The week's good news: August 4, 2022

It wasn't all bad!

Shadow on a sidewalk.
(Image credit: Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

1. Man reunites with woman he helped deliver on a San Francisco sidewalk 34 years ago

Patrick Combs always hoped that one day, he'd get to meet the baby girl he helped deliver on a San Francisco sidewalk. This year, that day finally came, when he was reunited with Searcy Hughes, now 34. On June 29, 1988, Combs was walking to work when he came across a woman on a street corner giving birth. He got there at the right time, as the baby landed in his outstretched hands. Combs shared his story with The San Francisco Chronicle, and it made the front page. Hughes, meanwhile, was later adopted, and raised in Virginia. "I vaguely knew that the story of my birth was sort of a big deal," she told The Chronicle. "So I asked a friend to type the keywords 'Crystal,' 'baby,' and 'born on the street' into the Ancestry.com website." After her friend found The Chronicle's article, Hughes contacted Combs on Facebook (much to his surprise). The pair recently met in San Francisco, where Combs took Hughes to the spot where she was born and explained the whole event in detail. Being able to connect with Hughes was "like an answered prayer," Combs told The Chronicle. Learning about her first day "definitely hit me super hard, but it's not a sad feeling," Hughes said. "It's a feeling that so much awesome humanity happened right here on the sidewalk."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.