Billie Winicov lived in East Boothbay, mostly year-round, with her husband Herb, for 30 years. You may have seen her around town when she worked in an antique jewelry store, The Ritz, on Townsend Avenue in Boothbay Harbor.

I would see her sometimes, standing in the doorway, and she always offered a smile and a friendly greeting when I walked by.

She always seemed like someone I’d like to get to know.

A few weeks ago, Andy Bielli called and invited me over to meet her friend, Little Billie, as she calls her. “Billie has a story that you need to hear,” she said. “You’ll want to write about it.”

Within five minutes of meeting Billie, I realized I’d been right in thinking she was someone I’d like to know. Unfortunately, for me, she told me her time in Boothbay Harbor would be over in a week. She and her husband were moving back to their other home, in Elk Grove, California.

We talked outside and it had gotten chilly on Andy’s deck, but I hadn’t noticed. I was too wrapped up in Billie’s story about how she had been “stolen” from her mother when she was a child.

Billie was 3 the day her father picked her up at daycare. She had never laid eyes on him before.

She doesn’t remember much about that day, or the nine months that followed. But her mother recounted the story to her so many times over the years, she tells it as though she remembers every detail.

“My mother used to say, ‘Come here and let me tell you about when I lost my little flower,’” Billie said.

Billie’s mother, Theda Gwendolyn Holly, grew up in Henrietta, Oklahoma. Billie remembers an old photo of her sitting in front of a shack. There were chickens walking around her. She asked her why she was sitting in the yard in front of the chicken house. “Mother said, ‘Honey that’s not a chicken house. That was our house.’”

Billie was born in 1940 when her mother was 18. She had married a man from her hometown named Bill Stevens. He left shortly after Billie was born. “He left Mother and me, and just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

World War II started and in 1942, Billie’s mother and grandmother, with Billie in tow, packed up and headed for the West Coast in search of jobs. They had heard there were jobs for women in California.

Holly, then 20, found work at a shipyard in Richmond, California. She was trained as a welder to build ships and became one of the growing group of women known for their icon, Rosie the Riveter.

“She wore a bandanna around her head like the one on the Rosie the Riveter poster,” Billie said.

One day, out of the blue, Billie’s father appeared at the shipyard. He had learned through relatives where she was. He asked Billie’s mother about their daughter, and having no reason to feel threatened, she told him where they were living, and where Billie’s daycare was located.

The next day, when Billie’ mother went to pick her daughter up at daycare, Billie wasn’t there. She was told that Billie’s father had picked her up.

“Mother said her world came apart. She went back to Henrietta and knocked on the door of an apartment where she thought my father was staying. It was empty. He was gone.”

Billie’s mother appealed to local law enforcement and the FBI. Both told her that with a war going on, there were more important things to worry about than a father picking his child up from daycare.

“It was a different world then, and it wasn’t considered kidnapping,” Billie said.

If she was to find her daughter, Billie’s mother realized it was going to be up to her. With money scraped together from her new boyfriend, her mother, and three aunts, Theda Holly packed a bag for herself and one for her missing 3-year old daughter, and boarded a bus.

“Mother tried to think of every relative, friend, town or place Bill Isaac Stevens had ever mentioned. She knew he had relatives in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Tennessee, and she traveled to all of them.”

Theda Holly spent the next nine months searching for her daughter.

This story will be continued.