WEB EXCLUSIVE

Vincent Pontius shows off a picture of his sister, who was first among them to speak to their father, Art Bell.

Lost in Space

The unacknowledged son of one of America’s most popular talk show hosts works in the mailroom at Philadelphia magazine.

by Steve Volk

As a kid Vincent Pontius watched In Search of … religiously, reveling in the show’s mixture of myth and mystery. Did the lost city of Atlantis ever exist? How were the pyramids of Egypt built? Were growing reports of UFO-related abductions real? What about unknown animals, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster? What happens to us when we die?

Pontius ate it all up and asked for seconds. He read fantasy novels and later, as an adult, followed The X-Files right down to the final, almost universally unwatched episodes.

Exploring the fantastic offered refuge to a kid whose life was always overly complicated.

He and his younger sister grew up without knowing their birth father, a man who left when Pontius was just 3 years old. His mother remarried about two years later but that man left when Pontius was around 13.

Issues? Pontius had them. Trust issues. Abandonment issues. He always needed to be in a relationship. He just couldn’t maintain one. Both he and his sister say they were sexually abused in the years after their birth father left. (The person they allege preyed upon them isn’t named anywhere in this article because no criminal charges have been filed.) Only the last few years have brought him any peace.

Two years ago he discovered he had a 12-year-old daughter of his own. He’s now 41, married, the father of a little girl he didn’t know existed until recently, and he and his wife are expecting a child of their own in January. He supervises the mailroom at Philadelphia magazine, tucked away in a windowless office on the 36th floor of a sleek city office tower that boasts views stretching miles.

His interest in the paranormal continues unabated. In some ways that facet of his personality may seem more important now than it did when he was a child. Because about 10 years ago his sister made contact with their birth father, who was by then the king of the paranormal—radio talk show legend Art Bell.

“I don’t know,” says Pontius. “Does it explain anything?”

He finds it hard to believe his father’s interests could’ve been passed on to him—by nature or nurture. Strangely enough, his sister harbors the same interests, saying she “got used to being the only girl in the science-fiction aisle at the bookstore.”

“I have no memory of him whatsoever,” says Vincent Pontius. “The first time I ever saw him was on the Larry King show, after my sister had found him.”

When Lisa Minei contacted Bell a second time, he sent a letter along with a copy of his autobiography.

According to Pontius’ mother Sachiko Toguchi, when they married she was 22 and Bell was 20. They met in Japan, where Bell served in the Air Force, and moved back to the States after marrying. Vincent Michael Bell was born in 1965, in Newark, N.J., but the trio moved back to Okinawa when Toguchi grew homesick.

The marriage lasted only a few years. Toguchi says that after she gave birth to Vincent’s sister Lisa, Bell told her he was leaving.

“He told me he thought he could [be a husband and father], but he couldn’t do it,” says Sachiko Toguchi during a phone interview from Camp Hill, Pa. “Having two kids, a wife, he was not up to it. It was too much for him. I think he was [caught between] being a boy and a man.”

Bell, for his part, acknowledges fathering both Vincent, whom he calls “Michael,” and Lisa during a phone interview with PW. He declines to talk about why the relationship ended. “That was 40 years ago,” he says. “I’m not sure what purpose it serves.”

Toguchi was left to take care of two small children on her own. When she remarried about two years later, her new husband adopted the kids, freeing Bell from any legal obligations. Bell started living the life that made him famous.

His online bio says he was a licensed FCC technician by age 13, and that as a DJ in Okinawa he landed in the Guinness Book of Records for a 116-hour-15-minute solo broadcast marathon. (The bio makes no mention of a wife or children at that time.)

After leaving Toguchi, he went on to broadcast during the early ’90s on the overnight shift for KDWN in Las Vegas, which reached 13 Western states, and finally he took his show national—first with Chancellor Broadcasting Company and now with Premiere Radio Networks. His easy, just-folks broadcasting style and strange subject matter proved a potent commercial combination, winning him 14 million listeners in his late-night radio slot.

Today the 62-year-old Bell is still associated with Coast to Coast, the show that made him so famous. He also co-wrote the book The Coming Global Superstorm with author and self-proclaimed UFO abductee Whitley Strieber, which spawned the global warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow.

He had another son, Art Bell IV, with his second wife, whom he divorced before marrying his third wife of 15 years, Ramona, who died suddenly in January of last year after an asthma attack.

He remarried less than four months later after what he told his listeners was an Internet video-conferencing romance with a Filipina woman roughly 40 years his junior. He remains married to Airyn Ruiz Bell, who recently gave birth to a girl, the couple’s first child.

Pontius is conversant in all these facts, including what he imagines to be his father’s considerable wealth. But money isn’t something he says he’s ever thought about in relation to Art Bell. “I don’t want money,” he said when PW first interviewed him. “I really don’t. I would like to meet him, and hear him explain his side of things. All I want is to meet my father face to face.”

For one thing, Bell retired. He announced on his Sun., July 1 show that he’d continue to work as a fill-in host and occasionally broadcast special programs but would no longer act as weekend host.

It also became clear that Pontius’ sister Lisa didn’t care to speak to her father.

Lisa Minei says she’s been in contact with Bell before. The now 38-year-old mother of two first contacted Bell when she was 10 years old.

“My mother had never tried to hide anything,” says Minei, “but she never talked about him much. So I guess I found out his name from her, and found him on my own.”

Toguchi says she also spoke to Bell briefly by phone at the time too. “He said his mother and father were still alive,” she says. “He asked if [Vincent] still had allergies, that sort of thing.”

She remembers the conversation as “polite,” but says she didn’t talk to him for very long. “We have a saying in Japan,” she says. “When someone leaves, do not follow him. It means to move forward.”

When Bell left, she burned her photographs of him. “I threw away everything related to him,” she says.

Later, when Minei turned 28, she says she sent a letter to Bell, who had by then achieved fame. He responded with a one-page letter. It reads: “Many years ago I spoke with your mom. She told me that you and [Vincent] had been adopted by the man who had married her. It seemed better to let your family remain undisturbed. She told me he was a wonderful man who was father to you and Michael … ”

He also sent a signed copy of his autobiography The Art of Talk. The inscription reads: “To Lisa, Here’s the ‘rest of the story.’”

She says they emailed each other for a short time after that, but he didn’t seem particularly enthused about starting a relationship. She soon stopped emailing him.

“He never wrote and said, ‘Hey, why’d you stop emailing me?’” she says. “So I figured he didn’t really want to be in touch.”

She didn’t save copies of the emails.

“I feel like I tried, and if he was interested in starting a relationship he would have,” she says in a phone interview from Boston. “I’m more interested now on my brother’s behalf.”

Bell has also spoken to PW several times, and though he’s requested most of the interviews remain off the record, he did leave several phone messages for Pontius after that first conversation, a fact Pontius confirms. He says his son seemed “angry.”

Bell himself says he was shaken up by the news that his birth children had been sexually abused. “I was horrified,” says Bell. “All of this is news to me. When I did talk to Vincent, the first 80 percent of our conversation was about the abuse. I just couldn’t believe it because I had the opposite information. And I think what happened to him has a lot to do with his anger.”

He says he’d stayed away from his ex-wife and kids because the information he had is that they were happy without him. “I just figured everyone had gotten on with their lives,” says Bell. “Until I got a phone call from [PW], the last conversation I had with my ex-wife was that she had remarried and that it would be best if I just let them be.”

Pontius says he walked around for many years with a hole inside him he couldn’t fill. Bell raised him until he was 3 years old, an age when a child’s parents pretty much constitute their whole world.

Myrna Shure, a professor of child psychology at Drexel University and the author of Thinking Parent, Thinking Child, says that on one hand a child might be “better off” if a man capable of leaving him and never speaking to him again for 38 years is simply out of his life for good. But having Bell around the first three years of his life means that Pontius went through his most formative years with a man who suddenly disappeared.

“He suffered a loss,” she says, “and in a normal divorce situation the child can be told, ‘This is about Mommy and Daddy. They can’t live together, but Mommy still loves you, Daddy still loves you.’ But if Daddy isn’t there, you can’t say that. The child’s going to think, ‘Daddy doesn’t love me, and that’s why he’s not coming back.’”

For Pontius, finding out who his father was led to some surreally difficult moments. He recalls receiving a phone call from his sister in 1999, telling him their father was going to be on CNN’s Larry King Live. “It was the first time I ever got to see him move and talk,” he says. “And I—I taped it, and I watched everything about him—his mannerisms, the sound of his voice—trying to see if I could see anything of myself in him.”

Could he? “I don’t know,” he says. “You tell me.”

Still a sci-fi fan, he was also a regular viewer of the TV show Millennium when Bell turned up on an episode playing himself. “I didn’t know he was going to be on,” says Pontius, “and all of a sudden there he was.”

That appearance affected him in ways he can’t describe. “I didn’t sleep,” he says. “For days. I was just … I don’t know what I was feeling. It messed me up.”

Seeing the father he’d never met on a TV series he regularly watched was something he just couldn’t process. He says he made his own attempts to contact Bell over the years with no success. He tried emailing him through the Coast to Coast website, and received no reply, which is perhaps not surprising given the sheer volume of emails Bell says he receives.

Then in May of last year he sent a letter to Bell at his address in Pahrump, Nev. Bell was living in Manila in the Philippines with his new wife Airyn at the time (The talk show host moved his wife to the U.S. in December) and says he never received it.

In the end, after PW contacted Bell, the talk show host immediately suggested this reporter give his son his phone number. Both say the ensuing conversation involved a lot of talk about what had happened 40 years ago; what led to the dissolution of the marriage with Toguchi; and why Bell had never made further contact with his children on his own.

“I started the conversation by saying, ‘This is Sachiko’s son,’” recalls Pontius of his single conversation with Bell. “I felt so disconnected by not having known Art senior, and I guess I feel liberated because not having heard from him haunted me for, like, 35 years. I saw flashes of emotion from him here and there. Maybe the first 20 minutes I sensed a little guilt, but he never apologized for leaving me, my mother and my sister.”

Bell says, “I guess I wasn’t ready to apologize for something I didn’t know I had done. I’m not the kind of person who abandons people, and I didn’t think I had abandoned them.”

While the hour-long conversation between father and son hasn’t led to any ongoing relationship, at least for now, Pontius calls the experience cathartic. “I’d been waiting so long to talk to him,” he says, “for some kind of acknowledgement from him, and now after that one conversation I feel like I can move on with my life.”

His sister echoes those sentiments.

It’s been hard for both of them to see every last bio of Bell exclude their existence. So telling their story is a chance, at long last, to claim their full identities. And they also believe they have a deeper responsibility to come forward.

The two subjects—Art Bell and sexual abuse—are unrelated, yet they know their birth father’s fame gives them a moment in the spotlight to talk about being the victims of sexual abuse.

“Unless people speak out about it,” says Minei, “this stigma will always be there. But I was abused. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Pontius feels the same way, seizing on this moment of attention to make a larger point.

“Because there’s such a societal stigma attached to child abuse and nobody talks about it,” says Pontius, “people instead choose to bury it underneath a lot of shit. I think it’s important for people to know we’re regular people, and yes, this thing happened to us, and it shaped us and it made us who we are. It was tough, but ultimately it made us stronger. In my case, I never let go of my resolve that I wasn’t going to let this thing destroy me.”

In addition to the drama of the father he never knew, his life took another dramatic turn just a few years ago, when he was living in Boston. “I’d been in a relationship with someone here in Philadelphia many years ago,” says Pontius, “and when we broke up I didn’t know it, but she was pregnant with my daughter, and she never told me.”

He was contacted by a third party, who told him he had a then 12-year-old daughter, Elysia. He admits he “freaked out.”

“I wanted to run,” he says, “but I didn’t want to be like my father.”

Today he coparents that daughter and is married to another woman with a child on the way. “That’s the other reason I want to come forward,” he says. “Because with all the troubles I had, I still reached a place where—all the good things people dream about, I got. I got married. I’m going to have a kid. It’s important for people to know not everyone succumbs to this kind of thing. They survive and go on with their lives.”