Tape 1, Side B

[Begin Tape 1, Side B]

[Tape resumes in mid sentence talking about the interviews themselves] . . . chronological progression. It’s just like it really is, you know. It’s all jumbled together. And none of it makes any fucking sense . . .

. . . [Laughs] That’s life . . .

. . . To me anyway.

. . . Yeah. That’s pretty much my experience too [laughing]. Um, we might have missed a little there [on the tape] about your mother; so you found that she was ill . . .

. . . Yeah. It turns out that she was sick, and my father by then was in the Navy again. We were living near the base, and . . .

. . . This is still in Kansas?

Still in Kansas, in Olathe, Kansas, and suddenly we were living in Aurora, Colorado*, because she was accepted in Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, which is near Denver, and ah--digression: President Eisenhower was there at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital at around that same time too.

Really?

Yeah. That was in the news.

Was that when he had his heart attack?

I don’t remember. But that was the best place for it.

This would have been in fifty-four?

I guess fifty-five, pushin’ fifty-five. So there’s a few months in--I’m changing schools and gettin’ into meeting new people, doing different things. The school was really nice there. I remember there was a teacher--it was like a physical sciences class--there was a teacher there who instead of using the regular textbook he had brought in these mimeographed bits and pieces from Russian textbooks illustrating all sorts of ah--and so he was teaching out of these mimeographed Russian textbooks we all had bits and pieces of it, and he was . . .

. . . And he spoke Russian?

No, but he was translating. Maybe he did, but mostly he was working through the pictures as I remember, and he constructed all these wonderful models that illustrated various aspects of physics, you know, motion and action and reaction and that sort of stuff, and I don’t think that--I think that was like experimental and he wasn’t supposed to be doing it, and I think he got--yeah, I don’t remember. Something happened to him. But that was--I remember that. And the other thing I remember at that time was I was pretty much on my own because my mother was in this hospital all the time and my father had to work, so that’s when I really started--I mean I’d already become . . .

. . . And so you’re maybe nine years old?

Yeah, yeah.

And you’re like a latch-key kid?

Yeah, yeah. I was cookin’ my own breakfasts, and wandering around at night . . .

Did you take care of your little siblings?

No, and again it’s one of those things where I don’t remember what happened to them, I mean they were there. I hear from them later--now--that they spent a lot of time with the neighbors. You know, the neighbors were taking care of them. So again my focus was just on me, me, me, and I don’t remember . . .

. . . So you were kind of raising yourself at that time?

Yeah, I was; no question about it; I was, and I was gettin’ into trouble [laughs]. I remember a couple of incidents where a--you know these old-time soda pop racks where they were just a great big bin, great big cooler, and you lifted up this lid and all the sodas were in there on these tracks . . .

. . . And then you just lifted them out.

Yeah, you put your money in and you swung it down the track and lifted it out through the--Well I got the idea that, you know, gee, they’re just sittin’ there. If you got a bottle opener and some straws, you could just go right in there. Well, so I got a couple of my buddies and we went down there, and of course we got busted right away.

[Laughs] Did you have your butt sticking out of the cooler?

Well, no, it was like at a service station, outside, and it wasn’t even closed. You know I saw it was night, so I thought that’s the sort of time you did that sort of stuff. And, you know, just got the little tap on the shoulder and they . . .

. . . It was the police?

No, it was the guys that ran the service station. They were there. It was sheer stupidity. I wasn’t much of a juvenile delinquent I guess. Yeah. They called my daddy somewhere, and he had to come down and get me.

Where is this place? Is it a town in Colorado, a city, or . . .?

Yeah, it’s like a suburb of Denver. It’s just a tiny little place. So I was hangin’ out at night at the pizza place, you know, ‘cause there was nobody there to--but again I was havin’ a fun time, havin’ a high old time. The fact that my mother was dying in this hospital didn’t seem to make much of an impression on me. I would bicycle out there, take about an hour to bike out there, and I’d go and visit her in the bed. She was in a bed. Far as I remember she didn’t look so good, but it didn’t seem to affect me that much, just--I mean she was there and I was spinning around doing all the things I was doing.

Did it register to you?--at the time then you probably didn’t realize how serious it was. Essentially was she dying?

Yes, she was. Yeah, she died very shortly thereafter, like in 1956. So we didn’t live that long in Aurora, a few months.

No one had sat you down and said, look, this is . . .

. . . I’m sure they had, but I just don’t remember it being devastating. It wasn’t devastating. I think to my younger brother and sister it was. But to me it was simply, you know, it was just another thing that happens [laughs]. So I came home one day and my father was crying in the kitchen and he told me that she had died and, you know, my attitude was like, oh, you know, gee that’s--what next? Now what? Now what’s gonna happen? Now I heard later on from my older half-brother Gene and Bob that they actually were called from somewhere, wherever they were, and they came out to Aurora. I guess they were probably both back in Missouri or something like that. So they got there very quickly and they--the story I hear is they found him, my father, out babbling in the street. They had to physically restrain him and drag him back into the house. And apparently from that point on to the rest of his life, he had just flipped. The things that he did thereafter were completely unexpected. He’d flipped.

So his personality had just completely changed?

Yeah. And I’ve seen some letter since then, around that time, from him to my cousin where he’s just losing it: “I don’t know what’s gonna happen”, you know, “I think I’m going crazy” dah, dah, dah, dah, “I don’t know how I can live without her”, all that sort of stuff, “I don’t know how I’m gonna take care of the kids.”

So part of it was just the practical side of life. But what was his relationship with her like? Do you remember?

All I can remember are the--every now and then there would be fights, violent fights, you know, sometimes drunken brawls, maybe not physical but I kind of remember people gettin’--or at least the after-effects of perhaps people getting slapped around, one or the other of ‘em. So, I don’t know, again, not paying attention [laughing]!

Do you think he kind of deified her after she died?

No, no, I just think he was a very--he didn’t--he never--he wasn’t able to live on his own. He didn’t have much substance of his own, you know; everything that he had was wrapped up in her, and he had no reason to exist thereafter; he had no rationale for going on except us, taking care of us, and that was very clear in some of these letters. That was the only thing that kept him from killing himself possibly was that he felt like he had to take care of us.

Was it more a sense of responsibility than a sense of: this is my family, this is what’s left now that she’s gone?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I think a lot of it is mechanical. This is what you’re supposed to do. This is what you have to do. You just have to do it.

So then you moved from Colorado?

Well, that’s when all these homes started coming into the picture. Right before my mother died she needed to be baptized, she needed to be a Catholic. I forgot what we were . . .

. . . She just got that into her mind?

Yeah, yeah, probably from--the way I always figured it was she met some people in the hospital. Maybe they had roving bands of missionaries or something like that, you know. And so she got really enamored of that and studied it and became a Catholic and she insisted that we get baptized Catholic too. And I don’t think it actually happened with me. I don’t remember actually--in fact I know it didn’t ‘cause of an incident that came up later, but it was close enough that we were allowed to be accepted into this Catholic home in Denver. And so the three of us, you know, my father just couldn’t maintain, so after she was dead and buried . . .

. . . He tried for a while you say?

It couldn’t have been a day or two, no. I think he--he just knew, even with neighbors helping out and that sort of stuff, so he just parked us right away, right away.

Do you think that for your mother, part of her converting to Catholicism had something to do with the notion that the Catholic church would provide for you kids?

I don’t know, possibly.

So she might have felt that maybe he’d lose it or not be able to handle it?

I don’t know. I don’t get that--from some of these letters that I see she was mostly--the people in El Paso, her sister, who coincidentally developed breast cancer and died months after she did, just a few months, yeah, it was her younger sister [pausing for thought]--no, while she--her sister developed . . . yeah, ‘cause I remember now in these letters they’re like: What are we gonna do if those three kids are shipped out to us in El Paso? So there was a concern that they were already overburdened . . .

So that’s part of the reason, ‘cause you might have gone to her?

Right. Probably normally, in other circumstances. Yeah, so I think you’re right that everybody knew that Pat Conkin, my father, wasn’t going to be able to do anything [laughs]. He wasn’t going to be able to handle anything. Obviously he couldn’t take care of these three children . . .

. . . Oh God . . .

. . . nine, five, and one or two, or whatever they were. So he parked us right away in this Catholic home.

One question I meant to ask earlier: Was your mother older than your father?

I don’t know.

She’d already had this marriage, and the kids were older, I just wondered.

I don’t know. They were probably roughly the same age.

How old was she when she died? Do you know?

I did know at one point. Thirty-six maybe, something like that.

So her first marriage must have been really young.

Yeah, right, it was, very young. Maybe, yeah, thirty-four, thirty-six, something like that. Yeah, I think they were roughly equivalent.

Boy.

So, they put us in this Catholic home, you know.

This is in Colorado?

This is in Colorado. I can’t remember the name of it. But we weren’t there for too long, and the thing I remember about that right away is they would give you numbers; and the number they gave me was X9 [laughing]. Still remember my number. But we weren’t there for too long before he took me out, left them there, and he took me on this long driving trip all around the Southwest. And that must have been for weeks. He just drove aimlessly all around the Southwest, and I don’t remember talking to him or hearing anything from him or questioning him. I just thought it was a trip, you know; I got out of that awful place, and here I was just driving around. We’d wander into town after town, and pop into some place at six thirty in the morning and have breakfast, and then go out and drive around some more, and then go pop into someplace else.

So there was no objective apparently, or . . .?

Not that I knew of. I mean we may have gone into El Paso, back where all those other relatives live, but I don’t remember anything about it. Mostly it was just driving around.

Do you think that he basically wanted a companion, and that’s why he took you and not the younger kids?

Yeah, I suppose, I suppose; I don’t know.

But he didn’t talk to you.

Not that I remember. We didn’t talk much about it. As far as I remember he didn’t talk much about anything. I do remember that whenever the subject ever turned to her he would just cry. He cried all the time. He cried all the time [laughs]. That’s what I remember. So . . .

. . . So did you feel like you couldn’t really talk about her?

No. I don’t think I felt anything. I didn’t feel--I wasn’t deep or smart enough to . . .

. . . You didn’t avoid . . .

. . . No, I didn’t avoid it, nor did I try to figure anything out. I just thought, again: So that’s the way this is. So that’s how this game works. That’s when I started really feeling like I was really a--I didn’t belong on this planet, you know—I didn’t have the same feelings that other people did, you know. I felt kind of like an alien observer, or something like that. But it was fun; I was having fun on the planet, so [laughs] . . .

. . . But it wasn’t really your planet, huh?

Well yeah, I wasn’t really like them. I didn’t seem to really fit in, ‘cause I just didn’t understand some of the things that the other humans were saying or feeling, especially adults.

Was it about bursting into tears and that sort of emotional stuff that seemed alien?

No, no, no. It was the progress of going from one day to the next and doing all these different things, and um, you know, the whole “emotional underpinnings”.* [hearty laughter] No, I mean it just didn’t seem to--it all just seemed random. Not that I really spent a lot of time worrying or figuring out why things were the way they were. I didn’t. I just sort of, well . . .

. . . So you just kind of went with it, like here we are in the car, we’re driving around, and you were in the institution before, and now here you are in the car.

Right, yeah. It didn’t surprise me. Didn’t surprise me. Then they put me back in a home for a while, and he took us all out, and we were back in Olathe again, and he was in the Navy again. We were back at the very same base housing that we were in before.

And your mother’s kids from the first marriage are out of the picture now?

Yeah, now they’re really out of the picture. I don’t think of them or consider them for several years.

So it’s just the three of you.

And then we’re in St. Louis. Then we’re driving up to this huge edifice in St. Louis, and it’s the Masonic home, and we’re going to be living there for a while while my father goes to Turkey [laughs, then both laugh]. [Leaning into the microphone] To be continued.

[Commenting on the interview itself] Okay. [Laughing] It’s cheaper than therapy. You know this is really amazing.

So this is workin’ out okay? [Referring to the tape] Is it rolling, Bob?

We’re rollin’. It’s--I’m flabbergasted. I’m stupefied [laughter].

Oh well, you’re asking me some hard questions though, and I appreciate it. [Pause in the tape] I mean that’s my history. I can’t pretend that it was some other way. That’s really the way that it is, and, you know, I can’t make anything rich and wonderful out of it because there really wasn’t; it’s just--it was what it was, and all these things--I still see it this way--they were things that just happened to me. So, I didn’t have any control over anything until right about this time. I started thinking that--I started remembering . . .

. . . You mean St. Louis?

Yeah, right about this time. I guess from then for several years I really felt that I was independent and that I had to really look out for myself, ‘cause then some things happened where it wasn’t just being plucked up and popped into some other happy environment by people who weren’t out to hurt me. It was all sort of benign and I understand that they were reacting to forces beyond their control. Then were some--then I started developing enemies [chuckles], and I felt like I had to look out for myself.

That was in the institution?

Right, yeah.

Uh huh, okay, jeez . . .

We could go on forever, but we’d better stop.

I guess we’d better, okay.

[End Tape 1, Side B]