Cary man and his long-lost sister catch up after spending over 50 years apart

CARY, North Carolina (WTVD) -- A Cary man is getting to know his sister for the first time in his life. He reunited with her at RDU airport, after meeting her for the first time in 50 years.

Their special moment was shared hundreds of times on social media, and now they're catching up on a lifetime of missed memories.

"Well I try not to stare because we look alike," Bambi Will said of her found half-brother, Allan Smith.

Will flew in from her home in Bend, Oregon, to visit Smith in Cary. Now the brother and sister are getting to know each other for the first time in a lifetime.

"Poking and joking, and pushing, and laughing," Smith said. "I would say something and she would finish my sentence."

Smith thought he was an only child for most his life. Now reunited with Will, he shares fond memories of being adopted into an Armenian-American family and growing up as a child actor, getting roles in Oscar Mayer commercials and a gig on the Brady Bunch.

Will said her upbringing wasn't so nice.

She said her adopted father got into selling drugs and was once held at gunpoint by one of his then wives.

"Why is that thing (gun) pointed at me," she recalled. "And I remember this because I was five or six, and I just had a bath, and I was basically naked in a towel, standing on a heating vent, with the rifle in my face."

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While things were tough for her then, the reunion is something she's been searching to have for over 30 years, and Smith couldn't be more grateful for it.

"This is like winning the lottery," Smith said. "I mean there's no money; there's nothing in the world that can bring what happened yesterday...nothing," he said, tearing up. "So, that was just, that was a dream come true."

The two of them are excited to keep looking, as they still have at least two other siblings out there somewhere who share the same mother with them.

"We look all the time," Will said. "I'll go on Ancestry (dot com) and it'll say Alan Smith checked in and it's yesterday. You know it's like we're both still looking."

"To have both families come together," Smith said, describing his hopes for the future, "and to be one big solid family where we celebrate holidays and stuff together. And it probably sounds like a pipe dream, where people go, 'Oh yeah you know they're on cloud nine,' we are, but again, dreams come true, and that's the future that I want."