Gathering Wool: Fall 1965

“It seems that God has been with me all of my life,
even when I wasn’t with Him ...”

Buzz Trexler, a black sheep

Sometime during the fall, Mom told us she and Dad weren’t going to be living together any longer. They would be getting a divorce.

I can’t remember if I cried.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, for me to remember my emotional reaction — except that I started getting sick quite a bit and spent a lot of time at my grandparents.


Mom started having “spells” where she would go into seizures. At 10 years old, I was charged with sitting on her and holding her hands in a manner that would not severely restrict her movement, but would keep her from hurting herself. It would be 20 years or more before we discovered they were likely petit mall seizures that may have originated from a blow to the head by an ice ball that she sustained as a child.

Unfortunately for Mom, it was deemed a psychiatric problem and she was sent to Tucker’s Hospital, where she underwent shock treatments and nearly terminal isolation.

As if an omen of the laxness in discipline that would follow, Mom bought me a pool table for Christmas and placed it square in the middle of the living room. It would later be moved to the master bedroom.

It was a strange Christmas. Sheree and I spied on Mom from a bedroom door as she brought the presents into the living room: There was a record player, albums (Sonny and Cher’s “I Got Your Babe,” Burl Ives’ Christmas album, and Boots Randolph’s “Yakkety Sax.”)

We broke out the aluminum Christmas tree with a spinning colored disk that caused an array of colors to dance off the sparkling branches. Pure Sixties schlock.

The following spring or summer, another “broken” family – Mabel and her children, Garland and Janet – joined us at the house at 6400 Horsepen Road. Garland was my age, while Janet was the same age as my sister, Sheree.

In the summer of 1966, Mom began dating. There was a college kid who came down from University of Virginia in a Triumph Spitfire, but Mom decided that at 34 years old, she was too old for him. It turned out to be a fun summer, with playground "block" parties at Westhampton Elementary and summer camp at Tuckahoe.

But it was also a time of anger: Garland caught the crux of my rage at having been robbed of a “normal” family.

Not long afterward, the two “broken” families moved from Horsepen Road to a three-bedroom apartment across from Lakeside Elementary School. The apartment complex, which had a small pool, was called Hermitage Manor.

During that time, Mom started dating Jim, a printer she worked with at Mailing Services. Sheree and I initially liked Jim, whom everyone called “Festus.” Since we weren’t seeing our dad regularly, it was only natural. He was a likable guy: mid-30s, with a crewcut, slim build, a bit rowdy and a cigar smoker -- the kind with the plastic tip.

Mom started drinking more, but there was no isolation from us. We were all like a big family: fishing, camping, water skiing, all of the things kids like to do.

I split my time by staying with my paternal Grandma and Grandpa, who was the No. 1 male in my life. He was a retired police officer and professional baseball player and would take me shooting. I only occasionally saw my dad, mostly during his lunch break while on patrol.
He, too, was a police officer and former baseball player. I loved and respected him, but could have loved and respected him more. I was really uncertain why they split up and would not know most of the details for nearly 20 years.

There was a great deal of tension within the family during this time. My dad started dating a Lebanese woman named Theresa and later married her. We were told she placed three of her four children in a “home,” which caused a great deal of suspicion on the part of me and my sister.

There always seemed to be a battle going on between my mom and dad, mom and Theresa, or my grandfather and Theresa. As if that wasn't enough, Mom began battling with Jim’s ex-wife and even nearly ran the woman over in a parking lot one evening. Mom started smoking an occasional cigar and her friends began calling her “Butchie.”

It was this constant state of warfare that sent my mom and us packing off to Florida in the fall of 1967.

To be fair, it was my sister and I who decided to call Jim from the Princess Anne Motel on Route 1 in Richmond, Va. Sheree and I were afraid for the three of us to head to Florida alone. After all, I was 11 years old and she was only 13. Moving 1,000 miles away is a scary thought to a child. But I’ve occasionally wondered whether things would have been different if we hadn’t called him that morning after eating breakfast at the motel’s pancake house.

The trip down South was treated as one big adventure: We had a 1965 Ford Galaxy 500 convertible that Sheree and mom rode in; Jim had a 1965 Pontiac LeMans convertible that he and I rode in, pulling an AristaCraft boat. Jim collected comic books, and as an avid reader I devoured everything from "Adventures of Spiderman" to "Thor."

We followed the Intracoastal Waterway and mused what it would be like to boat the whole thing; bought fireworks at South of the Border, South Carolina; and had a rather disgusting overnight stay in a trailer park where the sewage came up into the bathtub whenever you flushed the commode.

When we crossed the state line into Florida in October 1967, we all got out and kissed the sand. For an 11-year-old boy, it was something of a dream: frequent visits to the beach, fishing and warm weather. Later, it became a nightmare.

We settled in at 711 Amelia Street in Orlando, a house that had two grapefruit trees, two orange trees and a tangelo tree in the backyard.

We hadn’t been there very long before the repo guys first got the Ford, then the boat, then they came for the Pontiac. Jim chased them off one night with a pistol, but they eventually got everything anyway.

Things were a bit tight and I slimmed down some, likely as a result of circumstances. One time we had $1 to last the whole week. We ate beans, fish (we became pretty good anglers over the years) and cornbread. Christmas was tight, too. Sheree and I settled for board games and I got a plastic army truck to go with my GI Joes.

For fun, we had family card games (such as "Casino"), played Monopoly (with some pretty serious rules about rolling dice and knocking hotels and houses off the board) and made homemade fudge. We were broke as church mice, but seemed happy enough.

Still, there were peculiar moments. Like the time Mom and Jim got hooked up with this nudist family. They had a bunch of kids, but Sheree and I were glad they didn’t stay around long.

Then, for some reason Mom and Jim had one fight too many and she, Sheree and I moved to a house near the airport. It was so full of sand fleas that we had quite a time sweeping them out the back door. We didn’t stay long.

As the cycle continued, life was fine for a while, but things got nasty about a year later following Mom and Jim’s marriage in Kissimmee, Florida. (They were building Disney World there at the time, as if there weren't enough Looney Tunes around.)

Jim bought a Sears motorcycle and I think he fancied himself a cross between Marlon Brando and Clint Eastwood. We also had a 1949 Ford with holes in the floorboard that we’d take to drive-ins to see spaghetti westerns and Pink Panther cartoons.

We continued to fish quite a bit and I’m not sure whether it was out of necessity or for fun.

At one particular spot, Lake Tyler, there seemed to be a number of families doing the same. One night, someone said, “Hey, there’s a guy laying over here in the weeds.”

Jim went over and discovered this fellow who carried all of the appearances of being a “bum.” We took him home with us and discovered his name was Ray.

Ray, who appeared to be in his mid-30s, stayed with us a while, rolling his own cigarettes with a Bugler rolling machine (which fascinated me) and pretty much hanging out.

He got cleaned up and Jim got him a job working at, of all places, a liquor warehouse. As a savvy 12-year-old, I thought, “Well, that’ll last a long time.”

Looking back, it’s amusing how God could use even the likes of us. About three years later, after Mom left Jim and began working at the Virginia Department of Education, her boss returned from a trip to Chicago. The conversation went something like this:

“Nora, do you know a man named Ray?” he asked.

“No, not that I recall,” she said.

“Well, it’s strange. I met this guy named Ray in a bar in Chicago and he told me about how a family helped him out when he was really on the skids in Florida. He said it changed his whole life,” the boss said. “He said the woman’s name was ‘Butchie’ and I thought, ‘Surely there can’t be two Butchies in this world.’”

Likely not.

After Mom married Jim in 1968, he started beating her in drunken rages. One night, Mom, Sheree and I were forced to flee and Jim took to the streets of Orlando on that Sears motorcycle, gun in hand, looking for us. We hid in a neighbor’s hedge row and could see him through the dark, patrolling the neighborhood.

It seemed an eternity before the neighbors (were they angels?) let us into their house. Mom telephoned friends, who put us up for the night. As for the neighbors, we had never met the people before, nor to my recollection have we seen them since. Undoubtedly, God had directed them to protect us in the night.

Mom, Sheree and I left Orlando a day or two later and went to live with my Uncle Lee in Miami Springs. But, like a moth drawn to a flame, we returned to Orlando about a month later.

During those days in Orlando, I would periodically get premonitions of “trouble” to come and would go and stay at a friend’s house. Often the premonitions were correct and the “trouble” would turn out to be another beating for Mom. Because of that, I became something of a barometer of their relationship. Like the time Jim tried to push Mom out of the car while traveling down the highway ...

About nine months after we returned to Orlando from Miami Springs, in June 1969, Mom and Jim took Sheree and I back to Richmond to stay with relatives “for the summer.” It was a bizarre journey. I have foggy recollections of him threatening to put all of us out of the car somewhere between Orlando and Richmond. Rantings and ravings accompanied the whole trip.

As the Summer of ’69 drew to a close, Mom came back to Richmond without Jim and filed for a divorce.

The decade of the Sixties was coming to an end, but my awareness of all that was associated with it was only beginning.

As the question is sometimes posed: When did the Sixties begin for you? In my case, it’s hard to tell, though it may have been when we began to start over that year in Richmond.

That new beginning was nearly the genesis of my end, and may well have been if it had not been for one thing: my baptism.

The fall after the summer of '69, I began attending church and was baptized, thanks to my Uncle Russell who was a deacon at Hatcher Memorial Baptist Church.

I joined the youth group and took part in some of the activities, but it was a lonely situation: my mom didn’t go to church; my sister didn’t go to church; and a kid from a “broken” home was not nearly as common then as today.

Mom was still partying, my sister became pregnant and I started drinking the following fall.

Mom would have parties in the downstairs portion of the apartment, while my friends and I would gather upstairs. We would drink and play music throughout the night, occasionally journeying downstairs for more beer and to check out what the adults were into. About 2 or 3 in the morning, we would head out for breakfast. Thus began a series of events that proved God worked to protect me not only from others, but from myself the reason for which is only known to Him.