WHEELER DEALER: Chapter 2
It’s just not that difficult to steal a car. Roger and his pals picked it up right away from this older guy, Dale Lane, who was probably 18 or 19 then, at Colonel Summers Park where they all used to hang out. He’d been busted for UUMV a couple of times before so he obviously knew what he was talking about.
You take the red wire, which goes to the battery. Clip it to the ignition wire, which might be blue but you also might have to experiment around a little before you’re sure. Then touch them both with the wire that goes to the starter motor, which is probably yellow, and if you’ve done it right you’re off like a herd of turtles, which everyone thought was a pretty funny thing to say back then.
So this was hardly the first time Roger ever boosted a car. And here he was, a skinny 13-year-old kid, just starting out as a freshman at Washington high, headed for school that morning with three of his young idiot friends in a beat-up Chevy they’d swiped the night before.
Another rainy fall day in Portland. Probably some leaves on the street making it slicker than usual. And somehow – Roger would like to make clear that he wasn’t the one driving at the time – the car flipped on its side, right in front of the school just as eveyone is going inside, and they take off running.
It takes them the better part of an hour before they find another one – this time a 1956 Olds Super 88 – and the four of them pile in and head for California. Down the Oregon coast. Stealing food and gas along the way. Eight days later they get caught outside the tiny northern California town of Hoopa when their car breaks down by a bridge over the river there.
The local sheriff, who’s obviously been on the lookout for four young hoodlums in an Olds 88, drives by and says “Where you boys from?”
“Over there,” they say pointing to a cluster of ramshackle houses, which they have no way of knowing is part of the local Hoopa Indian reservation.
“Well,” says the sheriff, “there’s only about ten white people live over there and you’re not one of them. So get in the car or jump in the river.” And with that they are taken into custody, and after their families came down to claim them – for Roger, that would be his uncle Dennis and aunt Linda – returned to Portland.
Roger remembers his uncle asking him what they planned to do in California. “We thought we’d pick grapefruit,” is what he said.
Just so you know, Roger had been going back and forth between his grandmother Wanita’s house in inner Southeast and his aunt and uncle’s place in Parkrose for the past few years. He was five when they took his mother away and committed her to the state mental institution. For a while his aunt Linda tried taking him to visit her at the hospital. “But it was just too alien,” he says, thinking how there was just no emotion left in her after the shock treatments, and the visits were discontinued.
His father was a logger who obviously couldn’t cope with it all, and so for a while there Roger and his younger sister were boarded out to a succession of state assigned care-takers – “pingponged all over the place,” as Roger puts it. Some of them were more considerate than others. Finally Dennis and Linda and Grandma Wanita – who spelled her name that way because she wasn’t Mexican but was named after an Indian woman who grew up with her family in Oklahoma – took charge and did what they could.
After the arrest Roger was returned to Portland and sent to the Donald E. Long juvenile center. And from there, because he coldcocked a guard while trying to escape – hid behind a door and when the guard came in hit him over the head with a wooden duster brush – he would spend the next six months at the notorious MacLaren Juvenile Detention Center in Woodburn.
He tried to escape from there five or six times. Last time being when he and a couple of black guys hijacked the driver-training car, ditched it outside the compound and managed to make it a couple of miles on foot before they were apprehended in a swamp.
“And so they took us back, and they had what they called the Bridal Suite. I mean it was the worst solitary confinement unit I was ever in in my life – and I mean I’ve been in the hole in Leavenworth, El Reno, Lompoc, OSP, and this was the hardest hole. You were butt naked. And the only thing you had was a sheet and a five gallon bucket. Nothing but a Bible in the cell.”
A couple of times he got thrown in the hole just for fighting. And while no one, least of all Roger, is making any excuses for his untoward behavior, it’s probably apparent by now that what we’re we’re dealing with here is a very angry young man. Or at least one who has come to expect the world to screw him over at every opportunity and is more than ready to respond in kind.
After six months at MacLaren, Roger was back in school, but at Parkrose – and believe it or not, actually trying to go straight. Or at least stay out of trouble. In 1960, shortly after his release, he sold the most ice cream bars at the Rose Festival Starlight Parade and was rewarded by the head consessionaire a few days later with an introduction to the grand marshall of the Rose Parade – Richard Boone himself, star of the popular TV cowboy show “Have Gun Will Travel.” As Roger recalls, Boone, who was so drunk they practically had to tie him in his saddle, reached down to shake his hand and said “I heard you sold a lot of ice cream yesterday, kid. Good work.”
And then every day after school, from five to nine, Roger would go to work washing dishes at the Satellite restaurant and lounge out at 188th and Burnside. Even made enough money to buy his own car this time, a 55 Chevy.
So it was Uncle Dennis and Aunt Linda’s, out in Parkrose, during the week and Grandma Wanita’s on weekends. As it happened, Grandma Wanita had a house on Southeast 15th, three blocks from Amato’s brand new, open-24-hours-a-day, bowling alley and pool hall on 12th and Taylor. We can only imagine how differently this story might have turned out if it had been otherwise.
Roger and his friend Gator were second in the door when Amato’s opened for business. First day, free pool all day.