The Getaway
My parents were in the middle of a contentious divorce when Hurricane Agnes rolled into Maryland on June 22, 1972. Weeks before Agnes was even a tropical storm, my father had picked this date for us kids to flee the state.
My mother had become increasingly abusive, verbally and physically, as her children got older. It was a very active household with loads of screaming, cussing, and hitting. My father planned a divorce and he was going to sue for custody of the children. This was uncommon in the 1970s. Just as a woman was denied the right to her own credit in those days, a man was considered ill-equipped to raise children.
My dad did his research and planned an escape for his kids. He asked his company for a transfer, “as close to Oklahoma as possible.” He’d come from Oklahoma and five of his seven siblings still lived there. As close as possible turned out to be Little Rock, Arkansas. He moved to a rented trailer at the Indian Springs Park right off the interstate in Bryant. He hired an Arkansas law firm and filed for divorce and custody there. He waited until my younger sister was 12 because the law at that time would consider the child’s wishes in custody determination if the child was at least 12.
The four of us siblings were called down to a Baltimore law firm in early-1972 and gave depositions. It was during my deposition I realized I was pretty stupid for my age, 13. My mother had laid hands on all of us daily for years. Belts, fists, any handy object. One sister became a professional at deflecting blame so it was normally two or three of us getting the “attention.”
The lawyers asked me if my mother had ever “abused” me. In my head I had only ever associated “abuse” with “neglect.” We were always clothed and well-fed, never neglected. I answered, “No.” I saw a couple of the people at the table tilt their heads so I continued, “I mean, she beats us.” It was the look of pity that came across their faces I remember.
My mother made it clear that she wasn’t going to allow my father any custody or anything at all. Her lawyers got an injunction against my father forbidding him to “transport out of Maryland” his own children. My dad was a law-abiding man, but the law is full of loopholes. The injunction forbade my father from taking us out of Maryland, but he decided that meant anybody else could take us out of Maryland and meet him in another state. And that was the plan.
My dad had a place for us in Arkansas; he’d bought a house that’d be ready before school started in the town with the best schools within commuting distance to Little Rock. He was getting our school records transferred. I like to think he thought of everything. The decision was made to get us out of Baltimore as soon as the school year ended. My brother, 18, had just graduated from Poly and he became the designated driver for this mission.
My mother had an ally in the woman who lived next door. Divorce offended this neighbor’s Catholic sensibilities so she promised my mother that she’d keep an eye out and if my father or anything unusual were seen, she’d call the police first and then my mother. The neighbor warned us that that’s what she’d do, too.
Early in the planning it was clear that my older sister’s Siamese cat, Frasso Bobbo, had to be included. Our mother hated cats and if this one was left behind, it’d be dumped or put down.
The neighbor was a dog hoarder. At one time she had 14 dogs in that Calvert St. row house. Now, she had about eight. They’d bark at anything and activate all the other barkers in that zip code. We were going to have to sneak this cat past them somehow.
The date was set. My mother’s bar closed at two a.m. and she was always there for closing. That was the time chosen. My brother said we’d be told the day before we left, “So be ready.”
The day arrived and my mother left for work. My brother told us that tonight would be the night and we could only take “what we could carry” and we’d leave in the middle of the night. I packed a small bag with enough clothes for a week and a box full of my toys, collectibles, mementos, souvenirs. My brother told us to go to sleep and he’d wake us up when it was time to go. Nobody slept. We just watched the clock. The rain outside got heavier.
We couldn’t leave by the front door. Too many eyes. Two o’clock arrived and we picked up what we could carry and went to the back door. My brother’s station wagon was parked up the alley on a side street nearby. My brother turned to me with my small bag and box of junk and started screaming, “ONE THING! I SAID ONLY ONE THING!” Living in the House of Argument, I countered, “You said ‘What we could carry!’” He jerked the box out of my hand and set it on a nearby dresser. He opened the door to push me out and the wind cracked it back against the porch wall separating us from the dog hoarding neighbor. The dogs started barking but the wind was howling louder. We all started running to the back gate. The conditions were horrendous.
The cat was scared to death. When a Siamese cat is wailing, it sounds like it’s screaming “RARE! RARE! RARE!” We get to the back gate and one of my sisters said she saw the neighbor in the window. We went for it anyway, outrun the cops if necessary, and ran north to 27th St.
Dogs are barking; we can barely see; the streetlights are out. We get to the station wagon, a ’68 Ford LTD Country Squire, black with the wood paneling on the side. Plenty of room for “stuff.” My brother’s driving, I’m shotgun, and my sisters are in the back with the wailing Siamese. Because we’ve been sprinting through the rain and the excitement is almost too much, as soon as we get in the vehicle every window fogs up. My brother wore glasses and they immediately fogged up. But he had a dry spare pair. He takes off his foggy glasses with his right hand, straight-arms me right in the chest, shouting, “CLEAN THESE!” He’s wiping the inside of the windshield, the girls are wiping their windows, and even wiped clean we couldn’t see 20 feet. He puts on his dry glasses, pulls out. We’re lucky. There’s nobody on the street.
His spare glasses have now fogged up so he hits me with them where the stoplight should be while I’m still wiping the first pair. I pass them back anyway and this is my job for the next 15 minutes while the air conditioning dehumidifies the cabin. We’re filled in on the remaining details of the plan. Since our dad can’t take us across state lines, he’s going to meet us west of Baltimore at a hotel way out on Route 40 in Ellicott City. And then we’re going to follow him to Virginia. Technically, my brother was taking us across the state line and there was no injunction against that. The poor cat was clearly distressed as the conditions outside the station wagon were frightening to all of us. All our concentration had been on the impending escape and not the weather report.
We drive west on 27th, turn left on Maryland Ave. My brother is driving way too fast for the conditions. But we believe we’ve been spotted leaving the house by the neighbor and we’re thinking the alarm has been raised. There’s an All Points Bulletin for four runaways! We watched too much TV.
We’re driving south on Maryland Ave. My brother is jerking to a near stop at every intersection. We can’t even see the street signs. At one point I look up and shout, “RED LIGHT!” My brother hit the brakes and we came to a sideways stop right in the middle of the traffic lanes at Maryland Ave./Mount Royal Ave. But there was no traffic. It’s about 2:30 a.m. and we’re only a handful of blocks from my mother’s bar stopped in a hurricane and can barely see which way to go.
We turn west again when we reach Route 40. We just need to go about 15 miles or so to the motel where my dad was waiting. He expected us in 30 minutes… by three a.m.
By this time the windows are defrosted, the cat’s less vocal, and we’re settling into the terror of this drive. My younger sister has been crying since the beginning and is still crying for her dad. We’re making good progress until just before the Patapsco State Park area, there’s a State Trooper blocking the road. Well, that’s it, we’re caught, we’re going to Juvenile Hall. Maybe not that, but surely my mother was going to beat the hell out of each of us.
We pulled up slowly to the trooper whose car was parked across both lanes of traffic. My brother was growling at us, Shut up! Don’t say a thing!” The trooper was a tall, ramrod-straight black man clad in his slicker suit. He had a big elastic plastic protective shell for his campaign hat. He approached us, leaned down to look into the station wagon, and said to my brother, “Sir, I can’t let you go this way.” All of us were immediately crushed. The trooper continued, “The road is closed. A tree is down.” It had not occurred to us that nobody would give a hoot about a custody battle during a hurricane. My brother told him we were trying to meet our father farther west on 40 but he wasn’t particularly concerned about our plight.
The trooper said he couldn’t provide an alternative route because he didn’t know the road conditions or the alternatives. We turned around slowly. I still don’t understand why that trooper didn’t ask a few more questions of a car full of panicked kids joyriding in a hurricane. For several miles we were the only vehicle on the road.
My task now was navigator. I was always good with maps and now I had to find a route around Hurricane Agnes. I didn’t know until many years later, but the Patapsco State Park area we were trying to get through was hardest hit by Agnes. Bridges out, flooding, stoplights out. Nineteen people died in Maryland alone.
There weren’t a lot of bridges across the Patapsco River in that area besides the Route 40 one we’d just been denied. I did a good job of finding them, but as we’d get closer there’d be barriers saying, “Road Closed.” It was probably the fourth attempt at a bridge when we finally crossed the Patapsco but we’d gotten some distance from our goal. We finally got back on Route 40 the other side of the roadblock and were looking for the motel. It was just at 3:30 a.m. as we approached the motel. It was on the opposite side of the highway and as we were pulling in, there was our dad pulling out. My brother started frantically honking the horn and flashing the lights but it looked like he didn’t see or hear. He pulled out heading into Baltimore but must’ve seen us in his rear view mirror because he made a U-turn.
He was already packed and his pickup was loaded with a few last items. We pulled up side by side in the parking lot. He didn’t know about the roads blocked because of Agnes. There was no all-night television with breaking updates back then. He knew the storm had intensified but it was unexpected and too late to change the plan.
My little sister cried her eyes out to be allowed to ride with my father, but the injunction forbade it. We kids got back in the station wagon and dad was in his pickup in front of us. We headed straight west until we crossed into Virginia probably due south of Frederick. My dad did pull over at the first roadside picnic table and my little sister climbed into the cab of his truck. We rode to Indian Springs Campground in Arkansas and lived in a mobile home until Dad settled on the new house in Benton just a few weeks before school started.
The Arkansas courts granted him custody. I don’t know what it cost him to get custody, but it was almost everything he had. My brother went on to college that year. My older sister went back to my mother’s house after two years of small-town high school. She graduated early and got the hell out of that town. My younger sister went back to Baltimore a year after that. I’m sure my dad was heartbroken. I graduated and joined the service. I went to serve in Turkey instead of returning to Baltimore, but after that I also returned to Baltimore. We all ended up back in Baltimore, even my dad.
On the evening of our rainy run down the alley, my sisters had cleaned the kitchen after dinner. We had one of those old portable dishwashing machines that you rolled up to the sink and it had a double hose. You connected one side to the faucet and the other side was to drain into the sink. My sisters filled the dishwasher and set it to run. When my older sister returned after two years, that evening’s load of dishes were still in the portable dishwasher. My mother had never unloaded it.
When I finally returned home after military service, I found that old box of stuff that my brother made me leave behind. But everything else I had owned in that house was discarded in the intervening years.
After the divorce, neither my mother nor father ever “dated” anyone again. And in the 40 years my dad lived after their marriage ended, I believe they only spoke again once.