by Jerry Parr
As I entered adolescence, Mom married a third time, and we moved to Louisville, Kentucky. Unlike Dad and Everett, Jack was not handsome; he was short, bald, and strong. He offered Mom a different kind of stability: he worked hard and was proud of it. He used to tell Mom, “You married one who wouldn’t work and one who couldn’t work. I work!”
Jack tried to be a good husband and stepfather. He’d never had a child, and he liked me. But he had a violent temper. It didn’t surface in all its fury until we moved back to Hialeah, a Miami suburb, in December 1944. With money saved from Louisville and from selling Mom’s houses, they bought two beauty shops, and Jack started a car repair business, Cox Motors. I helped him build his garage.
But the stress of starting a business—and my mother’s nagging—brought out his anger full force. It terrified my mother. And me.
On Thanksgiving Day 1945, Mom and “Bom,” my grandmother, had prepared a beautiful dinner. The table was laid with a turkey, dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes—everything. Jack stood at one end of the table, I at the other. I can’t remember what precipitated it. There were words. Jack may have been drinking. None of us had taken a bite. Suddenly, enraged, he lifted one end of the table and turned it upside down. Everything was on the floor, the entire dinner. Salad, cranberry sauce—our entire feast. We stood there stunned and silent. Mom started putting handfuls of food from the floor back on the platters, then realized it was pointless.
Later, Jack got down on the floor with us and helped clean our dinner up, sobbing.
One evening when Jack started on a rampage, Mom and I ran across a vacant lot to a neighbor. We watched from her porch as he wrecked the house. We saw him pacing up and down, a bandanna dissecting his square forehead. We heard the sound of furniture breaking. He threw something out the window that shattered on the concrete. He heaved over the refrigerator on our covered back porch.
Then he was crying and pacing. Spent, he sat on the side porch and buried his head in his hands. After a while Mom went over and put a tentative hand on his shoulder.
An elderly Hialeah neighbor who had known Jack all his life told us Jack’s temper was so bad as a child that his mother chained him to the bed and beat him. He also said people thought Jack had murdered his first wife. I don’t know whether that was true, but he had told Mom many times, “I’ll kill you if you trifle on me.” It was a shadow that hung over their marriage seventeen years, until Jack died.
From 1945 to 1950 (when I left home), I slept with a kitchen knife under my pillow.
I couldn’t know then what I know now: those dark, confusing years with Jack, when I flailed through school and life, were preparing me for what lay ahead. I learned to be ever alert. I learned that violence can turn up anywhere, anytime. I couldn’t control Jack or my Mom’s decision to stay with him, but with self-control and patience, I could keep watch for her and for me. Finally—and I can’t explain this except by God’s grace—in spite of the hatred I could feel flare up in a crisis, I learned a deep compassion for the perpetrator, to love the sinner and hate the sin.
Even though Mom seemed forgiving, she never put a marker on Jack’s grave. After she passed, I paid to have one put on. It said, “Theilan D. Cox, World War I and World War II.” He was one of the few Americans who had served in both wars.
My teen years were the pits. All of my contemporaries went to beach parties with girlfriends. The only pretty girl I knew was taken—and four of us were in love with her. All through high school I never had a date. I didn’t own a suit. I didn’t go to the prom. I didn’t make good grades or play sports except for intramural track. Besides, was I going to bring a girl home to meet the resident maniac?
I escaped when the Korean War began. I enlisted in the Air Force.
With my Air Force commitment behind me, I returned to Miami with a wife, Mary Henry, whom I’d met in Minnesota when she was only seventeen and I was nineteen. We married soon after and were together in Alaska. We settled in Miami, where I resumed line work with Florida Power & Light, and Mary became a flight attendant with Eastern Air Lines. But not long after that, in 1954, the marriage disintegrated. The truth is, we were both too immature to know what we wanted, what we needed from each other, or how to give it.
I was disappointed and buried my pain in work and drinking with friends. I dated very little, perhaps wanting to avoid repeating my mother’s pattern of serial marriages and divorces. In 1956 something else happened to distract me from women: my deeply loved father died, leaving me a mission. His final request was a whispered, “Son, take care of Mabel.” Mabel was Dad’s elderly second wife. I took a room in her house to try to look after her.
When Carolyn waltzed into my life in the summer of 1958, she was a twenty-one-year-old college senior. I was a twenty-eight-year-old power lineman, brown and lined from the Miami sun. On the surface we seemed totally unsuited for each other.
Carolyn and her roommate, Marilyn, had rented a furnished apartment for the summer in a one-story apartment house squatting on a treeless lot in Miami. My best friend, Roscoe, whose mother was Carolyn’s new landlady, recruited me to meet the girls. When we knocked at the apartment door, a hazel-eyed brunette with a dazzling smile answered. Inviting us in, she turned to put away her ironing board. I noticed a red rose on the back of her white shorts. I never forgot that rose.
We invited Carolyn and Marilyn to go for a pizza at one of the many drive-in restaurants then springing up in Miami. We surmised that since the girls had just arrived, they probably hadn’t drawn a paycheck yet, so a free meal would tempt them. They looked us over, looked at each other, and nodded. “Okay!”
Carolyn and I were drawn to each other right away. Carolyn liked that I was six feet tall and lean. She thought my dark brown eyes looked sad—and kind. She thought I was older than I said, but she wasn’t put off by this, or by learning I was divorced. I seemed a little dangerous but intriguing. Later she told me I reminded her of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind!
When her mother first met me, Carolyn says her only comment was, “He looks experienced.”
It surprised Carolyn that a lineman quoted Thomas Wolfe and Plato. That I loved Madame Butterfly. That I read poetry by W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost. That I was majoring in English and philosophy at the University of Miami night school, not to get a better job but just because I liked ideas. I was happy doing line work.
Carolyn seemed both smart and caring. She was curious about the books I loved and, like me, enjoyed discussing ideas that moved her. Caryl Chessman, a rapist, was about to be put to death, and this disturbed me. I told Carolyn I was against capital punishment. I saw—and still see—life as a precious thing, even the life of a rapist. She wasn’t so sure about that.
I liked that Carolyn was spiritual. She was a Christian with Baptist roots and an evolving faith. She said wryly, “I’m still waiting to hear my first sermon that names race prejudice a sin.” This was the South in 1958.
I’d had an on-and-off romance with the Catholic church, since I had attended Holy Family Catholic School in eighth grade in Louisville, where Sister Mary Olive told me who I was and where I was going. She was emphatic. As one of only two non-Catholic students, I had to go to daily mass but could not take Communion. However, I loved the mystery of the Latin words, the scent of incense, and the music of the Gregorian chants, which awakened a yearning deep within me. School ended, and Mom, Jack, and I had returned to Jack’s house in Hialeah and resumed our normal churchless life. But as a young adult in the Air Force, I read Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, and in Alaska I took instruction to become a Catholic.
But now it was 1958, and I was divorced and searching again. Carolyn and I shared honestly where we were in our faith, but it didn’t seem like anything we needed to resolve right then. We both wanted to follow Jesus, but we were still figuring out what that meant.
I learned that she, like me, had blue-collar roots. Her father was a carpenter, and I felt comfortable around him
.
Carolyn says that on the night of our first date she told her roommate, “That’s a man I could marry!” But I questioned my own ability to be a good husband, and it took me awhile to get serious.
Carolyn returned to Stetson University, just north of Orlando, for her senior year, and I drove back and forth to see her. We spent holidays and the summer of ’59 together. I dragged my feet, wanting to be engaged but not wanting to set a date. Carolyn tried to be understanding, but she had too much pride to dangle in the wind for long. Besides, she was under time pressure to make another decision. She had graduated magna cum laude and was offered graduate fellowships to six universities, including Yale. She wanted to get a PhD and teach in college. She had to let the schools know her plans.
In light of my indecision, she accepted a three-year fellowship in comparative literature at Vanderbilt. I drove her to the airport, and we shared a tearful good-bye. She left for Nashville.
Six weeks of misery later, I knew I couldn’t live without Carolyn. So I gave up my job at Florida Power & Light, where I had ten years’ seniority that had accumulated during my service time, four years of which were as a journeyman lineman—no small sacrifice—and drove with Honey, my Alaskan husky-shepherd, to Nashville. Bringing Honey along conveyed “Love me, love my dog.” We got married three days later.
Our wedding rings, which we picked up en route to the courthouse, cost ten dollars each. Carolyn was giving a Chaucer seminar that afternoon, so we had a morning wedding. She wore her school clothes: a red-and-gray-plaid wool skirt and a red hand-me-down cashmere sweater. I can’t remember what I had on. When we got to the courthouse, I was perfectly calm, but Carolyn’s knees were so shaky I had to hold her up. It was October 12, 1959.
Until then it had never occurred to me to get a college degree. The course work I took earlier was for fun. I loved learning, and books opened up the whole universe to me. A college education, I thought, was just for polish. It wouldn’t do much besides teach me to say “alternative,” not “al-ter-nate-tive.”
But when Carolyn asked, “Would you like to finish college?” I thought, Why not? First, I had to be in Nashville anyway to accompany Carolyn in her education. Second, I could pay my tuition through the GI Bill, since I’d served four years in the Air Force. I could work at night and some days to supplement Carolyn’s stipend. And third, I wasn’t so sure anymore that I was going to spend the rest of my life doing line work. I was beginning to imagine something different for myself. I just didn’t yet know what.
Carolyn completed her master’s thesis on “Faulkner’s Use of the Christ Symbol” and got her degree in English in August 1960—in less than a year—with straight As. This was to be an interim step toward the PhD; she still had two years remaining on her fellowship. But she began teaching at Hillsboro High, since Vanderbilt refused her request for a year’s leave of absence. An extra year would have allowed me to graduate and begin work, and such leave was routinely granted to male grad students. The reason for turning her down? “You shouldn’t have gotten married.”
The truth is, she didn’t mind too much. Her dream of earning a PhD was morphing into another dream. She was already thinking about law school.
After Carolyn taught English and Spanish for a year and a half, Kimberly, our first daughter, was born. Full of dreams of a new life together, we said good-bye to Vanderbilt—and Nashville—and headed to New York. As I held Kimberly close, I whispered in her ear, “Honey, your daddy’s going to be a Secret Service agent!”
CHAPTER 3
FROM NEW YORK TO DALLAS: “THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD”
Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
LAST WORDS OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S REMARKS PREPARED FOR TRADE MART
November 22, 1963
OCTOBER 1962–DECEMBER 1963
We arrived in New York City the last week in September 1962, pulling a small U-Haul.[7] Inside were our few pitiful belongings: a portable crib (a gift from Carolyn’s high school students), bricks and boards for a bookcase, a lot of books, and a few clothes. The U-Haul also carried Carolyn’s Fiat Bianchina, about the size of a golf cart and boasting a 22-horsepower engine. Driving the Fiat was like driving a lawn mower. It was so small that one day, back in Nashville, four ninth grade boys picked it up and carried it into the school, where they set the car down in the hall in front of the cafeteria door. Carolyn laughed as hard as they did.
That minicar would have been awfully convenient in New York, but our first surprise when we arrived in the city was how poor we were. My starting salary of $5,355 per year yielded about $160 take-home pay every two weeks. We had to sell Carolyn’s car because we couldn’t afford to pay for the tags and insurance. Everything seemed to cost twice what it had in Nashville. We rented a tiny, one-bedroom, garden apartment in Glen Oaks, a huge development in Queens. Our larger space in Nashville had cost $65 a month, furnished. Glen Oaks was $110 a month, empty. And we were glad to get it.
Money from selling Carolyn’s car bought me a second suit and us a little furniture. We couldn’t afford a bed and a sofa, so we bought a sofa bed and slept on it the whole time we were in New York. The bedroom eventually held two cribs and a dresser we bought secondhand and painted white; we did purchase new crib mattresses. We dined on a used card table camouflaged with a flowered tablecloth that picked up the pale yellow of the walls of our tiny kitchen.
Our second surprise was that Glen Oaks was as segregated as Nashville. In a development with around ten thousand residents, not one was black. Discrimination in housing was illegal in New York, but when a prospective tenant called, the receptionist would say, ever so sweetly, “We don’t have any vacancies right now, but people do move out. Come in and fill out an application, and we’ll let you know as soon as an apartment is available.” When a white person showed up, they were in luck: someone had just moved out. African American applicants were never called back.
We were disappointed to discover this ruse because we’d looked forward to having friends across the racial divide. We did learn something about bigotry, though: it wasn’t all in the South.
Raring to begin a new adventure, I reported for duty October 1, 1962, at the Secret Service field office, 90 Church Street in lower Manhattan. Four other new agents started the same day: in time, Ernie Luzania became Special Agent in Charge (SAIC) of Sacramento, Chuck Zboril became assistant SAIC of Chicago; John Joe Howlett retired in Little Rock; and Roger Counts became executive assistant to Director John Simpson. We were all eager to make a good impression and to do well. At thirty-two, I was the oldest rookie. None of us imagined, least of all me, that one day I’d become SAIC of the presidential protective division (PPD) for two future presidents.
A noisy forty-by-eighty-foot squad room was the hub of various activities for around twenty-six agents. It was filled with cigarette smoke, jangling phones, slamming doors, the incessant clicks and metallic sound of carriages being thrown on manual typewriters—and rows of government-issue, gray steel desks arranged back-to-back. Each agent had a phone, but every two men shared an Underwood typewriter.
The squad room was the beating heart of the field office. We left there in the morning with the day’s assignments, often returning with suspects or witnesses, sometimes in handcuffs, to be fingerprinted and questioned. There we typed our daily reports. We dictated longer investigative reports to female secretaries, who also worked with four or five other agents. There we also made telephone calls and checked out local threats to President John F. Kennedy, who came to New York frequently.
There were separate small rooms for fingerprinting and interviews. A special counterfeiting unit with five or six agents was very active across the hall.
Although the Secret Service in 1962 was predominantly white and male, the New York field office may have been the most diverse in the country. Charles Gittens, the Service’s only African American agent for many years, had been in since 1956. Al Wong was of Chinese descent. Victor Gonzalez was a dark-
skinned Puerto Rican. The first female agents would not be hired until 1971.
We new guys met the boss, Alfred E. Whitaker, on our first day. He’d been SAIC of New York for a very long time and in the Secret Service since before I was born. A very, very imposing person with a piercing, no-nonsense gaze and steely character, he was all cop. We referred to one-on-ones with him as “going to confession.”
George Jukes was second in command. If Whitaker was the stern father, Jukes was more like a big brother. He was conscious of and cared about the stress agents and their families were feeling. He was also an outstanding investigator and a source of advice when an agent was stuck.
In those days we didn’t get any formal training until after about six months. On our first day the Service wanted to know whether we could shoot. So they gave us a four-inch barrel, .38-caliber gun and took us to the pistol range in the building. The room was long and narrow, and we had to hit a bull’s-eye fifty feet away. The odor of gunpowder invaded my lungs, and the noise was deafening. Ear protectors were not provided in those days: we had to make do with stuffing cotton in our ears, which didn’t help much.
A muscular instructor from Customs demonstrated how to load and unload safely. “Turn the weapon sideways so it’s not pointing at anyone, push the cylinder toward yourself, and empty the six bullets out of it. Look at the cylinder to be sure all chambers are empty, look away, and then look again.” We had to look twice to be absolutely certain the gun was empty. Then we reloaded all six bullets—we carried six more in a bullet pouch attached to our belts—and fired. I was relieved to qualify right away.