At one point, two aunts tried to help Dallas Eakins track down the whereabouts of Ted Yoder, his birth father.
“I didn’t want to meet him,” he says. “I just wanted to see him.”
Eventually, he learned that Yoder had died at age 55.
In 1995, while Eakins was moving up and down from the NHL and the minors, his mother felt pain in her side after not feeling well for a few months. She checked into hospital. Two weeks later, she was dead of cancer that had spread throughout her body. She was just 51.
That was hard enough. Within a matter of months, the man Eakins had grown to call “dad,” the man who had brought a fatherless boy north and called him his son, began to distance himself.
“After my mother died, it was like he unzipped his body and somebody else stepped out,” Eakins says.
Family differences became open wounds. By the time Eakins was being sent down by Phoenix to Springfield the next fall, his adoptive father no longer wanted anything to do with Dallas.
The estrangement went on for years, more than a decade. Roger Neilson encouraged Eakins to reach out to his father, to cross that seemingly impassable divide.
“He kept saying, ‘There’s gotta be a way,’” says Eakins.
When Jim Eakins’ mother passed, Dallas quietly arrived late to the funeral, not wanting to start a family row. As he was leaving, he saw his dad in the parking lot.
“He stared at me. It was like he wanted me to know he saw me,” says Eakins. “And then he just turned away.”
The distance between them was never closed. In September of 2008, Eakins got the news. His adoptive father had taken his own life, using the same .22 rifle his mother Carol had once used to shoot snakes.