Tape 2, Side B

[Begin Tape 2, Side B]

I thought I was a free man before, but once I disgorge all this stuff I’ll really be liberated.

[Laughing] So, you ran back to the car.

Yeah. Ran back to the car. Sat there; and I might have been cryin’, I don’t know. [Lighting cigar]

So, you weren’t running from your family, or you wouldn’t have gone back to the car; you were running from the home, basically, like: Get me out; I’m not going to do this.

Yeah. I don’t know, I just didn’t, yeah, I just knew I just somehow didn’t like the setup. It’s the same thing that happened to me, I had sort of the same feeling--let’s go back in time now. I never went to kindergarten because when they took me--I have a clear memory of this--when they took me on the first day of kindergarten and showed me how it was going to be in kindergarten; I looked, I remember seeing looking and there were all these squalling brats, you know, and they were running back and forth and just looked--it was like chaos--and I ran away then too. I didn’t want any part of that either. And I refused to go to kindergarten.

It was the same sort of thing? You just walked out of there . . .

. . . I just, yeah . . .

. . . or ran out of there?

Yeah. [Kid voice] No! Just refused to go in there; and they didn’t send me.

But in that case they let you have your way.

Yeah, exactly. So maybe I’m thinking on some level: that worked before, so I’ll just go back and get in the car and we’ll go home and everything will be like it was. We’ll let them other two stay there if they want to [laughing]. So my father came out, and, you know, he’s very emotional.

How did he handle that sort of thing?

Well, I don’t know; I don’t remember; I think he just talked to me and said: We have to do this. I’m going to Turkey . . .

. . . I mean you didn’t think you were going to get a beating or spanked or anything?

I don’t think I thought anything, you know, I didn’t . . .

Had he explained it?

Yeah, he probably told us all about it, for weeks ahead of time and on the trip there--it was a long trip driving there--I mean it just didn’t . . . I’ve always had problems paying attention, [laughing] so I wasn’t really . . .

. . . It didn’t register until you got there and saw the setup. Okay . . .

. . . That’s right. Just when the reality hits you in the face, you know, you don’t, you don’t--I just don’t know. So I’m sure he talked to me, cried and said: Oh, you know, I’m sorry it has to be like this, but I’ve got this job in Turkey, and I gotta go, and you stay here for a while. I’ll be back to get you out as soon as I can. And eventually I was taken back in. He took off.

So you finally came around to his way of seeing it or just thought you weren’t going to get your way this time?

Yeah, probably. I just--I didn’t have any way of calculating the alternatives or making an argument or anything I don’t think--I just viscerally objected to it, and that was how I expressed it, so--but it didn’t make any difference; and then I saw that it wouldn’t make any difference; so there was that reality.

Tell me about Turkey. What was that all about?

Again I’m only reconstructing this from bits and pieces that I picked up later.

Before you made the long drive--you were going from Colorado to . . .

. . . No, from our home in--after Colorado we went back to Olathe, Kansas, and my father was back in the Navy again, you know; I’m guessing it was just a few months we were there. We were back living in the Navy base, the housing on the Navy base.

That was the period of time that he was trying to see if he could make it--directly after your mother’s death?

Right. We drove around, drove around. I guess he was in the Navy at that time and they gave him some leave, and then he got reassigned back to where he was originally. So during that time he was plotting, I guess, you know, trying to figure out what to do, what to--and he had some contracting experience, one of the many things--oh, by the way, I remember now--[politician’s voice] just to correct the record, Senator--it wasn’t deputy--he was a chief of police in this town in New Mexico, is what I hear now. It wasn’t deputy sheriff. He was Chief of Police, I guess. But one of the things he did--he had a lot of contracting experience, so apparently he had applied for a job with NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]. They were building oil pipelines in Turkey, and he had to go to Turkey, I mean he got a gig. Apparently it was a lot of money.

Was the oil coming from Iraq or . . .

. . . I don’t know, I don’t know . . .

. . . Saudi Arabia . . .

. . . I don’t know. Oil pipelines in Turkey; that’s what I know. So he spun off and went to Turkey, and we’d get letters from him and we’d get presents from him. Every now and then, you know, he would fly back and hang out for a day or two, and we’d visit with him.

Did he explain his plan for going to Turkey to you on this drive to St. Louis?

I’m sure, I’m sure he did, and in the time before that. [Under his breath] I don’t remember. Don’t remember. Don’t remember any of that. I mean I must have known on some level that he was going somewhere, ‘cause he wouldn’t have done this otherwise, you know; he wasn’t gonna be around. If he was gonna be around he wouldn’t have had to park us anywhere.

But I guess Turkey doesn’t mean too much to a nine-year-old.

No. It’s overseas. But, you know, as I got older and absorbed more and more information about it, and as time, you know, the amount of time that went by without him being there, it, you know, you get used to it. You get used to it. And I tried to have a real good time there at the home. And, like I say, it wasn’t awful; punishment wasn’t bad; we went to regular high schools; and we could associate with the people at those schools; sometimes we could bring them back to the home; sometimes we couldn’t; sometimes we could go out, you know--everything was very tightly controlled. You weren’t supposed to go off the ground of the home ever, unless you had special weekend passes or overnight passes, or something like that, you know; you couldn’t even go stay with your mom. Some of the kids had mothers and fathers in the area.

Now why would they--were they afraid of runaways? What was the deal?

I don’t know. I don’t really know. It was pretty tightly controlled and they had, you know, they had a huge staff, and they had--well the woman who was in charge of the children’s part of the home, she was called the Matron, she sort of reported to this guy who was called the Superintendent; and he ran the entire operation, and he probably was answerable to somebody in the Mason chain of command. But they hired all these people. They were specialists in their field. They all had some kind of, you know . . . --Gu--I was trying to think of what they called the, the term that they called the--you know under the Matron there were four . . .

. . . Like Governor . . .

. . . There was a governess. That’s what they called the women. That’s true. They were all governesses. It wasn’t till later on that they got a man, male, to be in charge of the big boys [laughing].

Really. So that happened during your stay?

No, actually that happened during the time, during the time I was absent from the home for a while; then I came back; we all came back. So, yeah, it was women. It was all women who ran the place, except the superintendent; he was a man. And then I think they hired an assistant superintendent; he was a man.

Did you, in the absence of--with your mother being dead and your father gone to Turkey, which was out of the picture--did you find that you became attached to any adults who sort of served in those roles. Were there substitute mothers and substitute fathers around?

No, no, in fact there was never any--they discouraged that too. That was smart of them. They actually--because most of these kids had a surviving parent. And they--pretty much it was all, it was a pretty sophisticated way of dealing with that particular I think, and probably correct. It was business-like. They were very business-like.

They didn’t want you to be attached?

No, they didn’t. They didn’t--except [laughs], except in our case, me and my brother and sister, because it turned out that the matron of the home was always hinting that my father and her could have a thing after he came back. It was very weird, ‘cause nobody else had that, you know; she would be hinting--and my younger brother and sister really remember this, that she could be our step-mother, which was pretty weird because she was very powerful.

And she said things implying that to you?

Yeah, yes, and she took a special interest in us. She would take us over to her son’s house for like Thanksgiving dinners and things like that.

And everyone else was sort of under house arrest, I mean they weren’t usually allowed to . . . ?

. . . Well, they could go to their, you know--we didn’t have a relative; everybody else did . . .

. . . So they were able to go but under controlled circumstances.

. . . They, yeah, they were able to go, yeah. They could go for holidays and things like that, and they would have visitor’s days, and their mothers and fathers or whoever would come, and I think you could drop in too, because as it turned out my [brother Bob visited]. I don’t think Gene did, but I think Bob came to the home once. He was like going to school maybe, near by, University of Missouri or something like that. Yeah, so we had one or two visits from them I think. That’s an interesting question [laughs].

So a lot of her solicitous attitude toward you . . .

. . . Yeah, but we didn’t believe it. We didn’t believe a word of it. We thought it was all part of the manipulation . . .

. . . Oh, really, like that she told that to all the kids?

No, just us, because we were different, you know; we always thought we were different. And, you know, I was saying that before, before I didn’t really have any consciousness of my younger brother and sister; well, beginning when we were in the home, I did. That’s when I started to realize that, oh, that there were three of us, there were three of us, and we were together, and we were different from them, and we had to look out for one another to some extent. So I became aware of them as people who were, you know, somehow--had something to do with me.

Did you have much contact with them?

Yeah, yeah, even though, you know, my brother was one of the little boys and I was one of the big boys, and my sister was one of the girls, still, you could see them. I don’t know that we sat at the same tables, but, like I say, from time to time we did things together with the matron and, you know. . . .

And she facilitated your being together with your younger siblings?

Sometimes, until I became so bad, you know. Well that was one of the things that, ah, that, ah, I got into a lot of trouble there too, as a--you know, from their point of view [laughing]--trouble maker.

[Noticing a problem with the tape recorder] Wait a second. I think we lost something here.

[End Tape 2, Side B]