How One Newton Resident Became Famous In Romania For A Day

NEWTON, MA — All it took was some cold weather, a bit of nostalgia and a few decades. Newton resident and former chairman of the School Committee was hanging out at home by the fire with his family during that really cold spell a couple weeks ago when an passing comment by his daughter sparked a memory that lead to some online sleuthing and some long lost photos reunited with the people they were meant for - in Romania.

Cue the Romanian paparazzi.

"It was just wild. It came up in the most coincidental way," said Matt Hills in a phone interview with Patch. "And now I've done multiple interviews on Romanian TV."

It's less a tale about him, he says, than it is about the power of the internet to reconnect the long lost.

His children were home visiting recently, but because it was so cold out the family had a lot of down time together, since no one wanted to go out into the weather.

"So we were sitting around the fireplace for four hours and my daughter mentions Croatia," he said.

Hills had actually traveled throughout Eastern Europe with some buddies after graduating from college in 1981 and had pictures to show them. When he took out the album there were photos of his trip, including several wedding photos he took of a couple getting married in a church in Romania. That couple had asked him to take some photos, he remembers, gave him their address to send the photos to later and that was that.

After the trip he lost the address but made an effort to look them up, but to no avail. The photos once developed stayed in his album.

But on this cold day, his sister suggested posting them to Facebook to see if anyone might recognize them. Enter the wiz, boom, whoosh of technology and within days, a family member recognized the couple.

"They found the family, they're still married," said Hills. An interview with the Boston Globe (which broke the story) and at least two Romanian television interviews later, and Hills was able to speak to the woman in the photos through a translator. She seemed happy to be reunited with the photos, he said.

As for the man in the photos, not so much.

His son texted Hills' sister and let her know that the man wasn't into all the fanfare or TV.

Meanwhile, there's still one simple question Hills still has:

"How would they like their pictures? I have the negatives, do you want me to print them out, put into a snap fish album. That's all I want to know," Hills told Patch recently.

And that's the rest of the story.

Read the Globe's article Here.

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Photos courtesy Matt Hills. The photo of the guys by the car? He's the one with the great hair second from the right. Ah the 80s.