I was 13 years old when I realized just how tough my father was. We were at a craft show in downtown St. Louis, selling Dad’s homemade leather goods at an annual festival, Strassenfest.
At this particular show, we had done OK, but not nearly as well as the old man expected. On the Saturday night of the show, the skies opened and pelted us and surrounding crafters with rain for hours.
A few shoppers hung around, including two couples who decided to camp under our booth during the entirety of the storm. As they stood there for an hour blocking any traffic into our tent, Dad’s irritation was rising.
Dad eventually said it was time to start packing up. We moved around the tables putting belts, wallets and dozens of other items into boxes. Even though we were trying to wrap up the day and leave, the couples wouldn’t move and were constantly in the old man’s way.
Dad bumped one of the guys, who was about 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds, lightly a couple of times while trying to get to boxes under the table after asking him to move. Eventually, the booth squatter lost his cool and told my dad loudly, “If you bump me one more time, I’m going to kick your ass.”
As I stood to the side 10 feet away and scared to death, Dad put down a handful of belts, turned toward the giant, looked up at him, took his glasses off and stared into his eyes. I’d seen this look a few times, though not at this level. I knew when the old man meant business.
The look was enough. The man turned away, grabbed his wife’s hand and walked out of the booth into the pouring rain with the other couple.
“Son, size means nothing. Where I’m from and where I grew up, all you have to do is be a man,” Dad said as we drove away from the festival. “I asked them to move several times. Bumping him as I was trying to pack was the only way to get them out of there so we could leave.”
Little did I know my dad had seen bigger, stronger and tougher men his entire life. Hell, he’d fought dozens of them. Sometimes, he lost, and sometimes he won. He had little choice but to fight when he went to juvenile hall before he was a teen. That was the beginning of more than a decade in various boys homes, jails and prisons from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.
“I had to fight, didn’t have a choice,” he said. “When you go in to prisons that young, and I was only 15 the first time I went into a real prison, they are all over you.”
Imagine being in prison as a 15-year-old. At that time, Dad was no more than 5-foot-5 and 120 pounds. He said he was “fortunate” that an older inmate offered him “sound” advice in his first few days of incarceration.
“This guy liked me, for whatever reason, and wanted to help me,” he said. “He said, ‘Webb, what you need to do is find the biggest guy you can find and punch him as hard as you can. You’re going to get your ass kicked, but it’ll show people you aren’t a punk.’”
So, the old man did find the biggest inmate he could find, and he did punch him as hard as he could with his 120 pounds. And he did get his ass kicked.
“For the first year, I had to fight all the time,” Dad said. “It seemed like somebody was trying to get on me every other day. But, they never did. I always fought them off. I was never a punk.”
As Morgan Freeman said in “Shawshank,” “Prison is no fairy tale world.” But after a year of trading punches, Dad settled into prison life and survived. He had plenty of fights over the years, but nothing like his first stretch in the system.
“Back then, all you had to do was be a man,” Dad said. “If you stood up for yourself, you’d make it. Nowadays, they’d just kill you. You saw some of that when I was in there, but it was rare.”
Once he left prison for good, that toughness served Dad well. He wasn’t scared of anybody, and he was never intimidated. In fact, he was the most intimidating 5-foot-6, 160-pound person I’ve ever known.
I never saw him fight. He did come home from a show in Illinois one time with an incredible story about a biker who tried to steal an item off one of his tables. Dad said the biker was more than 6-foot tall and 250 pounds, and that he walked up the table, looked right at him, grabbed the item and walked off.
“Normally, a guy that size, if it was a cheap item, I’d let it go,” he said. “But he grabbed a $50 piece, looked at me and walked off. I wasn’t going to let that go.”
Dad ran after the guy and said, “Hey, give me that back,” to which he replied, “Fuck you.” The next thing he knew, they were rolling around on the ground, trading punches. Dad got the item back and got the hell out of town. He was in his late 40s at the time.
“These guys travel in packs,” Dad said. “I wasn’t going to stick around.”
I might normally question this story, but it’s been confirmed by several fellow crafters. You just didn’t mess with the old man.
That didn’t change as he got older. Though he mellowed considerably, one of my favorite stories about Dad came when he was 64 years old. According to his girlfriend at the time, Dad went toe to toe with a bigger guy 25 years younger than he was … at a Spangles.
“I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t,” she said. “I turn around, and the next thing I know he’s on the ground fighting this guy in the entrance of a damn Spangles.”
As Dad told the story, “We walked in, got in the line, and this guy walks in with his woman and cuts right in front of us. It was so damn rude. I said, ‘So, you’re just going to cut right in front of us.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘What the hell are you going to do about it, old man?’”
As soon as the “man” came out, that old man’s right arm was cocked. Moments later, it connected. Down they both went to the floor. In a Spangles.
“He’s lucky,” Dad said. “If it’d been 10 years ago, I would have knocked his ignorant ass out.”