A friend at work who is seriously into the family genealogy thing unearthed, at my request, the above newspaper fragment of my family history.   That is a photograph of my dad laying dead on the sidewalk after he’d tried to rob another bank. I just saw this image a few days ago and even thinking that I’d made my peace with all that it had its impact on me somewhere deep down inside.   This is the first time I’ve seen this photo.   I’d only asked my friend to see if he could dig up a newspaper article about it.   I hadn’t expected to actually see dad laying dead on a sidewalk.   But…well…I asked for it.   Some days I wish I’d had that Leave It To Beaver life I saw on the TV growing up and some days I’m fine with the life I had.   But even those days when I’m fine with it I wonder about what might have been, had I had the chances the other kids got. Thing of it is though, it would have been some other kid who had that better life, had mom married the other guy instead of the one who died robbing a bank.

A Certain Someone down in Florida told me recently that I was “a piece of work.” So by way of explanation I’ve been giving him some insight these past few days as to why that might be via email.   Getting into the telling of it…how I came to be both the son of a man who died robbing a bank and a good Christian woman…is something I find I just need to get out of me now anyway.   So I’m going to tell the whole thing, in several parts over a period of time, omitting or disguising only pieces of it that might enable a more modern sort of crook then dad in his day would ever have imagined, and make some of those still living a bit too uncomfortable.

In retrospect I’ve had…an interesting life.   It’s taught me a lot.   And in a day and age when single mothers are disrespected by dishonest political frauds and pious pulpit thumping louts I think there may be some value in the telling of it. When you have been raised by a divorced, single working mother back in the 1950s and 60s, you got a front row seat into how 50s sexual morality and the status of woman worked in practice as opposed to theory. You also come to know something intimately well: that if a kid has just one good parent who loves them and sets a good example, they’ve got all they need for life.

Probably the biggest shocker to some of you, a thing I’ve only recently been able to talk openly about with just a few select friends, is the situation with my dad.   My story has always been he was a truck driver, and that he was. But toward the end of his life he lost the truck and he turned to robbing banks.  And that is how he came to his end.   Thievery wasn’t so much a way of life with him as a bad habit he would fall in and out of.   Mom loved him very much but when I was two she divorced him when his gambling and thievery became too much. It broke her heart. When they started seeing each other again I was 15 and he was making an honest living as an interstate truck driver.   One summer he took me out on the road with him.   It is a treasured memory.   But the truck was taken away from him and he apparently decided afterward to get his money where the money was. I learned about that the afternoon I heard a knock at the door and opened it to find two very nice FBI agents there who wanted to know if I knew where dad was.

So Dad…had issues. I’ll try my best in the telling of my story to be fair to him as well as honest. I bear him no grudge whatsoever. He was my dad.   It’s possible for a boy to love his dad even knowing that dad is probably not the person you want to grow up to be.

Mom was a good Baptist woman in the old sense, not the modern right wing political sense. She set a good example and raised me as well as she could on the income of a single working woman in the 1950s and 60s. We didn’t have much, but I never really noticed when I was young because we lived in neighborhoods were nobody else really did either. Mom worked for most of her life as a clerk in a company that sold advertising. Her mother, Ruth took care of me while mom was at work. Ruth hated dad from what I hear the moment she laid eyes on him, and she often took that out on me when mom wasn’t looking. If you notice I never refer to her as grandma during this little history, that’s why.

Mom met dad one day on the pier at Avalon on Catalina Island. But this story needs to start before that.   When she was a young woman she met and fell in love with a Jewish man, Morris, who was in the Navy, serving on a ship in the Pacific during World War II…

To Be Continued…