A colorful past catches up with me at passport office

On this sunny Friday morning, as I finish this column in my home office, excitement is heavy in the air, knowing in roughly two hours my family will be heading for the Minneapolis airport to begin our trip to Italy. It’s going to happen! For the past two months I’ve been living in passport hell so I want to share some of the nerve-wracking details that have since been overcome.

Over the years I’ve periodically heard people talk about getting passports and the problems they’ve had in doing so. I’ve heard you need to allow plenty of time. So what is plenty of time?  Soon after selling a family cabin in late July, my original travel group of me, son Keaton and his girlfriend Ashley started the passport process for a travel date of Oct. 16. Our travel agent reassured us that we had time but needed to stay on top of it.

Adding to the elation of the summer events was a chance meeting with a man on Aug. 3. Bill Stone was up vacationing from central Illinois where he had been operating a grain elevator, and in a whirlwind of sparks he and I got together, he relocated, and the group invited him to join our trip to Italy!  Sounds “wacko”, I get that, but here we are well and alive. We all had begun by applying for our passports at the courthouse here in Ely. The cost is roughly one-hundred and ten dollars, plus a city fee of twenty-five dollars. We paid an additional seventy-eight dollars to expedite Bill’s passport because he got a bit of a later start. In mid-August I received a letter of notification from the U.S. Passport Center in Sterling, Va., telling me that the birth certificate I’d sent for my son was not a “long form” and I needed to send a certified one, with the raised seal. I drove to the records office in Virginia, paid my sixteen dollars and got it in the mail, dusting my hands off in relief as if I’d added the final detail to the passport process.

On Aug. 24, I received notification from the Passport Center stating that they needed verification on my name change from Minier to O’Hara. I thought, “Well, okay,” went back to Virginia and got this document, after paying another sixteen dollars, and sent it off in the mail. September rolled in; Bill got a letter from the Passport Center requesting a “long form” birth certificate as well. He was born in Texas so we had to find a way to get it up here. The woman at the Texas Vital Statistics Office said it would take ten to fifteen days for their process. After more phone calls, we found a person who directed us to the “expediting” branch of that office, and Bill paid another rush fee. Meanwhile, Ashley’s passport arrived in the mail with ease and no extra documentation required. Her name hasn’t changed, she has a fresh and gentle history, and no red flags surround her at age eighteen. I was like that once! Bill did get his birth certificate quickly and we express mailed it to the Passport Center around mid-September. The rest of September was a glorious month of great weather and we all were gathering things together, reading, and discussing Italy in anticipation of our impending trip. Keaton’s passport arrived and things were coming together.

No Passport Center news is good news we figured and I kept checking my email to watch for notification that the holy little black books were on their way. Bill got his passport! Great news, as I figured we were over all the bumps. “WRONG!” On Tuesday, Oct. 6, I got home in the evening and saw a letter from the Passport Center; I knew the look of these by this time. They were requesting documentation on how my name went from Johnson (maiden), all the way to O’Hara. My mouth dropped. We were slated to leave only eleven days from then! This was extremely alarming.

My teenage travel partners were afraid we’d have to cancel the trip. My colorful history had placed red flags all over my head! The government needed details on me! I felt so sorry for this situation.

The next day was a Wednesday and I made several phone calls, getting hold of an actual agent at the Passport Center to see exactly she needed. We had almost no time left. I told her I’d been married three times, changing my surname each time, plus had another legal name change done along the way...I suppose just to liven things up a bit!

She instructed me to provide all the court-issued, legally stamped, certified documentation for marriages and divorces. As my blood pressure climbed and I mentally detailed how to scale the mountain in front of me, I realized I’d have to miss a production/press day at the Timberjay because I was going to have to visit courthouses in Virginia, Hibbing and Bemidji in order to gather all these documents. Thank god they were all in-state! Opting to miss a newspaper production day is something not to be done, unless you are gravely ill or actually dead. I called my boss Jodi and she calmly talked to me about the fact I truly needed to get the documents and overnight them to the East Coast. Her calm approach gave me some confidence this could be done in one day.

I moved ahead. With Bill at the wheel and me feeling over-the-edge, like a rabid animal, we headed to the Virginia Courthouse. The clerk was not cordial; I had a choice to melt, snap or hang on....I hung on. She found three documents I needed and I purchased them. She sent me downtown to the recorder’s office for marriage certificates. There was a vacation replacement working and she was unable to locate my documents. Luckily she telephoned the records office at the Hibbing Courthouse and we went there. I purchased all but the two remaining documents that had to be gotten at Beltrami County Courthouse in Bemidji where I had accomplished a marriage and divorce, back in the eighties.

In this day of computers you’d think we’d have another option, but to get the raised seal certified copy you have to get it mailed to you or go pick it up. So we drove to Bemidji. The day was glorious, blue sky and colorful autumn leaves. A perfect backdrop to hearing my heart beating up into my ears from the stress and elevated blood pressure.

Up until this point I’d been all right with my colorful past until I realized my change of names put me in the high alert as a possible terrorist category. Getting this accomplished on the government’s terms would keep our country safer. What can ya do? Ya do what you’re told or you stay home and vacation with a trip to the North Shore or something.

We arrived at the Bemidji Courthouse and had to get directions to the correct office where we were greeted by an officer in uniform telling us to leave our possessions in a basket and go through a body scanner on our way to the clerk’s desk. Well, after this “brush with the law,” I finally had my hands on all the documents I needed. We headed to the Fed Ex Shipping Office and I paid eighty dollars to send the packet overnight express to the Passport Center in Sterling, Va. When we reached Cass Lake the Passport Center agent returned a message to me by cell phone. She told me I should have sent it to a different address to expedite the process. We spun around and drove thirty minutes back to Bemidji to change the address on my package. Simply nuts!

We stopped for a nice dinner on our way back home and felt assured the ordeal would work out, and it did. I received my passport booklet by UPS on Monday, October 12, Columbus Day. It figures there’d have to have been a holiday in the mess to slow things down just a bit more.

As I wrap up this column, I have my passport in my purse, I am ready to leave, and I lived through passport hell with yet another good story to write about. Moral of this tale, “Start your passport process a year in advance, folks.” My next column will highlight the nine days of our art-enriched, pasta-filled trip! Ciao!