KEWPIE DOLLS TO CRIME PART- ONE

I remember when I was a little guy and was arrested for the first time. I was eleven years old and living in the Oak Park district near Third Avenue and Thirty-Fifth Street in Sacramento.

There were six of us children. Lydia, one, Ruth, five, Ester, eight, myself, eleven, Miriam, thirteen, and paul, who was fifteen. He worked earning about twelve dollars a week, and was away a lot at nights because he was beginning to fight professionally.

Mom was a pretty, slim woman, with eyes that looked at a fellow as if she had faith in him. She was still in her teens when she and my Dad were married. I know they were happy together, and his death was a shock to her. In her gather, and his death was a shock to her. In her early thirties, with six children, she was not trained to earn a living for us. She had to work as domestic, scrubbing floors, washing windows for rich folks. She had to leave the house early in the morning, before we kids were half awake, and if the folks she worked for had a party, it was after midnight before she got back to her brood.

With Mom gone all day long I had the inward felling that no one cared what I did. Breakfast was cold cereal and milk. At school sometimes I studied and sometimes I didn’t. After school, I played with the other boys in the neighborhood, mostly older than I. My special pals were Tom and Al. One day, on the prowl for something to do, we noticed a deserted garage. The windows were dirty but we rubbed a place until it was clean enough to peek in. Our eyes grew big-there were kewpie dolls, cheap boxes of chocolates and other trinkets to be used as prizes at the joy land Amusement park!

Let’s snitch the stuff, someone suggested.

Sure, no one is using it, the other two agreed. I don’t remember who made the first suggestion but probably we all thought it. And I was as game as the next one.

We tried to get the window open. It was locked we tried the door. It was locked the more we tried, the more determined we grew. Finally we found a loose board. One of the boys held it back while the other two crawled in. Sure, I was one of the two that went in and got the stuff.

Soon we were big shots all over the neighborhood, giving kewpie dolls to our girlfriends, trinkets to the other boys and stuffing ourselves with the chocolates. It was a real spree and I enjoyed the excitement of it. I knew Mom would be cross if she found out but farther than that I didn’t think. I was always more of a doer than a thinker. In those days, I was a restless and unhappy kid. I had been ever since my Dad died. Another kid in the neighborhood had taught me to snitch pennies and nickels from Mom’s purse for candy and ice cream. Mom had been troubled about me and had me live on ranches at a couple of foster homes. But I didn’t like them and had insisted on coming home. I was really looking for someone to take Dad’s place and love me like he did; only I didn’t know what I wanted, so I gave kewpie dolls to the girls in the neighborhood to make myself feel big.