, he decided he wouldn’t be able to go on.  

“I was so desponded that this was probably my last chance.”  

Before long, his cousins arrived in brightly colored swimsuits, ready to guide him across the channel.  

As he made the trek, he said he thought of his first mother Sister Murray, the one who taught “that I always had that strength to go against the odds.” 

When Bruso dug his toes into U.S. soil, the gray water and air that surrounded him became drowned out by overwhelming joy.   

“If Canada didn’t hear me, I’m surprised,” Bruso said. His family watched in admiration from the boat, cheering along with him. “I was all soaked, and I could feel tears.” 

Returning home, Bruso was welcomed with a homemade macaroni necklace and crocheted gold medal crafted by the family that took so long to find. 

After returning to Montana, Bruso reminisced on the comfort of Sister Murray who shielded his isolation, the incessant drive of his adoptive mother and on his newfound family that welcomed him with open arms.  

All culminating in a series of strokes across a river that had watched his life unfold, Bruso felt he was representing those who feel the odds are stacked against them, the underdogs. 

“I am so grateful for the life that I have had.”  

Reporter Jack Underhill can be reached at junderhill@dailyinterlake.com and 406-758-4407.  

    Ben Bruso cheers on the shore in Ogdensburg, New York after swimming across the Saint Lawrence River. (Courtesy photo)