Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  According to Bob, the divorce suit was just one more example of Theresa taking extreme action to control him. He had moved out over her objections and vowed not to come back. She didn’t get a gun and go after him as she had often threatened, but she did hire a lawyer and asked the court to order Bob to pay $250 a month in alimony and child support.

  Bob came back. Despite her dramatic accusations of extreme cruelty in the divorce petition, by the end of the month Theresa dropped her suit. They decided to try a change of locale in one last effort to make their marriage work.

  The court clerk had barely stamped DISMISSED on the Knorr divorce before Bob and Theresa packed up their belongings and children and left the state.

  V

  Duke McIntyre hadn’t seen Bob Knorr since he watched him leave Vietnam on a stretcher back in the summer of ’66. When “Bubbles” Knorr called him one day nearly three years later, it was “out of the blue,” Duke recalled.

  “He says, ‘Hey, what’s the job situation like up there in Spokane?’ And I said, ‘There’s jobs up here.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m on my way up!’”

  At the end of June, just days after Theresa dropped her suit for divorce, Bob loaded all their worldly goods in a trailer, hitched it to the back of Theresa’s brand-new Plymouth Roadrunner, and drove his wife, five children, and father-in-law nearly a thousand miles to Spokane to start a new life.

  It was Theresa’s idea, he said. If they got out of town and started all over in a new place, maybe their marriage would work out.

  But Bob and Theresa weren’t simply in the market for new opportunities in Washington State. They were also on the run from bill collectors back in California.

  “Our credit rating was shot by the time we left Sacramento,” said Bob. “She bought clothes, furniture … just anything and everything. Instead of making the payments, I guess she was spending the money, because nothing ever got paid.”

  But Bob was no wizard when it came to handling money either, according to the man who helped the Knorrs resettle in Spokane.

  “He seemed like he always lived above his budget,” said Duke McIntyre. “He was kind of a dreamer, always trying to measure up to her expectations.”

  Bob’s dreams always exceeded his ability to achieve them, even during their days in the corps together, according to McIntyre. If reality wasn’t quite to his liking, Bob was not above inventing a little fiction. He may not have meant for it to happen, but Knorr tended to shine up the unvarnished truth about his humble roots and how he planned to conduct his life, particularly after a beer or three.

  While they were still in training in Hawaii, for instance, McIntyre says Knorr told him that his father owned a food-processing plant in Placerville that manufactured C rations for the military. When Theresa flew over to see him, Bob left Duke with the impression that his wealthy father had paid for the trip.

  When Bob “Bubbles” Knorr came rolling into Spokane looking like a latter-day Tom Joad, loaded down with kids, ragged clothes, and boxes of bric-a-brac, McIntyre began questioning everything that Knorr had ever told him. “Bob was a nice enough guy,” said McIntyre. “He just really didn’t have his cards all together.”

  Shortly after the Knorrs’ arrival, McIntyre threw a welcoming party at his mother’s house. Before the young couple arrived, he got an odd phone call from someone wanting to know if Duke knew who Bob Knorr was and where he might be.

  “They said, ‘He had a car involved in a hit-and-run, and we’d like to talk to him.’ So I said, ‘Well, he’ll be here at my mother’s house tonight at ten P.M.’”

  Bob did show up at ten, just as he promised, but the mystery caller didn’t. Bob and Duke reverted to old times, recalling how they used to hit the bars in Hawaii and the settlements outside of Saigon, drinking sweet Southern Comfort until everything that had gone wrong in their lives seemed right again. All went well until about two A.M., when Bob went outside for a smoke and returned a few moments later, as agitated as a snakebite victim.

  “Duke!” he yelled. “Duke, call the cops! My car’s gone!”

  When he called the Spokane police, McIntyre was told that they already knew about the car. It hadn’t been stolen, it had been repossessed. The Knorrs had bought it half a year earlier, he was told, and hadn’t made the required $116-a-month payment on the $3,600 purchase price for several months.

  Their Plymouth Roadrunner now gone, Bob needed a job more than ever. He found two, both at little more than minimum wage. “I was working two jobs up there: delivering for a furniture store and working in a service station in the evenings,” Knorr recalled.

  He worked himself to exhaustion, but it didn’t help. Even twelve-to-sixteen-hour days, six days a week, could not keep up with Theresa’s new spending, let alone the outstanding bills.

  “They were living about one step above welfare,” said Duke.

  In his job hunting, it didn’t help that Knorr was a Vietnam veteran. By the summer of ’69, the war had come home, even to Spokane, and it was inadvisable to advertise the fact that you had once been a gun-toting GI in Southeast Asia.

  “They classified Vietnam as a conflict, not a war,” said Bob. “We had no heroes’ welcome. And the people more or less treated us like we were in conflict with them. They treated us like we were warmongers.”

  McIntyre tried to help, but there was only so much he could do. Bob was a great drinking buddy, but he had few marketable skills and only a tenth-grade education. He did have one helluva wife, though, according to McIntyre.

  “She struck me as the type of lady who expected the guy she was with to take care of her,” he said. “He’d have to have a good job so she could buy clothes. If she wanted fifty different colors of lipstick, she expected the guy to provide it. It looked to me like a mismatch between her and Bubbles. He was in love with her, head over heels. And she used him for, like, whatever she could get.”

  McIntyre, who insisted on calling Bob by the nickname he’d given him during their marine days, nicknamed Theresa “Mrs. Bubbles.” She didn’t grumble about it like her husband.

  “She thought that was cuter than shit,” McIntyre said.

  And though he was recently discharged from the marines and newly married, McIntyre found Mrs. Bubbles pretty cute, too.

  “Terry was a beautiful blonde back then. She would always wear sweaters to show off her boobs,” he said. “She knew she was looking good and wore tight slacks, too. Kathleen, my ex-wife, was a little jealous of her because Kathleen was short and stocky and kind of all business. She wasn’t quite as beautiful and stunning as Terry. She’d say, ‘Gee whiz, that sweater’s about two sizes too small for her!’”

  As a couple, the Knorrs might not have had a lot of things in common, but one mutual interest they developed in Spokane under Duke’s tutelage was drag racing.

  “I had a ’34 Ford coupe painted with purple primer that I used to race,” said McIntyre. “It had six carburetors and an Olds engine in the front seat with eight flames shooting out the exhaust. I used to run it at the drag races up at Deer Park and Bob would tow it to the track for me.”

  Duke remembered Bob’s eyes widening and his mouth hanging open as he waited on the sidelines, watching Duke’s purple chariot shoot off the line. With exhaust flames scorching the dust of the racetrack, the squarish old chassis of the souped-up coupe appeared jet-propelled. After that first time Bob confessed what McIntyre had already read in his friend’s eyes: Bob had to have a dragster of his own.

  Bubbles Knorr wasn’t the only one turned on by Duke McIntyre’s speed machine. Mrs. Bubbles was equally smitten. “Terry saw me as the master of this fire-breathing animal,” Duke said with a chuckle.

  After they lost the Roadrunner, Bob went shopping for a new car. At a used lot, he found a 1940 Ford that he thought he might be able to bring up to the hot-rod standard set by McIntyre’s coupe. Bob paid too much for the old heap and brought it home.

  “It looked like shit,” said Duke. “It was not exactly what y
ou ought to have as a family vehicle. Three hippies had driven it in from New York, and it looked like they painted it canary yellow with a broom. But the car bug just kind of bites you sometimes I guess.”

  McIntyre helped Bob work on the engine, and Theresa had become enough of a crash-wagon buff herself that she helped her husband tinker with the jalopy whenever she got a chance. During one of their engine overhauls, Theresa got so involved that she fell and broke her leg, according to McIntyre.

  The Knorrs’ joint enthusiasm for auto mechanics amounted to little more than a truce, however. The level of warfare between them escalated by the winter of 1969, even though Theresa appeared to outsiders to be utterly devoted to her family.

  “The facade Terry put on for me was [that of] the very loving mother,” said Duke. “She loved Bob and her kids. I never saw any abuse. I saw them correct the kids—whack ’em on the ass like normal parents. But that was the most I ever saw.”

  The manner in which she ran her household was a little out of the ordinary, though. Theresa kept her house spotless and would not tolerate insubordination from her children. McIntyre remembers the Knorr family performing chores like a miniature marine platoon. “The sergeant major was the tough guy in the marine corps, the guy who snapped the troops into readiness,” he said. “And Terry was like that. Whenever Bob would come home, Terry would say to the kids, ‘Get in line now. Your dad’s home.’ She was like that.”

  But around McIntyre, she was all softness and giggles. As she had done in San Francisco and Sacramento, Theresa tended to leave her father and Howard in charge of the younger children while she went out visiting. One place she liked to visit was McIntyre’s apartment.

  “I was very attracted to Terry,” Duke admitted. “Back then she was a very attractive lady. She was a good-looking gal. But there was nothing between us. You know, she was my buddy’s wife.

  “There was a time she came by my apartment and Kathleen, my wife, was gone, and we could’ve had an affair, but it didn’t happen. Not that it couldn’t have and not that she didn’t want it to. Had I not been just freshly married, I’d’ve been very attracted to her.”

  Bob was never so sure that something didn’t happen between his wife and his best friend. “I didn’t want to argue and fight,” he said. “It seemed like that was all we were doing. But yet, when I came home from work one night while we were living in Spokane, Duke was laying in my bed, and she come downstairs in a nightgown.”

  Bob never accused either of them of the obvious, but he did harbor the belief that it was the first time in their marriage that he had almost caught Theresa red-handed. He puzzled over the hypocrisy of her constant accusations that he was having affairs until several years later, when he took a junior-college psychology course and learned about projection. Only then did it seem clear to him that what his wife was doing was accusing him of promiscuity when, in fact, she was the one sleeping around.

  “She was like a reverse-psychology person,” said Bob. “When she was out fooling around with somebody, she’d come home and try to accuse me of everything in the book.

  “By that time I didn’t give a shit anymore. I just wanted to get back to California.”

  But it wasn’t his suspicions about his wife that prompted his sudden homesickness. It was the weather.

  “Shit, I grew up in California and I wasn’t used to snow,” he said. “I was trying to hold a job down and the first snow came and the streets were covered up. That’s when I said this place ain’t for me. Get me back to California!”

  For months Bob had been writing, calling, and visiting the Veterans Administration, trying to qualify for military medical disability. As soon as it came through, he planned to return to Sacramento. “They didn’t figure my injuries were bad enough to medically discharge me,” he said. “I’m over 75 percent disabled, but to get a retired military ID card all you have to be is 50 percent disabled. Yet they say I don’t rate one.”

  Finally, with the snow still falling outside his window, Bob got confirmation that his disability benefits had come through. And all he could think about was going back home to sunny, dry Sacramento. He went to Duke and offered him his only two assets: the partially restored ’40 Ford coupe and a ’44 Dodge he’d purchased with the hope of turning it, too, into a dragster. He hated to part with them, he said, but he needed cash to get his family back to California.

  “I said, ‘All I got is this paycheck here for three hundred dollars,” remembers McIntyre. “So he took it. And that’s the last I heard of him.”

  By now, it was 1970: new year, new decade, fresh start. Bob and Theresa reconciled and made one more try at staying together. They moved back to an apartment at 1380 Morse Avenue in Sacramento, and shortly after their return, Theresa announced to Bob that she was pregnant once more.

  Bob got a job as a service-station attendant. In addition to his veteran’s disability, he earned $650 a month pumping gas, changing oil, and lubing cars at Jerry’s Shell. Combined with the Social Security money Theresa got for her father, Howard, and Sheila, they were making a fair living.

  But the jealousy persisted. Bob was sure she was sneaking off and having affairs and Theresa was accusing Bob of the same thing.

  “She was so jealous of me I couldn’t watch TV programs that had women on them,” he said. “She’d come in the living room and shut it off.”

  She insisted on driving Bob to work each day instead of letting him drive.

  “We had two cars: a Chrysler station wagon and a ’64 Chevy,” he said. “But she had to drop me off at work. She had to have control of both cars. If I had a car at work, I was gonna go fool around.”

  Even without a car, she was sure he had a girl on the side.

  “Where she thought I was fooling around during the day, I don’t know,” said Bob. “Maybe back in the lube room or something.”

  Returning to Sacramento got him out of the snow, but it didn’t save his marriage. The war of words escalated into fists and slaps, and by the spring of 1970, the marriage was over.

  “The day we split up for the last time, I went to work that morning,” said Bob. “A friend of hers came by and gave me a note from Theresa. It said, Your car is parked around the corner on the street with your belongings in it. Do not come back to the house.

  “She’d packed up my clothes, put them in the backseat of the Chevy, and left it parked down the street from where I was working. Left it with the key under the mat. That was the final straw.”

  They separated in May and the divorce became final on July 3, 1970. Theresa waived alimony and the court ordered Bob to pay $150 a month in child support. Theresa got the Chrysler and the kids. Bob got the Chevy and his mechanic’s tools. Ironically, the judge who signed the interlocutory decree was none other than Charles W. Johnson, the Sacramento superior-court judge who had presided over Theresa’s murder trial just six years earlier.

  “People say I was a lot of things when I was younger,” said Knorr. “I was an asshole most of the time. But, boy, I don’t think I ever deserved her.”

  Knorr had always found a roost in neighborhood bars, long before he ever left Theresa, but this accelerated after they were formally separated and he no longer had a real home. One bar he frequented was called the Bluebird on Dry Creek Road in Rio Linda. There, he met Georgia Desouza, a petite, effervescent brunette with a malleable personality who seemed to be the polar opposite of his ex-wife. Instead of being bitterly cynical, Georgia seemed naive. She giggled and had a sense of humor. She was the same age as Theresa, but she seemed years younger. She also deferred to Bob in all decisions. She let him be in control instead of trying to direct his every move. And Bob liked that.

  But he was not yet rid of Theresa. Despite the divorce, she still regarded him as her property and was not ready to surrender him to another woman—especially a Hispanic woman who had graduated from North Highlands High the same year she herself would have graduated had she remained in school. Theresa’s imagined jealousies of Bob�
��s affairs were now glaringly real—once the divorce was over—and she couldn’t stand it. She began stalking them.

  “At first we thought it was our imagination,” said Georgia. “But we’d see her in the rearview mirror, and she’d make the same turns that we made. We’d flip a U-turn, and then she’d make a U-turn. We started taking the back roads, just to try to lose her.”

  The harassment didn’t stop there. If she could, Theresa made a scene whenever she saw them out in public together. And she used the telephone like a weapon against her rival.

  “She called my parents’ house and Bob’s folks and his aunt and uncle,” Georgia recalled. “She called me a whore, a slut, a dirty Mexican. She said I paraded around in a negligee and I wasn’t fit for her husband. And when she’d get Bob on the phone, it was ‘oh honey’ this and ‘oh honey’ that.”

  The children missed Bob as much as she did, Theresa pleaded. If only he would dump the wetback and return, they could be a family again. Bob resisted. He talked to Georgia about how he wanted to see his children, especially his sons, but he refused to go through with visits for fear of Theresa’s harangues.

  “When I first met him, Bob seemed like he was in the same state of absolute control that his kids were,” remembered Georgia. “She worked on him, and if I hadn’t shown up on the scene, I think he would have gone back to her.”