what my mother didn’t know was that, in the process of teaching me how to do an interview, she probably opened up a bit of a Pandora’s box. When the microphones were in front of me in the years to come, I think a lot of people wished that I would just shut up. For now, I would take my mom’s advice and try to give more developed answers whenever I was interviewed. However, this process also spawned my lack of trust with the media early on, when I was interviewed by our local newspaper soon after my middle school interview.
As my mother had ordered, I gave what I thought were thoughtful and conversational answers to the questions my interviewer asked me about swimming. But once the paper came out, I saw sections in print that I knew I hadn’t spoken. I didn’t even know the meaning of some of the words being attributed to me, so how could I have said them in the first place? Such was the beginning of my love-hate relationship with the press.
Back home, it was still a house of horrors. I didn’t want anything to happen to my baby sister, but didn’t know what to do to protect her, either. I couldn’t go to my mother. I don’t think my two brothers knew what was going on. I had not told them, and I doubt they had picked up on anything. What was I going to do?
As it turned out, I didn’t have to do anything.
One night, there was a knock at our front door. It was in the evening, around eight o’clock or so. My father was at work; the rest of the family was home.
As my mother opened the door, I saw a group of men standing in our doorway, maybe six or seven deep. They all looked very angry and upset.
“Do you know why we’re here?” one of them asked my mother.
“Do you know what’s going on?” asked another.
My mother just stared back at them, not saying a word.
As I looked at these men, I began to recognize them. They were our neighbors. They were the fathers of other children who lived on our street.
“Your husband has been molesting our children,” one of the men said.
My mother shook her head in silence, denying the charge.
Another man spoke up. “Yes, he has! He’s been molesting them in your garage. Our daughters have told us everything, and now we’re doing something about it.”
My mother took a step back from the door. The color had left her face. I think she knew that this was it. This was the moment. All of the secrets and dark lies and sinister threats and abusive behavior was being exposed right before her eyes—and mine.
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered.
“Liar!” one of them yelled. The others joined in, shouting the word at her.
As the men continued lighting into my mother, I felt a surge of vindication inside. This was what I had always wanted: adults confronting my parents about their behavior. I had dreamed about this. Back when my first-grade teacher had suspected that something was going on, I had thought that would be the moment. But it wasn’t. Little did I know that a knock at the door would be the beginning of the end for my father.
The men’s voices grew louder and louder as they told my mother in no uncertain terms that they were going to call the police and have my father arrested.
As relieved as I was that this was happening, I was also growing sick to my stomach at the thought of the other children he had touched. Had he molested my friends? Who had been in my garage? What had he done to them? I thought back to all of those times when he had filmed my friends at our backyard pool parties with his home movie camera. Why had he taken such a special interest in them?
Never in my life had I imagined that he was doing this to other children. How many lives had he ruined? How many people had he destroyed?
After a few minutes, the men left. My mother closed the door slowly and didn’t say a word to me. My brothers had been in their rooms, and hadn’t seen the confrontation. I didn’t say a word to her, because I knew there was nothing I could say. Reality had finally slammed her right in the face, and she was going to have to deal with it. I walked to my room quietly and went to bed.
The next morning, there was another knock at the front door. I watched my mother open the door and saw two policemen and a policewoman standing outside.
“Your husband has been arrested for child molestation,” the policewoman told my mom.
My mother didn’t react, so the policewoman repeated that my father had been arrested.
My mother seemed to come out of her daze. “But my dad is a pastor,” she said. “My dad is a pastor.”
The policewoman was confused. “Ma’am, we’re not talking about your dad. We are talking about your husband.”
To this day, I’m not quite sure what my mother meant by that. On the one hand, it seems like she was suggesting that her father might be able to help with the situation. On the other hand, knowing what my extended family was like and how strict and unforgiving everyone was, I suppose she also may have been scared about how her father might react to all of this.
The police asked her a few more questions, took some notes, and then left. They must have arrested my father at work, I remember thinking. But he was never really in prison for what he did. It was like a furlough program. He could still go to work each day, but as I understood it, he would return to some kind of minimum detention facility at night. As I remember, after a year or two, he came back home. Back in the early ’70s, these kinds of crimes just weren’t dealt with the way they are today.
A few days after my father was taken in, on the way home from swim practice, we stopped at the McDonald’s in Norwalk, where we often had dinner. As we were waiting in line to order our food, a man who was eating at a table started looking at us with a peculiar expression on his face.
He stood up and approached us, looking us up and down. When he finally finished studying my mother’s face he raised his hand and pointed a finger at her.
“Her husband has been molesting all of your daughters!” the man shouted, so that the whole restaurant could hear him. “All of the young girls in this town were victims of her husband. Her husband is a monster. Her husband has been molesting all of our little girls!”
Immediately, the people standing near us in line started backing away. It was a busy night at the restaurant, and it felt like everyone in the place was backing away from us. There were looks of horror on everyone’s faces as they stared at my mother and me and my brothers. People started saying things and yelling at my mother. It was starting to feel dangerous.
Quickly, my mother hustled us out of the restaurant and into the car. As we left the McDonald’s, I can still remember the yelling of the angry mob behind us. If there had been a bunch of people with pitchforks and torches at our house that night, I would not have been surprised.
It was time for us to leave Norwalk. Thanks to my father, we were now being treated like lepers. With my dad incarcerated, my mom made plans to find a place for us to live where no one in the whole town would know who we were.
At the time, I didn’t have too much time to think about all of this. I had a race coming up that would help me escape the madness. The moment I had always dreamed of—the opportunity to get away from the pain of my family—had finally arrived.
CHAPTER THREE
My First Adventure
Shortly after I turned fourteen, my coach, Flip, came over to me at practice one day and said, “Shirley, you’ve qualified again for the 1971 Short Course Nationals!” This one would be held that spring in Pullman, Washington.
I swam the 500-yard freestyle against the well-known swimmer