A Life Wasted

Foundation for a Trouble Maker

The personality traits that led me to become an FBI 10 Most Wanted fugitive and the most wanted man in America could be seen at a very young age. It began with an active and curious mind, and a sense of adventure. When I was six I watched a telephone repair man fix a line at the top of our telephone pole. After the repair he connected a lineman's phone to bare wires, then dialed the number for his repair center to test the line. Seeing this I said to my mom, "If I had one of those we'd never have to pay for long distance calls." This simple exchange sums up how I have thought my entire life.

At the same age I began bringing home live snakes. Mom was raised in Texas so was okay with snakes as long as they were dead, but dad despised harming anything without a good reason. He also had a thing about caging anything, so he released my pet snakes back into the woods. It wasn't long before Mom told me to quit playing with snakes, which I interpreted to mean I couldn't bring them home. At seven I caught a diamondback rattle snake too big for my small body to handle. I had a good grip on her head but her large body had wrapped around my small arm. The snake was strong and angry so I couldn't control her well enough to release her. I could have killed her, but I had adopted dad's belief of not harming anything, so my only choice was to bring the rattler home. Mom was not pleased. Dad came home from work to save both the snake and I. He said he was impressed with this snake, then put her in a box and drove far away to release her.

My mom and dad's different view of snakes stems from their different background. Mom grew up in Texas with a dad who worked the oil derricks. Mom's first job was on an oil derrick, shooting the many snakes drawn to the oil derrick's lights at night. She was an expert shot and she didn't care for snakes. It's not surprising mom wasn't into my snake hobby. Dad grew up on his family's working farm in Augusta, Georgia. His dad was an Austrian with an impressive pedigree who was forced to flee his native country as a child. Grandpa Waagner was a sophisticated and complicated man who spoke seven languages and listened to German opera on an ancient phonograph. He was also a simple man who taught me to milk a cow, ride a mule, shoot a gun and to respect nature. Just like he taught his children. There were plenty of snakes on his property, but they didn't kill them. Even the big king snakes often found in the chicken coup eating eggs were carried to the woods and released. His lessons were the same as my dad's so they stuck with me. Neither man would kill a mouse unless they had good reason. He passed those lessons on to me at an early age. This is why I never killed the snakes, even though my friends made fun of me for it and my mom didn't like it.

A few years later I would learn that my dad wasn't really my dad. My birth dad was Billy Joe Clay. Clay and my mother married young, with my mom giving birth to my sister in 1953. Terry Jane Clay died when she was five of brain cancer. I was two at the time so I have no memory of her. After she died my parents divorced and we moved to Aiken, South Carolina to live with mom's parents. But her parents weren't really her parents either. Mildred, who everyone called Mickey, was my mom's mother, but Jack Ash was the man she married after divorcing mom's real dad, the oil derrick guy. I only met mom's biological dad once, but my impression was that he wouldn't like me bringing home live snakes either. He was more likely to pay a bounty on dead ones.

So when I was six, the man that I thought was my dad was an easy going county boy with a degree from the Richmond Military Academy. This man drank very little, was home every night, was a pillar of the business community in Savannah, and was one of the finest men I ever knew. His dad taught him how to be a good man, something he tried to teach me. The not killing animals part stuck, but little else.

Before I came under the influence of Karl Waagner, mom and I lived with her parents for a year, then across the street from them. They were Mildred and Jack Ashe. Always Mickey and Jack to everyone, including my brothers and I. Never grandma. I didn't know her real name for thirty years. I knew Mickey & Jack over many years, but never knew them well. They were stable. From my birth in 1956 through their death nearly fifty years later, they lived in the same house and had the same phone number. Jack worked the same job until his retirement. Mickey smoked and drank constantly. Jack didn't smoke and rarely drank. Mickey was an attractive woman and a high fashion clothes horse who only wore dresses, most of them short. Jack was simple and solid. They couldn't be more different, but somehow it worked well for them.

My family fell outside of regional societal norms. Most Southerners of the period attended church. It isn't called "The Bible Belt" for nothing. Surprisingly no one in my life went to church, except Jack, and he went only on special occasions, and he went alone. My dad's parents were salt of the earth types, but not once did I hear them reference church or God. Mickey never attended church. Nor did my mom until much later, and I don't recall Karl ever mentioning church.

Everyone I knew outside of my family smoked. In the early 60's smoking was an accepted part of society. It was natural. You could smoke everywhere and every place you went people were smoking. But in my family Mickey was the only one who smoked, and she chain smoked. Mickey was a heavy drinker. Mom drank, but not a lot. Karl drank even less. Karl's parents only drank buttermilk and water. No wine or beer in their house. Never ever. Nor did any of them curse. For the most part they were a straight laced group. With the exception of Mickey who drank, smoked and often called me "A little shit," a handle I earned.

Mickey quickly learned that I needed to be tied down. They had a large back yard completely bordered in good fence. I think I was five when I started escaping her back yard. That fence was nearly twice my height, making it a challenge, not an obstacle. Mickey was patient with my escapes and subsequent escapades but she lost it with me when I found a friend and brought him home. She didn't mind me having friends, but she didn't like this kid because he was "colored."  That was her nicest term for blacks. This event earned me the only spanking she ever gave me and it was a good one. Mickey didn't like blacks. To my knowledge she was the only one with a strong racial opinion in my extended family. That too was odd. Early 1960's South Georgia was immersed in racism, but rare in my family.

The South still had it's racist infrastructure. I recall seeing three bathrooms at every gas station: Men, Women, and Colored. The "Colored" bathroom never had a door. Yet in my family we had a black housekeeper named Bertha who was more family and friend than paid help.

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