Bud Kennedy’s amazing life story. He won’t tell you, but I will.

Bud Kennedy and I are opposites. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist is a Fort Worth native, and I, a Dallas Morning News columnist, am from Manhattan. He’d rather cut off his pinky than write a story about himself.

Me, on the other hand, I’ll write about my family and personal life any time I can make it fit. Hell, I proposed to my wife Karen in a prize winning 1994 newspaper column! (“Here in Texas, I met the woman of my dreams. Unfortunately, she lives with the dog of my nightmares.”)

Bud wouldn’t think of it, and I respect his position. I just think those personal stories create strong connections with readers.

We both are still kicking it. We are the senior columnists in North Texas. Bud writes three columns a week, two on food and one anything else. I write two Watchdog columns a week. Both of us have been at it for more than 30 years.

This is my introduction to the incredibly wonderful tale Bud told me in a recent video podcast that I host.
You can watch the entire interview with Bud Kennedy here.

Here’s a lightly edited transcript of Bud’s revelation:

Lieber: I’m going to start off with your origin story. You have the greatest origin story , except for Kal-El, who was Superman, … This is from Fort Worth magazine, when you were picked as one of the 150th most influential people. And I remember reading this over and over again.

It said “Bud Kennedy was in the newspaper before he was even born. He was sold for $600 to his adoptive parents, who made the purchase out of a classified ad in the Fort Worth Press. He's still in the newspaper and all the other media platforms, opining mostly on good and bad local government and public policy players, as well as chicken-fried-steak.”

Bud: I do politics and barbecue and everything in between. … On the origin story and what happened: people don't realize that until 1957 it was legal to sell and so in 1955 I know a little bit more of this.

Now through DNA, I know a little bit more of the origin story. But the family, there was a couple who had just had a boy, and the mother got pregnant again, and she had a great deal of difficulty with the pregnancy and after the pregnancy. And so the family speculated, the decision was that she couldn't go through another pregnancy right away.

And so, they arranged through an attorney downtown to adopt the next baby. Now my parents, the couple who adopted me – the Kennedys — they were older. They were in their 40s already. They had gone to Edna Gladney, which is a wonderful adoption agency, and Gladney, very honestly, said, ‘You know, we think y'all are a little too old to adopt a baby.’ They were already in their 40s.

So they went to a private attorney and arranged a adoption through this classified ad. And I still have the classified ad. You know, it says, ”Anglo baby due in March. Arrange to pay mother's room and board. Contact the attorney.” … I still have that ad.

So they went through the attorney and adopted me. And my father, Bud Kennedy, wanted a new Chevy. My mother wanted a baby. She got her way, $600 and she got the baby. A few months later, he went ahead and got the Chevy….

My parents had passed away. … And so I finally got curious. What really happened? Is this story true? You know, I've never even seen the legal papers. So I sent in the DNA, and it comes back.

Oh, Dave, you're gonna like this, because I don't think you've heard this…. A few weeks later, I call up the page and it says, “OK, we found it. Here's your brother and here's your family.” And I look at my brother and it’s somebody who was so antagonistic on Facebook and Twitter that I had blocked him on social media. He had trolled me and had been hostile throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, and he was the most antagonistic troll. … My worst troll turned out to be my brother.

So the sibling rivalry held through even though we didn't know we were siblings.

So since then, we've talked and gotten along, civil and nice. The family's nice. They've been wonderful to me. .

He's less than a year older than me, and we were in the same class. We were both on the radio station at TCU at the same time, you know, the same circle of friends and people, knew people in common.

I mean, I'm really fortunate, you know? That's a big, nice family, but I'm fortunate I was raised by my little family.

LIEBER: Well, amazing story, but key question, did you ever write about this?

BUD: You know, Dave, this is where you're not going to believe this. And this is something where we obviously take different paths. But I've kind of held this story to myself, and I don't want to use my family for content. I don't want them to feel like that I'm doing all this or talking to them or having good times with them to get a column for next week. And I have jotted it down a little bit and talked to people about it. Even took some calls from reporters, took a call from a national talk show and kind of held off…

LIEBER: That makes us opposite. Beside the fact that you grew up in Fort Worth and I grew up in Manhattan – [we’re opposites] because I would have done 10 columns about that. I proposed marriage in the newspaper, and that's something you would have never done in a million years.

BUD: No, I did write about it when I got married. Well, Mary Rogers wrote about me getting married, but I wrote about my father-in-law … But I really most of my life, I have kept to myself, and I believe in writing about news and comment about news, I just don't believe people pick up paper to read about me.

LIEBER: I disagree. For the next five years [people would say] I love that column. That's the one they remember.

BUD: Oh, I wrote a column about my mother on Mother’s Day more than 20 years ago, and the problem she had being at a nursing home and all this, and how I went to see her, and how [I had] mixed emotions.

That's quite a story. Watch the entire interview with Bud here.