by Jerry Parr
Vaughn leaned forward as if to warn me. “Now, new agents don’t get sent to the White House. You have to work your way up. But field agents do get protection experience, especially in an election year. That’s because we’re called on to supplement the White House guys when a president or vice president—or a major party candidate—comes to town.”
He said that field agents also track down threats. They pay a personal visit to anyone who threatens to harm the president. They have a “friendly” chat to determine whether the person is just letting off steam or presents a real danger. Unfortunately, predicting human behavior is not a science. There is room for failure.
My excitement was mounting. Then Vaughn said, “If you’re ever in the ‘kill zone’ around a protectee, you’d be expected to throw yourself between him or her and danger. You might have to give your life for theirs.”
That did it! I knew on the spot, this was the job I really wanted! I confess, at that moment I didn’t consider how such work might affect a wife and family.
The Secret Service invited me to a second interview in Memphis.
With my hair newly cut, I dressed in my only suit and a crisp white shirt freshly pressed by Carolyn. Bright and early, wearing her favorite navy-blue tie, I drove to Memphis and bounded up the steps to the door of the Secret Service field office. Swallowing hard, I brushed my palms on my jacket so I’d have a dry handshake and went in. The head of the office, Robert Taylor, was expecting me.
Taylor, who later became head of the White House detail, didn’t waste any time on small talk. “Why do you want to be an agent?” he asked.
Without thinking, I blurted out, “Well, it’s safer than what I’ve been doing!” He laughed, and I relaxed. Then I told him the rest of the story. I returned home and hoped that I’d hear back from the Secret Service.
Meanwhile, not long after my initial interview at Vanderbilt, the CIA invited me to Washington for a final round of interviewing and fingerprinting, a polygraph, and a battery of tests to qualify me for a top security clearance. But I kept hoping to hear from the Secret Service.
I went to Washington for the final meeting with the CIA. But while I was in town, on an impulse I dropped by the Secret Service office at the Treasury, hoping someone would talk to me about my application. It turned out they were worried about my age—thirty-two was the oldest cutoff—but George Chaney and Howard Anderson thought I was gutsy to drop in and agreed to meet with me.
Later, on an early March afternoon, I came in from class to find two letters had arrived in the same day’s mail. Hands shaking, I tore open the envelopes. The CIA offered me a job as an industrial analyst, and the Secret Service wanted me as a special agent. My wish was coming true.
Until I married Carolyn in 1959, I never imagined myself as a college graduate, even though when we met, I’d already completed the equivalent of a year and a half of college classes between military courses and the University of Miami night school. None of my closest buddies went to college. I was working-class through and through. My highest ambition was to become foreman of a bull gang at Florida Power & Light.
Neither of my parents had finished high school. When I was born on September 16, 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, they’d already been married ten years—longing for a child the whole time. They were never able to conceive another.
Dad was tall, dark, and dashing. He was ten years older than Mom, a girlish brunette beauty with flirty eyes and an hourglass figure. All her life she attracted men, though not always ones who would treat her well. Patricia Studstill and Oliver Parr met at a USO dance in Alabama. He had just returned from World War I, where he saw combat in France. She was twenty and he was thirty when they married.
The earliest memory that sings in my soul is being held, warm and secure, by my mom in our shiny Model T. The second is running into my father’s arms, his front-right gold tooth flashing in the Miami sun. Love and embrace were my first human hints of another kind of love, of a God I didn’t yet know.
The Bible says, “Love covers a multitude of sins.”[6] During my childhood I absorbed a large share of both love and sin. When I look back at the forces that pressed in on my family from without—World War I and the Great Depression—and the inferno of feelings that threatened our family from within, I see Love holding and protecting me. Covering me, you might say. When all was said and done—my father’s night fears and drinking, my parents’ eventual divorce, a heartbreaking separation from Dad, a lonely adolescence, an abusive stepfather—I always felt the gracious light of my parents’ love and the protective sanctuary of God’s arms.
For the first eight years of my life we lived in half of a beige concrete block-and-stucco duplex at 1822 and 1824 Northwest 4th Street, down the street from the old Orange Bowl, inhabiting one side and renting out the other. After a Category 4 hurricane struck in 1926, Dad had to rebuild the two other rental units on our property. The frame houses had been completely flattened, leaving only two piles of debris. A detached garage in back sheltered our black Model T on one side and Dad’s repair shop on the other. We had—believe it or not—a solar water heater on our roof. Before we got an electric refrigerator, our perishable food went into an icebox on the back porch. Every few days a sweaty, muscular guy from Palmetto Ice Company left a block of ice. We’d use an ice pick to chip off pieces for iced tea or to suck on when the heat was unbearable.
Our yard was alive with bright poincianas, hibiscus, and poinsettias. A white trellis full of red roses ran up the side of one of the frame houses next door. I loved to bury my nose in the roses. Between the small houses, Dad planted avocado trees bearing enormous, mouthwatering avocados. I ate mangoes and guavas from the neighbors’ trees. Although meat was expensive, nobody went hungry for fruit. Big banyan trees offered shade and an irresistible temptation to climb.
But hints of something darker also lurked among the houses. I witnessed evil for the first time one sultry afternoon when a vicious dogfight broke out between a reddish-brown Airedale and a tan-and-white pit bull. Men were drinking and yelling and betting on the outcome. Later, I saw the Airedale hanging by its feet, its eyes sunken. Flies buzzed noisily in the end-of-day stillness. I felt wounded by the horror of it. How could these men I knew and trusted be so cruel?
In those early years, I spent more time with Dad than Mom. Except for the few dollars he made fixing machines for small businesses like bars and restaurants, he was out of work. I went with him everywhere.
One of Dad’s cash register customers was Skippy’s, an open-air restaurant where we shared bowls of vegetable soup with little round crackers. He gave me sips of beer and said, “Don’t tell Mama.” In the dark, smoke-filled bars where he drank, I felt cool and relieved, sheltered from the terrific heat of a Miami summer in the ’30s, before air-conditioning.
Dad and I fished with cane poles in Biscayne Bay or nearby canals. We caught blowfish and ate them fried. We hunted dove and quail in Opa-locka. We ate what we killed because we needed it for food. But Dad had a tender heart.
He was a rescuer, and I became one too. For a while we had a big cage in the backyard where we kept a hawk with a broken wing until it healed and flew away. Together we pulled all kinds of creatures from the road, dead or alive. I was partial to turtles, and to this day I will stop my car to move a turtle out of harm’s way. We took in stray dogs, one at a time, and named them all Buddy. Our black cat, Kitty Boots, had to be kept away from my pet mice.
Dad once rescued a three-foot alligator and tied it to an outdoor faucet with a dog leash so it could get water. Its mouth looked big enough to swallow a little boy whole. Snap! It lunged at me. That’s when Dad put it in the car and returned it to the Everglades.
Mom didn’t rescue animals like Dad did, but once she did rescue me. On a sunny Sunday afternoon when I was seven or eight, she took me swimming at Miami Beach. A neighbor boy, Gene, and his mother, Rose, went with us. Gene and I were playing in waist-high water when suddenly I felt myself being suck
ed farther out. I struggled to regain my footing but couldn’t hold it. Gene, about ten, was swimming furiously in the riptide but getting nowhere. I screamed, “Mama!” She came running, waded in, grabbed us both, and tried to drag us to shore, but the current was too strong. All she could do was hold on. My heart was pounding louder than the crashing surf. It didn’t slow down until a lifeguard deposited me safely onto shore.
I loved Sundays. Sunday was Mom’s day off from the beauty shop where she worked, and we could all do things together. Sometimes we’d just take a ride to Miami Beach in our shiny Ford. My favorite part was coming back across MacArthur Causeway, which was dominated by an enormous neon sign. I’d watch, awestruck, as red paint magically poured out of a Sherwin-Williams paint can and covered a blue-and-green globe. Then the words would appear: “Cover the earth.” The paint reminded me, somehow, of love.
Sunday was also the time to snuggle beside Dad, my head resting on his shoulder, while he read me the funnies from the Miami Herald: “Dick Tracy,” “L’il Abner,” “Blondie,” “Little Orphan Annie.”
I felt safe with Dad. He used to smile and say, “I’d fight a ripsaw for you, Son.”
Dad’s desire to protect Mom and me sometimes took a frightening turn. When I was around five, I awoke to the sounds of a violent thunderstorm very early in the morning. The fifty-foot-high Australian pine beside our house was swaying and moaning in the wind. Scared, I tiptoed from my little cot in the kitchen to my parents’ room and crept into bed with them.
The window was open, and mist was coming in through the screen. The wind was whistling. I was starting to enjoy the sound.
Suddenly there was a terrific clap of thunder. Dad leaped up, screaming, “Shells! Get under the bed!”
Mom cried, “Oliver! Oliver! What are you doing?”
He yelled, “Cover! Cover!”
The terror in his face sucked the air out of my lungs. He threw us violently under the bed and covered us with his body. I could feel his heart pounding hard, and I wriggled to get out from under that bed. But he grasped me tight, and we stayed there until the storm stopped.
In World War I, Dad had served in the 37th Infantry Division of the 116th Regiment of the Ohio National Guard, military police. He fought in the Argonne Forest campaign and at Chateau-Thierry, two of the fiercest battles of the war. He and his comrades had come under intense shelling, and he’d seen many men die.
Dad started drinking in France. Although seventeen years had passed when he threw us under the bed, he was still stuck in the bloody French countryside. Since there was no treatment for what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, he numbed his memories with the bottle.
Mom worked full-time in a beauty shop and brought home eighteen dollars a week. She stood on her feet all day every day, trying to make cheery small talk with customers while she cut, curled, or colored their hair. Then she dragged herself home and collapsed on the couch. I’d help put her feet up to make her swollen ankles feel better and bring her iced tea. Then I might climb up beside her for a hug. Sometimes she smelled sweet like hand lotion. Sometimes I noticed the pungent odor of hair-perming chemicals. I didn’t mind at all.
But life with Mom could be problematic. She had hoped I’d be a girl. She sometimes treated me like her toy, a doll to dress up. Even though I was a boy, I came with a head of thick, naturally curly, black hair. She loved to play with it, combing it this way and that, making spit curls. I would wiggle away. She trimmed my hair, but I didn’t get a real boy’s haircut until Dad finally said, “Enough!” and took me to a barber. I was nearly six years old and ready for school.
I fiercely resisted Mom’s efforts to tame me, even then refusing to go with her to the Christian Science church because I hated getting dressed up in the little white suit she favored. I played in the dirt and always had a skinned knee or elbow. I climbed everything in sight. I collected turtles and snakes. The more Mom hovered and warned, “Be careful!” the more risks I took.
I used to see linemen from Florida Power & Light working in the neighborhood. I thought, I’d love to do that. One day when I was about eight, I practiced on a telephone pole that stood near our neighbor’s garage. Starting a few feet up from the ground were horizontal metal rods, “steps” to climb the pole. Ignoring Mom’s admonitions to stay out of trouble, I jumped up, grabbed a step to use as a handhold, and struggled into position to climb the pole. Then I scrambled up the pole and stepped onto Mrs. Munden’s garage roof. Three wires hung over the roof, and to steady myself I grabbed two wires. I got the shock of my life. I was lucky that day—one of the wires I grabbed was the ground wire. The other two carried 110 volts, and had I grabbed them both, I might have died.
I was a happy child and was not consciously aware of the growing tension between my parents. But I must have been blocking out a lot of stress, because I have no memory of second or third grade, not even my teachers’ names. I must have picked up a few cues, however, because one night Mom heard a noise on the back porch and discovered me walking in my sleep. Then one day I saw Dad push Mom down in the driveway.
On a muggy Saturday afternoon in the late summer of my ninth year, Mom said, “Jerry, I want to talk to you about something serious.” Her eyes were puffy, as if she’d been crying. My stomach turned. I sensed it was going to be bad. We walked out of the house and turned right onto 18th Avenue, and then took another right on Flagler Street, where the trolley ran. She wanted to get me away from the house to break the news privately.
Though the day was ending, moisture hung in the hot air. It felt menacing. Neither of us said a word.
The trolley ran between downtown and 22nd Avenue, where City Line Grocery marked the western boundary of Miami. As the trolley approached us, I could see sparks fly where it connected to the overhead electric line that powered it. When the trolley stopped, we got on, headed toward downtown, and Mom put two nickels in the conductor’s box.
The nearly empty car smelled like cigarettes and human sweat. Windows were open, but the air was muggy, with hardly any breeze. We took hard seats in the back. The trolley rattled as it went along. We passed Stroberg’s Grocery on the left, then Bascomb’s Pet Store.
Mom said, “I’m going to leave your dad. We’re going to get a divorce.” In the twilight her face was somber. Twenty years of marriage were coming to an end. The huge sign for Goodyear Tire passed on the right, across from Skippy’s. “We still love each other,” she said. “But his drinking is wearing me out. He won’t work. I just can’t take it anymore.”
The trolley came to the end of the line, and the conductor walked through the car to the opposite end. We started back toward home. I couldn’t say a word.
The sun was going down. “I know how much you love your dad, and I hate to do this,” she said. “You’ll live with me, but you can still see him anytime. He’ll stay in Miami. He’ll always be your dad.”
For years after, like many children of divorce, I couldn’t shake the thought that I was to blame. Decades later a woman in my prayer group said, “I didn’t get the mother I wanted, but I got the one I needed.” God gave me the parents I wanted and needed, and the capacity to absorb the right stuff from each. I could have inherited Dad’s love of alcohol and lack of ambition. I might have taken Mom’s inability to form healthy relationships with the opposite sex. I could have been violent. But by God’s grace I took my work ethic from Mom and my love of nature and living creatures from Dad. The stability of my first nine years helped me survive some very hard stuff that was to come.
Soon after the divorce was final, Mom married our next-door neighbor, and we moved to another town. But a year later we were back in Mom’s duplex in Miami. The second marriage ended when her husband, Everett, kicked me in the face. I still have a scar on my chin.
Around that time I learned how to deal with bullies. Mom had advised me, “Don’t fight, Son. Walk away.” There came a day when I had to disobey her.
I was in fifth grade. A big, muscular boy named Claud
e decided I was a safe target: the new kid in town and one of the smallest. He focused on my bag lunch. At the bus stop he regularly grabbed it, threw it in the air, kicked it, and sent it scattering. He laughed mockingly as I collected my baloney sandwich from one end of the sidewalk and my apple from the other. Other kids, afraid of Claude, laughed along with him. I hated going to school.
One day as I was getting off the school bus, I’d had enough. I called Claude a swearword. He lurched toward me menacingly, and I ran up the cement school steps, trying to escape. He followed. About two steps from the top, I realized I was trapped. In desperation, I turned and shoved him with all my might.
He tumbled backward, somersaulting a couple of times on his way down. At the bottom, he lay on his back, spread-eagled. He looked stunned. I glared at him with hatred. He looked away.
Claude never touched my lunch again. Or anybody else’s, for that matter.
I tried to stay under the radar so as to not make things worse for Mom. But my inner life was chaos. I never knew what was coming next, from Mom’s trolley car announcement, to my separation from Dad, to a new stepfather and stepbrother, to moving to a new house, new school, new neighborhood. Then the stepfather, stepbrother, and new living arrangements disappeared, and we were back where we started but without Dad. All in one year.
My mother used a lot of soap trying to wash out of my mouth all the words I learned from my father. But I was learning there were far worse sins, usually hidden by a thin veneer of respectability. These sins were like the surface of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, most of their mass below the waterline. In only a few years I would come face-to-face with murderous hatred, more than once. And I would feel hatred in return, in the depths of my being.