by Hope Solo
III.
How did my father come to Richland? I wish I knew the entire answer to that question.
Here’s part of the answer: my mother, who had moved to Everett, Washington, as a young woman, married my father and became pregnant with me during a conjugal visit while my father was serving a prison sentence in Washington. My brother, Marcus, was a toddler at the time. Overwhelmed, my mother had no choice but to move in with her parents in Richland. My father followed after his release. He and my mother eventually set up house behind the smiley-face fence, a few blocks from my grandparents.
I was born on a hot, dry day in the middle of summer: July 30, 1981. My father chose that day to bring his other two children from his first marriage to Richland from the Seattle area for a visit. My half brother, David, was twelve, and my half sister, Terry, was nine. My mother brought me, her new baby—Hope Amelia Solo—home from the hospital to a chaotic house with three young children. Things never really got any calmer.
David and Terry lived in Kirkland, Washington—just outside of Seattle, on the other side of the mountains—with their mother, whose name was also, oddly, Judy Lynn Solo. My father had the name tattooed on his forearm. Once, when my mother went to visit my father in prison, she was denied entrance because a Judy Lynn Solo—David and Terry’s mother—had already been there to visit him. Though we had different mothers, the four of us shared my father’s DNA: piercing eyes, Italian coloring, intense emotions. David and Terry came to visit every summer, and sometimes went camping with us. They learned to call my grandparents Grandma and Grandpa. I didn’t realize until I was much older how unusual it was that both Judy Solos managed to work out travel plans and schedules and invitations so that the four or us could, at brief moments, resemble a nuclear family.
David and Terry and the other Judy Solo were my first indications that my father had a past that didn’t include my mother or me and Marcus, that our life wasn’t as simple as four people and a sheepdog inside a tract house. Terry adored me. She liked to dress me up and curl my hair, but as I got older, I resisted. I was an active, grubby little kid. I didn’t want to wear dresses. I didn’t like dolls. I liked to play outside, wear an oversize Orange Crush hat and do whatever Marcus was doing, which was usually something athletic.
If he ran, I ran. If he played baseball, I played baseball. If he rode his skateboard, I wanted to ride his skateboard—not mine, his, because mine was hot pink and girly and his wasn’t compromised by frills. Even as a little girl, I was tough and strong. One day I took Marcus’s skateboard to the top of the little hill across from our house and rode down. I smashed into our bikes, which were lying in the driveway. A pedal gashed my chin and blood splashed everywhere. I was running in circles to distract myself from the pain as the blood gushed through my fingers. I had to go to the emergency room and get stitched up.
Marcus and his friends would challenge me to pull them in a wagon. And I could do it, all three of them. When my mom went on a bike ride, I would run alongside her chatting, never getting winded. I wanted so badly to play basketball with Marcus and David—my father and I would play against them, and he would have to lift me up toward the hoop so I could shoot. I loved to play whiffle ball and hated losing, determined to play until I won.
Luckily for me, I was growing up in a time when active little girls could finally turn to organized sports. That wasn’t the case for my grandma, who had loved speed skating while she was a girl in Duluth, Minnesota. Or for my mother—a wiry, athletic woman—who turned to karate, and later waterskiing, for her sports fix. In the early 1980s, youth soccer was growing fast everywhere. It was my first organized sport, starting in kindergarten. I had no problem scoring goals, even as a five-year-old. We were the Pink Panthers, my dad was the coach, and I always played forward. I would dribble through all the other kids, who seemed to lack my skill or coordination, and I’d score. It was easy for me, and fun.
We played on soccer fields along the banks of the Columbia. The river dominated our lives. My mother’s teenage depression over moving to eastern Washington disappeared once she discovered the river and the fun-loving community that it sustained. The river snaked through every aspect of Richland experience: we jumped in to cool off after soccer practice; we spent weekends on one another’s family boats; we hung out with friends on the river docks, gossiping and tanning; we tied rafts together to create giant flotation parties; we jumped off bridges into deep, cool pools. My grandparents had a yacht and hosted large parties on the river. My mom had a small boat, and we would head upriver to the sand dunes every weekend, staying there all day, hanging out in the heat. The adults barbecued and drank, and the kids shot skeet guns, rode kneeboards down the dunes, and went inner-tubing.
My mother was working at Hanford by then, testing plutonium samples on rotating shifts, which meant a week of day shifts, a week of swing shifts, and a week of graveyards. She was exhausted a lot of the time. My father stayed home, taking care of Marcus and me. He worked sporadically, sometimes doing counseling for troubled youth. My early memories of my father are of a loving, loud, larger-than-life man—six-foot-three with a huge belly and a big laugh. He had jet-black hair and tattooed arms—a skull and crossbones on one biceps, a mermaid on one forearm, and JUDY LYNN SOLO on the other.
To him, I was always Baby Hope. We had a special bond. I remember riding on his shoulders and stroking his thick black hair. I remember wrestling on the floor with him—his big round belly shaking with laughter. He helped teach me to read. On Christmas he dressed up as Santa. He was a popular youth coach—my soccer teammates loved him. He also coached all my brother’s sports teams—baseball, basketball, soccer—and all the kids adored Coach Gerry. Sports were his passion: in our house we loved the Oakland Raiders, the Red Sox, and the University of Washington football teams, which made us outliers in an area loyal to the Seahawks, Mariners, and Washington State.
When my dad was around, we would share tubs of Neapolitan ice cream—although he ate all the strawberry—while we watched TV. We’d go to 7-Eleven and get white powdered donuts and Slurpees, mixing up all the different flavors into a sweet, soothing concoction. But as I got older, I started to see the cracks in my idyllic life. One spring, when I was a Brownie, the Girl Scout Cookie money went missing. Sometimes my father went missing. One morning, my mother went out to get her car and it was gone: repossessed for lack of payment.
When I was about five or six, my parents and grandfather stood outside in our driveway having an animated conversation one afternoon. “Come inside, Hope,” Grandma said. “Come on, Marcus.”
We sat at the kitchen table, with an Etch A Sketch between us. “What else can you draw on that?” Grandma asked as soon as we finished a picture. She was trying to distract us from what was going on outside, but I could hear the angry voices. I knew something bad was happening. Grandpa Pete was very upset as he talked to my parents in front of the smiley face.
Later I learned that my father had taken my grandfather’s checkbook out of my grandparents’ home and stolen $1,800 by writing checks to himself. He told my grandfather he had been poking around in his private office because he wanted to take his guns, but they were all locked up. He found the checkbook instead.
My father moved out the day after the Etch A Sketch marathon. I didn’t get to say good-bye—he asked my mother if he could pick me up from school, but I was going to a friend’s house, so he said good-bye only to Marcus. My brother wanted to give Dad something to make him feel better, so he gave him the baseball he had hit for his first home run. Marcus signed it and added the date, the inning, and the ball-and-strike count of his home run. I felt guilty for years that I didn’t say good-bye to my father that day.
A short time later, we were evicted from the smiley-face house. We came home to find a sheriff standing in our front yard, saying we had to move. My father had never paid the mortgage, even though he told my mother that he had. She deposited money in their b
ank account, and he was supposed to pay the bills with it. To this day, she doesn’t know where the money went.
IV.
There was a lot we didn’t know about Gerry Solo. For one thing, that wasn’t his name. I found out later, through police reports, that his name was Jeffrey John Solo. Maybe. He had other names. One time, he hinted that his last name was really DeMatteo. Or was it really Beyers? In a police investigation, years later, we learned he had two social security numbers. He said he was from New York. He said his parents were from Italy and came over in the 1880s. He was born sometime before World War II. He said he had an aunt but grew up in an orphanage in the Bronx. He had a brother named Marcus, who, he said, died in a parachuting accident in Vietnam. He may have been a loan shark in Boston. He may have had another family in Michigan.
How he got to Washington is also a mystery. He liked to hint that he had a criminal past, that he had been in the Mob. Maybe. Or maybe he wanted everyone to think he had. Maybe he was in the Witness Protection Program. He said he’d been a boxer and a semipro football player. He said he’d been in the navy and alluded to a tour of duty in Vietnam.
We did know this: he was tall and gregarious and loud. As a young man, he was extremely handsome, with classic Italian looks and a distinctive style, wearing leather loafers without socks. He oozed charisma. He had met his first Judy in the 1960s, while they were both working at Boeing, which pretty much rules out that tour in Vietnam. David was born in 1969 and Terry a few years later. Thanks to help from the first Judy’s parents, they lived on twenty acres in Carnation, Washington. They had horses, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and German shepherds. They lived in a little cabin while they had a house built, which was finished in 1976.
Around that time, he met the second Judy. My mom had been married briefly and was on the rebound. She was living in Everett, Washington, going to community college and teaching karate. She was a black belt, and that wasn’t the only tough thing about her back then: she also worked as the first female corrections officer in a men’s prison in Monroe. My dad met her in a karate class. They went out for drinks. She thought he was fun. He thought she was cute. Pretty soon she was pregnant with Marcus, and they bought a house in Marysville with big bay windows overlooking Puget Sound. So now he had two families and there might have been others.
The two Judys found out about each other when the first Judy found pictures of my mom and Marcus in the glove compartment of their car. My mom got a phone call from the other Judy. When it was all out in the open, my dad brought David and Terry to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle to meet my mom and Marcus. Terry was thrilled to have a little brother. David was confused. Both Judys were intertwined—to my father and each other—forever because of their children.
And then my father was arrested for embezzlement. David and Terry and their mother were living in a house built with funds stolen from Lockheed-Martin, where my dad was working at the time. They were tossed out, their furniture was confiscated as restitution, and my father was sent to Walla Walla State Penitentiary. David and Terry and their mother moved to Kirkland, where she got a job that paid $6 an hour while she filed for divorce.
My mom lost the house on Puget Sound, also part of the restitution, and moved home to Richland, and toward the end of my father’s sentence, she married him and became pregnant with me. Not long after I was born, my father started an affair with the wife of a minister. My mother found out about that when the credit-card bills for Seattle hotel rooms came to our house.
It’s a complicated thing, knowing how much pain my father caused in my life and the lives of others whom I love, yet still holding love for him in my heart. No matter what he did, he was my father. He helped create the person I am. He showered me with love; he just didn’t know how to be a husband or a father or a responsible member of society. Yes, he was a con man. Yes, he was a ladies man. Yes, he was unreliable at best and a criminal at worst.
If I hadn’t made peace with him later in my life, I’d still be bitter and angry.
V.
After we got evicted, and moved into a duplex in a low-rent part of Richland, we still had occasional contact with my father. My mother didn’t bar him from our lives because she knew how much we loved him. He would promise to come and take us out for ice cream or come to our soccer games, and then he wouldn’t show. I remember waiting hours for him. Sometimes he would give me a card with a check inside, and I would ask my mother if the check was any good. Even as a little girl, I was learning not to take things at face value.
One afternoon I came home from school. My mom was at work as usual. My dog, Charlotte, wasn’t rushing to the door to greet me. Something seemed odd. Then I heard a noise down in the unfinished basement. “Come downstairs and see me, Baby Hope,” my dad called.
To my delight, my father was in our unfinished basement. Marcus came home, and we all hung out down there: the kids, Dad, and our sheepdog, Charlotte. We wrestled and laughed. It was a great treat. But we knew to keep it a secret from my mother. We knew he wasn’t supposed to be there: he had broken in and was crashing on our old couch at night. Eventually, of course, my mother found out. But instead of immediately tossing him out, she let him stay until he found another place to sleep.
Looking back, I realize my mother was pretty remarkable. She put up with a lot because my brother and I idolized our dad. Though she harbored her own demons, she had a kind heart. But there was only so much she could take. The breaking point came in July 1989.
My mother had already moved on: there was a new man in her life, Glenn Burnett. That created more tension in our household—Marcus and I weren’t ready for a new parent—and my father’s behavior was becoming more and more erratic. One weekend he took Marcus to Seattle without permission and had an accident—a car crash at an intersection. Marcus wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and hit the windshield. He was OK, but the crack in the windshield was clear evidence of my father’s recklessness. My father phoned in bomb threats to the Richland credit union and was arrested, a swat team kicking down his door and his name printed in the local paper. He wasn’t particularly good at covering his tracks, whether it was leaving photos in the car glove compartment or having his phone number traced. My mother thinks the bomb-threat stunt was a ploy to distract from the fact that he was siphoning money out of her account.
After that arrest, my father was allowed to see us one night a week at the Bali Hi Motel, where he was living. But after awhile, he couldn’t afford the motel and started living in the office of Chilly Willy, a packaged-food processing plant where he had a part-time job. When my mother found out that that was where her children were staying when he took them out, she put her foot down. She had just married Glenn and was trying to create a stable home. She wasn’t going to have her children sleeping on the floor of Chilly Willy, even though we thought grabbing food out of the giant freezer and unrolling sleeping bags on the office floor was a treat.
One afternoon when I was seven, while my mother was at work, my dad picked up Marcus and me to take us to the Little League All-Star game in Yakima. Marcus was eleven and was upset that he hadn’t made the all-star team, and my dad wanted him to experience the game. But we never stopped in Yakima. We kept going, all the way to Seattle.
We were excited, going to the big city with our dad. He made sure it was a special trip. We had ice cream and Chinese food and went to the Space Needle and the Pacific Science Center. We stayed in a hotel. It was like a vacation.
But back in Richland, it was the beginning of a nightmare. As my mom waited and waited and the hours ticked by, she realized her children had been kidnapped by their unreliable father. She didn’t know if we even knew our phone number or the address of the new house we lived in with Glenn. She borrowed my grandpa’s truck and drove all the way to Seattle on what she knew was a futile mission, circling around places she thought we might be. It was useless. She ended up driving back over the Cascades and contacting the
Richland police.
I knew in my heart that my father was hurting my mother and grandparents, yet I was just happy to be spending time with him. I wasn’t happy with my new life with Glenn, and the changes made me angry. I knew my dad and brother would keep me safe. I didn’t want to think about the consequences.
BUT AFTER A day or two, the fun started to wear off. One morning in the hotel, I woke up and my dad sat down on the bed. “Baby Hope, you just missed your mom,” he said. “She just called and said you could stay another couple of days.”
I hadn’t heard the phone ring. I hadn’t heard him talking. I knew something wasn’t right.
In the middle of another night, a woman came to our hotel room. My dad opened the door a crack and let her slip in, thinking Marcus and I were sleeping. I remember waking up and seeing her naked at the foot of the bed with my father. He was on top of her, and then they slowly slipped down to the floor. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, trying to erase what I had seen, but I was scared and confused and ashamed. In the morning, I pretended to be asleep until the strange woman left and then made a deliberate show of waking up. I was angry with my father and didn’t speak to him but refused to tell him why. As the “vacation” continued, I was more and more sure that what we were doing was very wrong.
Then, on July 26—I know because of the police records—my father took us to a bank in downtown Seattle to cash a check. The police, guns drawn, quickly surrounded him when we walked in the door. He was handcuffed and pushed into the back of a police car as my brother and I watched in horror. He was driven away, and Marcus and I were all alone on the sidewalk in a big city, abandoned and terrified.
How did my father get caught? It was a setup. I was told that the naked woman in our hotel room had a love-hate relationship with him—she sometimes gave him money; her daughter may have been his daughter, but he didn’t claim her. That woman wanted to hurt him, so she gave him a check to cash and then called my mother to let her know where he’d be. My mother called the Richland police, who alerted the Seattle authorities.