by Earley, Pete
“I remember the heat in Richmond,” Arthur Walker recalled later. “I had been up north all of my life and I thought it was really hot in Richmond. Life was good there. We assimilated quickly into the neighborhood. “
Because of his association with Warner Brothers, Johnny was regarded as a neighborhood celebrity, a glitter that gave Peggy and her three sons a special status too.
“Dad was really making decent money,” Arthur recalled. “If a person made fifteen or twenty bucks a week back then, they were happy, and he made much more than that. . .. I remember him opening up a Christmas bonus check of a thousand dollars.”
The Walkers’ life might have seemed idyllic, but it wasn’t. Johnny and Peggy fought constantly. The exact cause of their unhappiness isn’t clear. At the time, Peggy complained that johnny’s work took him away from the family too much and he wasn’t helping around the house as much as she wanted. But as in many marriages, the most obvious complaints were just signs of deeper unrest. One night after suffering through one of Peggy’s harangues, Johnny exploded and slugged her in the face. The next morning, after he had cooled, he apologized.
“He was so upset that he began to cry,” Peggy recalled. But the altercation was not an unfortunate aberration.
Some people can look back over the years and pick an incident that marked a dramatic change in their lives. Johnny Walker could cite the exact day his life turned topsy-turvy: September 19, 1944. While returning home from booking a movie in Emmitsburg, Maryland, his car and another vehicle collided in a spectacular accident. The only particulars about the mishap come from memory, and everyone who remembers the event tells a different story. But there is one thing that they all agree upon: Johnny Walker nearly died.
His injuries were so severe that when the police arrived on the scene they didn’t think anything could be done to save him. “The county coroner had already started filling out my death certificate when he discovered I was still breathing,” Johnny told me later. He was rushed to the hospital in Gettysburg, where Peggy hurried to his bedside. The boys were left behind to be cared for by the family’s live-in housekeeper, Emma Evans. The subsequent hospital bills and lawsuit against Johnny filed by the other driver drained the Walker family bank account.
After he recovered, Johnny lost his prestigious Warner Brothers’ post and went through a series of other jobs – he sold pots and pans door-to-door, worked as a department store clerk, and drove a taxi – but none of them paid all the bills. Peggy was forced to find work. During the day, she labored at the Franklin Uniform Company; at night, she took photographs of couples at the Tantilla Garden, a nightclub that claimed to have the “South’s finest ballroom.” By 1947, the Walkers’ home was a shambles.
“I remember my father coming home from work and drinking himself into oblivion,” John Walker, Jr., said. “My mother would start on him, bitching endlessly about money or shooting her mouth off about how he didn’t do anything and couldn’t care for the family, and pretty soon he’d punch her, and then all hen would break loose.”
All three boys recall being awakened at night by the sounds of their parents yelling and cursing each other. The boys shared a large upstairs bedroom in Richmond and during lulls in the fighting downstairs, one of them – usually John, the most adventuresome of the brothers – would creep down the staircase and peek around the corner to see what was happening.
One night John saw his father passed out drunk in a chair and Peggy lying on the floor amid broken dishes. She was sobbing. “Is she dead?
“Did he kill her?” Arthur demanded when John came scampering back upstairs.
“Naw, she’s still alive,” John said, “but he got her good.” Jimmy began to cry.
“Shut up!” John shrieked. “You want him to come up here and beat us?”
It was a confusing time for Arthur, John, and Jimmy. They had always been proud of their father and, like most boys, had seen him as a larger-than-life figure and a role model. Before the accident, the boys had waited anxiously for Johnny to come home on weekends from his sales trips. Not now.
“Suddenly, I wasn’t talking about Dad like other kids did,” Arthur recalled. “I wasn’t proud of him anymore.”
As a boy, John became furious when Johnny beat Peggy. “I didn’t understand what was happening,” John said later. “I didn’t really appreciate my father’s sober days because I was too little. My mother would tell me that he was a good man and that she loved him, and when he was sober, he was good to us, but it was a fucking horror movie when he wasn’t.”
Loud arguments, slammed doors, brawls, and drunken lectures were the norm. Arthur received the brunt of Johnny’s anger toward his boys, but John was the one who became outraged by his father’s behavior. After a confrontation, Arthur would hide in the woods near his home and simply wait for Johnny to go to bed. John seethed and plotted.
“I decided I had no choice but to kill him,” John recalled. “I was probably ten or eleven years old, but I was serious. I was going to do it. In fact, I wanted to do it. I was going to kill my father because I hated him for what he was doing to my mother.”
John spent a week planning the murder, considering various methods, rejecting them one by one. Finally, he hit upon an acceptable plan. “We had a cast-iron bed, a rollaway that was heavy. It probably weighed seventy or eighty pounds. Jesus, it was a monster, and I decided to use it to kill him.”
The next time his father came home drunk, John intended to push the heavy rollaway to the edge of the stairway. When his father began climbing the steps, John would push the bed down on top of him. “Either the fall would kill him or he would be pinned under the bed and I could go down and hit him with a baseball bat and finish him off.”
A few days after John had decided on his murder plan, Johnny came home drunk and got into an argument with Peggy. John quietly pushed the bed into position at the top of the stairs. He sat down and waited. The next morning Peggy found her son asleep next to the rollaway bed. Johnny had passed out in a living room chair and had never made it up the stairway that night.
On November 12, 1948, the Realty Industrial Loan Corporation foreclosed on the Walkers~ house after Peggy and Johnny failed to make the $50 mortgage payment for the seventh month in a row. Peggy’s swank studio couch, Johnny’s piano, the boys’ maple bedroom set, were dragged outside and sold to the highest bidder by the loan company to recover a $2,600 loan.
The glamor days of the $1,000 Christmas bonus and live-in housekeeper were long since over. Peggy had no choice but to telephone her father.
“Papa, we need someplace to live,” she said.
Heartbroken over his daughter’s financial plight, Arthur Scaramuzzo suggested that she and Johnny return to Scranton. He would find a place where she, Johnny, and the boys could live with relatives until they got back on a good financial footing. Peggy turned scarlet as she spoke with her father. She had never felt so humiliated in her life. John saw his mother sobbing as the family prepared to move to Scranton, and it made him angry.
“I wished,” he told me later, his voice filled with anger, “that I’d never fallen asleep on the stairs that night and that my father had tried to come up them.”
Chapter 5
As he had done twice before, Johnny Walker sought Frank Comerford Walker’s help when he returned to Scranton in early 1949. Frank delivered by getting Johnny a job in the business end of the Roosevelt Theater in Scranton. Everyone in the family except Jimmy, who was only eleven years old, went to work. Peggy took photographs of school-children for Prestwood’s Photo Studio; Arthur was a stock boy at Belinski’s Market after school; John sold the blue streak edition of the Scranton Tribune. The boys were farmed out to relatives until Peggy and Johnny had saved enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment over the theater. Johnny joined Alcoholics Anonymous and there were fewer confrontations at home. But the family had changed.
It was time, Peggy had decided, to accept the harshness of life. She no longer paid attention to
Johnny’s talk of making it big and leaving Scranton. She would dream through her children now, especially through her cherished son John. Of the three, only he seemed to have what it would take to break away from Scranton and its tedious, blue-collar life-style.
On most nights, Peggy could see John through her kitchen window as he stood across the street from the theater selling papers to people leaving the last show. A determined and frugal boy, each night, he tucked aside half of the $1.25 that he averaged. Peggy helped him hide his money from his father. When he earned his first $10, she took him to the bank to open a savings account.
While John was selling newspapers on a particularly harsh February night in 1949, he saw a small boy pedaling his bicycle toward the theater. It was so cold that the boy’s wool mittens had frozen to the handlebars of his bike. Most of the color had left his face and he was puffing.
“Whatcha doing?” John asked.
“Deliverin’ the Trib’ to people’s homes,” Joey Long answered. “Just finished. How ‘bout lettin’ me come behind your stand and warm up?”
John nodded, eager for the company. That night’s meeting was the beginning of a friendship that lasted more than thirty years. Joey Long, a year older, was a husky, uncomplicated boy who was honest, worked hard, and never got into any trouble. As youngsters, John and Joey created their own adventures.
“John and I would talk about getting away and seeing the world,” Long later remembered. “He was very aggressive, very sure of himself. He wasn’t lazy. He wanted to get ahead. He was very tight with his money. He told me he was saving it, but I didn’t know what for. He used to say that his father was a failure and he didn’t want to be that way.”
When Joey turned seventeen, he joined the Marines. John went with him to the recruiter’s office and helped Joey fill out some of the necessary forms. Afterward, Joey pestered John about signing up, but John wasn’t interested in a military career. He had other plans.
Joey was not John’s only “best friend.” A short time after the Walkers moved to Scranton, John met Charles “Chas” Bennett, a thin, bespectacled boy one year younger than him.
John’s friendships with Joey Long and Chas Bennett were completely separate. Each one was his friend and John never made an effort to bring them together, nor did he encourage them to become friends with each other. But there was something else about his friendships with Joey and Chas that was peculiar.
When Joey Long was with him, John was a rambunctious adventurer who was polite, respectful, and honest. But when he was with Chas Bennett, it was a different story altogether. “On the surface, Jack [John still was known as Jack during this period] was never in any trouble,” Charles Bennett recalled. “But believe me, what you see on the surface with Jack is not what you get. Trust me. I knew him like a brother, better than anyone else. Jack is cunning, intelligent, clever, personable, and intrinsically evil.”
John and Chas stole eggs and threw them at streetcars, rolled used tires down hills at cars passing below, threw rocks through windows at St. Paul’s Catholic School. They soon graduated to more serious pranks. They stole money from purses and coats left unattended during school functions and stole coins from the tiny canisters in church sanctuaries where worshippers left donations for the poor and money to pay for prayer candles.
Once they stole a tin of hosts. The next day at St. Paul’s, Chas asked several girls in between classes if they wanted to “receive communion.”
“I didn’t realize until much later,” Charles Bennett recalled, “that I was always the one passing out the hosts while Jack lurked in the shadows watching.”
Years later, Charles Bennett still talked about John’s influence over him. “It was almost hypnotic,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but he became my Svengali. There was just something intriguing about him that drew me to him. He had a certain manipulative power.”
He added, “Jack was constantly calculating, his mind was active all the time. There was no spur-of-the-moment action, no random conversation. If you said something, he was filing it away, figuring out how to use it in the future.”
The boys’ misdeeds became more and more dangerous. John made a pair of brass knuckles and got into a fist fight in order to use them. He and Chas began setting fires. In 1950 John went to work as an usher at the Roosevelt Theater and pulled a prank that terrified Chas. One of the pictures playing that summer was Winchester .73, a hard-driving western that starred Jimmy Stewart and Rock Hudson. As part of a publicity stunt, the studio sent theaters replicas of a Winchester rifle. John borrowed the rifle one night and invited Chas and another boy to go “shooting” with him. They hiked into the mountains overlooking the city and took turns shooting empty beer bottles and discarded cans. But John got bored and when it was time for him to shoot again, he moved to a nearby ledge and began firing at the headlights of the cars on the main highway below.
“I was terrified,” Charles Bennett recalled, “not of the police, but what my father would do if he had found out. But Jack didn’t seem to care and I remember thinking after that incident that Jack wanted his father to find out what he was doing. I think he really wanted to strike back at his father and embarrass his old man.”
Chapter 6
Johnny and Peggy moved across town in 1951, into a house in the same West Scranton neighborhood where both of them had grown up. Neither Arthur nor John wanted to enroll at St. Patrick’s High School. They had heard stories about the strictness of the nuns and priests there, and it was much smaller than the public schools that Arthur and John liked. But Johnny Walker didn’t care what his sons wanted. He had graduated from St. Patrick’s and felt the rigid discipline would be good for his boys. Peggy also liked the idea because she was turning more and more to the Church for solace, returning to the teachings that had sustained her parents.
The school was run with absolute authority. Answers were black and white; actions were good or evil. There was no room for gray, whether it was a question of school rules or Catholic dogma. Physical punishment, a crack on the knuckles with a ruler or a swat with a wooden paddle, came quickly and often. Students were required to say the rosary every day. A photograph of Pope Pius XII was displayed next to a picture of President Harry Truman in the principal’s office. The three-story brick school building looked more like a fortress than a school.
To John it became a prison.
He developed an intense distaste for organized religion, but while he shared his feelings with his brother, John was cagey enough to conceal them at school. Open confrontation with the priests and nuns would have been catastrophic. Instead, he resisted tacitly, doing as little homework as possible and showing no interest in any school function. He even refused to have his picture taken for the yearbook. He wanted no part of St. Patrick’s.
Meanwhile, Arthur thrived at the school. Academically, he had his ups and downs, but he excelled in sports, particularly football, scoring three touchdowns and averaging four yards per carry as a running back for the Paddies during his senior year. Arthur also was into basketball, baseball, and track, played the trumpet in the band, and was the hero in a senior class play. Just before graduation in 1952, his classmates named him the most popular student in the school.
John and Arthur had always depended upon one another – each filling in for the other’s weaknesses – but after the move to West Scranton they began to grow apart. The separation was partially because of girls. John wasn’t interested in them; Arthur was obsessed. Years later, Arthur would claim that he was a virgin when he married and was rarely unfaithful to his wife. Others, including John, would recall how Arthur had had a string of girlfriends and how he had, in fact, lost his virginity as a teenager when the family lived in Richmond. At St. Patrick’s in 1952, he met Rita Clare Fritsch, a prim and proper blonde pixie with large black-rimmed glasses and a pug nose. Rita fell in love with Arthur, but not with his family. She had heard from her mother that Johnny was a drunk. Rita also had trouble getting along with Peggy, who s
eemed jealous of her son’s new interest. The more serious Rita and Arthur became, the more time Arthur spent at the Fritsch home.
Arthur was not the only member of the Walker family spending less and less time at home. Johnny had quit his job at the Roosevelt and gone to work as a disc jockey at radio station WARM. The most popular radio deejays in Scranton were on the air in the afternoon and early evening. Being a newcomer, Johnny was stuck with the graveyard shift. But he didn’t mind the schedule because it gave him the opportunity to experiment with different formats. Within a few months, he had developed a show called The Night Walker. Johnny played soft music and read love poems over the Scranton airwaves. Sometimes he would whisper into the microphone as if he were confiding in an unseen lover. The show was an overnight sensation and Johnny was, once again, a celebrity, especially among women. The circuits overloaded whenever Johnny asked listeners to phone in and request “that special song for someone you love.” Soon he was earning $4 an hour, at a time when some workers in the Lackawanna Valley were earning that amount for a full day’s work.
For a while, Johnny’s success made family life much easier. The tranquility did not last, however. Trouble seemed to follow Johnny. Merchants began to complain that he was not paying his bills. There were shocked whispers that he had been seen around town with various women. Gossip escalated after a loud public argument between him and a bartender ended in Johnny’s being kicked out of a popular nightclub. Johnny and Peggy began fighting physically again. Some of the brawls were so violent the police were called in by neighbors.
When Arthur graduated from St. Patrick’s, Johnny took him aside and told him that he was going to college. Arthur didn’t want to go, but his father insisted. Perhaps he had failed his boys, but he wasn’t the first father to get mired in alcohol, and his problems didn’t mean that he didn’t want his sons to succeed. Arthur dutifully enrolled at the University of Scranton, but by the end of the first semester it was obvious that he was in over his head. Without telling his parents, he went downtown to see a Navy recruiter. He chose the Navy, he confided to me later, because he liked the uniform.