Mr. X and Mr. Lawrence

One night last month listeners to the radio program We, the People heard a pathetic plea of a faltering old amnesiac who called himself Mr. X. He wanted to know who he was. "I do not want to die nameless and alone," he wept.

In the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield near Jackson, where Mr. X had been a patient for nearly eight years, nobody had taken overmuch trouble to find out who Mr. X was. Then the Memphis Commercial Appeal wrote a Sunday story about his pathetic but not unusual case and the radio people picked it up (TIME, Jan. 30).

In the past month, thousands of messages have poured into the State Hospital suggesting Mr. X's identity. None checked, however, until one day last week Ben H. Lawrence of Tuscaloosa, Ala. and his sister, Mrs. J. P. Haley, a dentist's wife of Marion, Ala., went to the hospital with a family group picture taken in 1929. The picture in TIME was a ringer for the group picture likeness of bachelor brother William, whom the family had not heard from since May 24, 1931, his 63rd birthday.

As soon as Ben Lawrence and Mrs. Haley saw Mr. X there was no doubt that he was William, but Mr. X knew them not. Then, given a dose of sedative sodium amytal and hypnotic cross-questioning, Mr. X began to recall his boyhood on a Georgia farm, his sisters and brothers--two of whom had died since his disappearance--his later life as a successful insurance man. When he woke up he knew he was William H. Lawrence and was glad to see his brother and sister.

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