Taking your questions in reverse order:

I suppose age, growing up made him change over the years. I'm not the same person I was at 25 either.

As for what prevented him from keeping me, when I say the law, I mean it as more of a concept than an actual statute. I'm a retired lawyer, so I know the laws that were on the books at the time. We're talking about a poor Black man with a grade 8 education suddenly in the crosshairs of medical staff and social services. Also, my mother was separated from her husband, but no yet divorced and as was apparently custom at the time, used her married surname and listed her estranged husband as my father. This was a physical impossibility because he'd been living in Alaska for at least 3 years by that time. It's not like there were dna tests in 1971, so in a very practical sense, on paper, I wasn't his even though the whole small town knew I was.