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Fifty years of Sharon Powers' agonies and hopes were poured into one brief ad that ran in the classified section of the Tucson newspapers in mid-March looking for the son she never knew.

The former bartender doesn't know the name of the doctor who delivered her son on April 5, 1958, at Tucson Medical Center. She doesn't remember the attorney who arranged his adoption. She never even got to see her baby at the hospital before he was whisked away to his new adoptive family.

Sometimes, Powers, 68, tries to imagine what her son looks like.

She figures he's not very tall and may be blond with blue eyes. She said she's not too bad looking, and neither was his father, so she wouldn't be surprised if he's "halfway decent looking." But genetic pools are fickle. He could be none of those things.

Now a Virginia resident, her story far predates the Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown spat about single mothers and the normalization of out-of-wedlock pregnancies in Hollywood. Her story is all too familiar for women of her generation who lacked ready access to birth control and career opportunities.

Then Sharon Cherman, she got pregnant at 17. When she told the baby's father, a 20-year-old airman at Davis- Monthan Air Force Base, she never saw him again. She dropped out of school and was confined in the house until the birth. Her parents made it clear she wouldn't be keeping the baby.

Shy and unable to stand up for herself, she didn't question them. "I had no alternative. In those days, your parents told you what to do and you did it. It was a terrible stigma on a child to be born out of wedlock, let alone on the mother."

She regretted it from day one, she said, and left Tucson shortly afterward.

Even though she went on to have four more sons, she said she was never whole. "He's part of me. It's just like there's something missing," she said. "I guess I would just like to know that he's happy."

Five years ago, she sent off for a form to look for a match. She carried it in her purse for two years. "I never sent it because I was so afraid that he didn't want to find me." Later, she found one agency that said it could find him for $3,000 — money she didn't have.

Finally this year, realizing they are both running out of time, she decided to make another effort to find her son, who would now be 50, and placed the ad. It was a long shot. She didn't get a response.