A few thousand dollars, and life looks completely different. That thought runs through my mind every time I think about my parents and the beginning of their lives together.
Dad and Mom met in San Diego in the mid-1970s, not long after the old man finished his last stretch behind bars, largely because his boss and friend Jean Ann wrote the court system every week for a year.
My father’s journey to the West Coast began after the State of Kansas paroled him in 1969 (far earlier than his maximum sentence, which would have kept him in prison until 1986) on a robbery conviction.
“My parents had moved out there, so that’s the only reason I went to California,” Dad said. “I ended up in Borrego Springs and had to help them out because my dad was having a hell of a time finding a job.”
The old man wasn’t done with crime by a long shot, even after his stint in the Hutchinson Correctional Facility. He picked up where he left off, burglarizing homes in Southern California, enough so that he covered the down payment on his parents’ house.
“The bottom line is I liked to steal,” he said. “I’m not proud of it now. But back then, the money and the adrenaline rush … I couldn’t stop.”
Dad committed hundreds of burglaries in the San Diego area and was only caught because, in his own words, he got stupid.
“I’d just had a big score – guns, coins, $6,000 in cash – and I went out to celebrate and got drunk,” he said. “On the way home, I got pulled over, and the gun I carried slid out from underneath my car seat. The cop saw it, and that was it.”
The old man served a relatively short term considering his history and tried something different for a while: college. His time as a student at San Diego State lasted all of one semester.
“You talk about a fish out of water. I hated it,” he said. “I was a loner, and I wasn’t like anybody else there.”
Even though he was making decent money managing the print shop, Dad returned to his habits, pulling a number of burglaries, in part because he had to raise money to help his brother.
“Your Uncle Wayne got busted in Mexico, and I needed to raise $3,000 fast to get him out,” he said. “So, I went back to what I knew, and I couldn’t stop.”
With a little help from Jean Ann, the old man was out of jail for the last time by 1975. Last December, I received an early Christmas gift from the State of California, which mailed me four pages related to his last criminal conviction, including a mug shot. It’s still the only time I’ve seen my father wearing a suit.
Not long after his release, Dad began dating my mother. They married in 1975, and I came along in 1976, followed by my brother in 1977.
Before I was born, my parents were comfortable in San Diego and trying to buy a house. But they couldn’t afford to live there, coming up a little short financially.
“We looked and looked, and we tried to find a place,” the old man said. “It just didn’t work out.”
So, a few thousand dollars separated my brother and I from growing up in San Diego. As I said, life would look completely different.
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART IX: An excerpt from Chapter 12 of “Goodbye, Butterfly”
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART VIII: The old man and the high-speed chase
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART VII: Christmas and Lebanon Junior High
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART VI: Christmas with mono
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART V: ShowBiz, Dragon’s Lair and other difficult games
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART IV: “Dutch,” a guilty pleasure
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART III: Christmas in Independence
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART II: Craving an NES Classic
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART I: An update on the search for James Danny Hollingshead
ABOUT MY SECOND BOOK: THE OLD MAN
ORDER “GOODBYE, BUTTERFLY: MURDER, FAITH AND FORGIVENESS IN A SMALL KANSAS TOWN”