CHAPTER ONE

The three boys were wearing masks of the type used by bandits in many western movies, except these were not made from true bandanas; they were handkerchiefs borrowed from their dads, white and barely large enough to be tied behind their necks. In fact, one of the boys was unable to secure a fast knot on the mask and wound up exposing his face when the mask slipped off his nose at an inopportune time. One of the boys carried a single shot .22 caliber rifle which he poked under a teller window in the First State Bank of my hometown, demanding all the cash in the three teller stations to be turned over to his fellow thieves, each of whom was carrying an empty shoe box. The tellers complied and the boys stuffed a sizeable number of bills in the boxes, backed out the front entrance, jumped into a car owned by one of the robbers and sped out of town. There were several witnesses to the escape, at least one of whom noted the license tag number and two others who recognized the car and its owner, by then unmasked. 

They didn’t get far. Even in those days before our current multiple forms of instant communication, it took nothing more than a single telephone call to the police in a neighboring town where the car was spotted – speeding, of course — and stopped. The boys were arrested and all the money was recovered. Apparently, their only plan was to make it to Dallas, disappear there for a while and enjoy their new wealth until things blew over a bit.

Neither the ineptitude of the bandits nor the amateurish nature of their gambit was known to me for years after. All my 12-year-old senses were able to process was that people I knew personally had ROBBED A BANK AT GUNPOINT! This information shook me to my foundation. Harry Simmons, Billy Ray Thompson and Avery Jenson were all recent graduates of the high school in my hometown, a small rural community in northeast Texas where I had been born and lived my entire life — a very sheltered and simple life of rampant naivete to be sure. Of course, all 12-year-olds are naïve, especially those from small towns which, in 1953, tended to be fairly isolated, with news being provided by radio, newspapers and word-of-mouth (a few televisions were finding their way into rural areas, but were mostly considered novelty items due to the poor-to-non-existent reception). But whatever the standard may have been for judging naivete at that time, I was well behind it when it came to understanding the many evil aspects of the world. Sure, I had read about bank robberies, murder and other violent crimes; and probably had heard something about the exploits of Bonny and Clyde. But those events had all occurred somewhere outside my sphere of experience, usually in places like Gotham City or Metropolis. I had heard tales of bootlegging whiskey and beer in and around my town, but that crime seemed more seedy than sinister, involving shady characters on both sides of the offense. My family didn’t own a television at the time, but I had seen some movies, mostly westerns, where a “stick-up” would sometimes be dramatized. But this, this was different – and personal. I thought about the robbery constantly in days and weeks following and I don’t think I have ever looked at the world the same since. It would be overly indulgent to suggest this single event caused or hastened the end of my adolescence or that it signaled the end of my naivete. Looking back though, it did have a major influence on my life and my way of looking at life. In that respect, it was, if nothing else, an introduction to a kind of sadness I had never known before and that has never fully been overcome.