My Life So Far, Part 17

When I last wrote in this blog, I left off on the cusp of Monday May 21, 1984. The next day, Tuesday May 22^nd, would be the second anniversary of my marriage to Bertha. We had planned to put off celebrating until my paycheck same on the 24^th. Then we would go out to eat. The week went by without anything exceptional that I would have remarked upon had not the events of Wednesday the 23^rd and Thursday the 24^th.

(Friends, this really hurts to write about. But I must get it in writing, because next moth my annual parole review comes up, and I may be revoked for lack of employment. If I don’t tell what truly happened, the only story in the public forum will be the one concocted by the police and prosecutors to convict me of the heinous crime of which I am a co-victim. That is why it takes so ling for me to post episodes, the trauma being renewed stirs up PTSD, and I need a few weeks to recover.)

On the night of Wednesday May 23^rd, Bertha was very tired and laid down to sleep before I left for work. Before I was quite ready, Bert asked me to check to see if her friend Debbie O’Bannon would come over to spend the night. I found Debbie and her boyfriend, Jesse Aranda lounging on the tailgate of Jesse’s truck and talking. When I asked if Debbie was coming to keep Bertha company, the consensus was that there was a possibility if Jesse didn’t spend the night with Debbie. So I passed this on to Bertha, who asked me to leave the door unlocked to allow Debbie to come in if Jesse left. Bertha did not want to have to get out of bed.

I left for work at about five minutes before eleven, trying to get there with enough time to check in and get squared away before I started my shift. I got there a few minutes before shift started at 11:30 PM and filled in my log, checked out my equipment, and asked the outgoing shift if there were any alerts. Just then a secretary came by with a stack of ledger books to place in the office of one Ed Carson in Plaza One. No one could tell me which office was Mr. Carson’s, but I am a Marine and whenever I encounter a problem, it is in my training to try my best to resolve it. So I took the books to Plaza One looking throughout the office suite for the one belonging to Mr. Carson.

The people who worked at the Methodist Church’s Dallas area medical center’s administrative office, The Deadman Medical Center, must have been exceptionally humble. Not one item of identification was on any office door, desk or wall throughout the suite. I must have spent forty minutes looking through drawers and around desks for a name tag or letterhead. Nothing!

Finally I gave up and left the books in a common area where there were a counter and sink, apparently a lunch and break area. At that time I got a radio call from my immediate supervisor, former Maj. Jim Houston, USMC, who wanted me back in the security office so he could escort the pretty nurses going off shift to their cars (there had been a few assaults in the neighborhood, and the nurses were frightened to walk through the dark parking lot alone.).

Immediately I set the alarms and attempted to lock up. It was 12:40 AM, May 24, 1984. As I tried to lock the back door of the plaza, the key that was already cracked decided to break off in the lock. Enough was protruding to grip it with my fingernails, so to avoid anyone using it to open the door, I opted to take the minute longer to extract the broken pieces. Mr. Houston met me at the emergency door to the hospital as I came around the back of the plaza and we went down to the office in the basement while he was castigating me for failure to answer the beeper.

Our beepers were small squares of plastic with a view port on top and two buttons on the face. One of those buttons, when pushed, placed the beeper in silent mode where it recorded calls but didn’t notify the wearer of the incoming call. As I moved around the office suite, I bumped into a lot of furniture. It seems that one of the corners of a desk or table must have hit the right button at the right time to place it in silent mode without my knowledge. When checked, the beeper displayed the two pages and was in silent mode.

No other events of note took place before 7:00 AM when the alarm in Plaza Two went off. Plaza Two housed a pharmacy, and management was especially worried that there would be an attempt to raid it for drugs. So we took any alarms in that plaza very seriously. It turned out that the cardiologist in the plaza had come in early and never bothered to inform us so we could shunt the alarm for him.

The shift ended and I went home, tired but expecting to get my paycheck and take my beloved out for dinner to celebrate our two years of marriage. I arrived a bit after 8:05 AM, to find the door closed only part way and not truly latched, even though it was locked. Upon entering the door I noticed the apartment was in a shambles with the contents of my wife’s purse, the closets and the trunk we used in lieu of a table all strewn about the floor. All the closet doors were open, the kitchen cabinets and drawers too.

Deborah was awake and playing in her pen that doubled as her bed until we could get our furniture. Her diaper was full but we had no more Pampers in stock. So I went to find Bertha to discuss using one of the cloth diapers until I could get my paycheck and buy new Pampers. When I entered the master bedroom, the first thing I noticed is the bed, devoid of all bedclothes, but with a huge red stain in the middle of the top part of the mattress. A pile of clothes, the ones Bert had just washed the evening before and left folded in the hamper overnight, was in the middle of the floor, and Bert’s legs were sticking out of the pile.

At this point I knew something happened to Bert, but I didn’t know if she were alive or not. So I dug out her body from the pile of clothes and pealed back the sheets she was shrouded in only to be assaulted by the sight of my beloved’s face brutally marred with many wounds and a knife protruding from her neck. My mind refused to accept the vision and assumed the knife was in her mouth. I gripped the handle lightly and flung the knife into the pile of clothes, then reached for Bert’s right carotid artery to check for a pulse. When I did, my fingers entered one of the wounds on her neck and sank to the second knuckle in her cold meat.

The world receded and I could hear the blood in my own arteries as I went into shock myself. I wanted to cry, by tears were dammed up and everything I saw seemed to be on the other side of a glass wall, like I was in a terrarium. My training kicked in and I rose to report to the local authorities. I used the terminology that I had been taught to use in a crime scene. But my shocked mind kept dredging up useless trivia to distract me from the horror I had witnessed. One of the things my mind dredged up was the memory of Krystalnacht, The Night of Broken Glass, when the Nazi Brown Shirts vandalized the homes and businesses of Jews throughout Germany and beat them in their beds, many of them to death. I couldn’t help comparing my beloved to those victems.

I trudged to the home of Debbie and Jan, Bert’s friends, to use the telephone, and called the Grand Prairie, TX police to report Bertha’s murder and get the ball rolling. I was so out of myself I cannot clearly recall what I said or did, but I know I wanted to try one more time to revive Bertha. So I returned to my apartment and Jan followed. While Jan cared for Deborah, I returned to the bedroom and cried over Bertha while gently asking her to wake. I placed my hand over her heart and prayed that God would restore its rhythm, but Bertha didn’t have enough blood left in her body for her heart to move. At some point during my prayer, Jan showed up at the door and said, “Don’t touch anything.”

I answered, “I already messed up the scene. Besides, I have to do this.” Then I finished my prayer and pleading with Bert.

Officer Richard Bender, now a full Detective, responded to the call about 8:40 AM. When Jan announced the police were here, I picked up the knife that I had thrown and carried it out to him on my palms, trying not to smear any evidence on it. I told Bender what the scene looked like when I arrived and that I was a fool to mess it up. Then I offered some conclusions, trying to keep my mind from the reality of the horror in the room. Bender ignored everything I told him unless he could spin it into testimony to use against me in court.

When the detectives, Junkin and Rhodes, showed up, Junkin told me that the police received a string of prowler calls the night before, but they don’t respond to prowler calls. If they did so, my beloved may have still been alive when I returned home. Once the detective lieutenant arrived, the investigation turned hostile toward me. The detectives asked me to come with them to “make a statement” at the police station. They claimed I was not under arrest, but I was not free to go get my paycheck to buy diapers and formula for my daughter. Remember this when I tell you about the trial.

From 9:45 AM until 4:30 PM, the detectives tag-teamed me to sweat a confession out of me. I was trained by the United States Marine Corps to withstand the torture techniques of the Communists who were our enemies at the time. So the mental torture of the police was not irresistible, in spite of the fact that I had not slept in more than thirty-six hours nor eaten in more than twenty-four hours, by the time the “questioning” was through. At one time, Detective Rhodes, a former Navy swift boat sailor from the Viet Nam war, took me into the pipe chase behind the cell block to beat a confession out of me. Realizing that my life was in danger, I stood in a non-threatening Akido stance to await whatever happened. I am not trained in Akido, but I do know how to stand and how to bluff. Rhodes took a second look at me and how big and ready I was for anything he might do, and decided to forgo the beating.

Detective Junkin tried to belittle my faith, and suggested I had voices from God telling me to kill my own wife. I told him he was sick in the head himself and ought to get help for it. I was then turned over to another detective, a devout Catholic, who tried to get me to lie based on the spiritual angle of confession. I realized, however, that the stricture against bearing false witness applies to false confessions. So the detectives finally gave up trying to shake my self discipline, and took down the statement that I had been making all along. Then they announced that they caught me in a lie and placed me under arrest.

At no time did the detectives make a serious attempt to identify the two prowlers that were reported the night before. Nor were they willing to consider the connection between the prowlers and the murder of my wife. It wasn’t until after they told me I was arrested that they allowed me to call anyone, although they did let me talk to my mother-in-law, whom they had called, to see if she could make me confess. She tried to trap me by asking me if I had raped Bertha after I killed her. I answered the underlying question, no I didn’t kill her, but the call was not recorded and my mother-in-law twisted the words in court to make it sound as though I told her I killed Bertha.

I remained in the city jail until Monday, even though it was a holiday, when they moved me to the county jail and had my first arraignment. I was appointed Mark Stoltz, who now sits on the Federal bench, to defend me. He assumed I was guilty, and when I insisted upon my innocence, he ignored my input. When he finally did tell me something about the case against me, I informed him that the primary witnesses were lying because the first wasn’t there and his wife was only parroting his story. Stoltz never investigated the truth.

In my next post, I will tell you of the trial that lasted four days and led to me spending thirty-two and a half years incarcerated for a crime that I was a co-victim of. Under Texas law, if a murder is committed during the commission of another felony, it is a capital offense to be punished by the death of the murderer. A capital crime was committed in my apartment that morning, by the State couldn’t charge me with it because it is fundamentally impossible to burglarize your own home. While I sat in the county jail, I received a three-months subscription to the Dallas Times Herald, now defunct. I counted fifty cases in that time in which people were murdered with the same modis opperendi as my beloved. I couldn’t help but wonder how many people would be alive if the police responded to prowler calls and made arrests for trespassing before the murders were committed.

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until there is enough traffic on the blogs to interest advertisers (20,000 hits per month). If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. First, share, share, share. The more people who know about the blogs, the more who will visit them. And you can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

My Life So Far, Part 16

Because of Bertha’s neurosis, my family turned us out, not wanting to have their purses and wallets rifled for minor cash. I stood beside my wife in the troubles even when my sister tried to use blood ties to turn me against her. Bertha had a problem and until she was willing to accept it, there was no way to help her. We lived with a Mormon family who were friends of Bertha’s family for three weeks, until Bert found a subsidized apartment in Grand Prairie, Texas that we could afford.

I got a job working security for Jim Bearden and Associates out of Arlington, Texas. Most of the work entailed guarding hospitals and high-rise apartments. One job we had, that I was assigned to cover, was to guard a parking lot for a restaurant that had a bar next door. The bar patrons would fill up the restaurant parking lot so the diners had no place to park. I would stand outside and direct people to put their cars in the bar’s lot until the restaurant closed and their parking lot opened to non-restaurant cars.

On the same nights I worked the restaurant parking lot, I also guarded the parking garage of a high-rise with a broken garage door. That job started exactly one hour after the restaurant job ended. I had to use the time in some way, and I didn’t drink. So on one occasion in mid May, I decided to go home and kiss my wife. When I got there, thinking I would give Bertha a pleasant surprise, I found her not at home. I don’t expect my wife to give up any personal life for me. So I didn’t feel any wrong was done by her, but I was disappointed that I could not share a kiss before I returned to the high-rise for my second shift of the night.

The next Wednesday morning, May 16, 1984, I met my neighbor, Gary Don Shepherd, outside. Gary said he and his buddies met every Wednesday night from 10:30 PM to 12:30 AM at the doughnut shop just off the freeway entrance. I explained that I had to be to work in Farmers Branch, Texas before 11:30 PM on Wednesday nights, and I felt it would be rude for me to show up for only twenty minutes and leave. So I begged out of it. Besides, those few minutes on an evening were the only time I could spend with my wife and child. I valued that time with them.

Around this time my mother-in-law had begun a renewed effort to convince my wife to take the baby and leave me. Whenever my wife called home, it was the same refrain. When we had saved enough to rent a moving truck and bring our furniture and household appliances to Grand Prairie on the weekend of May 26-27, my mother-in-law saw this as the opportunity to split us apart. Since I had to work that weekend, Bertha would be going alone. But I had unwavering faith in Bertha and her love. The one thing Bertha craved in life was the only thing she could never have, the approval of her mother.

To be continued….

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until there is enough traffic on the blogs to interest advertisers (20,000 hits per month). If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. You can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

My Life So Far, Part 15

Because of the time I spent in Galveston with my wife giving birth to Deborah, I couldn’t make my rent for October, 1983. Bertha and I lost the house we were renting in Beaumont, Texas in January. So we packed all our things in a borrowed truck and moved into her brother’s house next door to their mother in Houston. This gave me more employment options.

I got a job grinding castings at Bethlehem Steel’s Houston facility, which served the oil industry. This is the same work my father did in the auto industry in Michigan, and I felt closer to my dad every time I went to work. But the rest of the crew were immigrants and I didn’t speak Spanish. The foreman’s English was minimal and only the manager could give me detailed instructions. I am a self-starter when I understand the job, and I did good work by myself. But I was unaware that OSHA was hard on the local shop, and I was moving 400 to 1,500 pound castings by myself. At college I dead-lifted 1,500 pounds for official score. I was comfortable with the weight, but OSHA was not. So after only three weeks I was fired for violating OSHA regulations about lifting heavy weights in the workplace.

After the foundry debacle, I got my chauffeurs’ endorsement on my driver’s license and started driving for Yellow Cab. The best hours for work were from two in the afternoon to two in the morning, and on my worst day in 1984 I brought in over a hundred dollars. After the lease on the car and gas money I would have more than forty dollars left for an eight hour shift. Naturally I worked the extra four hours to improve our finances.

In February my mother-in-law came to me to propose taking our five month old daughter and my wife to visit her East coast relatives. I saw nothing wrong with the idea as presented to me, so I gave my approval. That was my biggest mistake. One should never take a proposal by that woman or any of her offspring at face value.

The first stop on their trip took my wife and child to visit my wife’s grandmother and namesake in Florida. The lady was a wonderful person and I am glad she got to meet my child so early in Deborah’s life. Then my mother-in-law took them to Maryland, where she dumped them at her brother’s house, my wife’s uncle, with instructions to not allow them to leave unless I paid a ransom and bought them an airplane ticket. Then my mother-in-law took a flight to Pakistan where she had men whom she was bilking for money.

When my wife talked with her mother on the telephone, she was told the my mother-in-law could not return because the airport was closed. For most of the month of February we gave her a chance, but it was only a ploy to tear apart my marriage. I called the Pakistani consulate in Houston to ask if there were any problems in the airport in Karachi. The answer was no, the airport had been open for international flights the whole time.

I value my wife and child far more than I value mere money. So I drew out our entire savings, put it in an overnight envelope and mailed it to my wife as certified mail. Bertha paid off her uncle, bought a plane ticket, and returned to Houston that next night. Shortly after dawn, I picked them up from the airport and we packed what would fit in our car, put the rest of our things in storage, and fled to my family in the Dallas area.

Suddenly the Karachi airport opened to let my mother-in-law fly back. But by the time she got to Houston, we were gone. Strike two.

To be continued….

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until there is enough traffic on the blogs to interest advertisers (20,000 hits per month). If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. You can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

My Life So Far, Vol. 14

I had no trouble finding a job in retail. I was hired to manage a kiosk in the Gulfgate Mall for Frontier Fruit and Nut Company. We sold ready to eat dried fruits and nuts as a snack item people could eat in the store. Working by myself, I brought the store to within a few dollars of the company quota for the first time in the history of the kiosk.

I finally found a crew to work the store with me, but one I had to let go because he couldn’t return from lunch in the half hour we gave him. As soon as there were two other people working with me, my quota was doubled. I taught them my tricks and techniques for sales, mostly how to catch the attention of passers by because the food sold itself once people looked at it. I took applications from a large number of people. No one gave it the effort that I did.

One of my tricks was to put a honey dipped, sun dried date on the scoop and present it to the oldest woman in the hall, saying, “Hay gorgeous, do you want a date?” It always made a sale. I just couldn’t get my employees to try. My most productive one became hostile because she perceived things in a racial way, being a black woman in Houston, Texas, and decided I had singled her out for being black. Little did she know I had singled her out for being good at the job. Before I could clarify it with her I was hired away at a shoe store for Genesco Shoes in the San Jacinto Mall in Baytown, Texas.

I worked for a black lady as her assistant manager in the Jarmin store. The job lasted through the end of 1982, then the company moved me to Beaumont, Texas to work in one of their Flag Brothers stores. My wife was now pregnant with our daughter, and she was miserable all summer. The economy in Beaumont is very much tied to the oil industry. When the country goes into a recession, oil is depressed. When the oil business is in a bust, Beaumont is dirt poor. The oil depression caused sales in the Flag Brothers store to drop so low the company was thinking of closing it for lost revenue. So that summer of 1983 in Beaumont, I was unemployed with a pregnant wife.

I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners and picked up scrap metal along the highway, mostly aluminum cans. It wasn’t easy making rent. But I did. When my daughter was due on September 4^th, my wife had not yet shown signs of immanent delivery. On September 16^th, the Ob/Gyn resident in John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, Texas had Bertha admitted to force labor with a pitosin drip. Bertha had the IV in her arm for seven whole days, in agony the whole time from forced labor. But the baby was not yet ready to come. Finally, on the afternoon of the 23^rd, Bertha began to dilate. If we had medical insurance, Deborah would have been taken by Caesarian section at least five days earlier. But non-paying customers don’t get surgical procedures unless it is life threatening.

It was four o’clock in the evening when the nurses suggested I dress in scrubs to help my wife with the delivery. My mother-in-law demanded to take my place in the delivery room. She had already monopolized the visiting time before delivery, and she had been telling my wife that I left and wouldn’t stay for the baby’s birth. I had already slept the night in the waiting room. I told her it was my place to be there for Bertha when the baby was born and so I shall be. My mother-in-law was livid. Her lies to my wife would all become apparent if I were to be there. She dressed in scrubs herself and told me I couldn’t go in there or “there’ll be hell on this floor.” I leaned forward and very quietly but firmly stated, “So be it.”

I would always be willing to give her her way in matters of no import. But when she would supplant my place beside my wife as our child was born, I had to stand up to her and put down my foot. I heard no more of it from her. The battle lost, my mother-in-law looked for other ways of tearing apart our marriage.

Deborah was born late in the night of September 23^rd, 1983. I had just turned 25 the previous month. Deborah weighed a little less than nine pounds and was healthy in all respects but one, her neck had not finished forming in the womb. She was precious to me from the start. The first time she sunk her little hands into my beard and refused to let go, I was smitten for life.

To be continued….

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until September. If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. You can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

My Life So Far, Part 13

As painful as it is to dredge up old memories of my life with Bertha, I must finish this series or I shall burst. I have been avoiding it far too long. So I shall plug in where I left off.

Bertha found an apartment in the Centerwood area of Houston where she wanted to live so she could be near her favorite church. In April, 1982, I moved into the apartment to hold it until our wedding. Bertha was still living in a mobile home she shared with a friend in Pasadena, Texas, half way between Gilley’s and Johnny Lee’s. Those were the big landmarks on the highway that every one used to navigate.

I found a job in Deer Park, Texas, delivering welding gasses for Amerigas, Inc. I usually drove a pickup truck. But sometimes I drove a three-ton flatbed. When the wedding day arrived, I dressed in my rented tuxedo along with my best man, my brother Alan and my father. We set out for the church in plenty of time. In fact we arrived fifteen minutes before the service was to begin. But my mother-in-law to be set sentries at all the doors of the church to tell me I could not come in by that door because the photographer was taking wedding pictures, and it is bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding. Each pair of sentries directed me to try the other doors. Of course, when I got to the other doors there was a pair of sentries guarding it too.

So I decided to do a little prenuptial shopping at the local big-box store. My father, brother and I spent half an hour browsing at K-Mart and then returned to the church. Now the doors were unguarded and I could enter. Of course, my mother-in-law had begun a whisper campain against me in the church that I didn’t care enough to be on time. So I called on the people who were preventing my entry to testify of the time I showed for the service. There was a lot of squirming and excuses, but everyone realized how they had been used by my future mother-in-law.

Bert and I could not afford a honeymoon because we had moved the date up so far. So we decided to put it off for Christmas, and simply live as we pleased until then. Bertha reveled in the freedom I granted her as my wife. For the first time in her life, she was allowed to make her own decisions based on her own good judgment. Her mother hated the loss of control over Bertha’s life. Less than a week after the wedding, my mother-in-law was trying to drive a wedge between my wife and me.

On Christmas Eve, I had to work bringing in stock for the post holiday time. I was offered the week between Christmas and New Year off in compensation. I took the three-ton down NASA Road One to Texas City to pick up oxygen at one plant and acetylene at another. Then I set off for Deer Park and my honeymoon. The weather was turning bad before I finished loading, and by the time I hit the highway, there was a full blown ice storm in the coastal area of Texas. Driving on crowned roads covered in ice and sleet is no fun in a three-ton truck loaded with five tons of explosive gasses. Due to conditions, I didn’t make it back to the shop before closing time. There were three people there to help me unload.

As we were moving the gas bottles into the storage building, I heard a hiss and smelled acetone, a sure sign of a leaking acetylene bottle. We found the bottle that was leaking and moved it outside to a blast proof site built just for that purpose, finished unloading and set off for the holiday. Boy, was I tired!

Bertha and I went to NASA and took the bridal suite in the big motel there as soon as I was showered. Tired as I was from driving the bad road in the truck and then driving back in our car, Bertha didn’t let me have any sleep that night. Nine months later, Deborah Rochele Seys was born. I can’t complain about the abuse from my wife.

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until September. If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. You can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

My Life So Far, Vol 12

I find it difficult emotionally to write about my life with Bertha. I have never been allowed to mourn her passing. But I must press on even if no one reads these words. I need the catharsis.

On our trip to Dallas, my stepfather decided to take the Southern route along I-10 through Houston to see Bertha. The familiy was in three vehicles. I was driving a ten-wheel van with Pop, Mom drove a pickup and my brother drove another pickup. We looked like a band of Roma when we pulled into her block on Avenue E just West of Macario Garcia Blvd.

When I knocked on the door, no one answered. Bertha’s cousins were all around the house and they assured me she was in there. So we waited for an hour and a half for Bertha to emerge. She was napping and didn’t hear the knock on the door. I only had ten minutes to greet her and get a hug before we had to get back on the road to Dallas.

The brakes on the big truck were failing by the time we got into the Dallas city limits. The slope of the street on one intersection caused us to have an adventure we didn’t want to have. As we sat at a red traffic light the truck began to drift backward. My mother, the hero, pushed the big truck with the front of the Dodge Power Wagon, the same Pickup type that today is called a Ram. It is fortunate that the pickup had enough power to hold that ten-ton truck from running over the other vehicles. We all were frightened by that close call.

We spent a couple days in the building to be demolished before we got a place to stay. That was like living in a haunted mansion from some old movie. I attended the Lakewood Memorial Assembly of God that first Sunday in Texas. My beard was down to my third button on my shirt and, with my dark complexion and Semitic cast to my face, made me look Hasidim in my dark suit. A woman walked by twice, giving me the eye, before she blurted out, “Are you Jewish?” and I answered, “Only by faith sister, only by faith.” I was referring to the passage in Romans where Saint Paul said we are Grafted into Israel. But I’m not sure she caught the allusion.

Pop’s employer had lined us up a house to rent in Garland, and it was a nice one. We moved in and got ready to begin work on the salvage and demolition of an old, condemned apartment complex to make room for condos. The buildings were fairly well preserved for ones that were not fit to inhabit. The fixtures were all antiques, quite valuable on the market, and we had the task of removing them intact.

I began attending the Broadway Assembly of God, just a short walk from the house, and enjoyed the fellowship of the congregation. Little was I to know that when I was falsely accused they would turn against me.

I only stayed the rest of the summer with my family. In November, I moved to Houston to be with Bertha. I got a job driving a delivery truck for Amerigas, Inc. in Deer Park, Texas while Bertha got us an apartment near her favorite church. Our engagement was announced and I moved into the apartment while Bertha sold her mobile home to her friend and roommate. Our relationship grew closer with the proximity, but the months to wait until June were trying on both of us. Finally, Bertha could take no more and moved the date for our June wedding up to May 22, 1982. I was all for it!

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until September. If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. You can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

My Life So Far, Vol 11

The Fall semester of 1980 begins a rough time for me to remember. This is the start of my relationship with the wonderful lady who became my wife, Bertha. We came together the second week of the semester, after her supposed fiancee told her he wanted to see all the other, prettier women on campus, and not be seen with her. I guess my biggest attraction to Bert was that she needed me. It is fine and lovely for a woman to be independent, but a couple needs to be interdependent, and that’s what Bert and I became. After only two weeks of doing everything with her, I could not imagine doing anything without her.

My GPA fell from 3.7 to 2.9 and I spent more money on Bertha than on my tuition. We had internships together, went to church together, took several classes together and studied together. Bertha was an elementary education major while I was still studying Bible and Ministerial Arts. But the electives and basic courses were still the same.

My homeletics course was easy that semester, I could always give a good talk if I took the time to organize my thoughts. The only hard part was trying to keep the sermons to ten or fifteen minutes. Vaudie Lambert told us, “Give me a couple of hours to fill and I can speak off the cuff. But if I only have ten minutes, it takes days to prepare.” But it was enormous fun.

That Fall, just like they do every year, the college sponsored a “Sadie Hawkins Party” based on the Li’l Abner comic strip character that was always stalking around Dog Patch trying to get her a man. For this party only the women could invite men to come. The year before, I was in the band and was exempt from this stricture. But this year Bertha asked me to come, so I put away my guitar. Bertha didn’t have a country style hat to wear, so I gave her my Stetson western hat for the night and broke out my old Resistol hat. It needed re-blocking, having spent the past few months in the bottom of a sea bag, so I blocked it Winchester style and pinned the front brim up like Forrest Kelley in F-Troop.

We had photos taken, and it was a joy to show off my lovely lady to all the people who took the time to look at the pics. Bertha had a beauty rare in a big and tall woman. It came from the love in her heart. You could see the light of that love radiate from her in every pose she struck. Even the camera loved her. Not something most people can say.

I can’t recall if it was that Christmas or the following Easter that I took Bertha to my mother’s and stepfather’s home in Margate, Florida to show her off. At first my family loved her and there was no wrong she could do. We attended the little Full Gospel Assembly of God in a nearby town and did as much as we could together. But my mom wanted to teach Bert how to cook my favorite dishes. So my stepfather had me change out the water pump on his Dodge Power Wagon. I always enjoyed working with my hands, and there is little in the way of mechanical things I can’t figure out if I try. So the water pump was a blast, even though it was simple. But my poor Bert was not enjoying the kitchen. I made it up to her after I showered with a little snuggle time.

At the end of the spring semester the college informed me I would not be welcome back until I paid off the complete promissory note that I was required to sign. The debt I owed the school was in the range of twelve hundred dollars, but after the promissory note it jumped over two thousand. My distaste for banks began then.

Bertha was transferring to the University of Houston for her sophomore year, and I returned to Margate to be with the folks. I helped out at the mini locker complex with the crew of Haitian men who my stepfather had hired. William F. Ogden is also a Marine, a veteran of World War II and Korea, so he was confident that I knew how to lead men. One time the work required that a large stack of cinder block be moved by hand from the pallets they were received on into the building to be near the sites were they would be used. I first made sure every one of the men had gloves because the blocks will tear the skin of even a heavily calloused hand. Then I went to the pile of block and took the first two block into the building to show by example what was required of the men. After that I moved more block than any two of the others combined, sort of a challenge to them to keep up. My stepdad became worried that someone would get hurt moving block at that pace and put me on a different assignment. The Haitian men worked harder for me than any other foreman my stepdad had assigned to them.

When the mini locker was finished, the company decided they liked my stepdad’s work so much they wanted to move him and his family to Dallas, Texas to work on condominiums. I was without employment for a week, but didn’t need any money except to pay my college debt. So when I saw a help wanted sign at the local Denny's Restaurant, I went in and offered to fill in for the manager for one week, just to have something to do. I became the line cook on the midnight to eight AM shift. I ran the place for eight hours a night for six nights. But I couldn’t stay. If I didn’t move with my family, I would have no place to stay. So when the week was up and there was still no replacement, I had to leave the manager without a night shift line cook. I hated to leave him out on a limb like that.

To be continued….

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until September. If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. You can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.