My dad was married 5 times. My mother was his first wife and I am his first child.
Back in the early 60’s he was married to his third wife, a really flamboyant woman, very likeable, impetuous. A buxom blonde. She had 4 boys by a previous marriage, all in the same age range as Lois and me. They didn’t live here but occasionally they came to Lebanon to visit my grandparents Rowden, and Daddy would come get us girls and we would all be together at my grandparents.
One summer night in 1963 up in the night, somebody knocked on the door of our Wood St home. Mom (Grandma Dame) was sleeping downstairs. She got up – that’s what you did back in those days – and it was one of my Dad’s stepsons. He asked her if he could sleep out the rest of the night on her couch – that he had been out somewhere and was too tired and sleepy to drive back to the Jefferson City area. She told him yes and brought him a blanket and pillow. Kay and I were sleeping upstairs.
(Lois was already married and not there any more. That’s how I know the date, Lois married Frank in May or June 1963, and Milan and I didn’t get married until November of that year.)
Mom woke me to tell me he was downstairs so I wouldn’t get scared knowing somebody else was there. When I got up the next morning he was gone. I think he left even before she got up, don’t really remember.
I didn’t think anything more about it, got up and went to work at the law office as usual. But by the next morning there was a major news story all over the front page. There had been an armed robbery at the Holiday Inn at the Lake and they had found the man responsible. When they located him he had a whole arsenal of guns in the trunk of his car.
It was the stepbrother who had slept at our house, and that car had been parked on Wood Street that night. For some reason, I guess to elude capture, he had headed to Lebanon after the robbery instead of north to his home territory. I’m sure the police were not looking for that car parked in Old Town where a widowed senior citizen and her two granddaughters lived.
We never contacted the authorities. By the time we knew about it, he was in custody and we had no idea that we probably should have. I did tell Mr. Honssinger who I thought was going to have a heart attack because he was always so concerned about his reputation and I was his secretary. If he ever told Mr. Low or anyone else, I never knew about it.
Things played out in the justice system and my step-brother ended up in the state penitentiary and that was the end of my dad’s marriage to that “lady”. Not because it was a stress on the marriage, but because while she was going to Jeff City to visit her son, she became involved in an affair with one of the prison guards and that was a little too much for my dad to handle.
If you would like to read more of my stuff, check out my blog: straightfromthehart.blogspot.com. It is a work in progress which means I post more new stuff every day.
Comments