In the summer of 1957 my mother became pregnant with her second child. She had fled central Illinois for the wilds of southern California and dragged me along with her, presumably to piss off my father who had been given custody of me.
Either way we spent a fair amount of time moving from place to place in the greater LA area: we stayed in a rooming house ran by an orthodox Jewish couple, I was farmed out to a military school (short-lived thank the gods), and we lived for a short spell with my mother's brother and his family in Santa Monica right across the street from 20th Century Fox Studios. For a time I boarded with a Catholic family and attended parochial school in West Covina. It was all a strange time for me, not so much upsetting as just aimless I suppose.
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| my mother smiling for a change |
At some point we lived with the man who would eventually impregnate my mother in the summer of 1957, probably sometime in July. Sometime in late autumn or early winter mother and I ended up on a Greyhound bus heading back east. Not to Illinois, but to the small town of Canby in western Minnesota, where we stayed with the parents of the father of my soon-to-be half brother.
It wasn't unpleasant but I sensed they were not terribly keen to have either one of us there. And as things would turn out my father would catch up with us there. I was to learn later that he had been searching for me for months and at last tracked me down -- first in California and then in Minnesota. He and my soon-to-be Uncle Red drove all the way from central Illinois in the dead of winter to find me.
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| my dad in 1943 |
I ended up leaving Minnesota in early spring, flying alone to Illinois where I was met by my dad and soon-to-be-step-mom Helen, although she quickly became my mother, officially and otherwise. She had once been my babysitter during the time when my dad was divorced and juggling two growing boys and a job that required him to spend a fair amount of time on the road.
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| my older brother Don and I in 1950 - I was 2 and he was 14 |
And lest you think Helen was a 16-year-old Twinkie, think again: she herself had been divorced and lost her one and only child to pneumonia in 1938. More to the point for me, she was a cashier at the Avon theater in the town where she would let me into the movies for free. I spent my soome of my childhood years enjoying the peace and solitude of the various theaters in town (although I did walk out of The King and I); my taste ran more to Tarantula, Them!, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
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| my stepmother with her son Robert in June of 1937 |
Anyway, not long after leaving Canby my mother gave birth to my half-brother Greg. Curiously enough we share the same middle name - Paul. According to Greg, my mother's favorite uncle (on her mother's side) was named Paul.
Over the next few years I would see Greg just a handful of times but we eventually lost touch.
In late 1993, Greg reached out to my dad and we soon reconnected in person. By then he was working as a minister at a church in Kansas City and would eventually settle in the western suburbs of Chicago, where he lives today.
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| Greg c. 1962 |
