At ages eight and twelve I joined little neighborhood gangs that had as membership requirements stealing items from a local store.  I was on my way to becoming a thief.  I have little memory of the first incident other than we were caught and my mom was upset.  The second round, a few years later, is clear in my mind and, upon reflection, one of those life-turning points.

Vinnie and Mark were my mates, with the former the leader of the gang.  To be in the gang, each of us had to steal one item from a drug store located a few blocks from our houses.  We all lived in a middle-class neighborhood, on the east side of Davenport, Iowa.  My mom was a stay-at-home-mom as was Mark’s.  I am not sure about Vinnie’s mom as she seemed gone a lot.  Mark’s dad owned an advertising agency, Vinnie’s was a judge, and mine was a chemical engineer.

Vinnie was the leader, the toughest of the three, and had a parent-free house during the day where we planned our shenanigans and reconnoitered with our loot.  Mine was a bottle of aspirin, stolen from a drug store in the Village section of East Davenport that would be knocked down some years later to make room for a Happy Joe’s Pizza Parlor. I don’t remember the items Mark or Vinnie stole.  It was the summer of 1961 and my life was about to change.

The phone call from Mrs. Cleveland who lived next to Vinnie and a few houses down from Mark came in the early evening.  I answered it and she must have given me her name because when I handed the phone to my mom I went up to my room and started worrying.  Mrs. Cleveland was not a friend of my moms, why was she calling?  Our one phone was in the living room, down the stairs from my bedroom.  I could hear my mom’s voice and the conversation seemed to go on for a long time.  Eventually my dad came up to my room and sat next to me on the bed.  He was calm and direct, as was his way.  He told me Mrs. Cleveland had talked to the drug store owner who had observed me steal the aspirin.  I must have ratted out Vinnie and Mark because a few days later Vinnie beat me up and Mark ignored me the rest of the summer. 

My dad told me my mom was very upset and it would take her some time to get over how disappointed she was in me.  And that she would not talk to me for a while.  This was the first silence.  My memory is that my mom did not talk to me for a couple of weeks.  It may have been shorter or longer but one morning as she was closing the refrigerator door she turned to me at the breakfast table and said good morning.  My mom broke her silence.  I was back in her good graces and no longer ostracized.  For a kid not quite a teenager, more on my 13^th birthday later, being back mattered, a lot.

My dad’s silence was different.  A few days after Mrs. Cleveland spilled the beans, a Friday, I think, my dad came home from work and said to me, only me and not also my two brothers, Peter and Pat, ‘let’s go for a ride.’  My dad would often take me, the oldest, to get donuts on Saturday morning so being in the car alone with him was not so unusual.  This was a Friday late afternoon, something must be up, and he did not say anything as we rode together along River Road toward downtown and much to my surprise, the Davenport Police Station. 

We walked together into the station, a first for me, with my dad still not saying anything.  We were met by a policeman who took me, without my dad, through a door and back to an area with cells.  I don’t remember what he said, and there were no prisoners behind those bars, and after a brief tour we were back in the lobby where my dad was waiting.  We got in the car and rode home together, in silence. 

Later that fall my dad would also break his silence on this stealing problem but in way that was about someone else but really was about me.  Again, it started with a phone call from a neighbor who told us someone else was collecting money for the paper I delivered to her.  She gave my dad the name of the kid and my dad and I went to his house to confront him.  The house was a few blocks from our house, very small, dark and a little run down.  I waited just inside the front door while my father went inside to talk with the culprit and his father.  

On the way home, he told me some kids are the way they are because of the kind of family circumstance they come from.  I could tell my dad felt sorry for the kid who tried to steal my paper route money.  But he was also telling me, no, that’s not quite right, he was showing me that my family was different and that I could be different.  

A few days after the paper route incident we celebrated my 13^th birthday.  My mother would make for the first time what would become my favorite cake, a chocolate wafer icebox cake.  Earlier that day, my dad and I got in the car and went for donuts.

I never stole again.