and everyone seemed to know him and his reputation. He was a feared man in the city of Trenton, about 6 feet tall and weighing over 200 pounds, part Irish, part German, with quick and powerful fists. On the streets, my father was known as “Big Red.” No one faced him and went away standing. He would fight his friends, his enemies, strangers and the police. I thought of him as a man’s man, and I loved the guy. But he made too many enemies, and my mom, my siblings, and I lived in fear that one day someone would get the better of him, sneaking up from behind because they were too afraid to approach him head-on. My dad never did hit my mother, but he sure did make a lot of noise around the house when he came home from his favorite watering hole, a place called the Hi-Hat.
My parents had five children, and I was the second from the youngest. I learned one thing at an early age from my father: “Never be afraid of anyone.” I never was, so I fought often, and most of the time I took on the biggest guys in the crowd just like my dad did. If I couldn’t beat them, well it was okay because I had the backing of my oldest brother, Willie Jr., my brother Clarence who was a year older than me, and my old sister Debbie. Any one of these three would come to my aid at the drop of a hat, and they would never lose.
Clarence deftly inherited my father’s punching power and quickness, but he was a peaceful guy until he had to fight. Willie Jr. was more of a ladies’ man and less of a fighter, and his intelligence was unmatched. When he was young, Willie Jr. was tested, and my mother was told that her oldest son was, in fact, a genius. But make no mistake; if someone messed with my family, Willie Jr. was in their face. Debbie was not one to be played with, either, and I often thought that if she drank, she would be a female carbon copy of my dad.
One day Willie Jr. and some friends were going to form a group called the Junior Black Panthers, modeled after the radical group from the 60s and 70s, and my father hit the roof when he heard the news. My father beat Willie Jr., and then paid a visit to some of his friends. As the oldest child, Willie Jr. got the brunt of my father’s anger, but he also received the love a first child normally gets.
For me as a boy, life in Trenton was great, but I never knew the pain and suffering my mom and Willie Jr. endured from my father. I didn’t see all the things that went on around me, but I understood early on that all was not well in our house. As each winter season rolled around, my mother would say that one day they would move away from the bitter cold New Jersey snow and move south to Florida where she always dreamed of living.
I never thought that day would actually come. To me, winters in Trenton were both fun and exciting. Some of my closest friends were the Murphy boys who lived next door: four boys living alone with their father after their mother ran off with another man. Clarence Murphy Jr., whom we nicknamed “Snuffy,” was the oldest, and then there was David, Richard, and the youngest, Phillip. We played a lot of street ball and ran around the neighborhood and often went down to the creek, to the woods, and to the farmer’s field. Trenton was like our own 500-acre farm, and I had great times with the Murphy boys.
But inside our home, life was not all that fun and exciting. Many times my dad would be out at a bar or with one of his girlfriends, and our electricity would be cut off. When this happened, my mother grabbed the broom and methodically tapped the electrical wiring running from the street pole to our house, and she somehow got the lights working again. I never really learned how she did it, but it was what needed to be done to survive. There were many times we couldn’t locate my father to get some much-needed money, so my mother would scrape together a few dollars from her pocketbook and send us about a mile to Mary’s store on Pennington Road to buy a can of Pork ’N Beans and a pack of hot dogs. This was our standby meal, and thank God for it because it fed us for many years, and to this day I still love my Pork ‘N Beans and hot dogs.
My mother grew up in Mississippi and Louisiana during Segregation in the ’30s and ’40s as the oldest of nine kids. She often said she didn’t really have a childhood because it was spent taking care of her siblings. When my mother did have time, she played basketball and other sports in school, and she was very good. Combining my mother and father’s athleticism, my siblings and I had a natural love for sports, and we played most of them all, like basketball, baseball, football, swimming and soccer.
My two older brothers were my heroes, and I followed them like shadows. I had to be just like Willie and Clarence. But I was more mischievous than them, and I was always getting myself into some kind of trouble. The Good Lord must have put two angels in charge of me, and I’m sure they were overworked. I had big, bright hazel eyes with specks of blue and green. My eyes came from my father’s German and Irish roots, and in my neighborhood, a little black boy with those kinds of features stood out. Anytime there would be some kind of trouble in the neighborhood, my parents always asked one question: “Did he have big Hazel eyes?” Ninety-nine percent of the time the answer came back “Yes.” I can’t tell you how many times my eyes got me caught, but if I were smarter back then I would have worn sunglasses all the time.
One day while on my way to school, I was walking across a newly landscaped baseball field. For no reason, I began to rip up the freshly laid pieces of the grass sod and threw them into the air until they broke apart. It felt good at that moment—being a stupid kid doing stupid things—but fifteen seconds later I spotted a police car fast approaching the field. It kicked up a long cloud of dust as it made its way directly towards me. There was no place to run because I was in an open field, so I just dropped the sod and froze in my tracks and waited for the outcome.
The police car pulled almost right up to the toes of my shoes and out stepped two plainclothes detectives. The driver motioned for me to walk to the car, and when I got to the car they just opened up the rear door and told me to get in. They immediately drove off, asking me why I was destroying the property; my answer was that I was having a little fun. They told me that I had just committed a crime and that I was being taken to the Ewing Township jail for booking. One of the detectives then asked me my name, and when I told him the detectives looked at each other and just nodded their heads as if they knew me.
At the station, they made me sit on a bench, and I sat there for about two hours until Sergeant Dick Masterson walked in. The tall man walked directly over to me and said, “Let’s go.”
Sergeant Masterson knew my father somehow, either back from when they were boys or from the streets, I never found out, but I often stopped over at his house to say hi to him and his wife. Once in the car, Sergeant Masterson told me how wrong it was for me to have ripped up the baseball field like that. He then explained that it was city property and that my parents may have to pay the city back for what I destroyed. He said that he might be able to convince the two detectives not to press charges against me. I was relieved, but didn’t know how the detectives knew to call Sergeant Masterson, and I thought it better not to ask. The sergeant took me back to his house where his wife made some lunch, and afterwards the man gave me a stern warning not to do anything like that again. I promised that I would be a good boy from there on out. Mrs. Masterson packed a few sweet goodies for me and I went my way. My father and mother never mentioned anything about that incident to me, and so they must not have ever heard about it, because I’m sure I would have been in some very serious trouble.
My father didn’t beat us. That job was left to my mother. She had a favorite bush on the side of the house that grew the biggest, longest branches that were perfect for her to use as “Rods of Correction.” I hated those bushes, and even today when I see them in Los Angeles, I have to just shake my head and shudder. When I talk to my mom about those things now we just laugh, but it sure wasn’t funny back then because my mom meant business. She had five kids to raise, and from her experience in helping raise her brothers and sisters, she knew just what to do.
As a young boy, I don’t know what it was about birds, but I just seemed to love them. I would climb up into the trees to look at the baby birds in their nests, and sometimes I would take the baby birds out of the trees and then try to put them back without the mother bird missing them. My family teased me for my obsession with birds, but it all came to an end one nice summer day when I climbed the pine tree in our back yard. The day before I had heard the chirps of baby birds coming from its top branches and I was determined to find them.
I climbed high up into the tree and found them about fifteen feet up, very well hidden