The Sun Is My God
It must seem like nothing much happens in small midwestern towns during the winter, but that’s not entirely true. In December 1957, eighteen-year-old Charles Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, embarked on their two-month killing spree in Nebraska, three hundred miles south of my South Dakota hometown.
They would take eleven lives. I myself was on the cusp of fourteen, and I remember studying Caril Ann’s photo in the newspaper−her smiling face and his smirk.
The following November, on a farm near Holcomb, Kansas, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith murdered the Clutter family in cold blood. They cut Herb Clutter’s throat and blew his head open with a shotgun blast. Then they shot to death his wife, Bonnie, and their teenage children, Kenyon and Nancy. I remember wondering if those killers were headed my way.
A week before that, three local teenage boys robbed a bank ten miles east of my town. This robbery didn’t begin to approach the magnitude of the Starkweather-Fugate killings or the Clutter family murders, yet over the years I kept thinking about it, amazed that those prairie boys dared rob a bank at gunpoint.
Finally pursuing this memory about three years ago, I was surprised to learn that the ringleader, Peter, (not his real name) had lived only two blocks down the alley from my house. I learned Peter never finished high school in our hometown, but he regularly attended local reunions with the class he would have graduated with had he stayed in school. The reunion organizer had meticulously recorded the names, street and email addresses, and telephone numbers of the reunion attendees on a website. Peter was at my fingertips. All I knew about him was that he came from a large Catholic family−the seventh of ten children, as I later learned.
I emailed Peter and explained that after all those years, the bank robbery had continued to fascinate me, and I asked if he would talk with me about it. I was stunned when he responded that his uncle and my father had been best friends in high school. It was as if my deceased father had introduced the two of us.
Peter agreed to telephone interviews from his home in Minnesota. He began his story a year before the bank robbery, in the fall of 1958, when he had left his Catholic school and entered the tenth grade at the public high school. His two best friends had moved away, he didn’t have a girlfriend, and he felt alone, sad, and scared. Everyone else seemed to be moving along smoothly enough, but Peter felt detached, like a zombie. He wasn’t suicidal, but his anxiety was so intense that he thought, Can I go on? Just how can I go on?
***
The school year progressed as most high school years did back then. Groups of boys, with cigarettes cupped in their hands, huddled together in the deeply rutted parking lot, shifting back and forth to stay warm. Girls darted between cars, squealing as they slipped and slid on the ice.
Couples passionately made out in cars, while other couples fought over obscure matters only they fully understood.
Peter was involved in none of that because he was skipping school.
***
He flunked his sophomore year and was now in classes with kids who were his younger sister’s friends. He spent the first two months overwhelmed with embarrassment, sadness, and hopelessness; feelings that merged with being awake yet walking around in a world where all colors were the same−a shimmering gray.
He began to skip school again. Some mornings he disconnected the telephone line outside his basement bedroom so that when the school called his parents to confirm his absence, there would be a busy signal. There was one reprieve from classes when the teachers were away at a conference. It was during that week that Peter happened to run into one of his friends, a boy named Tommy (not his real name). Peter and Tommy had one thing in common−they both hated their fathers.
There was abuse in Peter’s family, ranging from neglect to violence. One summer afternoon when he was young, Peter and his family went to a park at a nearby lake, where there were swings, sandboxes, and merry-go-rounds. He was happily swinging by himself, but when he got off, he realized that his family wasn’t there. They had driven away without him, and no one noticed he wasn’t in the car until they were home.
The physical abuse seemed to come out of nowhere.
“Hell, my father whipped me when I didn’t even know what I did,” he told me.
One time his father had him up against the refrigerator, choking him. Peter saw a knife by the stove and thought to himself, Should I stab him? At that moment, his mother walked into the kitchen and said, “You’re going to hurt the boy.” It was only then that his father stopped.
His mother was also the target of her husband’s rage. He would get a look on his face, like that of a wild animal. She had him committed several times.
When he died on their wedding anniversary, she claimed he planned it that way to hurt her.Even so, Peter was adamant that she loved his father.
Peter came to believe that his mother was depressed much of the time. It seemed that the only time she was happy and pleasant was when she was pregnant. When he was older, he asked a doctor about this change in his mother’s behavior. The doctor told him this behavioral change was common among pregnant women. Peter guessed that once his mother had the baby, all the good hormones went away and her depression returned.
Peter felt that he and his mother never bonded−there were few hugs or kisses from her. He seemed unable to please her, and when she died, his mourning for her was intense. He has asked himself the same question throughout his life, Why couldn’t it have been better?
There were some early pleasant memories of his mother. When he was a toddler, he sat in the backyard while she tended her flowers. He remembers looking up into the branches of a huge cottonwood tree and watching masses of cotton drifting into the garage.
Most people dislike cottonwood trees because they’re messy, but not Peter. “I love cottonwoods,” he told me. “I have four huge ones in my yard today. They are some fifty feet tall and so beautiful. In the summer I look up into the branches, and I can see their green leaves dancing in the wind, leaves that in the fall turn yellow. It’s sad how short their season is. I’ve had frequent dreams about cottonwood trees and how my life has changed since my childhood.”
***
Peter and Tommy decided to drive out into the countryside and maybe do a little rabbit hunting. Tommy invited two of his friends, Ray and Darrell (not their real names), and all four boys piled into the black and white 1957 Nash Rambler station wagon owned by Peter’s father.
It’s easy to imagine the boys driving on gravel back roads out into farmland, past neat white farmhouses surrounded by shelterbelts of cottonwood trees that provided protection from the indefatigable prairie wind.
The boys chose an extremely cold day to go rabbit hunting. It was five degrees below zero, breaking the record low of four below zero for that time of year. The headline in the local newspaper announced, “State Storm Followed by Biting Temperatures,” and a small front-page notice alerted readers that after midnight the street crews would begin clearing snow from the near-blizzard conditions the day before.
The smell of burning leaves was gone; the Midwest was entering the season where scratchy wool scarves covered children’s mouths and noses.
By noon the temperature rose to twenty-six degrees. It was a sunny clear day with no wind. As the boys drove along the gravel back roads, the warmth of the sun filled Peter’s car, and he was surprised by how good he felt, better than he had felt in so long.
***
Peter had this sensation before, when he was much younger. It was another warm prairie sunshiny day, and he and his sister, Linda (not her real name), were walking to church, both of them clutching money for the collection plate. He felt his spirits lift, a sense of happiness coming over him.
He said to his sister, “Let’s not go to church! Let’s take our money and go buy some doughnuts.”
Perhaps there is pleasure or a joy so long denied that when depression fades away, an impulsive response emerges, a sweet childish insistence on celebrating, a time to eat doughnuts.
He had a similar feeling in his early twenties after visiting his brother’s family in the Black Hills. It was early morning and still dark when his brother drove Peter to the bus station to return home. Peter settled into his seat and soon fell asleep. When he awoke, the intensity of the rising sun had filled the bus with its brilliance and warmth. He remembered thinking, This is my god. The sun is my god! The universe is my god!
Peter suffers from seasonal affective disorder, a depression related to lack of sunlight−people who live in areas with long winters and low sunlight (a Midwestern hallmark) can be at risk for SAD. And because depression is heritable, adolescents who have parents with depression are especially at risk, particularly when it’s the mother who’s depressed. Early exposure to stress, neglect, or abuse can also pose a risk for depression in teenagers.
But this was 1959, and depression wasn’t fully understood in adults and almost unthinkable for children and adolescents.
***
As Peter drove along the highway with his new friends, he felt the same joy he felt on that sunshiny day when he ate doughnuts with his sister. Whether it was the pleasure of the camaraderie with the boys, or a desire to prove that he was a real guy, Peter blurted out, “Let’s go rob a bank!”
And because they were close to a relatively obscure bank in a seemingly inconsequential, small town, everyone except Tommy decided, just like that, to do it.
The bank was on the main street, and Peter parked in the alley behind it, about a block away. By this time, Tommy was complaining loudly about the plan, saying that no way was he going into the bank and warning the others not to go through with it.
As Peter unloaded the bullets from his rifle, he told Tommy it was okay if he didn’t want to go in, he could just wait in the car.
They must’ve been a sight walking down the road toward the bank on that bright, wintery day−two boys with hands in their pockets trying to keep warm and another carrying a rifle. As they rounded the building to the front door, Peter instructed Ray to stand guard outside and Darrell to come inside with him. He walked right up to the teller and demanded the money from her drawer. He stuffed the fifteen hundred dollars she handed him into his jacket pocket and, as he and Darrell started to back out the door, announced to the bank president, the teller, and a cowering customer;
“Now, when I go out of here, don’t try to stop me. I’ll kill you. I’ve killed before, and I’ll do it again.”
Tommy was standing outside the car as the three boys ran towards him. They must’ve been running as fast as they could, arms pumping back and forth, one with a rifle raised in the air.
When they got to the car, Tommy wouldn’t get in. He said he was going to the bank to turn himself in, and he told the others that they should go with him because they would never get away with this.
Finally, three frightened boys agreed with Tommy and they drove down the alley back to the bank. In a rather matter-of-fact way, Peter told me he walked back into the bank and gave his gun, money, and car keys to a surprised bank president. Then they all waited for the police to arrive.
The robbery had no appearance of being planned, especially since Peter was driving his father’s car with signs on both backside windows advertising his father’s business, complete with a telephone number.
***
On November 7, the day after the robbery, the local paper told its readers that the state’s attorney and defense attorney were convinced the robbery “began as a prank and then things got serious. Apparently, two of the boys thought they were going to get a sack to fill with snow to fool a fourth boy who remained behind in a car during the robbery.”
On this same day, three members of the FBI arrived to investigate the circumstances of the robbery. According to the state’s attorney, South Dakota’s law for bank robbery was punishable by life imprisonment.
Peter scoffed at the newspaper report outlining a “snow in a bank sack” plan. Besides, he maintained there was no snow on the ground−a claim difficult to reconcile with headlines the day before reporting blizzard conditions and an announcement of street plowing that evening.
And if there had been a plan to fill a bank bag with snow to fool Tommy, when could that conversation have taken place? The four of them were, after all, together in the car. A discussion of such a plan could only have occurred while the three boys walked to the bank, out of earshot of Tommy.
Maybe Peter didn’t remember any talk about a plan to fool Tommy because he was thinking about what he would do once he got inside the bank, or maybe time has erased memories; this was, after all, almost sixty years ago.
Peter did remember that he sat in the backseat of the police car, and he claimed it was the longest ride of his life. As the sheriff turned onto the main highway, Peter stared out the window at a grove of cottonwood trees whose yellow autumnal leaves had dropped, leaving a stand of ash gray trunks with a raggedy crown. He thought, My life has dramatically changed.
Peter couldn’t recall if his parents met him at the police station, but he told me his mother was furious because of the expense he’d caused the family. His father, though, was uncharacteristically quiet and calm, a seemingly unusual reaction Peter attributed to his mental illness.
The police released Tommy the afternoon of the arrest, and his name never appeared in the newspaper. But the Juvenile Court Judge wanted to set an example for other teenagers and released the names, ages, and addresses of Peter, Ray, and Darrell and, according to the paper, charged them with delinquency and placed them under bonds of one thousand dollars each.
On November 9, the Monday after the robbery, the three boys appeared again before the judge who suspended sentencing for Ray and Darrell and, according to the paper, “told the sober faced boys that they should be cautious, and not to allow themselves to be regarded as heroes in any way or at any time.”
The judge also prohibited the boys from riding in any automobile operated by a minor, told them to surrender their hunting permits, and required them to maintain satisfactory grades and deportment for the rest of the school year.
The judge dealt with Peter in a more serious manner. Upon the advice of a court assigned psychologist, Peter was sentenced to ninety days of examination, observation and, if necessary, treatment at the Yankton State Hospital, formerly the South Dakota Lunatic Asylum.
Coincidentally, the judge lived less than a block from Peter’s house. Peter never questioned the judge’s sentencing him to Yankton, reasoning that he likely heard his father’s regular ranting and raving, and probably thought Peter was a little nuts too. Peter believed that the judge was looking out for his well-being by trying to help him get out of a bad family situation.
On November 13, just before he set off for Yankton, Peter turned seventeen. The only thing he received on his birthday was a card from Linda, the sister Peter claimed raised him, the one he ate doughnuts with on that warm, sunshiny prairie day.
***
Peter had no memory of his trip to Yankton, whether his parents accompanied him, or what happened after he arrived. But he would have driven through an iron gate into a campus-like enclosure and continued up a long drive to a complex of medium to large-size buildings of various styles, one a neo-classical design, a kind of Old Main.
Was this seventeen-year-old prairie boy startled and amazed to see this prestigious-looking compound, so unlike the simple ranch-style and Victorian houses in his hometown? This place was more like Massachusetts or Rhode Island. He could’ve been about to begin his studies at some Ivy League university.
Shortly after his arrival, he would’ve entered a long, low, one-story dormitory that had two wings. Did he share a room with another boy, or was the place set up as a ward? Where did he have dinner that night? It had to have been a strange and lonely first evening. Was he frightened? Did he wonder what they were going to do to him the next day?
Peter doesn’t remember.
He does remember that he had no problems there: “I accepted it all as a fact, didn’t feel sorry for myself or nothing. There were no drugs, no weird stuff going on there.”
Peter wasn’t at Yankton the full ninety days, more like thirty days, but this was during the Christmas season, his first time away from home during the holidays.
Some years later, he saw a Christmas picture of his family that year that didn’t include him. His mother and father and nine siblings were standing in front of a Christmas tree and everybody looked pissed off.
***
After Peter’s stay at Yankton, the same judge sentenced him to the State Training School in Plankinton, South Dakota. Peter was now beginning his third attempt to finish the tenth grade.
Things went well at Plankinton. For the first time in his life, he felt people were looking out for him. He believed he had begun to develop some discipline; he voluntarily got up at five o’clock each morning, worked in the laundry, went to high school, and even got an A in a typing class, typing one hundred words a minute.
Peter also got along well with the other boys. In the evenings, he would read the Reader’s Digest by the window in his room. He followed all of the institution’s rules, even making his bed perfectly, in fact, better than perfectly.
Because things seemed to be going well, he didn’t understand what happened next. Apparently, “making his bed better than perfectly,” and a judge who was “looking out for his well-being” landed Peter in a mental hospital for three months. The transfer to McKennan Hospital in Sioux Falls was never part of his sentencing.
Peter came to believe that in “those days,” psychologists wanted to get their hands on troubled kids to experiment with them. The 1950s saw the introduction of electroconvulsive therapy and insulin coma therapy, new treatments for depressed and schizophrenic patients. Doctors gave Peter both, three times a week. The treatments wiped out many of Peter’s experiences and affected his memory. Peter claimed, “The therapy was pretty brutal, really messed me up.”
In spite of having to undergo that horrific therapy, Peter adapted to life at McKennan. He liked designing pottery on the potter’s wheel. Like his stay at Yankton and Plankinton, he got along well with everyone and didn’t believe he was a problem.
***
After Peter’s release from McKennan Hospital, he went to live with his brother’s family. While Peter loved his brother’s children, he was miserable. He was now living in a tiny apartment in a strange college town and starting the tenth grade for the fourth time. His chances of making friends with classmates who were three to four years younger were next to impossible.
This time, instead of skipping school, he closed it down with a telephoned bomb threat. The school quickly identified Peter as the caller, and officials sent him back to McKennan Hospital for another three months. He declared, “It was more of the same, one of the toughest damn periods of my life.”
“More of the same” meant more electroconvulsive shock and insulin coma treatments over another three-month period. Peter didn’t tell me how many treatments he had, but if the regimen were consistent with that from his first three months, he would have undergone both types of therapies three times a week, enduring approximately seventy treatments during his two stays at Mckennan Hospital.
The tragedy is that by 1957, three years before Peter underwent insulin coma therapy, researchers found that it did not achieve a real cure and improvements were, at best, temporary. It’s hard to know why McKennan Hospital continued using that therapy. Was there a lag time for research information to reach hospitals across the country? Or were those South Dakota doctors unconvinced that insulin coma treatments were only temporary cures?
***
While other memories have faded, I have wondered why I remember the bank robbery when nearly all my friends and family have forgotten it. I also wonder how Peter recovered from this shattering early start at life, to lead a life no different from others building families and going to work. But mostly I think of him and wonder, when he sees necklace-like strands of cottonwood seedpods floating to the ground, does he think about his young mother sweeping the drifts of cottony fluff from the garage floor? In the winter, does a grove of skeletal-looking cottonwoods along the side of the road remind him of his younger self in the backseat of a police car? Or is it both memories that the teenage bank robber, now in his mid-seventies, thinks about when he looks up into the summer canopy of dark green, diamond-shaped leaves from the cottonwoods he planted in his own yard many years ago?
Author’s Note: The names have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted..
• • •
Jane Hegstrom is working on a number of memoir pieces about her Midwestern childhood in the 1950s. She is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Masters of Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in Bookends Review and Little Patuxent Review. She also has a PhD in sociology with specializations in social psychology and gender. Her academic writing has appeared in Sex Roles, Discourse Analysis: A Multidisciplinary Journal and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.