The first time I told my father I wanted to write about his life, he wasn’t keen on the idea. He wasn’t necessarily ashamed of his past, but he didn’t want his grandchildren to think less of him.
I countered that he had a great story of redemption. Not many people who spend 13 years in boys homes, jails and prisons before they’re 30 years old stay out of the clink, and most of them don’t go on to live meaningful lives.
Dad relented a few years later, and we often spoke about his transgressions from age 10 to 29, which included running away from home numerous times and burglarizing hundreds of homes in Kansas, Missouri and California.
The one part of his criminal career that really bothered Dad was the handful of armed robberies he pulled. He never physically harmed anybody, but armed robbery obviously is a dangerous and potentially deadly crime.
Those offenses began as almost all of them did: He needed the money, oftentimes because he was still a teenager.
“I got low on money and decided to start robbing people with a gun,” he said. “I’d but a bandage over my face right before I went in.”
One of Dad’s hangouts in the early 1960s was Chetopa, Kansas, of all places. It’s a small town in southeast Kansas known for its pecan festival and as “The Catfish Capital,” partly due to its location just off the Neosho River. On a cold day in 1964, Dad went to Chetopa to pull a robbery.
“I robbed a convenience store and a damn sheriff was in the back getting something while I was in there,” he said. “The clerk gave me the money, and I walked out the door, then ran to my car. Along the way, it just so happened that a cop was sitting in his car at the entrance of the alley my car was in.”
The cop lit a cigarette, or the old man wouldn’t have known he was there. He couldn’t get to his car and was relegated to running while trying to hatch a plan to get out of town.
“That’s when I burnt down the barn, set a fire as a distraction,” he said. “I knew in those small towns, everybody comes running when that happens. So, I did that, and I got out of town. I’m not proud of that, son.”
As luck would have it, while he was still on foot, a man driving a truck stopped as he saw Dad walking out of town. They knew each other, and he gave my father a ride to Parsons, where Dad laid low for a few days before the mother of a girl he was courting called the police after hearing about the Chetopa robbery on the radio.
“I got about two blocks from the house and saw cop lights everywhere, so she’d called the cops,” he said. “I saw them before they saw me, so I walked north of town, found a pickup truck that had the keys in it, pushed it down the driveway, started it and got out of town.”
Another stolen vehicle later, Dad was in Wichita. He was out of money, did not have a coat and was walking around town with a suit jacket and gun. Once again, he resorted to burglary. Within a few days, he was cornered while sneaking out the backdoor of a house.
“I was 19, and got 10 to 20 years out of that, and back to Hutch I went,” he said. “Prison had changed in the few years I was gone. It was a long, long, long stretch. I was in three or four riots. It was just a whole different deal.”
The only good that came out of that five-year stint was his best friend, Danny, who my brother is named after and who I’ve written about numerous times in this blog. Dad still had plenty of lessons to learn and plenty of time left behind bars.
Fortunately, he stopped being a knucklehead, a term he used lovingly with his kids and grandkids, by the early 1970s and was ready to live a good, respectable life. The kind of life his sons and grandchildren celebrate.