I wandered from place to place. Sometimes I ate out of
garbage pails. Sometimes I broke into a house and stole something to eat.
Sometimes I begged at the back door of a farm house. If anyone asked about my
parents I told them I was an orphan and had run away from an orphanage. Even
those who were kind to me, I didn’t trust. I didn’t dare trust them. I was a
twelve-year-old fugitive from justice.
Finally, desperate, I stayed and worked at a farm house and
the man and woman didn’t turn me in! After three months I ran across a distant
relative and worked for him two months, before word got around that I had run
away from reform school and I was arrested!
Back I went to Boys Aid! How I hated the place, the bullies
who ran it, the poor food, the dreary surroundings! For the third time, I ran
away, back to Mom. But I didn’t dare stay home. It was enough to be free and to
be in the neighborhood. I lived in the basement of a girl Friend’s home. After
the family had left the house, she would bring me something to eat. To her, I
was a hero!
By now, I was 13, looked 15, and stealing had become my
business. It was stealing or facing my crimes and paying for them. What it
takes to pay for one’s crimes in the general run of reformatories, I didn’t
have. One has to be either mealy-mouthed so one can be pushed around or a bully
who gloats in tormenting the younger, smaller guy. I was neither. I was an
impulsive, bull-headed kid, fighting an unkind world with the few tricks I knew
and all of them were the wrong kind, but as long as I could use my wits and
dodge the police, I was staying out of jail. Once during those days I was
picked up and sent to juvenile hall but the fence wasn’t high enough to hold
me. They don’t build them that high!
But I kept on living a life that was sending me straight
toward jail. And why not? What can the police and society expect when they turn
a wayward boy loose, back to where he came from, with no more help toward the
right than he ever had? At that time, the reformatories offered me the strap
and Mom prayed for me, but I needed more than either strap or prayer. No one
showed me the right way to go and I couldn’t find it myself. Neither was I as
smart as I thought I was. I was arrested again and sentenced to my second
reform school the Whittier
Industrial School
for Boys. With a defiant heart and chip on my shoulder toward the
superintendent and guards, I went there, expecting it to be pretty much like
Boys Aid.
On arrival, with several other boys, I was ushered into the
barber shop and told to sit in the chair. A boy with clippers in his hand asked
me, “How do you want your hair cut?”
Before I could answer, he parted my hair right through the
center with the clippers, and then ran them across the other way, back and
forth, criss-cross, until there was not a hair to be seen! That was service for
you.
Next, came my new clothes. I was given long-handled
underwear, khaki pants, a jacket with a high collar that buttoned up and shoes
two sizes too big for me. The officials weren’t taking any chances on my
outgrowing them!
Then we new boys were taken to the receiving cottages. While
we sat around a long table, the officer in charge gave us a stiff talk on how
to get along while we were at Whittier.
Afterwards we were put on silence until dinner. And that’s no fun! Sometime try
sitting in a room full of boys without saying anything to any of them. At
dinner, we were allowed to speak only if we wanted something passed. But the beans
were good, the bread pudding was sweet and a boy could have all the milk he
wanted to drink. I began to realize that maybe this place wasn’t so bad.
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