After 50 years, TWS helped these friends reconnect

One morning, TWS member Mike McEnroe got an email that someone was looking for him. It was Lou Baslaw—a friend Mike hadn’t heard from in over 50 years.

The email came from Kristi Confortin, TWS’ outreach manager. Confortin received a message from Baslaw asking if she could help connect him with a TWS member named Michael McEnroe. “I was surprised to get such a request but happy to be able to put them in touch,” Confortin said. “It feels special and shows how The Wildlife Society is more than just a membership—it’s a community that allows our members to build lifelong friendships.”

The two met in the summer of 1970 in Ghana during training for the Peace Corps and immediately hit it off. But McEnroe decided not to stay for his appointment. “I was a kid from Sioux Falls—that was a big change,” he said. After three months of training, he headed back home and enrolled at South Dakota State University in Brookings, where he joined TWS and studied wildlife biology.

Throughout his career—the majority of which was spent in North Dakota—McEnroe worked as a refuge manager and project leader for Devil’s Lake Wetland Management District, Audubon National Wildlife Refuge and Long Lake National Wildlife Refuge. He also served at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s North Dakota Ecological Services Field Office in Bismarck.

But Baslaw stayed in Ghana for the next two years to complete his term in the Peace Corps. In the summer of 1973, when his service ended, he returned home to New York to be with his ailing mother. Coming back to the U.S. was a difficult decision, Baslaw said. “By the beginning of September, I was climbing up a wall,” he said, so he decided to leave home in New York and take a road trip out west.

Remembering his good times with McEnroe, Baslaw decided to look him up and learned he was studying wildlife at South Dakota State University. He joined McEnroe and his roommate in their small trailer home in Brookings. “We took him ice fishing and fed him wild game,” McEnroe said. It was nearing Christmas, so they drove back to McEnroe’s parents’ house in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. “We just clicked, and I’ve never forgotten that friendship.”

Baslaw hadn’t forgotten their friendship, either. As a self-described “Brooklyn boy,” Baslaw had never tasted so much wild game before. “Nothing was store-bought—it was all shot,” he recalled.

When Christmas came, and presents were passed around, Baslaw was shocked to find a present had been passed to him. “It brought a tear to my eye,” he said. “I will always hold Mike and his family very, very dear because they took me in and made me a part of the family that year.”

After New Year’s, he brought McEnroe back to South Dakota, where they visited his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Eileen. McEnroe and Baslaw then parted ways—Baslaw made it out west and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. “And then I went on with my life,” Baslaw said. He returned to New York and went to nursing school before moving to Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Anne.

Baslaw tried to find McEnroe’s parents again in Wisconsin when driving through five or 10 years later, but they had moved, and the pair never reconnected—until a few months ago.

“Lo and behold, I got the bug to say, ‘Where is Mike now?’” Baslaw said. He knew he was a wildlife biologist and that he was with Eileen and in North Dakota. So he and his wife, Anne—who he admitted was the better sleuth—found a technical review on the public trust doctrine that McEnroe co-authored. Baslaw then reached out to the email listed on the report, asking if his contact information could be shared with McEnroe, along with the message that he was looking for him.

“It wasn’t until I got the email from Kristi that I knew Lou was trying to get in touch with me,” McEnroe said, “and I was just amazed at how that had worked.”

McEnroe was grateful that TWS was able to help connect him and Lou after so many years. “I thought it was so neat that the Society was a way for two guys who knew each other 50 years ago to get back in touch—I thought that was really wonderful,” he said. “We had to catch up on 50 years, but it was just like our friendship hadn’t skipped a beat.”

Baslaw is in touch with other friends from Peace Corps and his college days. He’s glad to be able to share memories again with McEnroe and hear about his life every once and a while. His philosophy on friendship is simple: “If you become my friend, you’re my friend for my life.”