The description of Donor White No. 6 in the Repository for Germinal Choice's catalog is spare and clinical. He's described as a "scientist involved in sophisticated research. Many highly technical publications." His IQ is "Not tested—but very high." His hobbies are "running, gardening, reading history." He "excelled in basketball and track." He's reported to be brown-haired, blue-eyed, medium-complexioned. His blood type is 0+, and he's myopic. One line breaks the chill. Under personality, it reads: "Very engaging, warm, friendly."

The Repository for Germinal Choice styled itself the "Nobel Prize" sperm bank. But like all its successful donors, Donor White hasn't won the Nobel Prize. Now retired from science, he describes himself as having had a "solid, but not outstanding, career in technical work, with scores of publications and a good number of patents, some with military applications." He still doesn't know why repository founder Robert Graham recruited him. He suspects that a former colleague, who may have himself been a repository donor, tipped Graham to him, and he guesses Graham liked that he was both a successful scientist and a decent athlete.

When two repository staffers approached him in 1984, Donor White was noncommittal. He and his wife couldn't have their own children, but the sperm bank didn't really interest him. Three months of steady requests didn't change his mind. Then he had a vivid dream about his great-grandfather, a soldier who enlisted in the Confederate Army only after his son was born, and then died in battle. In the dream, his great-grandfather told him that he too had an opportunity to give others the chance at life.

That inspired Donor White to sign up, and he soon became a stalwart contributor to the bank. He was older than most donors—around 50 when he started giving—but age didn't weaken his fertility. He fathered 19 children, more than any other donor I've heard about. (This large number of offspring raises questions about the repository's practices.)

Donor White soon knew more about his "kids" than he was supposed to. Most repository donors either had children of their own or chose to not have them. They tend to be less interested in their bank offspring than Donor White, who wanted to have his own kids but couldn't. (This is one reason Beth trusted him.)

The repository guaranteed anonymity, so how did Donor White learn about his kids? He seems an exceptionally warm and friendly man, he lived near the repository's office, and repository employees, particularly Dora Vaux, were soon confiding in him. Vaux, who more or less ran the repository, was looser with her tongue than she should have been. (She divulged the full name of a donor to at least one mother—not something a confidential sperm bank should ever let slip.) Vaux told Donor White the birthdays of all his kids and gave him baby pictures of 11 of them. She allowed him to meet infant Joy and correspond with Beth. She also accidentally revealed the identity of two children, a brother and sister.

Donor White became an enthusiast for the repository. In 1991, he published an article in a local women's magazine praising the bank. ("And Now a Word from a [Sperm Bank] Father" appeared under the pseudonym "R. White.") In the late '90s, Donor White asked the repository to let him study its birth records. He hoped to learn if sperm banks confirmed the finding in nature that couples in which the biological father is much older than the mother tend to disproportionately have boys. The repository never responded.

Of all his repository children, Joy was dearest to Donor White. She was the only one he met, and Beth was the only mother Donor White corresponded with. (Beth, who heard from Dora Vaux about Donor White's Confederate dream, even sent him a photograph of Joy with a Confederate soldier at a Civil War re-enactment. "I felt a tingling all over as I saw how much that soldier looked like the man in my dream," says Donor White.)

When the repository stopped their letters, he was heartbroken. Donor White made his own desperate, fruitless search for Beth and Joy. He had figured out what state they lived in (one picture of Joy bore the address of a photography studio) and guessed at their last name based on a few clues in a letter. He wrote a cryptic note to the only person in the state with that name in hopes that she would reply. He guessed wrong. He longed to meet Joy again and assumed he never would.