Stanley Patz doesn’t have to imagine. He is all too familiar with the Kletzky family’s pain. He knows that life for them can never be the same. “It’s not as if I have ever gotten back to normal life after my family problem occurred,” he said on Wednesday.
The family problem, as he called it, is the most famous case of a missing child in the history of New York and perhaps the entire country. On May 25, 1979, Etan Patz, 6 years old, left his apartment on Prince Street in SoHo to catch his school bus two blocks away. It was the boy’s first time making the walk alone. He had wanted to do it, and his parents, Stan and Julie Patz, said O.K.
They never saw him again.
Etan’s disappearance focused attention on the plague of missing children as no other case had before. His became the face of a movement. It was the first one to appear on a milk carton. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan declared May 25 National Missing Children’s Day. Without question, Mr. Patz said, “the family problem achieved iconic status.”
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/a-new-horror-recalls-another/