---

Vitality Stories

---

---

True Crime and Tiger Drive

---

 

Hello!

Last week I shared a memory of my dad being shamed for scrounging in a commercial laundry detergent dumpster when I was three years old. Not all of his dumpster dives ended in embarrassment. Some were downright rewarding.

After the soapbox incident, we moved from Boise, Idaho, to Reno, Nevada. Dad would become a garbage man (today we would say sanitation worker) and work the job to his dying day. Over the years, he worked his way up, and he drove a Peterbilt and handled commercial accounts–I’m sure he found some vindication in being able to sort through as many dumpsters with discarded laundry detergent, and other commercial goods, as he wanted. He loved picking through other people’s junk and amassing his own treasures, but often times, stores would put ‘expired’ food or obsolete items in a box next to the dumpsters for my dad.

One day in the late 1970s, he brought home boxes of True Detective magazines set aside by a customer. True Detective magazines ran from 1924 to 1995. They’d become known as True Crime magazines, too. He loved them. He poured over them, hundreds of them. After 12 hours of work and dinner, he’d sit in our small kitchen at his small two person table, pop open his can of Budweiser (all 6+ of them), and read both solved and unsolved crimes all night long. Every now and then, he’d yell for us children to “learn from what happened to this victim.”

He drilled it into our young heads to never walk by vans. Or if a “car starts following you, turn around and walk the opposite direction and don’t stop walking until you find a payphone or the police department.” And never, ever, ever were we to hitchhike.

In time, my sisters and I started reading the magazines, too. I was only nine or ten but my dad considered the true crime stories an “education in street smarts.”

Crime magazines play a role in Tiger Drive, too. I couldn’t help myself but to include them. Harry, the father, has a collection of crime journals he reads. According to his daughter, Carrie, Harry is a bit obsessed with justice even though he quite often puts himself in situations where he, and his family, question what justice he deserves.

When I was younger, I always wondered why my mom didn’t mind that we were reading about such scary events (especially since I was prone to nightmares), but once she wrote her memoirs, I found out she was a fan of mysteries in more ways than one.

In the memoirs my mom wrote for her children, she shares:

One time while I was in the first grade in Canby, my dad went to a farm bureau convention. He came back on a Sunday afternoon, and he saw stitches by my nose, and he was just livid. He asked my mother what had happened, and she said the neighbor’s dog had come over and bit me. My dad grabbed his 22 and got back in his car, drove over to the neighbor’s place, and shot the dog. Now in retrospect, the dog was right to bite me. He was a big dog, and I was riding him like a horse, but I thought I had better keep that to myself at the time.

Then I found out what a bootlegger was. I had to look it up in my dad’s True Detective magazines. It just so happens that a bootlegger was the owner of the dog that bit me in the first grade. Yellow Medicine County was a dry county meaning you couldn’t buy liquor, but my dad would always go see this guy right before our town dances. And I thought, I wonder why he always goes over to that house.

So this one day before a dance, I went and looked up everything in my dad’s magazines, which were my encyclopedias I tell you, and when he got ready to go, I asked if I could ride along. He said that of course I could but that I couldn’t get out of the car. That didn’t sit well with me, but I did it. I sat there.

They went walking down a ways into a shed, and my dad came back with a jar, or something or other, wrapped in brown paper. I found out later it was homemade booze. So he had that for the dance.

I asked my dad, “Does this man have a still?” That’s the only time my dad got gruff with me.
He said, “Shut up, Bumps, you don’t talk about that.”

Well then, so that’s how I knew—yes, he had a still, but it was not something you brought up to other people. So I had that taken care of and understood it. I had known a bootlegger whose dog had bit me, and I was right there in the same yard that the still was, I just didn’t see it. And I thought, while doggone, that’s pretty good. I bet there aren’t many kids my age—I was about seven—who could say that.

~Bonnie

To be honest, it thrills me to find out about these few common interests my parents shared. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mom was pulling crime magazines from my dad’s supply and reading them in her free time, what little she had while raising 9 children.

Have you ever learned something about your parents’ interests that you didn’t realize they shared?

I hope you had a safe and Happy 4th of July if you live in the states. Until next time, thanks for being you.

Teri

Click here to subscribe or email me at teri@tericase.com

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave