Glenwood School for Boys

A nine year old boy doesn’t prepare to be sent away anywhere foreign to his home. I attended 8 different elementary schools and even in the end I didn’t graduate from the 8th grade. It wasn’t my shoplifting that caused my mother to send me to military school it was the fact that we had been living in Salvation Army homes for a woman with 4 kids and no means of support. This is 1954, and single mothers weren’t an issue. There were the rich, the middle class and the poor. We were the poor. After much discussion with a friend, who we always called ‘Aunt Dorothy’ it was determined that of the 4 children I was the one that it seemed to make sense had to go. My older sister was a helper, my youngest sister was the baby and my brother was only 5.


Glenwood School for Boys was the first in a string of institutions that I would grow up in. When the car drove away that day, little did I know what the oncoming years would bring? But for me it was the end of family. For all purposes and intent I was orphaned, abandoned and left to the world of institutions. Children have an amazing capacity to adapt to even the worse environments of neglect. I make that declaration from experience. So when I watch today on TV of the plight of children in wretched conditions I know those kids are hardened and adapted to their environment beyond what the holier than thou would have you believe.

I compensated for my loneliness by burying myself in books. It was an escape into a world of fantasy where I was safe in my imaginary world where I was protected by the likes of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill Cody. I could range far to my left and spear a hard hit liner and turn it into a double-play. Reality was a life of obeying the strict rules and regulations of military life where older boys had the authority to knock you around as they brought you into military shape. If you rebelled against the Lieutenants and Captains, then the adults stepped in with their ‘Board of Education’ and whipped you into shape. It was hard to believe that you were bought into this world for any other reason than to endure and survive the violence on your way to manhood…where one day it would be your turn to dispense with the upbringing of future generations of civilians.

Every year on June 14th, Flag Day a military marching exercise was held along with the graduating class from high school. It was the time for seniors to move on. For some, it meant the military, for others college, (though few) and for some a return home. Glenwood was made up of other boys such as myself who were deposited for reasons as individual as life expressed. Who knew...? It was also an occasion for the awarding of medals for every conceivable thing; from marching in the drum and bugle corp., awards for ROTC, awards for best marching unit, etc. All the cadets, that’s what were, cadets, were instructed on how to march up to the reviewing stand and accept your medal if your name was called.

As the awards were announced I let my mind wander as I wondered what my mother had planned after the ceremony. I don’t recall her coming in the past 9 months since she left me there. I wouldn’t be going home for the summer as other boys would be. I instead was signed up for 2 months of camp up in Loretta, Wisconsin. Averting eyes were turning and looking at me. What had I done, the sense was impressed upon me that my name had been called. Why? I hadn’t been involved in anything. I sang in the choir in church but they didn’t award medals for that. I was not bad at it either. I sang before 500 people at the Congress Hotel at Christmas time, solo, “O Holy Night” because I had one of those ‘high C’ voices. So what could they have called my name for?

Here goes nothing I thought as I marched singularly toward the reviewing stand. I really didn’t like being humiliated and I had a feeling I was just made the butt of someone’s joke. No, they wouldn’t dare do that because someone would be held accountable. So what did I receive the medal for? It was a beautiful one as well. White ribbon with a gold medallion, wow. As I marched back to my company I realized I had heard something about education achievement. When the ceremonies were concluded I asked my Captain what I had received the medal for. He said I was kind of stupid not knowing for somebody who had the highest grade point average in the entire school.

By the second year in Glenwood I had settled in and the routine had become the norm. I didn’t think of home or family much and still they didn’t come to visit. I had a few health issues come up, measles, mumps, a need for glasses; all things a family is responsible for and should know about but when I went to the hospital to have my tonsils out, it was just me going through the experience. I went to the eye doctors in Homewood, Illinois for an examination. I hadn’t gotten in any trouble heretofore but for some reason being off the military campus I got an itch to leave. Why I could just walk right out the door and nobody would notice. The person who had brought me to the doctor had returned to the school until such time as I was to return, when the doctor would call them and tell them. The only problem was they had put a solution in my eyes that made them blurry and I couldn’t see very well. Some but not much.

The perfect excuse I thought as I eyed the door and casually got up and walked toward it. I never turned around as I entered the street below. I wasn’t sure of the direction I was going but I was just going to keep on walking in the hopes that eventually the solution would wear off and I could see where I was going. I didn’t think too much about the consequences or where I would go once I could see. Like the proverbial Forest Gump, I kept on walking.

“Hey Jack.” Who was that, I worried. Did they call me? I turned and across the street was JJ. JJ was my mother’s boyfriend, or so I thought. I had met him at the Flag Day ceremonies the previous year. I crossed the street and explained to him that I was lost having been left at the Eye Doctors not knowing where I was or where I was going. It was not lost on me the fact that I walked from Homewood to wherever this place was, which I was soon to learn was Hazel Crest. JJ was a switchman on the Illinois Central and worked in a place called Markham Yards. Interesting as well was the fact that when my father wasn’t a bartender, he too had been a switchman for the IC.

Someone from the school came and retrieved me. They accepted my version of what had happened and apologized profusely for leaving me there unattended. Something else changed that day though that would mark a difference in my attitude and behavior during the rest of my stay at Glenwood.

My second year at Glenwood had gone without incident. My grades were still the highest if not in the entire school at least in my 5th grade class. The teacher liked to play head games with the kids and had her own idea of how to motivate them. They sat the kids in rows according to their grade point average. The kid with the highest GPA sat in the first seat, first row. I had alternated between the 1st and 2nd seat all year with this kid named Beaver. “Eager Beaver” we called him, not having come up with the name “nerd” yet, that seemed an apt description for him. While her seating arrangement may have motivated Beaver and me I can’t imagine what it did for the kid in the last row in the last seat. Beaver only studied, I thought of myself as more involved in sports and music. I wasn’t very good at sports or music but I liked each enough to continue my involvement. After the eye doctor incident however, things changed.

It was difficult enough to be left there at Glenwood to fend for myself but to realize that my family was that close and they never came to visit on the weekends when I would be left there with the few others who were unwanted or unable to be visited. Rebelliousness grew inside me that wanted to strike back. When I was younger and wanted to get back at my mother at least for the physical abuse I would run away. I could see the fear in her eyes whenever I would be found by the police and returned or when I would get caught for false alarms. Maybe it was time to revisit those tactics.

The consequences for the more serious infractions at Glenwood were always the Board Of Education. Do not try to pad your britches and get caught or the oncoming beating was really going to hurt. You know I had to try it. The fear that gripped me as I walked over to the Captain’s office for my punishment, was enough to make me want to turn around and un-stuff my pants. But I maintained my gait and walked confidently into his office. Even the pronouncement that if anybody is caught… I stepped up and bent over to take my licks. “I grew up being beat by someone a lot more brutal than you”, I thought to myself. Undiscovered, I walked upright and proud as the stings of the beating coursed their way through my body.

The infractions against the school and the fights with other boys established that this was going to have to be the last year I’d be at Glenwood. I don’t know how long my mother would have left me there had I not rebelled. I wasn’t too sure what I was coming home to but coming home I was.

We lived on the south side of Chicago, 90th and Langley. I attended St. Joachim for what was the beginning of my 7th grade. Halfway through the school year we moved to Hazel Crest. My own Father and Mother had moved to Hazel Crest in 1953. We lived on the corner of 168th and Trappet. This time we lived at 16833 Head. We bought the house from the O’Meara’s,

I had become institutionalized at Glenwood and though only 14 years old its effects on me would be deleterious. When we arrived in Hazel Crest I would attend St. Josephs’ in Homewood. My time at St. Joachim’s was without any problems but there was a sense that I was out of place. St. Josephs was equally different. Trouble begets trouble and I gravitated to other kids who were no strangers to trouble.

Rich was one of those troubled kids. Who suggested it, I have no idea but it was agreeable to us both to take this car that someone had left the keys in. Neither of us knew how to drive a car and Rich quickly ran the car into the wall of a viaduct and a parked car. We drove by a group of people who were standing outside a movie theater and before Rich really crashed the car and got someone injured I decided it was time to get out. We started walking home back to Hazel Crest from Homewood, down Dixie Highway. A Homewood police officer pulled up beside us and asked us where we were going. Politely he offered to take us home as it was getting late. The year was 1958 when that sort of thing happened. Shortly after he dropped me off at the house after having already dropped off Rich his radio crackled. “You still have those two boys?” “No,” he replied. I just dropped them off at their homes.” “Well, go back and get them,” the radio squawked. “They stole a car.”

“Raise your right hand” sang the bailiff. Rich raised his left hand and I about died laughing. He didn’t make a mistake, he really didn’t know. But I knew that if I didn’t find another friend I was going to back here again. We got probation that time and my course in life was set.

The court put him on probation and had him live with a long-standing friend of the family, “Aunt Dorothy.” She had been one of the most positive influences on John, but he still didn’t make a turnaround. In two months he stole another car. This began a sequence of juvenile homes, escapes, further crime, two more auto thefts, and finally reformatory at St. Charles, Illinois.

What struck me here in the above paragraph from Dial 911 was that it reads like this kid is a career criminal. He is 14 years old. In the world of corrections then in 1958 the country is just coming out of the dark ages in the North, while in the South the treatment of youth is almost on par with the treatment of adults…and it was brutal.

During our early childhood we didn’t have a TV, TV not being available until 1948 and even then it would be awhile before we ever owned one. I remember the old Philco radio and The Green Hornet, Boston Blackie, Inner Sanctum and on and on. We sat quietly, trembling in excited anticipation for hours. Not so much in Glenwood, but even there someone would read stories of mystery that produced the same excitement. Aunt Dorothy was the first to own a TV and we would watch Howdy Doody, Kukla Fran and Ollie, The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy. Aunt Dorothy would wonder aloud at times and we’d learn things that had been kept secret from us, that today we find as mysterious as the programs we listened too.

In 1983 or so Sharon, my one older sister, called me from Rhinelander, Wisc. And asked me to do some research about her birth. Seems she could not find a record of her birth. I was working at Northwestern University at the time and had access to old print files of the Chicago Tribune (Micro film) back to 1942, the year Sharon was born. My father had a limp and I recall thinking as a child that he had been in a fight with a bear and was injured, another more likelihood was the story that the night Sharon was born my father in a drunken stupor raced to the hospital and was involved in a car accident that cost the life of a child. I don’t know about that one, what did occur six months later was that Sharon was left with Lutheran General Services and given over for adoption. I called Lutheran Services and told them that my sister had been with them back in June of 1943. The woman seemed quite eager to help in looking for any records and would I call back later in the afternoon. Sure I would…and if they discovered what Aunt Dorothy had told us as children that eagerness to help would soon melt. Sharon was to have been adopted when after being at Lutheran Services for 6 months my parents wanted her back and went to court and filed a law suit. Now they must have stumbled on an excellent attorney because they themselves were not that bright. My mother more so than my dad had some education but I doubt she orchestrated that initiative to sue Lutheran Services.

The mystic to the story gets more bizarre when you add the 007 styled kidnapping of Sharon by my dad’s brothers for what I have no idea but when the dust settles, my parents win the suit and Lutheran Services has to pay a substantial amount of money. I don’t know, I’m just saying what Aunt Dorothy passed down was $100,000.00. I’m sure the lawyers took a hefty cut from but still Aunt Dorothy waited for our lives to improve…and they never did. So where did all the money go? He drank it up…

The story goes that my mother (a Murphy) was Irish Catholic and had an Italian boyfriend. Her mother was adamant that her daughter was not going to marry an Italian and forbade her from ever seeing him. Was it my mother’s own Irish temper that caused her to go out and marry a protestant farm boy from Ransom, Illinois? Each of my dad’s brothers’s, including him and his twin brother Elmer, had 40 acres of land to farm. I don’t know if a mule was in the works or not. But my dad balked. I saw a picture of him in an Army uniform but where or when I don’t know.. He looked like one of those gangster types that Humphrey Bogart always portrayed. He never should have left the farm because the big city destroyed him and he died at the age of 52 from that cirrhosis of the liver.

One of the most prevalent comments I see from teenagers in the year 2010 on YouTube when the music is from the 50s and 60s is that “I wish I had lived back then because ever since I’ve been turned on to this music I have loved it.” I’m not talking about this lame stuff they put out for “oldies but goodies” but groups like the Platters, the Crests…doo wop. Songs that you could dance to, cheek to cheek. Well I was born then and yes, I loved it. It was a time and an era that nostalgia has milked ever since.

Living in Jeffrey Manor in the winter of ’58 I grew up on Rock N’ Roll. I haven’t seen Francine O’Keefe since 1963, she was my first teenage crush and the memory still lingers every time I hear ‘Heavenly shades of night our falling, its twilight time.” Janet Malito was another young girl from the neighborhood. We all went to Our Lady Gate of Heaven, me, Sharon, Margie Smith, Sharon Malito and Janet, and Francine. I was awkwardly getting to know young girls. Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Joe provided stability and things seemed to be going well. (Uncle Joe drove one of those Panzer Tanks in the 2nd World War.) I attended Junior Achievement classes, sold Christmas Cards door to door until there, out on the sidewalk, all the girls were laughing at me. I felt the sting of humiliation as anger surged through me, what are you laughing at I shrieked at them. “Those people are Jewish” they said. “So, they need Christmas Cards too” I demanded. They only laughed more. Being raised in a non-religious environment of a military school I couldn’t tell you one religion from a baseball team. Whats’ religion?

I was enjoying the onset of winter as the early evening hours descended, walking aimlessly through the neighborhood a car pulled up beside me. “Do you know where Merrill is?” the driver asked. I pointed in the direction he should go but there was a curve he needed to maneuver and “oh heck, why don’t I just get in and show you.” He said sure. The distance was a short one and I felt completely comfortable until he said; “why don’t you stay here” as he drove up to the house he was delivering furniture too, “and I’ll take you back to where I picked you up.” “That won’t be necessary” I said. For a moment I was frozen by his authoritative insistence. Was I reacting to the military command of his voice? When he stepped to the driveway, to meet the people of the house. Another plan was superseding whatever his plan may have been. I slipped into the driver’s seat, with the car still running, I hit the gas. The lurching forward of the car caused all the furniture to deposit itself on the driveway as I roared off into the night.

I drove around for awhile enjoying my ‘on the job’ car learning to drive lesson and managed to avoid hitting anybody or anything until it was time to park the car. I chose a parking lot and even dared to back the car into a spot adjacent to a light pole. As I backed the car in, BAM! I looked back and in an instant realized the tailgate was still down and all the while I could have been stopped by the police. The tailgate was smashed but still I managed to raise it and stuff it back up to a near position where it should have been. I didn’t plan on using it anymore any way and threw the keys across the street into a snow bank. Did I mention the onset of winter included snow?

Returning to the neighborhood I wondered was the man out looking for his car and eyed everyone I saw suspiciously. As I turned the corner on Chappel where we lived I saw my sister Sharon with some of her friends. “Would Francine be with them” I wondered. Francine lived on the same street as we did only a few houses down. She was also my age as was Janet. As I neared my sister and her friend’s one of them hollered out, “where is the car?” Somebody had seen me driving. I told them the whole story and went home. Sharon told Aunt Dorothy and she was worried for me, worried she would get in trouble for having me and she called the police.

At the police station they asked a lot of questions and one of the police officer came into the room and said “you were in jail in 1953?” I was surprised they would even know that. I had run away and managed to make it to Joliet where I was caught as a truant. I refused to tell them my name and to scare me; they locked me up over night in the City Jail. They also know about the false alarms and shoplifting when we lived at 62nd and Dorchester. As the police officer turned to Aunt Dorothy I relaxed when I heard him say bring him to court tomorrow. “Phew,” I exclaimed. I thought I was going to have to stay in jail. Aunt Dorothy looked solemnly at the police and said, “I don’t think I’ll have him in the morning if I take him home. I’m afraid he’ll run away.” At that my heart sank…



Audy Home was a foreboding fortress at 1:00 in the morning. I was scared. As the police deposited me in the Intake quarters, this skinny little kid sat frozen on the bench. As the doors slammed shut I looked at the man in charge. He was drunk. I didn’t have to be near him to smell him. From my child hood spot on the tavern floors I could tell he was of the violent type. He didn’t prove me wrong. From his pocket he pulled a knife, not a particularly large knife, but a knife still the same. “So, what did you do you punk son of a bitch. You snatch some women’s purse?” I got up from my seat and started backing up, furtively I glanced around for something to pick up but everything was secured to the floor. As the drunk I knew him to be there was no use in engaging him in a response to his slurred utterances, it would only arouse his anger further. I had to find a way to defend myself. Just as suddenly as he had verbally burst upon me, he stopped, and his gaze carried past me. I half turned around and saw a sea of black faces, chairs raised above their heads glaring at him. “Get back in bed, he hollered as he returned his knife to his pocket.” He ordered me to a bed back amongst my saviours where I laid all night awake and fearfully watching.

Prison Dorms For Welfare Recipients

WHAT A NOVEL IDEA...CAN'T SAY IT HAS MERIT. I WAS THINKING IF YOU HAVE A FEW EMPTY PRISONS LAYING AROUND YOU COULD MATCH THEM UP WITH SOME OF THE HOMELESS YOU HAVE LAYING AROUND AND THEN HIRE SOME EXCONVICTS TO WORK IN THE KITCHEN...THEY'D KNOW WHERE EVERYTHING IS AT. WHAT DO YOU THINK...BESIDES THE FACT YOU THINK I'M OFF MY ROCKER.

NY candidate: Prison dorms for welfare recipients
Buzz up!58 votes ShareretweetEmailPrintBy BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writer Beth Fouhy, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 53 mins ago
NEW YORK – Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they would work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene."

Paladino, a wealthy Buffalo real estate developer popular with many tea party activists, is competing for the Republican nomination with former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio. The primary is Sept. 14.

Paladino first described the idea in June at a meeting of The Journal News of White Plains and spoke about it again this week with The Associated Press.

Throughout his campaign, Paladino has criticized New York's rich menu of social service benefits, which he says encourages illegal immigrants and needy people to live in the state. He has promised a 20 percent reduction in the state budget and a 10 percent income tax cut if elected.

Asked at the meeting how he would achieve those savings, Paladino laid out several plans that included converting underused state prisons into centers that would house welfare recipients. There, they would do work for the state — "military service, in some cases park service, in other cases public works service," he said — while prison guards would be retrained to work as counselors.

"Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we'll teach people how to earn their check. We'll teach them personal hygiene ... the personal things they don't get when they come from dysfunctional homes," Paladino said.

New York, like other states, receives a federal block grant to provide cash and other forms of welfare to very low-income residents. Federal law already requires welfare recipients to do some form of work to receive benefits.

New York's welfare rolls have grown slightly during the recession, while food stamp eligibility has almost doubled, according to the state.

Paladino told The Associated Press the dormitory living would be voluntary, not mandatory, and would give welfare recipients an opportunity to take public, state-sponsored jobs far from home.

"These are beautiful properties with basketball courts, bathroom facilities, toilet facilities. Many young people would love to get the hell out of cities," Paladino he said.

He also defended his hygiene remarks, saying he had trained inner-city troops in the Army and knows their needs.

"You have to teach them basic things — taking care of themselves, physical fitness. In their dysfunctional environment, they never learned these things," he said.

Ketny Jean-Francois, a former welfare recipient and a New York City advocate for low-income people, said Paladino's idea shocked her.

"Being poor is not a crime," she said. "People are on welfare for many reasons ... Is he saying people are poor because they don't have any hygiene or any skills?"

A Lazio spokesman didn't immediately return a message.

Paladino said he based his ideas on the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program that paid young unemployed men during the Great Depression to plant trees, build roads and develop parks.

Paladino said he would open the program both to long-term welfare recipients and to people who had lost their jobs during the recession. He said that he didn't know how he would pay for it but that prisons could be consolidated to make room.

___

Associated Press writer Marc Beja contributed to this report.

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The Power of The Blog

3 years ago I posted a story about trumpeter Phil Driscoll. He was going to prison at the time for tax evasion. I had never heard of him before or since that article. I didn't even write the article, I lifted it from another source. But since then I have had 13 comments about his situation. That is not a whole lot of comments but they have been spread out for over 3 years with just another one today. Thats what I am saying "The power of a Blog."
...john

Prison: The Forgotten Ministry | revelife

Prison: The Forgotten Ministry revelife

Broken Chains

John Thomson re-read the letter from his sister as he sat on the edge of his bunk. She had heard from his father, whom the family hadn't seen for eight years. John had been only nine at the time his parents separated. Before that he mostly remembered how his dad used to come home raving drunk and beat the family. Once, John was nearly thrown out of the apartment window by his father.




I have been avoiding writing this story for 30 years, now with the horizon of my demise in sight there is no reason not to. It will take some brutal honesty to do so however because I'm not covering nothing no matter how unpalatable it might be.. The year above was 1962. The San Francisco Giants were in the World Series, I remember asking the guard what the score was right before I tried to lasoo him with my tore up mattress. It wasn't much of a rope considering I tore up the mattress with my hands and it sure wasn't going to hold him. In anger as he tore away I grabbed a rock that had fallen on the tier from the workers who earlier in the day were installing speakers on the wall that would monitor what we hollered up and down the tier when the guards were not there. I threw the rock as he ran down the tier in the early hours of the morn.



But the letter said that his father had cirrhosis of the liver, and, before he died, he wanted to visit John in the reformatory. John felt good about that even though he and his dad had never been very close. John wished that he could get out of the "hole" before his dad came. Waiting in his cell without being allowed to work or participate in any recreation and being completely segregated from any of the other boys was hard. The time went so slowly. He wished that he could talk to somebody, Possibly if he behaved himself he would be let out of the hole before his dad came.



"he and his dad had never been very close" The truth was my dad was a beast. While not a big man he was terribly brutal. He'd come home drunk and if my mother had it in for you it was hell to pay. Nobody was spared unless it was my brother Bill. There is always a pet in the family. Somehow Sharon had a forgiving spirit, Sharon being the oldest felt a responsibility for keeping the family together. It seems to be a trait of the abused. I could care less if I was in the "hole" or not, it was just another part of the prison. I wasn't giving any of these guards the slightest hint of what I was really feeling.



Then one day the Captain, a sargent and a Chaplain called John into an office. As John walked in and sat down, he hoped they were going to tell him about a date for the visit.



"John, tell us about your father." one of them said.

"What do you want to know?"

"Well, what kind of a man was he?"

John began to be a little apprehensive. Somewhere, in the back of his mind he had the impression that his dad had been in prison. As a child he remembered sitting in a courtroom once; he thought that had been a domestic fight, but maybe it had been more. If his father did have a record, the authorities at the Illinois Industrial School for Boys in Sheridan might not allow his father to see him. John answered: "Well, I don't know. Okay I guess. What do you mean?"

"When was the last time you saw him?"

"Eight years ago, when my folks separated."

"Did he ever take you on any picnics?"

"No, I can't remember any."

"Well, did he ever take you to a ballgame?"

"Yeah, He took me to one."

"Just one?"

"I only remember one. But so what? I was so small that I can't remember much about it."

"Then you and your dad didn't have a very close relationship, did you?"

"No, I was mostly afraid of him."

"Well good," said the captain. "Since it's been so long since you have seen your father and since he never did anything for you, he obviously didn't love you. So we don't think that you should feel too bad about his being dead."
John sat in silence for a few moments. “Can I go to the funeral?”


“No. That’s what we were saying. We don’t think you should feel bad. Now go back to your cell.”

That night John allowed himself to cry. But they were tears of bitterness and anger, not grief. His life had never been an easy one. Maybe the captain was right, and his dad didn’t love him. His mom had often told him that if he kept getting in trouble, he’d be in prison before he was 21. After his parents had separated, he’d started running away from home, turning in false fire alarms, and shop lifting so often that at the age of nine his mother sent him away to a military school in Glenwood, Illinois. While he was in the school his mother remarried and moved from Chicago to Hazel Crest, a nearby community. But she seldom visited him, and he didn’t know how close she lived to him until he got out of the school at the age of 13. At that time he tried to return to his family, but he couldn’t get along with his step-father.

"I was born and raised for the first nine years of my life in the 1300 east block of 62nd Street. More directly 62nd and Dorchester, in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the south side of Chicago."  . If I had to comment on the first thing I remember learning (and there is a ring of a Merle Haggard song in those words from “Momma Tried”) it would be violence. There is a contradictory dichotomy in the idea that growing up in the 40s and 50s’ was somehow a safer time than now. War was still in the air as the Big One WWII was concluding and the Korean War was beginning. From the fourth floor window of our apartment I could see and hear America’s melting pot.


From the apartment building on the northeast corner emanated the sounds of the blues at night only to be mixed with the sounds of guitars played by Mexicans sitting in their windows on the southeast corner. Other than the clatter of our mothers silverware hitting the pavement below as we threw them at passerbys I don’t think the two apartment buildings occupying the remaining corners was heard anything, unless it was the din of activity from within the apartments minus the cover of air conditioners not yet invented. Big burly blackmen delivered the coal, while another road the horsedrawn wagon selling watermelons, and then there was the ice being delivered to store in our ice boxes.

Rats were prevalent in the basements and the alleys which you were constantly warned to avoid. Little feet ran in terror to hide whenever my father came home. It was almost always the question “would he be drunk or sober”, which I mistook in hearing and thought my mother said silver. “He can’t be silver,” I thought, “that’s the Lone Rangers horse.” Confused nonetheless, I always feigned sleep hoping against the worse, that he wouldn’t be drunk. Drunkeness was the second thing I learned as a child. Whether it be my father (I don’t remember anyone of us calling him dad.) or mother or babysitter, I learned that people took on different forms of drunkenness. There were the silly incoherent type who were funny to watch at a distance as we sat on the floor of the taverns. Was my father working as a bartender or drinking I don’t recall, but I do remember frequenting the taverns on 63rd street. Then there were the violent ones who raised the tension in the air with their threats and knocked over bar stools. My father catered to the later.

Nor were schools a refuge from the pain inflicted from the nuns or brothers as they were sometimes called. I went to both Catholic schools (St. Cyril’s) and public schools (that we called protestant schools with their students with protruding bumps on their heads that would form horns as they got bigger.) I never actually saw any bumps on their heads but you were warned about them and of course believed as well.

You were warned about everything.

Along with the poor home situation, John remembers that he had difficulty adjusting to a non-structured life. He had done well in the institutional environment of the military school and “civilian” life seemed abnormal to him. He couldn’t get along with kids in public school, and drifted into more and more trouble until he stole a car at the age of 14.

At this juncture I need to note that what is written in black is what was written by the Author of Dial 911, a book written 30 years or so ago. The chapter “Broken Chains” was based on an interview between the Author and myself. Much of what the author wrote were his interpretation of what I told him. I don’t remember after all these years what the conversation was that we had. What I do want to point out here however is that many of his assumptions are not very accurate. At the time of the interview I had just arrived here, fresh from prison and doubt I gave the best interview or description of my life to a person I really didn’t even know. You can trust the overall facts of his writings but the opinions of the author are subject to correction which is what I am including in what I write in RED.