On January 28, 1958 I was 12 years old and a student at Irving jr. High. My dad had been sober for one month and one day and was home working as a freelance photographer with my mother as he had pretty well burned his bridges as a photojournalist because of his alcoholism.

My mother had started a news bureau and sold photographs and films to WOW-TV in Omaha. Someone in the county attorney’s office was their source of information and calls started coming in of reports of murdered bodies.

My parents would pack camera bags with 4x5 loaded film holders and check flash guns on speed graphic cameras and take off like volunteer firemen to rush to murder scenes. As calls continued the excitement grew as more sources demanded photos.

My dad beat everyone to the scene of the death of August Meier. My mother couldn’t keep up with him on the long trek to his farmhouse and stopped to catch her breath he went on. She yelled out what should she do if Starkweather came by and he yelled back to set the camera at F over 100.

I was surprised to see my mother show up at school to gather me up with some of my friends when the bodies of Lauer and Clara Ward and their maid Lillian Fencl were found two blocks away.  Panic has taken over the city and my mother is afraid of people shooting innocent people.

We lived in a very old, very large house with a big master bedroom and three children’s rooms. My room had been childhood room of Clara Ward when she was a child and her name was Clara Olson.  It was a perfect girl’s room with a double deep closet so winter clothes could be separated from summer clothes and a dainty cut glass light on the wall to read by over the bed.  There was a transom over the door t keep air circulating and two windows that looked down on the street.

I was haunted by the idea of Clara running to safety into her old room and hiding behind the double row of clothes.

Nothing about Starkweather seemed to scare me. I speculated with the other kids about why he did it and we concluded that he did it because he was really; really angry over the bullying he endured as a child.

Caril had gone to elementary school with my friends Dorothy and Marie and they said she let her dress fall down over her head and her underpants show while she played on the monkey bars at school so that explained it all to us.

Mike Ward was one of the beautiful lonely boys who went away to prep school and made us swoon with his exquisite manners on occasions when he would visit Irving while he was home for school breaks.

My dad’s photographs look like movie stills from a massacre picture show. My mother’s photo of Caril’s room at her house in Belmont made me think that this was a tragedy that should have been prevented. The contrast in our rooms was so extreme.

My mother gradually quit the news business in went into the business of helping people. She started a place to help people get help from each other and called it the “Self help information center. She had only a tiny handful of information – a book called “Searching for Serenity” and literature from Recovery Inc. and A.A. and Alanon.

She runs it still from Clara’s childhood home.  The phone rings daily with sad stories of hurt, scared and desperate people. No one ever has to wait or be put on hold and she listens to them as long as they talk and directs them to less desperate endings.

Every once in a while, someone confesses to me a childhood cruelty done to Charlie Starkweather.  Stories of beatings and stompings witnessed outside Sunnybrook restaurant or piles of wood lined up to make Charlie fall on a nail. Scapegoating someone small who stuttered and had bowed legs.

One of the town matrons controlled the behavior of the friends of Mike Ward with sharp words about crying or showing an emotion and they seem to die of broken hearts unhealed at a rate out of proportion to their economic level.  They were casualties of childhood trauma.

My dad stayed sober for the rest of his life and helped thousands do the same. Many, many helping agencies that still help people were drawn up at my parent’s kitchen table.

Charlie autographed a photo for my dad and said he ordered, “Fried Chicken” for dinner the night before his execution.

This story gets somewhat unbelievable now but it is true. I had a somewhat idyllic childhood at 1601 Euclid Ave. playing with the neighbor kids. A friend across the street, Kathy Bykirk and I made leaf houses for our “children” and discussed the deeper issues of life such as would we rather marry someone we loved or someone who loved us.

For some reason, no one I loved ever loved me and the boys who loved me were horrifying. One of my “children” was Cathy Blythe who is on the radio every day. We used to play guessing games in the dirt with sticks and count the different brands of cars to see which one was the most popular.

My parents worked almost 24 hours a day leading the “recovery movement” and running a photography business. One night I opened the door to let a screaming woman in with her 7 children while a raging husband with a loaded gun followed suit.  I hid them in the back of my double deep closet while he circled the block for hours. No police would come because they said he hadn’t done anything yet. I asked the oldest boy who was 11 then if he would have really hurt them and he said, “Oh, yes! He had robbed a savings and loan with a ball bat and just got out of Leavenworth.” The boy said that he thought we were angels.

By the time of my wedding to the first director of Houses of Hope of Nebraska, Ron Namuth, a boy who loved me that I loved back, the neighbors had forgiven us and came to the wedding. Cathy’s mother, Dorothy, played the wedding songs.  Ron was on a temporary grant from Lincoln Action Program. We hid a twenty in his billfold so we could get home from our Sugar Bowl honeymoon in New Orleans.

When I was 22, one of the “drifters” from the halfway house found us a house at 1400 A. He had a room across the street. Ron fell in love with it and described it’s amazing interior.  I worked as a first grade teacher at Cathedral of the Risen Christ and brought home $260 a month, a little more than the Benedictine sisters. I had saved it because it seemed pointless to spend it because we were working day and night too.

The house was wonderful with beamed ceilings and beautiful woodwork. It had statues of angels and Aurora greetings the sun. It was one of a kind. The realtor, a gentleman named Hal Pickets found us some extremely creative financing at a place called Provident Savings and Loans.

 Under the wings of this institution, we went to owning property, having a mountain cabin, living on a park where our daughters could play and finally owning Antlers Center, an beautiful old mansion that is a alcohol and drug treatment center.  My daughter has an art studio on 4^th floor. Children play safely in the ballroom while parents come for meetings. Dad’s come to treatment and families heal.

I spent my girlhood reading and drawing. I only got in trouble once. My mother said, “Are you reading ‘Little Women’ again?”  Instead of being kept in, I was made to go out.

I kept reading it in hopes it would have a different ending and Jo would marry Laurie and Beth wouldn’t die.

When I was 14, some older girl in Lincoln gave me a closet full of fancy dresses, one of which I wore to the Irving Christmas tea. I had two friends and we laughed so much we couldn’t breathe most of the time.  I appeared in the talent show with them being “Teen Angel”. Old people and babies really loved me even though I was as odd as Emily Dickenson would have been at Woodstock with the majority of my peers.

If I had a brain to think with and a heart to care and spiritual eyes to see with I should be thanking my spiritual guide, Clara Olson Ward and the Divine Providence Savings and Loan owned by her sister’s family.